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31 August 2010 By Denis G. Rancourt
In the
present essay I introduce the general notion of
“roundabout” as a mechanism of conflict avoidance used
by privileged social justice activists. I then
contrast this pseudo-liberation activism with the
needed true liberation activism of Malcolm X, which I
argue to be consistent with the model of liberation of
Freire.
INTRODUCTION
The now
familiar concept of “pacifism as pathology” was
introduced by Ward Churchill as the central
characteristic of First-World middleclass so-called
social justice activism. Churchill argued from history
that all liberations were leveraged through violence
and proposed that pacifism as cowardice was pathology.
[1]
Gandhi
stated that it was better to practice armed resistance
than to use pacifism as an excuse for cowardice [2].
Both men (Churchill and Ghandi) saw acceptance of and
self-justification for one’s (legal or circumstantial)
slavery as pathology.
Paulo
Freire’s work showed that all hierarchies, no matter
how cushioned in comfort, are violent and oppressive
and argued that we could only fight our own oppression
– that “solidarity” meant standing side by side with
those fighting our same oppression. Freire advanced
that all liberations had to be rooted in and driven by
the struggles of the oppressed themselves no matter
how underprivileged and that inter-social-class
“solidarity” was insignificant and limited to rare
individuals who joined in battle on the front lines.
[3]
Churchill
concentrated on the use of pacifism as an excuse to
avoid the needed direct confrontation with the
oppressive system. He and others have deconstructed
and exposed First World pacifism as avoidance;
including mainstream life-style environmentalism,
ecological or economic isolationism, love ideologies,
and so on, when taken to be activisms in themselves.
These authors did not explore the main creative active
strategies whereby pacifism can be enacted.
I explore
the latter strategies of evasive action (roundabout)
used by the most activist-minded sector of concerned
citizens.
My goal
is to provide a radical self-criticism for dedicated
anti-hierarchy (social justice) activists to help
ensure that we are as effective as possible and are
not simply fooling ourselves. I hope that my analysis
will help us to more easily recognize when we are
fooling ourselves and wasting our energies and will
help us to identify optimally effective outlooks and
strategies.
EXAMPLES
OF ROUNDABOUT
Education and progressive legislation
Here is
an example. A visible minority suffers racism. As a
way of avoiding effective direct challenges to this
racism, members of this visible minority ally
themselves (in “solidarity”) with privileged social
justice activist whites in order to train the majority
societal group away from overt racist behaviour using
social engineering managed by the establishment -
using sponsored “education” and progressive
legislation.
As a
result, a privileged class of educated and integrated
whites become self-conscious about racist behaviour
and self-sensor their racist expression, the
establishment strengthens its illusion of fairness,
and the minority looses its ability and perceived
legitimacy for effective direct daily confrontations
against now-more-covert racism.
A victim
in this particular roundabout is the collaborating
visible minority because it puts its efforts in
collaborating and its hopes in the social engineering
rather than practice its liberation. It denies itself
praxis (in the sense of Freire) and instead integrates
itself more fully with the oppressive dominant
hierarchy, thereby becoming more oppressed and more of
an oppressor. Other victims are the lower social class
individuals of the visible minority who loose actual
solidarity with the now more integrated higher social
class individuals of the visible minority and who are
saddled with a stronger establishment more able to
deflect their legitimate and persistent interests.
The above
described roundabout is common as a general model for
any oppressed group in a “free and democratic” First
World setting: women, queers, blacks, language or
cultural minorities, working class, working poor,
homeless, disabled, non-status, elderly,
disease-infected, professional workers, students,
migrant workers, colonized aboriginals, prisoners,
consumers, wage earners, tenants, home owners, single
fathers, single mothers, and so on.
The above
example involves a social class divide of the
oppressed group but the class divide is not an
essential feature because the roundabout is equally
effective when there is no underclass of the oppressed
group.
The
essential feature of this roundabout is that the
collaboration with the establishment, with the
hierarchical system of control, is a conscious or
unconscious diversion (in terms of personal psychology
and personal resource allocation) away from effective
direct confrontations, away from the praxis of
liberation and away from Freire’s needed revolt and
authentic rebellion.
The
dominant group partner in this roundabout also avoids
its own immediate oppressions, instead of its members
practicing their liberation. As a result of this
dedicated exercise of avoidance, members of the
dominant group partner in the roundabout are
perpetually depressed, in search of “hope”, and
routinely experience “burn out” despite
self-identifying as privileged. This is because the
authentically concerned dominant group partners (as
opposed to the cynical higher-hierarchical-level
dominant group partners such as law and policy makers)
are attempting to removed themselves from their own
pain and have denied themselves any possibility of
directly and effectively addressing their own
immediate oppression.
Organizing and politics
Another
example of roundabout is when a concerned and
sensitized individual, often burdened with survival
guilt associated with his/her relative privilege and
damaged by an institutionalization (school, work,
etc.) against which he/she has no personal experience
of effective resistance, identifies an injustice
needing to be redressed and launches into “organizing”
as a substitute for immediate and direct action, as a
substitute for initiating a praxis of liberation
focussed on one’s own oppression.
This type
of organizing is based of recruiting membership,
education regarding the issues, building a growing
pool of progressive opinion, and so on, but it guards
itself against “radical” actions that would scare off
potential allies and clings instead to the mythology
of a critical mass of opinion as a motor for societal
change. [4][5]
In
contrast, organizing that supports liberation is
driven by the need for efficient learning, protection
and power amplification in a group of individuals
already joined in solidarity via their practices of
liberation. It is an organizing that is an organic
part of the praxis, not a holding pattern of risk and
confrontation avoidance.
Deferring societal agency
In
another roundabout the concerned and sensitized
individual makes a conscious decision to temporarily
sacrifice himself/herself to fully integrate the
system and to seek advancement within the hierarchy
with the rationalization that he/she will be more able
to make positive change once a sufficient degree of
power and influence is achieved.
The
nature of a hierarchy is of course such that this is
impossible. The rare individuals who break free from
the top layers are expelled from the establishment.
The other climbers serve the system astonishingly well
or blame themselves for failure and drop out if they
cannot.
The
sacrifice of willing integration is a large price to
pay if the individual does not discover rebellion and
creative anti-hierarchical sabotage as methods to
change the system from within. Workers and students
play the system to survive and their suffering is
evident in absenteeism (both physical and mental),
indifference, detachment, cynicism, escapism,
self-destruction, and so on.
This
process and these difficulties are described by
Schmidt for the case of professional workers [6].
Adapted to our schooling, this is the story of our
institutionalization into the hierarchy, into an
economy controlled by concentrated power. In this
sense, student liberation during the developmental
years would be a most fertile ground for societal
transformation [7]. This is why schools are guarded
from outside influence and from ideological divergence
as rigorously or more than prisons. [8]
Anytime
the individual substitutes direct self-defence using
his/her body, language, personal influence in
community and personal power at school or at work for
some indirect or circuitous make-work near-zero-risk
scheme that involves going along or convincing others
to also not act, then the individual is practicing
roundabout rather than liberation activism.
MALCOLM X
ON LIBERATION SPYCHOLOGY
The Black
Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defence) was founded in 1966, one year after the
murder of Malcolm X. The spectre of such an organized
and focussed resistance was the main concrete driving
force which led to significant civil rights gains for
blacks. The Black Panther Party was eliminated by the
white state’s (FBI) political assassination unit known
as COINTELPRO which was also involved in the Malcolm X
assassination. Today US blacks disproportionately
populate the lowest economic class and US prisons.
In the
words of Rev. Albert Cleage [9]:
“Malcolm
X was tremendously important, beyond our comprehension
today … Malcolm laid down certain basic principles
that we can never forget. He changed the whole course.
The first basic principle that Malcolm laid down that
we can’t forget is this: The white man is your
enemy. That is a basic principle, we can’t forget
it. I don’t care what else they drag in from wherever
they drag it – remember one thing, Malcolm taught one
truth: The white man is our enemy. We can’t get away
from it, and if we accept and understand that one
basic truth, his life was not lived in vain. Because
upon that one basic truth we can build a total
philosophy, a total course of action for struggle.
Because that was the basic confusion which distorted
the lives of black people, with corrupted the
movements of black people.”
“He
didn’t just say it … he went out and he lived it. He
asked for moments of confrontation. He said we have
got to break our identification, we can’t go through
life identifying with the white man or his government.
… We must break our identification with the enemy, we
must confront him, and we must realize that conflict
and violence are necessary parts of a struggle against
an enemy – that is what he taught. Conflict, struggle,
and violence are not to be avoided. Don’t be afraid of
them…”
This
foundational principle that in the hierarchical
oppression of blacks your enemy is your enemy can be
generalized to any particular hierarchical oppression
and to all oppressions by hierarchies.
The
oppressor by nature is your enemy. You cannot
collaborate with your enemy devoted to your oppression
and come out ahead. At best, you will be used and
transformed into your enemy.
Malcolm
X’s psychology of liberation is one where you
recognize that the oppressor is an enemy that you
cannot integrate, where you know that this enemy can
only be deterred by your strength and your willingness
to defend yourself.
In this
psychology, like in Freire’s, you do not fight the
enemy in order to replace him in a hierarchy. You
fight for liberation, not for an opportunity to create
your own system of oppression. But you fight. You
understand that this is an enemy and that all
hierarchies can only violently oppress.
If it’s
not clear that you are oppressed or that your
oppressor is your enemy, then not only are you trapped
and confused but you also protect and serve the
oppressor. And you act against all those who are
oppressed by the oppressor. You collaborate.
One does
not like to live during a time of war and one does not
like to have enemies. But this is a time of war and
you are harmed by the system, denied your full
humanity, as surely as the million directly killed in
Iraq and as surely as those held in the open air
prison known as Gaza and illegally maintained by
Israel.
By not
fighting your own oppression directly as an individual
person you protect the same system that practices
these war crimes. By not understanding in your pores
that this system and those who sustain, protect and
project it are your enemy until they stop, by not
understanding this, you are co-opted into
collaborating and into denying yourself your own
liberation.
You can’t
even start a praxis of liberation until you start to
recognize the enemy. And you can’t sustain the
struggle without knowing who the enemy is and that he
is the enemy.
There is
an us and them. You are oppressed and you have an
oppressor. Indeed, you are oppressed by an entire
hierarchical system of oppression. You target where
you can best defend yourself, where you will inflict
the most punishment. Call it punitive justice.
As soon
as you loose sight that you are dealing with an enemy,
then you are part of the oppressor. All the internal
and external forces will make every attempt to confuse
you on this point and to buy or to force your
cooperation. In particular, those who invest in
roundabout will vehemently pressure and coerce you to
follow them because you represent a threat to their
psychological investment [4][5].
CONCLUSION
If I keep
my individual personal agency, my direct ability to
have influence, my direct bodily ability to defend
myself against my oppressor understood to be my enemy,
at the point of my strongest connection to my
oppressor, then I will not partake in roundabout. I
will have all my available resources for my praxis of
liberation which will naturally include organizing and
community.
Endnotes:
[1]
“Pacifism as Pathology” by Ward Churchill, 1986.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifism_as_Pathology:_Notes_on_an_American_Pseudopraxis
[2]
"Resolving the Israel-Palestine Conflict: What we can
learn from Gandhi" by Norman G. Finkelstein, 2009.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/resolving-the-israel-palestine-conflict-what-we-can-learn-from-gandhi/
[3]
“Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire, 1970.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed
[4] “On
the racism and pathology of left progressive
First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2010/08/on-racism-and-pathology-of-left.html
[5] “The
Activist Wars” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2009.
http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2009/08/activist-wars.html
[6]
“Disciplined Minds” by Jeff Schmidt, 2000.
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
[7] “Need
for and Practice of Student Liberation” by Denis G.
Rancourt, 2010.
http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2010/06/need-for-and-practice-of-student.html
[8] “The
Student as Nigger” by Jerry Farber, 1969.
http://ry4an.org/readings/short/student/
[9]
"Myths about Malcolm X" by Rev. Albert Cleage, speech
delivered in Detroit, February 24, 1967.
See many
RELATED POSTS on the Activist Teacher blog
http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/
August 2010. This essay was first
posted on the Activist Teacher blog.
http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2010/08/roundabout-as-conflict-avoidance-versus.html
This
article was written by Denis G. Rancourt and posted by
Stephen Lendman. Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and
full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa
in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which
were funded by a national agency and ran an
internationally recognized laboratory. He published
over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He
developed popular activism courses and was an
outspoken critic of the university administration and
a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was
fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is
a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See
rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]
http://rancourt.academicfreedom.ca/
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