At this time, while Occupy movements are spreading into more hybrid directions, and new tides of organizational planning are brewing, numerous consciously active resistant voices can benefit in their struggle against Corporatism with a Postcolonial Theory that integrates ideas from Frantz Fanon, C.R.L James, Claudia Jones, Edward Said, and Gloria Anzaldua, who all have useful tools to gain jolt.
Too often the problems on the national level are closer than expected. The greatest threat to the global community in the 21st Century in all honesty is Corporate power and it is not the so-called scapegoat of Terrorism. For most people do not even realize how often the problems at home are not due to some outside fearful threat of a few individuals whom our media claim dislike our ‘so-called values.’ Even our so-called values are victim to hypocrisy and contradictions.
Even the grandest terrorist acts in the past twelve years have stemmed from areas of the globe where our irresponsible and greedy corporations have been recklessly plundering: i.e. Exxon, Mobil, Halliburton, and smaller subsidies of their interests have been in the Middle East and throughout the globe with reckless regard for social accountability far longer than the very fundamentalist from such regions that perhaps are in existence due to a reaction from our corporate occupation. Need I remind us?
Yes, even Westerners and especially Americans can benefit from Postcolonial ideals, because in order to pull us out of our economic, moral, and social crisis at this time, we need to decolonize our minds. We have to step away from the massive river current to see where we have been coerced to flow. We have been spoon fed for so long that we do not realize that the spoon is in the hands of profit machines with no genuine motherly love.
C.R.L James and Claudia Jones were both from Trinidad. These intellectuals who at different times lived in the United States between the 1940’s and 1950’s were outspoken in their acknowledgement of social human rights. Trinidad was a British Colony, just like the United States. However, Trinidad did not receive independence from the British until 1962, and it was a controlled independence that followed. So at the time that both James and Jones were in the United States, their home nation was still in the clutches of British interest. While in America, they embraced the ‘values’ that were preached about freedom, liberty, and expressive openness, at the same time clearly aware that Jim Crow and McCarthyism was a vivid reflection of the contradictions.
While James and Jones were in America under McCarthyism, ‘freedom, liberty, and expression’ were not at all embraced in application for American citizens, even farther from the truth for foreigners. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1950's in the US legally gave the government the ability to deport any immigrant on the grounds of open speculation: especially, the freedom of speech. The First Amendment was for American citizens only, and not for those residing in the US who spoke out about colonialism, corporate greed, civil rights, socialism for labor rights, etc. Even American citizens, who spoke out freely at the time, were reprimanded for enacting their First Amendment Rights when their words were not supportive of the established authority.
C.R.L James took notice of this in his study of the great American skeptic Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. In his book Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, James reflects on the classic novels embrace by academic institutions, and the contradiction when in deed the American author was forewarning the public that the industrial-corporate power of the young United States in the mid–to-late 1800’s was equivalent to a gigantic whale that would swallow us all up if we did not overcome the sea, and that though we put our faith in an ill-corrupt captain, we would need to find true leadership and self-sacrifice to survive.
James reflected that ‘there was a limit to our sovereignty where the mechanism of our discipline was at odds of with our democratic ideal’, something that Melville was concerned with a century prior to James. The theme of corporate totalitarianism was apparent to the authors, but which naïve patriotism could not step away to see and critically balance out the two obvious contradictory values. The vivid contradiction is still apparent in the 21st Century.
In a parallel reflection to James’ understanding of the literary institutionalization of an American classic without fully embracing the value of its civil disobedience, Claudia Jones was equally civil disobedient in the way Henry David Thoreau and Emerson had been in the 1800’s. She acknowledged the contradiction of freedom in ideal and freedom in corporate treatment of American labor, especially the treatment of Black Americans. She was free to identify herself as a Socialist and a Feminist, because she felt it was necessary to integrate the ideals of both ideologies into her democratic ideal:
“We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. … We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic system of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are ‘socialists’ because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products and not for the profit of the bosses” (Jones, Words of Fire).
Unlike Rosa Parks, Claudia Jones and CRL James were not born in America, and yet their embrace of the ‘so-called value’ of freedom of speech and human dignity, allowed the established power in the US to deport them. Near to the island of Trinidad is another haven for Postcolonial theorists, the island of Martinique. While the British colonized Trinidad, the French were in Martinique. Intellectual activists from Martinique included Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Frantz Fanon.
In Frantz Fanon’s ground shaking The Wretched of the Earth he speaks in 1961 that the European masses needed to “stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty”. Such reflections can be true about the American masses, sleeping in an illusionary fairy tale today. He continues to separate the illusion of Cold War ideology, that in the 21st Century has still been a corporate media fear tactic that is thrown at dissidents standing up for inadequate imbalances of wealth. He alludes that it is pointless to try to implicate Socialism as a threat to Democracy. If anything Socialism is a threat to the corporate capitalism, and should never be confused with the ideal of Democracy.
It is irresponsible to use fear as a campaign of propaganda to add anxiety to socialistic innovation when ‘starving multitudes’, exploited millions have been underdeveloped, undeveloped or have been labeled undevelopable. The global levels of unemployment, homelessness, and the marginalized are constantly rising under the ‘free market’ approach, which merely is the modern form of neocolonialism under the World Trade Organization, dominated by corporate interests.
“Decolonization,” Fanon retorts, “comes in many shapes,” and just as the colonial world has been made into a compartmentalized world, so has the corporate world been trying to compartmentalize resistance into flimsy cliché labels or propagated ideologies. “No jargon is a substitute for reality.”
Gloria Anzaldua wanders down this similar path of overcoming jargon in her Borderlands. As a Chicana lesbian activist, she has experienced multiple forms of cultural tyranny. In reminiscence to the Thought-Police in Orwell’s 1984, she notes how the cultural restraints in the American society want to “control your tongue” and “jerk out your roots” so that you are passively silent and continually a consuming mechanical-body.
Anzaldua points out the idea of “La Facultad” which is the “capacity to see in the surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface”. Individuals must be able to arise the la facultad within his or her self in order to overcome the loss of tongue. Currently there is a real loss of balanced oppositions, because the only oppositions in the public eye are marketed in a false compartment of superficial political parties sucking up to the public to get their votes, and sucking up to the corporate interests to get their financial praise.
“This Cultural Tyranny” forms our belief system: a two party politics, an economic dominance over a spiritual height, consumption is more important than ecological preservation. It is much harder for the American public to conceptualize an alternative reality because corporations have colonized us for so long.
Adding to our ‘substitute reality’ we have been drugged up on pharmaceutical products for several decades now to make it even harder to come clean. In Ralph Nader’s newest book Getting Steamed Over Corporatism he and Dr. Sidney Wolfe in his Worst Pills, Best Pills reflect that “There are about 100,000 Americans who die every year from adverse reactions to the effects of approved prescription drugs … and 1.5 million people in the US are hospitalized annually due to adverse reactions to their medicines.”
A drugged up nation keeps all passive; the FDA’s “long lasting unwillingness to protect people in this country from even deadly but barely effective painkillers to” which profiting drug corporations promote for diseases where evidence that ill reflects the benefits to harmful side-effects is significant; continues to reflect that “Corporate crime pays – until it no longer doesn’t” (Nader).
We are living in the “Tower of Opulence” as Fanon calls it. The Affluent are dependent on goods and services, labor and investments from overseas. Yet they are reluctant to understand that their luxury is at the expense of so many others. This Opulence is literally built on the backs of slaves. The title of Aime Cesaire’s poem states “And the dogs were silent!” No “notion of compromise” with slave owners for the freedom of slaves, for if there is a compromise of 50% slave, this is not freedom at all. So why compromise with corporate greed on “personhood”, environmental regulations, tax-breaks, labor rights, and property-rights? “One Human, One Vote.”
In order to overcome this opulence, we need to, as Gloria Anzaldua, suggests, conceptualize first the inner struggle. We must first conceptualize the inner struggle; decolonize our mind, “because nothing happens in the real world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (Anzaldua).
In Carole Boyce Davies’ study on the life of Claudia Jones, Left of Karl Marx, within her introduction she integrates Edward Said’s helpful analysis of the Limits of the Artistic Imagination and the Secular Intellectual into her orientation of Claudia Jones’ mission as an activist. Edward Said has six axes of activity that could help activists challenge the corporate interest on controlling our tongues or giving into halfway compromises.
The axes are 1) to provide counter-information in an age where media have resources to manipulate the perception of reality, 2) provide a re-interpretive function of communicating ideas, such as social networking, music, and outsider art 3) demystify the illusion of reality we think we have, awakening basic issues of justice, and then reinforce the actual judicial objectivity, 4) interfering and intervening across lines of specialization that attempts to privatize knowledge, 5) advance a resistant position when consensus arrives from a dominant basis that fails to protect those outside the dominant collective, and 6) task force exercises that deploy a moral function between opposing irreconcilable and irreducible ideas, peoples, societies, histories, and claims (Said).
The challenge of individuals organizing together and making their neighbors aware of deeply imbedded corporate thought policing requires a level of discipline and commitment. The challenge of decolonizing our minds from the infantile consumerism that endangers healthy responsible growth is ever increasing. However, there are many tools from theorists in Postcolonial Studies that could advance the project to overcome our affluent denial that if we wait long enough or if we vote for the next candidate, all our problems will be solved. This denial of passive acceptance will not revive us. We can learn much from the voices of Claudia Jones, C.R.L James, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gloria Anzaldua.
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