SummerClub/Ruins - January Mix of Music, Sound, & Noise

SummerClub/Ruins - January Mix of Music, Sound, & Noise
 

https://www.mixcloud.com/RUINS_NODE801/summerclub-january-mix-of-music-sound-noise/


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PLAYLIST (in case the one above seems blank)
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Willis. 440606 D-Day-Lands With Infantry-This the day and this is the hour.

Hugh Hopper & Kramer. This Island Earth. A Remark Hugh Made.

SummerClub. Drone.

Stereolab. The Stars Our Destination. Mars Audiac Quintet.

Olivier Messiaen. Gagaku. Sept Haikai (Esquisses japnaises) Pierre Boulez conductor, Joela Jones piano.

Cannonball Adderley. Children of Time. Lovers.

Doug Seidel. Dozep. Distractors.

William S. Burroughs. The Wild Fruits.

News From Babel. Black Gold. Sirens & Silences.

Cicadas in Cambodia.

Cesaria Evora. Bejo De Longe. Cafe Atlantico.

Sona Jobarteh. Kemet.

Noveller. Corridors. Corridors.

Billie Holiday. Billie's Blues. The Legacy 1933-1958.

Luke Pearson. Unknown Bird Species - Mmabolela Reserve, SA 2018_11_20.

David Byrne. I Know Sometimes a Man is Wrong. Rei Momo.

Marc Anderson. Girringun Rainforest Morning, Queensland, Australia.

Sons of Kemet. My Queen Is Yaa Asantewaa. Your Queen is a Reptile.

First-Atomic-Sub-1952-repeat-last-trans

Hot 8 Brass Band. We Are One. Rock with the Hot 8.

Sun Ra And His Arkestra. ‎ Kingdom of Not. Supersonic Jazz.

NASA. Plasmawaves - Chorus.

Laetitia Sadier. Find Me The Pulse of the Universe.

NASA. Sun Sonification. Sonification of the Sun's vibration.

Zoë Keating. The Last Bird.

National Public Radio (NPR). The Polar Region. Soundscape.

J. G. Bennett. Concern for the Future (excerpt from The Dramatic Universe).

Lindsay Cooper. Mainz. Various, A Classic Guide To No Man's Land.

Robert Wyatt. Annie White. Left on Man - live BBC4.

Bell Orchestre. Recording A Tunnel (The Horns Play Underneath the Canal)

National Public Radio. The Polar Region. Soundscape.

Conrad Milstein, Chief Engineer, Pratt Institute. Orange Whistle at Pratt Institute New Year's Eve. Sound and Story of the Hudson Valley.

Edward Murrow (CBS). Oh-what-an-air-force-1944-09-17 (Counts Parachutes Over Holland).

Brian Eno. Here Come The Warm Jets.

RADIO tuning. Communications - Tune AM Radio

Remarks on "The Imperial Scholar" for "Bias in Academia - a Panel on the Politics of Citation" sponsored by the Pratt Institute Libraries

Remarks on "The Imperial Scholar" for "Bias in Academia" - A Panel on the Politics of Citation sponsored by the Pratt Institute Libraries

Bias in Academia
A panel discussion to expand consciousness of bias and discrimination in various academic practices and venues.
Organized by the Pratt Institute Libraries, the panelists include Janice Robertson, Ann Holder, Ric Brown, Minh-ha Pham, Mendi Obadike, Denisse Andrade, and Arlene Keizer and co-moderators Caitlin Cahill and Uzma Z. Rizvi.
This event is open to the Pratt community.
LOCATION: Alumni Reading Room, Pratt Library, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn Campus
DATE: September 12, 2018 at 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

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[[[Portions in brackets were not spoken due to time constraints]]]

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The sponsors and location of this panel have some significance to me since in the years before I became an academic, I was a legal reference librarian at a large firm in the City. It was during that time that many of the works of Critical Race Theory began to appear in the law reviews. So I had the luxury of easy access to the journals and read a fair amount over the 11 years I was a law librarian.

So it is because of this duel perspective that I want to stay fairly close to the texts that the organizers shared with us in preparation for today, particularly Delgado’s “Imperial Scholar” and also a later article that he wrote in response to the reaction.

I want to focus on these texts because they situate CRT in relation to a discussion of a politics of citation; because they expose issues that might otherwise be left aside or submerged in the desire to correct wrongs or to “make a difference” (and I use that phrase with all of its connotations in relation to CRT.

For Delgado, the context of Critical Race Theory lays within the bounds of the Law and problems within legal theory, particularly

“the exclusion of minority writing about key issues of race law…. [causing] “...blunting, skewings, and omissions in the literature dealing with race, racism, and American law.”

Delgado makes a demand for recognition and inclusion that I will return to in a moment

[[[but it is worth noting that at the time of his article, he counts the number of minority law professors at 233 out of the ABA’s 3,875 FT law professors.]]]

Ten years later, Delgado reflects on citation and the privilege to speak in the 1992 article “The Imperial Scholar Revisited,” which, like the first was originally published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (140 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1349). After a decade, Delgado finds that the important question has become “What happens when a group of insurgent scholars gains admission, gets inside the door, earns the credibility and credentials that warrant consideration by mainstream scholars?” (401)

His survey of this new terrain is subdued rather than triumphant.

[[[The inner circle of white legal scholars who had previously dominated the discussion of civil rights had now largely abandoned the field.]]]

Despite new voices and citations of new authorities, Delgado confronts what he calls a “melancholy truth”:

We take seriously new social thought only after hearing it so often that its tenets and themes begin to seem familiar, inevitable, and true. We then adopt the new paradigm, and the process repeats itself. We escape from one mental and intellectual prison only into a larger, slightly more expansive one….[[[We reject new thought until, eventually, it proponents are ‘elder states-persons,’ to be feared no longer”]]] (1992:407).

Should we be surprised by this given that CRT’s criticism never approached the level of a real critique of Justice and the system of Law [[[(by which I mean the discourses, techniques, bureaucracies)]]]? Now, CRT did offer fundamental challenges to legal theory, [[[court rules and procedures]]] and certainly gained the attention of academics in other fields. But, one can not separate CRT from its own constant references to the Law. It is all there in the footnotes, after all. CRT was deeply reformist in its demands for a fairer system and a better administration of justice.

At the same time we hardly need another “race theory” or “theory of race” with all of the historical/scientific references those phrases carry. As with the Law, CRT offered no real critique of “race theory”. Instead, its authorities often either naively or strategically Naturalize racial categories; making little or no reference to the work that has critiqued the scientific ideologies of race and racialism. But this is what one might expect of articles in elite law reviews.

So if CRT offered neither a critique of Law & Justice, nor a critique of race and racialism, then what did it offer? Nothing less than the demand for recognition and inclusion. Derrick Bell’s neo-conservatism, [[[and I dare say, his neo-segregationism,]]] is in some respects a reaction to the disappointing spoils of recognition [[[at the cost of am implicit acceptance of the system of Law and the administration of justice and punishment… maybe even with a dash of resentment and vengeance]]]. The replacement of one court by another, of one set of gatekeepers of a discipline by another set, of one Master with another, would go on, and so too would the constant assertion of privilege and of the right to judge, reward, and punish. When Audre Lorde asserted that one can not “Dismantle the Master’s House with the Master’s tools” she was in part responding to a very old and deeply ambiguous question that could be put to CRT:

“What are ye but the master’s tools?”

[[[A question also asked but answered in different ways by Aristotle, Jesus, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and every Slaver and slaver driver in the old South.]]]

Delgado’s “melancholy truth” suggests that if we want engage in a politics of citation, it may require either a compromise with the status quo, or a conscious sacrifice of status/privileges/reputation in order to undertake studies that are not mainstream, that probably will not be published in the recognized journals or by the best publishers, and that do not simply reproduce the established discourses. In other words, work that is “Untimely”. It is a matter of asking what is studied, why it is studied, and to what use, if any, one wants the work to be put. Of course, this would mean that search and tenure committees be guided by the same principles.

Let me just come back to where I began. In the second paragraph of the “Imperial Scholar,” Delgado mentions his assistant as having done most of the research for the article. At no point do we find out the name of this research assistant, nor are they actually thanked. Neither is the reference librarian who undoubtedly guided the research assistant in using the early Lexis database.

Delgado’s “Imperial Scholar” can take on many meanings and appear in many forms, even cloaked in the passion and rhetoric of an “Insurgent,” a “Nationalist,” or a “de-colonialist.”

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Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism: for “Stanley Aronowitz and the Labors of Theory”

Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism.**
B.Ricardo Brown, PhD
Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies
Pratt Institute

Prepared for

“Stanley Aronowitz and the Labors of Theory”

April 13 and 14, 2017
Center for the Study of Culture, Technology, and Work
Department of Sociology

The Graduate Center, City University of New York

There are many approaches to Aronowitz’s critique of Marx and Marxism.  I want to highlight how the critique of Marxism runs alongside Aronowitz’s critiques of science in general, and more specifically, of the aspirations of both Sociology and Marxism to become the sciences of life. 

Of course, from the start the relationship between sociology and Marxism has been hostile.  Marx wrote that “as a party man I have a thoroughly hostile attitude towards Comte’s philosophy, while as a scientific man I have a very poor opinion of it” (London June 12, 1871).  Engels wrote to none other than Ferdinand Tonnies regarding the new science of sociology:

In this system there are three characteristic elements: 1) a series of brilliant thoughts, which however are nearly always spoiled to some extent because they are incompetently set forth likewise; 2) a narrow, philistine way of thinking sharply contrasting with that brilliant mind; 3) a hierarchically organised religious constitution... but divested of all mysticism and turned into something extremely sober... [a] Catholicism without Christianity  (Engels to Tonnies January 24, 1895).

And Karl Korsch, whom Aronowitz praised for having recognized that Marx’s contribution “consisted in his discovery that nothing in society was immutable” 
Even Korsch, who argued for Marxism as “the science of socialism”, even he was careful to distinguish sociology from Marxism:

What is the relationship between Marxism and modern sociological teaching? ….we shall not find any affinity or link between it and Marxism. Marx and Engels, with all their keen desire to extend and enhance the knowledge of society, paid no attention to either the name or contents of that ostensibly new approach to the social studies.…

The science of socialism as formulated by Marx, owed nothing to this “sociology” of the 19th and 20th centuries.... bourgeois social thought has been a reaction against the theory and thus also against the practice of modern socialism. Up to the present day “sociologists” have endeavoured to submit another way of answering the embarrassing questions first raised by the rising proletarian movement. [This is] the essential unity of the manifold theoretical and practical tendencies which during the last hundred years have found their expression under the common denomination of Sociology. 
Karl Korsch. Karl Marx. (1938) https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1938/karl-marx/ch01.htm

Neither sociology nor Marxism successfully became the sciences of society that they worked to become.  Even at their most positivist extremes, they remain at the level of scientific ideologies.

These failures to secure a science of social life expose the problems that scientific ideologies pose to our understanding of science and truth, and therefore in Aronowitz handling demands the critique of Marxism itself. 

These are not abstract problems, because Aronowitz is after all a materialist.  It is a concern that runs through Aronowitz’s work:  the problem of continuity and discontinuity, for isn’t science – even scientific Marxism – shaped by its histories of error;  and doesn’t truth – even the truth of revolutionary transformation – always appear as continuous through the past, present, and future? 

It is here that Aronowitz’s somewhat overlooked engagement with Michel Foucault’s work provides an avenue for us to discuss matters of continuity and discontinuity in the histories of the Marxist movements/parties and the genealogies of Marxist theory.  In fact, Aronowitz’s encounter with Foucault has profound ramifications for our understanding of these histories and genealogies in relation to any critical theory derived from Marx. 

Moreover, in Aronowitz’s work, the problem of continuity and discontinuity sheds light on how to approach the deeply related yet often opposing formations of sociology and marxism as sciences of life. 

We can find this concern with continuity and discontinuity when we look again at works such as the Crisis in Historical Materialism, Science as Power, and Dead Artist/Live Theories.

I’ll begin with

1] The Crisis in Historical Materialism

In the chapter “History and Disruption” Aronowitz asks the question: “Can we speak of a unitary science or is the object of our knowledge constituted by structures/discourses that are fundamentally discontinuous? (301)”

For the most part I will leave aside Aronowitz’s discussion of the conjunctures of Benjamin and Foucault,  In this early encounter with Foucault on the question of the science and Marxism, Aronowitz makes two points that are particularly relevant to our discussion today: 

First, Aronowitz notes that Foucault pays close attention to that which is excluded, marginalized, and displaced by the relations of power/knowledge.  It is in this attention to exclusion that Foucault’s work seems to “parallel Thomas Kuhn’s notion that normal science excluded counter-paradigms until forced to account for them” (317).  And by “Normal science” here Aronowitz means the discipline or theoretical consensus that “excludes all possible sciences [so as to] make itself a monopoly of power and knowledge” (317). 

[Just as an aside:  One might play a little game when reading Aronowitz of substituting “marxism” or “the Parties” for Science (or vis-a-versa) and it becomes clear that what holds for one often holds for the other. Indeed one can not deny that the marxist parties sought to exclude other possible knowledges or to at the very least subsume them to the revolutionary sciences.  Moreover, Aronowitz has always maintained that the specific knowledges of certain classes are also excluded, marginalized, and displaced.] 

A second important point that Aronowitz makes regarding Foucault’s work is that Foucault consistently lays bare the ideological assumptions lurking within concepts such as continuity, coherence progress, and revolution. 
Aronowitz emphasizes that this notion of discontinuity moves us to something more than just the criticism of an author:  “here we are not just talking about Foucault.  We are talking about the enunciation of a principle” that should guide the practical activity of Critical Theory.

In other words, Marxist theory must be seen as Critical Theory and cultural critique, rather than as a science of social life.
Aronowitz writes that:

“It is a question of the status of literature, law, and science.  [Foucault and Benjamin insist that we see] culture as a material practice rather than as [a mere] representation of underlying social forces” (319)

or to put it another way, we should understand scientific ideologies through their modes of deploying continuity, discontinuity, power, and class.  At the same time, we must always remain skeptical of the utopianism that stands behind the desire for a science of social life.

As he writes in Science as Power: “The desire to transform politics and economics into sciences, rather than keep them as arts, is nearly universal” (300).

And if we turn to
2]  Science as Power

We find recognizable continuities within Aronowitz’s critique of Marxism, particularly in the chapter “The Science of Sociology and the Sociology of Science” which begins by deploying Foucault’s “concept of episteme as a way of seeing that is specific to a historical period, but that is, at the same time, discontinuous in time and space.... [The place of science in the social formation] is constantly renegotiated with the other power centers, and degree of its 'freedom’ is always understood in context. Marxism does not flourish (or wane) in some mythic pristine form.  Marxism adapts itself to other paradigms and adopts them as a condition of its own legitimacy within the academy.  Far from constituting an alternative to 'bourgeois’ theory, in the context of the academy, Marxism easily adapts” to being “a variety of [naive scientism]” (300).

Here, the views of Aronowitz and Henri Lefebrve converge in asserting the utter failure of both Marxism and Sociology to achieve the status of sciences.  They are “scientific ideologies” because, while they enjoy a certain appearance of – and will to be  – sciences (192), they can never achieve the same status and refinement that sciences such as physics enjoy.  To quote Lefebvre:

Towards the end of the 19th century, scientific knowledge began to address the city. Urban sociology, understood as a scientific discipline, was inaugurated in Germany by, among others, Max Weber. But this science of the city has not kept its promises. It brought forth what we today term ‘urbanism’ (l’urbanisme), which amounts to extremely rigid guidelines for architectural design and extremely vague information for the authorities and bureaucrats. Despite a few meritorious efforts, urbanism has not attained the status of a theory (pensée) of the city. What is worse, it has gradually shrunk to become a kind of gospel for technocrats.
How and why have so many investigations and evaluations failed to produce a living and livable City? It is easy to blame capitalism and the pursuit of profitability and social control. [But] This response seems all the more inadequate since the socialist world has encountered the same difficulties and the same failures in that domain. 
Henri Lefebrve. 1989/2014.  “Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 203–205.  Originally published as: “Quand la ville se perd dans une métamorphose planétaire”, in Le Monde diplomatique May 1989; republished in Manière de voir 114, Le Monde diplomatique, December 2010/January 2011, pages 20–23.

Although Sociology failed to become a science of society, it does continue to serve valuable functions within the apparatus of power.  And so it’s place amongst the other legitimate scientific ideologies is fairly secure.

On the other hand, Marxism of course does not enjoy such a secure position either inside or outside of academia.

In fact, the very notion of Marxism as a positive science of society, which is where sociology and marxism have often intersected to create that monstrosity known as “Marxist Sociology” languishes withing the confines of the discipline.  And who really ever speaks any more of a “science of Marxism” or “Marxist science”?

So the critique of science that we find in Aronowitz’s work is always bond up with his critiques of sociology and Marxism.  They fold into each other.  And these critiques are again taken up in his essays in Dead Artists/Live Theories,  where Marx’s work is presented as inviting a manner of cultural critique that can not be fully closed off by the structures of power and knowledge.

3]  Dead Artist/Live Theories

Now the essay “Tensions of Critical Theory” begins with an attempt to recover Foucault from his many fans:

“Foucault’s work has been shamelessly appropriated by his universalizing disciples who, nudged by academic environments, are prone to overtheorization.... It was, after all, in consideration of the dangers entailed by such a use of science that schools of social inquiry, including Marxism as well as positivist social science, bid us [to] return to the concrete” (130).   

Dispensing with this academic appropriation of Foucault, Aronowitz returns again with certain modifications, elaborations, and most of all, critically, to Foucault’s notion of the episteme, which Aronowitz takes to mean

“A way of seeing reality that not only forms a specific perception of the social world as well as ordinary objects, but also becomes a way of activity and inscribes itself in institutions such as law and education”

This

“notion of episteme requires not only an examination of ideological stances, it demands an attempt to recover and name [the activities that] resist representation in terms of ideological or scientific [systems of classification].”

Once again, that which is excluded, marginalized, and displaced by scientific ideologies also mark the space of resistance to the conventions of science.  To locate these sites of resistance requires an interrogation of “practical activity” (p.68) and for Aronowitz, history becomes an “interrogation that refuses to privilege political and economic events or perceptions over expressive forms” (68)

So we find that “practical activity” and the “expressive forms” of everyday life mark the limits of the sciences of life even as it is dominated by them.

“Practical activity... leaves a trace that is discontinuous with... scientific [classifications]”, ideological formations, and systems of knowledge. 
 
And “practical activity” and its expressive forms are located of that singular object of study that both Marxism and sociology have tried to reduce or fix as an object of scientific knowledge: class.

Now this is where Aronowitz supplies something more than a modified definition Foucault’s episteme, he alerts us to class as a fundamental silence in Foucault’s work, whereas for Aronowitz class supplies the foundation for any notion of history and continuity.  It  is not that Foucault is alone in his silence.  And Marx himself, we remember, had his own difficulties with the concept of class, as the final section of Capital III demonstrates when it famously breaks off just as we are finally about to be given the definition of class.

What continuity that concretely exists is supplied by class, culture, everyday life and its repetitions.  This point returns us to Marx by highlighting the discontinuities so as to open up Marxist theory to critique.  The history of Marxism itself becomes nothing less than “a theory of discontinuity as well as continuity” of science (68). 

In How Class Works, Aronowitz elaborates on this in the section titled “The Ideology of Endings” where he rejects the notion that “class and class struggle are relics of a bygone era” (210).

“History is made when – through self-constitution – the subordinate classes succeed in changing the mode of life in significant ways.  That these changes rarely involve transformations in the ownership of productive property does not disqualify them from being historic.  Moreover, rulers make history when they are able to abrogate previous gains made by insurgent social formations and return to some previous time.  In this sense Nietzsche’s comment that nothing disappears but, instead, returns to bite us is entirely vindicated by current events.  The form of the return is never identical to its previous incarnation, but it is recognizable as the past.... For the making of history is a creative act, but one constrained in part by conditions already in existence.  Because change is self-generated by social formations, it is always different in many respects, always new” (211).

Marxism thus becomes not an abstract science of abstracted life, as Aronowitz  notes regarding the vitalism behind Althuseer’s separation of science and ideology.  Instead Aronowitz offers a critique of life alienated from living: i. e., a materialist critique of everyday life that is not chained to a dogmatic moralism, or to the orthodoxy of past or future parties and political formations. 
There is no epistemological break in Aronowitz’s work.  Where we find discontinuities, they serve to mark the continuities of culture, the struggles of classes, and the domination of nature. 

Critique is never closed off.  This provides the continuity in Aronowitz’s contributions to Cultural Studies, labor, class, sociology and the other sciences of life, but especially to Marxism and Critical Theory.  The continuity that flows through them is less historical than it is cultural, that is, the continuity that allows us to trace these histories/genealogies is –  at its core –  the “practical activity” of social classes. The notion of historical continuity always appears in Aronowitz’s works as the concrete social relations of class formation. 

So how should we understand the relationship over time of science to Marxism, or rather, the various sciences to the various Marxisms?

This is the Unanswered Question of Marxist Theory.  Just as Charles Ives put the question of continuity and discontinuity to music, Aronowitz puts the question to Marxism and to the sciences of life and society.  And just as with Ives, the question is never answered, though the responses grow louder and more chaotic as they become more insistent.

As he states at the conclusion of “Tensions of Critical Theory”:
“I am persuaded that these debates [on the place of science and the relationship of Marxism to the sciences] will not end; a final solution will not be found.
And it should not be, for the very reason that the [social function of the various scientific and/or sociological Marxisms ] as with science in general, “is constantly renegotiated with the other power centers, and degree of its 'freedom’ is always understood in context” (300).

[**]  Before beginning this talk I added a few remarks about how I came to be a student of Stanley’s at the Grad Center. This is a slightly edited and expanded version:

In some respects I encountered Stanley long before I read or knew him.  As a undergraduate at Simon’s Rock, my sociology professor was Jim Monsonis.  Jim was in the SDS with Stanley.  Jim had in fact once been the national treasurer for the SDS.  My freshman year he gave the Intro. Sociology class Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capitalism for its first reading.  When I first heard Stanley speak at the American Sociological Association, he was speaking in part about the lessons to be drawn from Braverman....

At that time, I was more interested in being an Ecologist than in being a Sociologist.  By those twists of fate I got a fellowship to study Geography at Syracuse University.  While I was there I undertook a study involving Emerson’s philosophy of Nature and specifically how to observe nature, the social and natural transformations of the 18th and 19th century New England landscape, and the luminist-style paintings of that landscape.  My adviser, the one “Marxist” in the department, objected to my MA thesis on the grounds that no where had I denounced Emerson for being a bourgeois philosopher.  I said that that was both the most obvious and the least interesting thing about Emerson.  Upon that, he told me that I was “an armchair Marxist” (which was, if you can believe it, a pretty big insult back in the day) and I replied that he was a “Stalinist” and soon after moved to New York City to work as a legal reference librarian, giving little thought to ever going back to grad school.

But while I was at Syracuse I picked up a copy of the Crisis in Historical Materialism and was immediately taken with its mix of Critical Theory and what would later be known as Cultural Studies that came together to form a critique of Marxism itself.  Nancy was encouraging me to consider returning to grad school for Sociology and I realized that Stanley was only a few blocks away at the Graduate Center.  I sat in on a couple of classes and then dove back in.  With Patricia Clough coming to the Grad Center soon after, it was obviously the right decision.

Now, a couple of years after I started at the Grad Center I was talking to Jim Monsonis and only then learned that he and Stanley knew each other.  But there is something more that is directly relevant to my talk today.  When I was a senior at Simon’s Rock, I took the Social Science seminar with Jim.  The final essay question (15-20 pages!) was on the question “Is Marxism a science, a branch or the social sciences, or not a science at all?”

After thinking about it for a long time,I told Jim that I had no way to answer the question, as all of them could be either true or false depending on how one understood science.  Jim gave me a grade even though I never finished the paper... and I have always told him that I still owe him an answer.  And now, it is with these remarks on Stanley’s work that I, in fact, return to the question that Jim posed and whose answer, as you will see, Stanley leaves open.... unanswerable.... at least within the social relations of capital.....

Originally titled: A Foucauldian with a sense of class?  Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism.

Lathe Biosas. Epicurus

20 Works on Marx and Marxism

 

The twenty works which most influence my reading of Marx and Marxism.

I.  Rosa Luxemburg.  The Accumulation of Capital. [and The Anti-Critique].

II.  Rosa Luxemburg. The Junius Pamphlet.

III.  Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.  The Dialectic of Enlightenment.

IV.  Max Horkheimer.  Critical Theory.

V.  Theodor Adorno.  Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life.

VI.  Theodor Adorno.  Negative Dialectics.

VII.  Herbert Marcuse.  One-Dimensional Man.

VIII.  Isaak Illich Rubin.  Essays on Marx's Theory of Value.

IX.  Karl Polanyi.  The Great Transformation.

X.  Alfred Schmidt.  The Concept of Nature in Marx.

XI.  William Leiss.  The Domination of Nature.

XII.  Antonio Negri.  Marx Beyond Marx:  Lessons from the Grundrisse.

XIII.  Louis Althusser. For Marx. 

XIV.  Michel Foucault.  The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.

XV.  E. P. Thompson.  The Poverty of Theory.

XVI.  Henri Lefebvre.  Everyday Life in the Modern World. 

XVII.  Angela Davis.  Women, Race, and Class.

XVIII.  Stanley Aronowitz.  The Crisis in Historical Materialism. 

XIX.  Stanley Aronowitz.  Science as Power.

XX.  Terrell Carver.  The Postmodern Marx.

Remarks for "A Community Celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day"

Struggle, Organization, and the Meaning of Non-Violence

I had the honor and pleasure to be invited to give a few remarks at the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church just about a block away from the Pratt campus. The highlight of the evening was certainly the wonderful and talented musicians who performed with just the right mix of skill and passion. The selections and performances were fitting for both the space and the occasion.

The panel consisted of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Ms. L. Joy Williams, the President of the Brooklyn chapter of the NAACP, and myself. Obviously, it was a rather humbling experience for me. We were given four readings from Dr. King and asked to use them as starting places to reflect on three questions:

Dr. King’s non-violent approach was controversial in his day among activists. Is his approach relevant to our present situation? If so, how can it be commended? If not, what would be both a proper and effective alternative?

Is that dynamic at work still today? If so, what interests are promoting it? In our current situation how can people with similar economic interests be brought together?

Where is the principal resistance to racial justice now coming from? How can it be countered or neutralized?

Because of time, these notes approximate what was said and in more detail than voiced that night. In that respect, if I was not so clear in my shortened version, perhaps this will provide a bit more clarity.

The texts of the readings and the program are included below these remarks.

***

Introduction and Response to First Reading: from “The American Dream” (delivered on July 4, 1965 at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA.)

Thanks so very much for inviting me to speak today.
I have been thinking about your question and it seems to me that there are at least three things I could suggest from my perspective as an academic who grew up in a small town call Darlington, South Carolina during the 1960s and 70s. Who was in legally segregated public schools until the middle of the 3rd grade. So the words we have been asked to reflect on were for me just a part of daily life, rather than something to praised on one day and then forgotten the rest of the year.

To me, three things about this passage stand out:

I. The statement that violent action is both “impractical and immoral.” The passage elaborates on this theme, reminding us that the strategy of non-violence did not emerge only from moral values, but also from the practical need to find a strategy of confrontation when your oppressors have a monopoly on the means of social violence, from the small arsenals that individual gun owners amass to the use of the courts and prison system.

II. The passage points out how there has been, I think, a profound misunderstanding about the meaning of non-violence. One result of the appropriation of the Civil Rights movement by those on the right is that non-violence has become somehow equated with passivity. That somehow only the Nationalist or separatist threads of the Civil Rights movement offered active resistance. But let’s be clear in our own thinking: “Non-violence” is never passive. It is active “Noncooperation” with the forces of domination. As such, Non-violence is really confrontation, the disruption of everyday life, direct action, and occupation. These are all nonviolent responses to violence, authority, and power.

III. In keeping with this idea of non-violence/noncooperation, King urges us to be active and not reactive. The forces against freedom will constantly try to provoke us to respond, to spend all of our time responding to them. That is how Trump uses Twitter, and what is behind his attack on John Lewis. Distraction, diversion, and reaction.

Instead, despite these constant provocations, we should follow King’s example. We must decide on the times, places, and forms of our “noncooperation with evil” and not allow them to lure us into their various traps. This is not easy, because the provocations are constant and range from a sideways glance to outright murder.

So the passage is a challenge to us to understand that we have to endure a long struggle for freedom that will no doubt continue on long after us all, but that can’t get there without us. It is also a declaration that despite their brutality and cruelty, the enemies of freedom will ultimately fail, but only if we make the ethics/morality of the movement central to how we live our daily lives, then the forces of reaction can not win. That is a challenge, too, when the other side does not hesitate to use its violence and what King called its “propaganda agents” to attack and denigrate any attempt to move the country forward.

Just to mention that active does not mean just protesting, but it also means discussions like these, work in the arts, writing, criticism, and analysis. We need to be just as active and engaged in thinking about what it means to be a movement for freedom as we are in marching.

Response to Second and Third Readings: “Where Do we Go From Here?” (delivered on August 16, 1967 at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, Atlanta, GA. and “Our God is Marching On! (speech delivered on March 25, 1965 in Montgomery, Alabama).

Like I said about the first reading, nonviolence is not without its real costs in lives. In fact, as the passage indicates, the modern struggle is rooted in the violence of the Civil War and the dismantling of Reconstruction. I do not think it is any coincidence that Dr. King’s final words were “ Mine eyes have seen the coming of the Glory of the Lord” – the first line of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and a song sung to the tune of John Brown’s Body.

Martin Luther King, Jr: "Mountaintop" speech full length from Filip Goc on Vimeo.

In the same way, it is not a coincidence that his perhaps most quoted speech was made in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

 

Keep in mind how King (and those around and before him like Frederick Douglass, A. Phillip Randolph, James Farmer, Ida B. Wells, Baynard Rustin, and Mary McLeod Bethune, to name just a few) never allowed the opposition to control the meaning of national symbols and texts. He was always questioning their commitment to those words and ideals, but he never put ours in question.  [Ironically, this is what the right-wing has distorted in their attempts to co-opt King’s work]. 

Part of the genius of his rhetoric was that he seized on the idea that in reality the very story of the development of those American ideals is really the story of abolitionism, Civil Rights, and of universal human rights. Those symbols no longer mean what they meant before when the country was founded, because these struggles have given them new meanings. This is what Lincoln said at Gettysburg and why King stood at the Lincoln Memorial during the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” to speak again of the possibility of a new covenant. If we give this up, we give up our own history as well as handing the right a powerful weapon that we ourselves forged through our own struggles and one that belongs only to us.

For a practical example, I suggest that just as they were deployed at Standing Rock, recruit and put veterans -in uniform- front and center whenever possible for the powerful symbolic and political value it would have. As with the 1963 March For Jobs and Freedom, rally at the monuments and historical sites. Claim them – they are rightfully ours, anyway – and use them as everything from sites of resistance to backdrops for press conferences. It is a way to simultaneously lay claim to the active legacies of those that struggled before our time, while sowing confusion on the other side, as they will have to actively confront their hypocrisies and violence.

[Deleted paragraph: Trump’s attack on Rep Lewis is just one example of the attempt to erase the history of struggle for freedom that actually made America greater, and replace it with a vision of a past that never existed. Remember that Trump supporters said that they want “Their” country back and that “their” country did not look like it use to. These are their fantasies, but they are there to erase or obscure the real history of struggle and fellowship.]

While sort of preparing for this, I came to read the speech by King’s own elder, A. Phillip Randolph, and here is just a bit of what he said then because it fits with these passages from King at the March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom” and shows just how relevant they still are:

“We are the advanced guard of a massive, moral revolution for jobs and freedom. This revolution reverberates throughout the land touching every city, every town, every village where black men are segregated, oppressed and exploited. But this civil rights revolution is not confined to the Negro, nor is it confined to civil rights for our white allies know that they cannot be free while we are not.... The March on Washington is not the climax of our struggle, but a new beginning not only for the Negro but for all Americans who thirst for freedom and a better life. Look for the enemies of Medicare, of higher minimum wages, of Social Security, of federal aid to education and there you will find the enemy of the Negro, the coalition of Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans.... that seek to strangle Congress. We here today are only the first wave.” August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

So for both practical and moral reasons, when we are taking action, we should be certain to not surrender the symbols of the America to the “Cultural appropriation” of the Right/Far-Right. That is what King means by a renewal of the kind of Populist movement that fought against Jim Crow.

This also means that we must vote despite the stubborn obstacles that are put in our way. [And I know Rep. Jeffries can tell you that a phone call to Congress (not a text or an email) gets attention.]

Response to Fourth Reading: from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (April 1963).

I think he is absolutely correct and those voices of moderation, which ironically often quote select passages from Dr. King, but never this one, are very much still with us. (Ted Cruz or Fox News released statements explaining the meaning of MLK day as being just this kind of moderation! I know, it is hard to read such things some times!) The voices for that kind of moderation are really just advocates for keeping things as they are, but they just sound a bit nicer. Sometimes compromise is necessary to move forward, but compromise does not mean moderation, just like nonviolence does not mean cooperation.

I would just mention that this should make us think about the different groups and organizations in the movement and how they relate to each other.

Dr. King was but one of several leaders of several independent organizations. They were in constant dialogue and they differed on strategy and tactics. The leaders and the organizations changed over time in response to the circumstances and we can learn many lessons from them. One that I think is most important is that just as there are many forms of action, there should be many different groups and organizations with a wide range of tactics. They do not need to be coordinated, but they should not denigrate one another, either.

Bayard Rustin, Jack Greenberg, Whitney M. Young, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, unidentified.

It is not either/or. We should never say things like “Malcolm X was the real militant, and King was not” or some sideways denigration of the “Mainstream Civil Rights movement” or of BLM, because each of these are part of the same struggle. Different times and different places demand different tactics, and you see this in the relations between the leadership and in the different campaigns waged by the main Civil Rights organizations during King’s life.

Dr. King and his fellow leaders differed on strategy and tactics, but they did all agreed that the goal of a true struggle for freedom was universal freedom. They also agreed that freedom could not wait, which is the sentiment that has united us all since the very day slavery began and will until the day when domination finally ends. Randolph also said in that same speech I already mentioned that:

“Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy.”

And I think we know that there is a bright line from them to us: listen to Frederick Douglass speak in 1857 to this same issue:

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”

***

PROGRAM:
Music
Africa, Africa by Akua Dixon
Clarissa Howell, cello

Welcome
 The Rev’d Gerald W. Keucher

Song
Life Every Voice and Sing

First Reading: from “The American Dream” (delivered on July 4, 1965 at Ebeneezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia.)

And I would like to say to you this morning what I’ve tried to say all over this nation, what I believe firmly: that in seeking to make the dream a reality we must use and adopt a proper method. I’m more convinced than ever before that nonviolence is the way. I’m more convinced than ever before that violence is impractical as well as immoral. If we are to build right here a better America, we have a method as old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth and as modern as the techniques of Mohandas K. Gandhi. We need not hate; we need not use violence. We can stand up before our most violent opponent and say: We will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail. We will go in those jails and transform them from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom and human dignity. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half-dead, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Somehow go around the country and use your propaganda agents to make it appear that we are not fit culturally, morally, or otherwise for integration, and we will still love you. Threaten our children and bomb our homes, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you.

But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our freedom, but we will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.

Read by Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez

Second Reading: from “Where Do we Go From Here?” (delivered on August 16, 1967 at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, Atlanta, Georgia)

Now, let me rush on to say we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. And I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. Now, yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal with the causes for them. Today I want to give the other side. There is something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. (Yeah) And deep down within them, you perceive a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing. (Yes)

Occasionally, Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional anti-poverty money allotted by frightened government officials and a few water sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. (That’s right) Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations.

And when one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard, and finally, the army to call on, all of which are predominantly white. (Yes) Furthermore, few, if any, violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the non-resisting majority. [Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him and up in the hills (Yes), but he would have never overthrown the Batista regime unless he had had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people.] It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves.

This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. (All right) What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don't solve, answers that don't answer, and explanations that don't explain. [applause]

And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. (Yes) And I am still convinced [applause], and I'm still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for justice in this country.

And the other thing is, I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. (That’s right) And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. (Yes) Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. (That's right) Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. (All right, That’s right) Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that. [applause]

Read by the Honorable Letitia James

Third Reading: from “Our God is Marching On! (speech delivered on March 25, 1965 in Montgomery, Alabama)

On our part we must pay our profound respects to the white Americans who cherish their democratic traditions over the ugly customs and privileges of generations and come forth boldly to join hands with us. From Montgomery to Birmingham, from Birmingham to Selma, from Selma back to Montgomery, a trail wound in a circle long and often bloody, yet it has become a highway up from darkness. Alabama has tried to nurture and defend evil, but evil is choking to death in the dusty roads and streets of this state. So I stand before you this afternoon with the conviction that segregation is on its deathbed in Alabama, and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral.

Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland. Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South1 to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.

Read by The Honorble Laurie Cumbo

Fourth Reading: from “Letter from Birmingham Jail (April 1963)

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection…

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? … Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

Read by the Honorable Walter T Mosley, III

Music
Three Excerpts from Frederick Douglass by Dorothy Rudd Moore
Andrea Powe, soprano; Robert Wilson, piano
Dorian Lake, baritone; Andrea Powe, soprano; Robert Wilson, piano
Mae Carrington, soprano; Robert Wilson, piano

Panel Discussion
The Honorable Hakeem Jeffries, U. S. Congress, 8th District of New York
Ms. L. Joy Williams, President, Brooklyn NAACP
B. Ricardo Brown, PhD, Professor of Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute

Recognition of Honorees Receiving the Martin Luther King Community Award
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, presented by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz & Assembly member Walter T. Mossey III
Mrs. Alonta Wrighton, presented by Cythia McKnight and Adedemi Hope
Mrs. Lydia Cayasso, Ricky & Kendel Brackett, presented by Fr. Keucher & Andrea Gray.

Greetings
The Honorable Bill de Blasio, Mayor of the City of New York
The Honorable Scott Stringer, New York City Comptroller (presented in person)
The Honorable Robert Cornegy, NYC Council Member for the 36th District

Music: Higher Ground, followed by an Instrumental Medley of Spirituals arrange and performed by Elmer Hammond, organ