Temporal Index

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth.

[dr-treyf]

“There is often much talk in the Jewish community about the dangers of assimilation, of losing connection to Jewish identity and background; often these conversations dovetail with perceived lack of support for Israel, as well as heteronormative fears about marrying gentiles. What’s often missing from those conversations is a deeper political analysis of assimilation beyond just no longer speaking Yiddish or celebrating Christmas every once in a while. We would put forward another form of assimilation: many Jews today in the US, and the West generally, have molded their identity to be compatible with empire and capital. Anything that deviates from this becomes self-hatred, and so a left wing movement will automatically be seen as an antisemitic threat, anti-Zionist Jews are seen to hate themselves, and women of color with what we deem tenuous claims to Jewishness are not even real Jews. In fact, Tablet has a recent piece attempting to argue these very same conflations, that anti-Americanism is often wrapped up with antisemitism. That attacks on Salazar are happening at the same time as attacks on Jeremy Corbyn from the UK’s Jewish establishment, or Andrew Cuomo falsely claiming that Cynthia Nixon supports BDS, is no mere coincidence; they come from the same place of paranoia and defending Jewish complacency under the status quo.”

– Julia Salazar, Assimilation and Zionism 

[temporal-index]

That Tablet article is really interesting in how close it’s authors come to class consciousness basically by identifying contradictions in left-liberal nationalism. Makes me think of this bit of Lukacs:

[T]he bourgeoisie was quite unable to perfect its fundamental science, its own science of classes: the reef on which it foundered was its failure to discover even a theoretical solution to the problem of crises. The fact that a scientifically acceptable solution does exist is of no avail. For to accept that solution, even in theory, would be tantamount to observing society from a class standpoint other than that of the bourgeoisie. And no class can do that – unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely. Thus the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself. It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and is neither arbitrary, subjective nor psychological. The class consciousness of the bourgeoisie may well be able to reflect all the problems of organisation entailed by its hegemony and by the capitalist transformation and penetration of total production. But it becomes obscured as soon as it is called upon to face problems that remain within its jurisdiction but which point beyond the limits of capitalism. The discovery of the (natural laws’ of economics is pure light in comparison with medieval feudalism or even the mercantilism of the transitional period, but by an internal dialectical twist they became “natural laws based on the unconsciousness of those who are involved in them”.

[yekkes]

Photo of JSC members taken across from the synagogue that was intimidated by fascists carrying assault rifles last year

[tutti-durruti]

Chanukkah

5692

(1932)

“Death to Judah”

So the flag says

“Judah will live forever”

So the light answers

[tutti-durruti]

Here’s more information about the photo. 

Most of the Jews of Kiel escaped before the war and therefore survived.  The menorah is on display at Yad Vashem, and is returned to the family every year so that they can light it.

[temporal-index]

Here is a statement released by the Jewish Solidarity Caucus on fascism and their participation in anti-fascist action on the weekend of August 11th and 12th.

Jewish Currents also published a dispatch from the JSC this week, reflecting on their participation in actions in Charlottesville.

[temporal-index]

Organizing Principles for the Non-Organization

The power of any endeavor does not come from a banner, but from the cooperative work and shared struggle of people.

Revolutions are not fought by parties or other organizations – which are merely representations – but by people yearning for liberation.

Whether directed into revolutionary struggle or not, people will always seek to overcome conditions of oppression, dispossession and alienation.

The purpose of socialist organizing is not to build a party or some other organization, but to raise the root principle of the forces that engulf us into consciousness, to ignite revolutionary fervor in people and the will to act collectively to abolish the world that is and to bring forth the world to come. Socialism must foster spontaneity, initiative and confidence to act – the will to be free.

Revolution is a fire that must be kindled and constantly tended to in the soul of every person. Revolution will not be completed by force of arms, a vote, or an assembly – freedom is a custom all people must learn to practice.

It is always in one's power to throw oneself into the street, whether it is filled with traffic or not. We cannot wait for the revolution to practice freedom, we possess it now; we should practice this custom to the best of our ability, in spite of the forces of the conformism that always threatens to overpower it.

An organization that depends on the initiative of leaders or representatives and bureaucratized processes to make decisions and organize the collective struggle is vulnerable to expedient decisions and self-serving exploitation by its leaders, majoritarian coercion that grinds dissent away through superficially democratic processes, and decapitation.

Such an organization privileges the initiative of individuals who have made activism their profession, or who have significant amounts of time not spent at or preparing for work, who live in urban centers, who are able bodied and independent of obligations to care for parents, children and other loved ones while hampering the ability of others to share their valuable time, insight and will to struggle.

Relationships between comrades dedicated to shared work and struggle do not need legitimation by any organization. Such relationships can be freely formed and broken as needed without first garnering the stamp of approval of any body. The initiative of those involved is the only vote needed.

A network of comrades united by common principles that shares information and other resources as well as basic protocols that enable each contact to propose actions, projects and other endeavors without having to navigate any bureaucratic process provides the scaffold for collective action in which individual freedom and democratic decision-making are harmonized. With no organization and no members to lay claim to it and police the borders around what is permissible under its aegis, people may join and and withdraw from collective struggle as the vagaries of life permit, in whatever work their own initiative is joined with that of collaborators to realize.

Abuse, coercion, exploitation and other kinds of violence that do not strike at forms of domination, against any individual or group – comrade or not – betrays the spirit of revolution and cannot be tolerated. Redress for violence must be achieved in the eyes of its victims with all due haste. Repeat violation of the autonomy of others must be met with expulsion from any network; the will to dominate threatens the safety of collaborators and frays relationships meant to foster solidarity. Repeat offenders can demonstrate their commitment to revolution by staying home.

[dr-treyf]

In this regard there is plenty of analysis to draw on. Prominently, writers such as Moishe Postone have argued that the specificity of anti-semitism can be understood in terms of the hostile identification of Jews with the abstract and chaotic nature of capital in its movement across national boundaries. This helps us to explain how much of present day anti-semitism manifests as a crude opposition to ‘globalisation’, which can unfortunately find an audience on the left. Understood this way, anti-semitism is structurally determined by nationalism. The portrayal of Jewishness alongside the abstractions of capital as ‘unnatural’ and rootless creates an ideological logic against which we are supposed to understand nationhood as something ‘natural’ and concrete, accepting a tyrannical logic of borders and state power as the natural consequence of common language and ethnicity. The relationship between anti-semitism and other forms of racism can be clearly seen in the context of state violence, especially with regard to migration, with descriptions of migrants variously as a ‘swarm’ or a contagion clearly feeding off the similar notions of national identity and homogeneity.

In one respect, therefore, Labour can be said to have a quite clear ‘anti-semitism problem’ though it is one which is rarely talked about. The commitment of the Party to a ‘Parliamentary road’ to socialism, and the consequent compromises, with British imperialism and national chauvinism, have always implied racism and nativism. It is not difficult to see how a rhetoric juxtaposing the interests of ‘the many’ and ‘the few’ can take on anti-semitic overtones when the repressive nature of state power and the implicit assumptions of nationhood remain unquestioned; the foundations of bourgeois politics certainly make it far harder to fight anti-semitism. It is also notable that even in the Palestine solidarity movement, anti-semitic theories that emphasise the power and influence of the ‘Zionist lobby’ still rely on a naive faith in the nation and bourgeois democracy, on the assumption that, if it weren’t for the malign influence of a ‘lobby’, ‘our’ governments would never tolerate Israel’s apartheid and colonialism. A proper understanding of imperialism and the sham that is bourgeois democracy cautions us otherwise.

– Will Niko, “No Community Without Politics”

[drakontomalloi]

Tove Jansson - Midwinter Wolves. N.d., 1930s

[fox-teeth]

“And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”

~Ursula K. Le Guin, A Left-Handed Commencement Address (1989)

(a quote I think about a lot of lately and find comfort in) (tip jar)

[temporal-index]

Today teachers in KY strike to defend their pensions. Gazans march for their right of return & the IDF has killed several already. Today we‘re in a narrow place, but a better world is possible. A zisn pesakh. Next year in Jerusalem. Next year in Al-Quds. Next year in Socialism.

Jewish Solidarity Caucus on twitter

[temporal-index]

jewish socialists talking to each other: "INN's politics are limited by a disconnect from working class issues and a near-complete lack of relationships with palestinians. furthermore, they risk falling apart because many of them are in fact motivated by a feeling of marginalization by the jewish establishment - an establishment they are deeply invested in due to coming from wealthy families that could afford to raise them in that establishment - and a lot of them may well call it quits politically should the establishment fulfill their most moderate demands without completely ending israeli economic and political power over palestinians."

liberal jew with zero investment in INN: "look at this galaxy-brain BS, blocked"

[temporal-index]

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

[dr-treyf]

INN is not a political party that claims to represent the proletariat; it’s an activist org targeting a bourgeois ‘jewish public’ whose security is built off exploited labor which is spent to send their kids to summer camps.

[temporal-index]

Two impulses generally motivate INN members: anti-occupation politics (not Palestine solidarity) and indignation by young bourgeois Jews at not having the same power as older bourgeois Jews in the establishment. These impulses are at odds, and could very easily lead to a crack-up in the organization, or a co-optation of the bulk of their energy should the Jewish establishment repackage its reactionary politics with as progressive (Lauder endorsing the two state solution as a means of upholding the colonial relationship between Jews and Palestinians, trumpeted as a victory by liberal anti-occupation Jews, is an example of this).

[temporal-index]

The Black Panther Party says it is perfectly correct to organize the proletarians because after they are kicked out of the factory and are called unemployable or lumpen, they still want to live, and in order to live they have to eat. It is in the proletarian’s own best interest to seize the machinery that he has made in order to produce in abundance, so he and his brethren can live. We will not wait until the proletarian becomes the lumpen proletarian to educate him. Today we will lift the consciousness of the people. The wind is rising and the rivers flowing, times are getting hard and we can’t go home again. We can’t go back to our mother’s womb, nor can we go back to 1917.

Huey P. Newton, speaking at Boston College, 1970

[temporal-index]

The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn to the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.

Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940)

[temporal-index]

The Black Panther Party says it is perfectly correct to organize the proletarians because after they are kicked out of the factory and are called unemployable or lumpen, they still want to live, and in order to live they have to eat. It is in the proletarian's own best interest to seize the machinery that he has made in order to produce in abundance, so he and his brethren can live. We will not wait until the proletarian becomes the lumpen proletarian to educate him. Today we will lift the consciousness of the people. The wind is rising and the rivers flowing, times are getting hard and we can't go home again. We can't go back to our mother's womb, nor can we go back to 1917.

Huey P. Newton, speaking at Boston College, 1970

[temporal-index]

this is what i get for stealing time at work to read, now i have to pretend i am not crying. so much of “Equal in Paris” reminds me of my own experience and the experiences of people i care about, dealing with medicaid and the kinds of doctor’s offices medicaid gets you, not to speak of the kind of resources that exist for those who possess nothing and are too ill to sell even an hour of their labor (people like my oldest brother). these bureaucracies are so arbitrary, mean, and dehumanizing. they are products of the will of people who cannot begin to imagine the lives of “the wretched,” they will not and cannot imagine (and we can scarcely imagine it ourselves) our rehabilitation, so they manage us instead.

[temporal-index]

The next day, the 26th, I spent learning a peculiar kind of game, played with match-sticks, with my cellmates. For, since I no longer felt that I would stay in this cell forever, I was beginning to make peace with it for a time. On the 27th I went again to trial and, as had been predicted, the case against us was dismissed. The story of the drap de lit, finally told, caused great merriment in the courtroom, whereupon my friend decided that the French were “great.” I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled.

James Baldwin, “Equal in Paris” (1955)

[temporal-index]

I tried to watch the proceedings and to make my mind a blank. But the proceedings were not reassuring. The boy, for example, who had stolen the sweater did receive a six-month sentence. It seemed to me that all the sentences meted out that day were excessive; though, again, it seemed that all the people who were sentenced that day had made, or clearly were going to make, crime their career. This seemed to be the opinion of the judge, who scarcely looked at the prisoners or listened to them; it seemed to be the opinion of the prisoners, who scarcely bothered to speak in their own behalf; it seemed to be the opinion of the lawyers, state lawyers for the most part, who were defending them. The great impulse of the courtroom seemed to be to put these people where they could not be seen – and not because they were offended at the crimes, unless, indeed they were offended that the crimes were so petty, but because they did not wish to know that their society could be counted on to produce, probably in greater and greater numbers, a whole body of people for whom crime was the only possible career. Any society inevitably produces criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path. And the fact, perhaps, that the French are the earth’s least sentimental people and must also be numbered among the most proud aggravates the plight of their lowest, youngest, and unluckiest members, for it means that the idea of rehabilitation is scarcely real to them.

James Baldwin, “Equal in Paris” (1955)

[saltdragon]

“If science fiction is this, or is capable of being this, a true metaphor to our strange times, then surely it is rather stupid and reactionary to try to enclose it in the old limits of an old art – like trying to turn a nuclear reactor into a steam engine. Why should anyone try to patch up this marvelously smashed mirror so that it can reflect poor old Mrs. Brown – who may not even be among us anymore? Do we care, in fact, if she’s alive or dead? Well, yes. Speaking strictly for myself – yes. I do care. If Mrs. Brown is dead, you can take your galaxies and roll them up into a ball and throw them into the trashcan, for all I care. What good are all the objects in the universe, if there is no subject? It isn’t that mankind is all that important. I don’t think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don’t think Man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he know, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware – to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential. We are subjects, and whoever among us treats us as objects is acting inhumanly, wrongly, against nature. And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness. If we stop looking, the world goes blind. If we cease to speak and listen, the world goes deaf and dumb. If we stop thinking, there is no thought. If we destroy ourselves, we destroy consciousness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” (1976) in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood (1979)

[saltdragon]

I know many today will feel compelled to remind us of Ursula K. Le Guin’s observation that capitalism appears as inescapable to us as the divine right of kings did to those living in a feudal society. To it we might add her paraphrase of Tolkien: 

If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

(”Escape Routes,” 1974)

But I hope, today, that we can also remember that her writing and her anarchism were rooted in compassion, a desire to seriously and honestly deal with the predicament of modern society and all “the weight and pain and complexity involved in really, experientially, trying to cope with that question.” 

Let us remember her as someone who wrote about love, who knew that love is hard, and could find love for people made ugly, or useless, or pitiful by impossible, real situations. Let us remember her as the person who wrote: 

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

(The Lathe of Heaven, 1971)