Posts

Escaping From Within: Maroon Societies and Modern Fugitivity

  Escaping From Within: Maroon Societies and Modern Fugitivity  On Ontological Refusal and Epistemic Disobedience  Introduction: The Global Prison       What does it mean to be a fugitive? To most the word conjures up the image of someone who has committed a crime and has fled the scene for fear of punishment. But what does Fugitivity mean in the sociological and political sense? In this context, it means that one refuses to be governed, controlled, or contained by oppressive systems. It is a state of existence, rather than an act, whereby marginalized peoples create, sustain, and defend their individual and collective humanities in spaces that exist outside or on the edges of the dominant political structure. This is the concept of Fugitivity I would like to explore. How do we “escape” or transform a global society that grounds its foundations in a modernity built upon systemic violence and extractive exploitation? What alternatives are there and how ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Zealots Mirror: Why Tehran's "Fanatics" Are More Rational Than Washington's Sophists.

Image
      In the Western imagination, the world is divided into two camps: the "rational" heirs of the Enlightenment and the "mindless zealots" of the East. We are taught that our leaders operate from a place of objective, universal reason, while our supposed adversaries are driven by a primitive, unthinking dogma. But if you strip away the propaganda and look at the actual philosophical depth of these men, a jarring inversion of truth emerges.      The so-called zealots in Tehran—men like Abbas Araghchi and the late Ali Larijani—are often more deeply scholared in Western thought than the very people they negotiate against. They have used the tools of Kant and Marx to deconstruct Western liberalism better than the West can deconstruct itself. Meanwhile, the philosopher-statesmen of the West frequently engage in a form of high-level sophistry, using the language of universal rights as a hollow mask for what is essentially a nihilistic will to po...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Dialectical Manual for the 11th Hour

Image
I. The 11th Hour and the Agency of the Wheel   We stand at the "11th Hour" of the human experiment, a time of flickering lights and deepening shadows. The capitalist mode of production has transitioned from a system of expansion into a terminal phase of planetary cannibalism, where the "Wheel of History" spins with a blind, algorithmic momentum, indifferent to the Earth and the many interlinked beings that sustain us. In this state of emergency, the act of "Grabbing the Wheel" is the ultimate revolutionary necessity. It is the refusal to be a passenger on a ship steered by the cold logic of profit.   However, the path to liberation is littered with the wreckage of those who grabbed the wheel only to drive the vehicle into a different abyss. To avoid the traps of the past, the modern revolutionary must consult a "Living Library." This is not a collection of static dogmas, but a dynamic dialectic—a conversation between the raw, sun-dren...
Post a Comment
Read more

America's Curated Philosopher

Image
     I’ve written before about the sanitization of Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy as a radical philosopher, Christian, organizer, and activist that establishment culture has reduced to a man of meaningless platitudes. The bastardization of his legacy and how his thought and politics relates to today is always a question on my mind, especially around this holiday now venerated by the very U.S federal government that persecuted him while he was alive. Reducing a figure like MLK down to a palatable cliche turns him into an opiate for social and political change rather than a dynamic piece of dialectical radical history. His reduction to a figurehead of a toothless liberal resistance is a crying shame.    Social and political change is about mass movements, organized democratic change by regular people, but even so, human psychology naturally sees in individuals the qualities in which we wish to embody within our...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Absurdity of Hegemony

Image
                       The Face of War - Dalí 1940   Anyone that has read a healthy amount of modern history runs into an inevitable. The United States has its hands, in one way or another, in just about every societal atrocity happening globally. The genocide of Palestinians being the latest horrific chapter in this modern deadly epoch. The justifications for America's atrocities are endless and boundless, despite its long track record of heinous crimes. The illegal invasion of Iraq was a "mistake". The recent kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro "misguided" tactically. The genocidal aerial bombardment of Vietnam a "quagmire". A new Orwellian phrase trotted out each time to obscure the truth of murder, genocide, ecocide, & criminal behavior of the highest order enacted through deliberate U.S policy. Both the actions and the excuses for global gangsterism by the United States give a whole new meaning t...
Post a Comment
Read more

American Exceptionalism

Accept that 40 million plus people will be food deprived. Accept that civilians will be kidnapped by masked thugs without due process.  Accept an endless flow of money and weapons to an apartheid state.  Accept a level of wealth inequality that has produced the first trillionaire. Accept that we are exceptional. 
Post a Comment
Read more

No Kings Day: How the Democrats Passed the Crown to Trump.

Image
       This Saturday, across the United States, "No Kings" protests against the rising fascistic power of the Trump Administration have filled the streets. Rightfully so, these protests are calling out Trump and his plethora of christo-fascist goons for their dismantling of democratic norms. However, the general mood of these protests, especially among the organizers, is missing a key element that can unite the many coalitions of people who want and need change. Trump is not the problem. Trump and his lackeys did not spawn out of thin air. As another commentator put it, Trump is America's shadow made flesh.     It is all well to criticize Trump and his policies. But to not recognize that he is not only a product of long standing American domestic and foreign policy, but also the result of the Democratic party's betrayal of working class Americans, is a deadly trap. Obama, the darling of the Democratic party establishment, directly contribut...
Post a Comment
Read more