Critical Necessary Activity:

Edwidge Danticat, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Cornel West are from three very different political histories but they come together in a unifying global community of select voices that have the courage to speak truth to power. Cornel West grew up in Sacramento, California during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement. Edwidge Danticat grew up in Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship and Tsitsi Dangarembga grew up in Zimbabwe first under the apartheid Rhodesian government and then under the Mugabe regime. In order for us to overcome the limited constructions of greed, success, and sovereignty, we must create a global social consciousness that brings together active members willing to remain heard and outspoken. 

Cornwel West recently questioned, “What will you use your success for? Never confuse success with greatness. … You trouble the water by being honest and candid about truth and justice in the world.” Troubling the water with speaking truth to power is one way to overcome the heartless sovereignty. Those who have used their wealth and success to manipulate the system are not great: the corporate elite of Exxon, Mobil, General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Coca-Cola, Monsanto, and the list is long. But the open public, who have been externalities due to the practices of these giants, are significantly more populous in numbers.

Edwidge Danticat in a similar reflection to Cornel West, and alluding to Albert Camus, believes that the artist, the writer, and passionate individuals must be willing to ‘create dangerously’. The Haitian novelist in her superb essay of the same title, discusses how through creative work, ‘we trek back to rediscovery’, we are ‘not just accidents of literacy’ but one’s who ‘keep things alive’. Each writer (and artist) finds unity with the more we create. Reflecting on Roland Barthes terms, ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’ We must unify through our outspokenness and “create dangerously, no matter how trivial our words may seem” (Danticat).

Writing about reality and the hazardous roads that got us to this passing are our responsibility as citizens of the 21^st Century, whether here in the US or in Haiti and Zimbabwe, or all other destinations overcoming destitution. The luxury of not knowing is irresponsible. When corporations like Monsanto poison the food supply with chemicals and genetically modified crops, we are risking a great crime. When elder Americans claim support for US Presidents, whether current or dead, regardless of their policies and how many masses of innocent casualties foreign and domestic they’ve decided not to protect, this is irresponsible; this is not just irresponsible, but an acceptance of ‘repressive tolerance’.  In Haiti, the only significant reason the island is extremely poor and unable to develop is because the super-rich elite in Haiti does not care about the human dignity of those who lack the means of subsistence. Though Robert Mugabe may have been a revolutionary, who overcame the apartheid Rhodesian government in the 1970’s, he has overstayed his support to his people, leaving the nation with a dictator and not a savior.

In October 2011, Tsitsi Dangarembga read aloud, available on Tedtalks on-line, her essay reflecting on "The Question Posed by My Cat”. In her passionate reflection she gathered knowledge from observing her cat’s behavior. “The antidote to the desolation in Zimbabwe,” as also seen in the US and abroad, “is that amongst our interpretations of greed and violence, is that greed, like violence, is a much graver ‘existential crisis’ than our limited definition.” While her cat has the capacity to learn when she is full and is satisfied, certain human beings seem impossible to know what is required and when they have reached enough.

“When you do not know where your next meal will come from, it is impossible to eat enough” (Dangarembga). Her cat knows she has had enough, because she has the ability to identify when she is satisfied. But human capacity to identify satisfaction is not just greed or gluttony, it is deeper, there is “a neurosis of not knowing what ‘enough’ means,” and it is essential to understand this neurosis in order for us “to redefine it”. 

In the 1940’s, at the brunt of World War II, the economist Joseph Schumpeter projected an idea of Creative Destruction. When the corporations and the banks get too big and overstay their necessity to society, they become obtrusive and in the way. When dictatorships and wealthy elite limit the growth of others trying their hardest to gain a sense of human dignity, creative destruction allows the exclusive dinosaurs and larger trees to creatively collapse so that other species and plants can grow.

The neurosis that allows greed to maintain control with use of violence or manufactured consent is certainly an existential dilemma. But Dangarembge believes global viability is graspable. Edwidge Danticat believes that we can awaken this rediscovery through creative risks, and Tsitsi Dangaremba believes that it is essential to understand this neurosis, so that we can move from a stage of “not I” to a stage of “We” inclusive.

As for Cornel West’s commitment to speak candid and truthful, he traveled throughout the past year across the United States on a ‘poverty tour’ trying to bring to the American attention that poverty is significant in the US. While mainstream media attempts to hide the divide of wealth in the US, Cornel West is addressing the imbalances beyond politics. He is not alone. Ralph Nader and Senator Bernie Sanders have also continually stated that if a financial or corporate institution is “too big too fail,” then “it is too big to exist.” Sanders states, “We should break these institutions up, so they are no longer in a position to bring down the economy.” If they are too big to fail, then the corporate powers need to be broken up, so as not to bring desolation to a larger population. This is true not just in the corporate and financial world, but in the general relations of sovereignty to the greater public whether in the US, in Haiti, in Zimbabwe, and nearly the most overshadowing obtrusive powers.

If the power system does not provide the opportunity for inclusive growth, nor does it provide the tools to obtain a neurosis that understands when enough is enough, then we as socially conscious individuals need to bring together active like-minded progressive voices to be responsible and ‘creative’ risk-takers, like West, Danticat and Dangarembga, who speak truth to power. 

Gloria Steinem, Leymah Gbowee, and Willie Nelson: Positive Social Pressure...

In the past week, former President Jimmy Carter has reflected on the preliminary success of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Fidel Castro has pushed in his new memoir that the world needs higher expectations on human dignity, Ralph Nader in a speech at Harvard Law School iterates that both the Obama and Bush administrations are guilty of crimes against humanity while the established congress does little to make such issues legislatively accountable, Noam Chomsky examines “America’s decline”; and Gloria Steinem has recently started a new social networking movement, entitled Women Under Siege. We are at a unique time in global history and social pressure is steaming at the valves.

Social Pressure is a driving force for positive and negative change. Social Pressure begins when a small group verbally, physically, and even in subconscious ways push others to act in ways they would not necessarily follow maliciously or even conscientiously.  Most of us have largely seen negative social pressure early in life when in school. Peer Pressure is a micro-level of larger social pressures. When students bully, intimidate, or judge other students the psychological effects can create enormous distress.

Such distress on a micro-level appears in Mim Udovitch’s essay A Secret Society of the Starving, the author reflects on high school female students encouraging one another to be anorexic, because they consider looking thin and sexy more hip and more important than eating healthy.  This small level of social pressure reflects the larger society excessive emphasis on women as visual objects. Even several years ago, an example of extreme social pressure in school levels led seventeen fourteen-year olds to make a pregnancy pact in Massachusetts, where they all pressured one another to get pregnant by any means possible. As Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, noted in his research approach, one must study the extremes of society at times in order to better understand the manufactured norms of society.  A pregnancy pact or hip anorexia, seem like extremes. But such means to social acceptance seem painful ways to belong.

Beyond the levels of school peer pressures, the pressures on image, identity and conduct are continually at odds with what seems moral and what seems inclusively hip. In George Orwell’s short story Shooting an Elephant, the classic author brings to the focal point, the colonial police officer in Burma pressured to kill an elephant that had run-off in a mad rage. By the time the British officer reached the elephant, the rage had seemed to pass; however, the villagers were excited to see a white officer shoot an elephant. Unfortunately, he had easily given into to social pressure to prove his manliness and his image of powerful imperial control, so he shot the elephant. The officer appeared limited to his accepted action. Afterwards, he did not feel any more accepted. Submitting to social pressure, in the end, did little for outside interests but a brief entertainment, and no one really cared about his emotional dilemma or the elephant minutes later.

Why submit to negative social pressure, as Orwell’s character had or the girls in American high school, when after submitting to such forces there clearly appears limited new self-assurances? In Gloria Steinem’s new project, which continues her life long commitment to women’s rights and human rights, she seeks to end the use of rape as a weapon of war. Nobel Peace Prize activists in 2011 had also committed the same determination at a summit in Montebello, Canada. Like Shirin Ebadi and Jody Williams, Gloria Steinem with the new Women Under Siege Project seeks to gain global attention to stop one of the most brutal crimes against humanity.

Gloria Steinem addresses in a recent interview with Lauren Wolfe that rape and war were not always co-existent entities. Rape as a weapon for war has significantly been a 20^th Century and today phenomenon. One of the earliest notions when an army pushed rape as a military strategy was during World War II, when the Japanese soldiers entered China, Korea, and other neighboring nations. The historic ‘Rape of Nanking’ was an extreme example of such policies during wartime.  However, the US soldiers were guilty of the same crimes during the Vietnam War and the Serbian’s during the Balkan Conflicts.

Soldiers whether ordered to commit rape or soldiers who choose to commit rape as a social pressure among other soldiers during war, as seen in Iraq and Libya, are submitting to negative actions that only reflect the contradictions of just-wars. Soldiers enacting rape as a weapon of war, accepting such orders without civil disobedience, is a clear example of malicious social pressure. Gloria Steinem and her project are attempting to fight such practices with the positive social pressure of gaining enough ear and voice to create legal actions to stop the practice. If landmines and cluster bombs can be banned from war politics, certainly rape can be banned as well.

  

Positive Social Pressure can be a significant tool to make established norms change to a more moral and ethical practice. Rather than Orwell’s officer bowing down to social pressure to shoot an elephant, groups such as Green Peace use positive social pressure to overcome whaling boats and the fishing industry. Green Peace activists put their lives into the frontline to step in when malignant practices hurt and endanger the environment for animals as well as the public.

Positive Social Pressure can also be pushed during wartime. In the violent Second Civil War in Liberia in 2003, not to be confused with Libya in the past year, Leymah Gbowee organized a women’s peace movement to attempt to end the war. At the time, the dictator Charles Taylor was enacting atrocities across the nation; little did the US Government admit until 2011 that Charles Taylor previously worked under the Central Intelligence Agency. Leymah Gbowee, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, and her peace movement were fed up with the war, so they encouraged women throughout the nation, Christian and Muslim alike, to stage in nonviolent protests and participate in a Sex-Strike.  The Sex-Strike involved thousands of women refusing to sleep with any man until the war ended. Such acts of positive social pressure caused the war to surprisingly end faster than expected. This modern day acting out of the ancient Greek Lysistrata proves that there is a level of power that could be enacted through uses of Positive Social Pressure.

How can the acts in Liberia or the Women Under Siege Project be useful for those Americans and other high-Capitalist nations who are not in a war-zone or first handedly aware of their contributions to the globalized world? Most of the wars on foreign soil are directly connected to large Corporate interests in oil and other natural resources that wealthy nations are apathetically or ignorantly dependent upon at the expense of others: from Iraq to Vietnam, from Guatemala to Zimbabwe, et al. 

We have the potential to awaken our fellow neighbors to participate in Positive Social Pressure that would overcome Negative Pressures. For example, in the past week, the musician Willie Nelson and more than 300,000 American activists have sued the giant agro-chemical corporation Monsanto.  Willie Nelson’s new organization entitled “Occupy the Food System” attempts to use Positive Social Pressure to stop Monsanto from dominating the food industry nationally and globally.

Social Pressures, negative and positive, are imperative to human progress or human decline. We can choose to give into negative peer pressure and commit crimes we whole-heartedly wish not to accept, but accepting them we’ve become passive invisible voices. We must refuse to be silent. As Aurora Levins Morales notes we must work at “infusing people’s imaginations with possibility, with the belief in a bigger future.”   

Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Butler, and Ameena Mathews: Mix of Ambiguity and Shouting:

On the eve of turbulence where Syrian violence continues, Israel seems ever closer to bomb Iran, and Egypt has become more enraged, fear of war between worlds, clashes of civilization induced from a market out of control. But a common desire wants to push past greed and general sovereignty.

Gloria Anzaldua mentions the ideal ‘towards a new consciousness’, one that involves a Tolerance of Ambiguity, where the “borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirables out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior” (Anzaldua, Borderlands). Violence is a pattern. Such patterns and habits that lock us in are the enemy within. “Rigidity means death.” Rigid war profiteers, capitalizing on perpetual confrontation over oil, resources, and objectivity of desire.

The inner war, the borders of self and other should be inclusive and not exclusive; “breaking down the paradigms” is the duality of transcendence. Anzaldua persists that the “First step is to take inventory…Just what did we inherit from our ancestors? … This step is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and all religions. … We must surrender all notions of safety, of the familiar” (Anzaldua). Deconstruct in order to construct. The “whole struggle is to change the disciplines and overcome the internal struggles.”

Frantz Fanon urges the opposite. He urges that violence is the only way to “explode the former colonial reality.” For such a struggle overcomes unknown facets, “as the struggle enfolds, the power of ideology is elaborated,” and a ‘spectacular of voluntarism’, overcomes the ‘obscurantist tendencies’ (Fanon, Wretched of the Earth).

Yet Ameena Matthews, working with CeaseFire.org, an organization in Chicago consisting of ex-gang members, seeks to ‘Shout at Violence’. Matthews and her co-workers attempt to re-direct gang violence away from brutal means. “Violence is a disease. It does not solve anything.” She continues in a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, “We as Violence Interrupters stop the violence from one person to another… We just get right in the middle of it because our goal is to save a life and be proactive not reactive” (Matthews).

Violence hurts the innocent.  Violence objectifies the value of human life. In Judith Butler’s reflections on the Subjects of Desire, a reinterpretation of Hegel, she states “Desire is in part a desire for self-reflection, and because desire … as a cognitive effort to thematize identity, Desire and Reflection are not mutually exclusive terms” … Desire is an ambiguous project of life (Butler).

Butler’s ‘ambiguous project of life’ moves along the similar route as Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘tolerance of ambiguity’. Butler reflects, “Identity is not to be forfeited simply because there is no guarantee of its success … both arbitrary and doomed failure, the striving to know one’s self to think the conditions of one’s own life, is a function of the desire to be free.”

“Desire can relieve human beings of their Consciousness of their own negativity” (Butler). To grasp what is lacking without the violent urge to destroy. “The Negative exists in us and we must come to terms with our own negativity in order to accept what we cannot control” (Butler).

This possibility to create anew, hopes to avow an advocated violence, but one fears today violence is inevitable because too many pattern-prone powerful interests cannot self-reflect on their own negativity, and do not have a tolerance of ambiguity.

Ameena Matthews shouts at violence, “You deserve to be loved!” Violence won’t solve the problem; it avoids the problem rather than being constructive.

But is this a Catch-22? Are we left either doomed to be objectified by the hegemony, or empowered to demand subjectivity? Still that is the point of ambiguity, the opportunity for the new unknown.   

Corporate Boundaries

While the headlines reveal that Pfizer recalls over 1 million packets of birth control pills due to a packaging error and dosage strength, McDonald’s publically tries to eliminate a pink slime in its hamburger meat known as Ammonium Hydroxide, and Pepsi disputes a lawsuit over a mouse found in its products with a reply that their products are too acidic that a mouse would have dissolved before reaching the shelves; corporate business continues with limited sweat and limited outcry. When will the majority of the public get active enough to stand up? At this rate, most likely never, because the public has been passive for so long they would not know what to do.

Back in October 2011, Pfizer had briefly made the news with their taxpayer USAID funded Depo-Provera vaccine for HIV used in mostly African nations, where studies reflected that the drug actually may have increased the risk of women and their male partners becoming infected.  Now with the massive recall of birth control pills in the US, one has to wonder, where will the line of negligence stop?  

C.L.R. James questions in his Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, how does a society of free individualism give birth to corporate totalitarianism and be unable to defend against it? Why is there a ‘modern inability to judge’? (James).  I ask myself those same questions today. When reading Ralph Nader’s newest book Getting Steamed to Over Come Corporatism, he reflects with factual evidence how reckless and corrupt our capitalist elites have gotten. His suggestion is that in order to overcome this we must build together to win. 

Herbert Marcuse in an essay entitled Struggle Against Liberalism in Totalitarianism states: “A total activation, concretization, and politicization of all dimensions of existence is demanded. The autonomy of thought and the objectivity and neutrality of science are repudiated as heresy or even political falsification on the part of liberalism. ‘We are active, enterprising beings and incur guilt if we deny this essence: guilt by neutrality and tolerance” of the negligence is our crime, whether we are oblivious or apathetic (Marcuse).

Myles Horton and Paulo Freire state jointly in their conversations between one another: “We Make the Road by Walking!” We don’t build anything if we remain tolerant of repression and oppression. We create history through participatory education. 

How to Fight Corporate Control with a Postcolonial Edge:

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 21^st 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 21^st 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 21^st 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. 

CORPORATE RIGHTS versus HUMAN RIGHTS

There is a battle going on. It is an old battle that has been getting sneakier and sneakier as the corporate elite tries to desperately hold onto the tools that assist in their greed.

1) Historic Context

This battle was present during the US Civil War. Many Americans have been indoctrinated in school to believe the prime reason for the Civil War was to abolish slavery.  It wasn’t. The prime reason for the Civil War was that the Industrial giants in the north were expanding and the Plantation owners in the south were getting suffocated in the competition. The plantation owners failed to see that the freedoms they sought were in contradiction with their blatant racism and embrace of slavery.

The teaching of the Civil War allowed the Industrial north to use the political propaganda of abolishing slavery to support their goals. The Industrial north had already been utilizing slavery in the modern capitalist way before the Civil War. New immigrants were the cheap labor that Big Business used to build up American wealth after slavery was finally abolished.

Not only did the US Civil War bring an end to one form of slavery to be substituted with a more capitalist form of slavery, but the granting of the 14^th Amendment where the rights of Personhood were introduced to supposedly support newly freed slaves, somehow through legal loopholes the Industrial corporations gained the right to Personhood for their business ventures.

The loopholes of the 14^th Amendment gave Corporations limited liability. The wealthy elite now had the opportunity to take grave risks in pursuing profits, natural resources, and expanding nationally and internationally without ever having to be accountable for their acts.

At the same time, while the Industrial elites were gaining power on a progressive scale, due to the agreements between President Lincoln and his successors, compromises were made with the southern states. These compromises allowed States to have power in their local laws and legal agreements. This gave rise to Jim Crow Laws. Jim Crow Laws became a step backwards for freedom and human rights. It allowed States, which formally had slavery, to continue to segregate, racially discriminate, brutally enforce their mandates, and commit crimes against Black Americans with limited liability to those who committed violent acts to uphold Jim Crow.

The 13^th Amendment allowed loopholes that stripped prisoners of their legal rights returning a high level of unjust imprisonments of Black Americans to nearly slave level standards. While at the same time the 14^th Amendment loopholes gave civil rights to Corporations. The evolution of social treatment was a betrayal of human rights, social-responsibility to one’s neighbors, and illogical.    

Social exclusion of portions of the population were addressed under Jim Crow Laws, which allowed individual States to carry out their own reforms without federal involvement. However, on a parallel social evolution, the US government’s movement toward granting corporate elite gains began to boom with the Sherman Antitrust Laws.

The Sherman Antitrust Laws were a precursor to 20^th Century Corporate Capitalism’s creation of the World Trade Organization. While States could form their own laws, they could not create monopolies in individual states. Legally they could not favor their own local business over a national industry. The Sherman Act gave the bigger larger National industries the opportunity to spread their business throughout each State without states favoring their local industrial development.

On one hand Jim Crow and the other hand Sherman Antitrust; the Post-Civil War period allowed big industry to rise and dominate while allowing racist unjust practices for local states to continue to have some sense of domination over portions of their own population.

The first half of the 20^th Century allowed corporate power to rise at the hands of the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Melons, the Fords, and a small slew of other robber barons. Coming out on top after World War II, gave these industries the rest of the world to dominate for the next century. At the same time, the inspiration from previous revolutions inspired people all over the world to fight for their own human dignity and civil rights.

The complex development of social rights and economic rights were continually sending mixed messages. The mix message of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt allowed the largest industries to present the illusion that they were breaking up into smaller industries, but were still controlled largely by the same hands that controlled them before: i.e. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which is today Exxon and Mobil et al.  These big businesses had grown at rates unimagined while at the same time the worst economic depression was occurring.

Then after World War II with the intentionally separate creation of the United Nations to deal with social rights, and the IMF and World Bank, with the eventual creation of the World Trade Organization, to deal with economic interests. Our world today is still prey due to the separation of social and economic development from the World War II era. 

Corporate Power hit a new high with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s Neoliberal economic plans. Now corporations with limited liability could spread across the globe at a faster rate and with limited government interference. The Neoliberal Economic plan hit an even faster pace when the Cold War officially ended, and under Bill Clinton, corporate power hit its peak. Globalization allowed all corners of the planet to come under dominance of corporate interests.

2) Today’s Tactics

I started writing this essay thinking that I was going to discuss this week’s two current developments of SOPA and the surprise movement of Senators now leaning towards legalizing Gay Marriage. Most of the topics mentioned in the previous section are relevant to the issues: Economics, Human Rights, and historic similarities.

The freedom of human dignity and the freedom of information are at the center stage. Surrounding both is the corporate interest.

Firstly, desperate attempts to avoid losing Corporate Personhood certain businesses are supporting Gay Marriage, not because of moral intent, but to evade their own conduct. In the last few days, headlines of multiple media sources noted that Microsoft, Nike and a list of other major corporations are joining in their support for Washington State Marriage Equality. Several Senators with friends in high corporate places have also recently given their spontaneous support for single-sex marriage laws: i.e. Jim Kastama and Glenn Anderson.

The reason that these corporations and their friends in the senate are joining in the support of Gay Rights, which is in itself an important progressive drive for human rights, is that with the loopholes of the 14^th Amendment granting corporations personhood, acknowledging the agreements between individuals regardless of their gender and whether they are living, breathing entities, a corporation can fight for its right to exist.  

“Sometimes doing the wrong thing is right,” but Big Business should not demoralize the Human Rights’ campaign to grant freedom of Gay Rights, by twisting Amendments for Corporate gain. Americans praise President Lincoln for his involvements in the Civil War to end slavery, but we must remember that the US did not fight the Civil War because of slavery, but because of the influence of powerful industrial elites protecting their economic interests.

Evading social responsibility for larger gains through the tool of granting an additional freedom for a minority helps the minority, but still the question of motivation leads fuel for nurturing human dignity. Avoiding the genuine education and nurture of acceptance, with ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’, will be an ill accomplishment. Even after the Civil War ended and Black Americans were granted freedom of personhood, it took nearly a hundred more years for the government to address brutal education and social policies. We, as activists, do not want another written agreement that won’t go beyond the paper’s ink. Actual change involves commitments and accountability.

Secondly, the power of information is a significant tool. Who controls the information has been a base for any hegemony historically. With the corporate elite in the US having significant power of information over the public domain for so long the fear of Internet freedom is a danger to their monopoly. With the Internet giving nearly unlimited freedom for innovation and sharing of information regardless of property rights scares the hegemony big time.

2011 was a key year for Internet freedom of information sharing. During major protests globally in Egypt, Chile, Greece, riots in the UK, Occupy protests in New York City, Oakland and countless other growing locations. The power structure of most governments is in danger. Unlike during the 1920’s and 1960’s, when organizing was out on the streets and in a public place, today through social networking we can share information and organize within record time; and when police or the military could use manipulative unsuppressed violence, today with the technology of the Internet, digital cameras, and cell phones provide evidence that can be recorded on the spot. The world can learn about injustice faster and visually without having to get their information from a corporate media source that controls the same corporate controlled government.

The SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act, is in part highly an act of corporate control of passing information. However, it is a double-tongued snake, because it is also highly about trade related intellectual property rights. If the Internet can be controlled in the US, this means it will be easier for US corporations to control information globally. Whenever a song is shared, a book is quoted, a movie is clipped, a politician is caught with his foot in his mouth, this information if it is controlled by the corporate governance would force people to pay for every second, pixel, or image that gets shared between people.

This historically is a long ideological battle between hegemony and public rights. Before the World Trade Organization allowed the most powerful corporations from the most powerful countries to manipulate trade, ironically, the original Boston Tea-Party were revolutionary activists who did not want to submit to the British control. The idea of "Taxation without Representation" paralleled the necessity for the public to voice the need to overcome false power. When the US claimed Independence it insisted that the public ignore the international trade agreements that the British put forth in order to develop.  

However, how ironic that it was the US corporate elite that pushed for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which commenced in 1948 and would become the World Trade Organization, which is the significant suppressor of international development in younger nations for the past half century. Yet though Corporations have been protected with Personhood, they seem to continue to evade paying taxes. The largest corporations continually ignore their taxation commitments: "Representation without the need for Taxation".

Is the current online freedom of information debate a classic battle between capitalism and socialism, or is it a battle between corporate power and public power?  The famous anarchist philosopher Joseph Proudhon continually referred to ‘Property as Theft.’ When an artist releases his/her work to the world is it now everyone’s? Bob Dylan has been caught plagiarizing younger, known artists. Picasso used images he acquired from African masks. Rock n’ Roll initially took from Blues and Jazz beats. It is contradictory at times that the property rights restrictions of the powerful and the freedoms they seek to control the public domain are not true to their own actions, for example: the entire notion of bio-piracy, when large powerful pharmaceutical companies go to developing nations, they gather up plants and traditional medicines, and then copyright the material for financial sales. Afterwards they attempt to stop indigenous groups from using their cultural practices.

Who controls the information? Is it time to Jolt the System and remind those in power that people are people too not just corporations?   

All the World Needs a Jolt

“All the World Needs a Jolt,” Silvia Federici states in her book Caliban and the Witch, where she notes the evidence of a massive withdrawal of labor. She reflects that Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords and it was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle that could have led to a higher social inclusion (Federici).

Deep in the prison system in the 1970’s, Angela Davis was briefly allowed to be in the larger prison population after seclusion as a political prisoner for her associations with the Black Panther movement and the Civil Rights movement. Shortly after joining the general prison population, her fellow prisoners asked her about the meaning of communism, and she stated that what most American’s learn about communism, through the media and the government, tends to be exaggerated and false.

“Angela, what does ‘imperialism’ mean?” a prisoner shouted afterhours between cells. She shouted back, “It is when the ruling class of one country conquers the people of another in order to rob them of their land, their resources, and to exploit their labor,” and another prisoner retorted “You mean treating people in other countries the way Black people are treated here?”

In Angela Davis’ 1974 autobiography, she reflects on her life experiences and how she came to be such an icon during the late 1960’s and 1970’s. Raised in Birmingham, Alabama where racism flourished and brutalized black Americans, she was told that she was too young to walk with Martin Luther King Jr. during his marches for human dignity, so when she matured like other key activists in the late 1960’s she came to realize that though Dr. King was significant in the fight for civil rights, our society in crisis needed more than just an assimilation into a failing Capitalist agenda.

Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown were three of the most significant female activists associated with the Black Panther movement to have written memoirs of their lives from childhood to activism. The racial injustice, the police brutality, and the sexist treatment of individuals throughout the American society in the 1960’s and 70’s is not as far back in the past as we would like it to be. Racism still exists, imperial ambition has dominant voices pushing America into callous war after war (Iraq, Libya, and next Iran), and the prison system in America is the sharpest example of how unhealthy our society still remains.

Angela Davis and Elaine Brown still work with prison reform activism. Assata Shakur still remains in exile in Cuba after escaping from a biased judicial process that did not adequately protect her rights while on trail. She retreated to Cuba, yet was able to share her story in her 1987 autobiography. She retorts, “Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our repression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like Attica, San Quentin, Bedford Hills, Leavenworth, and Sing-Sing” (Shakur). With the 13^th Amendment stripping prisoners of their rights, returning them to a slave mentality, the prison industry gets paid to keep people behind bars then releases them, and then arrests them again, rather than making significant social reforms.

The crisis we are in is beyond class, race, and gender; yet those on the margins of wealth, from various races, who are poor, who are unemployed and still women, are the first victims of injustice. Voices like Angela Davis, refuse to be victimized. In Alondra Nelson’s recently published Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, she discusses that just as the idea of communism was manipulated via media exaggeration and false propaganda, so had the messages of the Black Panther movement, which had been exaggerated and falsely propagated. In fact, the Black Panther Movement involved itself in many community-building projects.

As Elaine Brown points out that not only were the Panther’s daring and headstrong against police injustice and brutality, but there were “the hundreds of thousands of people, Black, Latino, Asian and White, who participated in or benefitted from the Black Panther free-food programs, free medical clinics, legal aid programs, prison programs, school and education programs, senior assistance, child abuse and battered women programs, homeless outreach, and Vietnam Veteran services.” The Black Panthers reached out to all communities, and did not just represent reckless protest. A public revision of their cause and purpose is occurring.

Angela Davis, who spoke several months ago at an Occupy Wall Street protest, noted in her maturation process in the 1960’s that she “saw the problems of Black people as part and within the context of a larger working class movement … The present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super-incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. In reference to Marx, the free development of each is the condition for free development of all” (Davis).         

Grace Lee Boggs, prominent in urban development programs to strengthen the social consciousness in Detroit, in her groundbreaking reflections written with her husband James Boggs in 1974, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, inspects with a fine critical eye the jolting ripple effects from last century that are still evolving from their spring today.  She takes a look at certain revolutions and sees how we can learn from them. She is skeptical of Communist revolutions and Marxism that lead astray from their social intent. The fundamental questions she asks: 

1) Can revolutionists continue to base their activities chiefly on Marx’s analysis?

2) Would workers in industrially more advanced countries prove themselves as much in need of a cultural transformation to develop political and social consciousness and responsibility as the Russian backward worker had in 1917?

3)  What transformations in people does an oppressed social group or potentially revolutionary social force have to undergo to become an effective force in building a new society?

4)  How to bestow on the people a mobilized transformation that does not lead to a stagnant bureaucracy?

5)  And is it ever possible to have such a fundamental paradigm shift with nonviolent means of awakening?

Bogg’s assessment continues as she draws from a metaphor Mao had used in the Chinese Revolution before he was a dictator, but when he was a revolutionary thinker. The idea was along the lines of the traditional braided fibrous fishing rope and how the indifferent neutral masses lay in the center. Either end of the rope represented the Right and Left extremities. In order for the masses, sitting in political apathy, to move, both sides of the political rope had to pull hard enough at the same time to lift up the middle. Once off of its slump, the rope will inevitably have to be dragged into activity.

Grace Lee Boggs, even Angela Davis, reminds us that people must struggle simultaneously against their own weaknesses and the external enemy. Every responsible member must ‘build the revolution as you fight’, and as James Boggs totes “It is a struggle between seeing men and women as subjects and seeing them as objects, between seeing men and women as social beings capable of fighting, working, and acting together to transform themselves and transform each other,” we must overcome being isolated individuals, bundles of appetites, neuroses and fantasies, as so many become manipulated and programmed (Boggs).

Once you awaken, get to the side of the rope you are akin to and keep pulling:  All The World Needs A Jolt!