capitalism – African deep thought

Unchanging Sameness

This is a good reminder of how much Black political discourse over the last decade–with its emphasis on “representation” and the fetishization of secondary and tertiary identities–was ultimately vacuous. Far too many people ceased to be concerned with social change or even the acquisition of power, but rather with hyperindividualistic acquisitiveness within the neoliberal order. Black “activists” reveled in fashionable and vociferous (but impotent) rhetoric yet eschewed the lessons of Malcolm X and others that correctly identified our condition as internal colonialism, and also posed solutions to it (territorial sovereignty). Hence, in turning away from the historic traditions of Black radicalism, many instead embraced Western liberal theories–ideas that have proven incapable of even freeing whites from the thrall of capitalism or growing authoritarianism.

We were never going to sing, march, or boycott our way to freedom. We certainly weren’t going to twerk our way to it. Now that all of these illusory paths have exhausted themselves, perhaps we can take the path less traveled.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Can you hear that sound? That drumming?

Those are war drums being beaten.

Do you see who’s playing them? Do they look familiar to you?

They should. That’s the Western, capitalist elite. For them war, chaos, terror, and death is just a business opportunity. That’s for them. The dying part, that’s for you.

Can you see those lines? The ones being drawn between different blocs of allies?

Notice how former alliances are dissolving and new ones are being forged; how fading powers, desperate to cling even to the shadow of power, have grown more and more desperate–more and more bellicose.

Can you see that sign up ahead? The one that reads “Caution”? The one that’s being ignored because avarice and hubris are a dangerous combination?

We are being ushered into a world where danger and uncertainty will crest, giving rise to one where suffering and destruction become general, rather than particular conditions.

This is the world born of the savagery of colonialism and slavery and the avarice of their progeny–capitalism. This is the world as is it and as it will be, that is, until we decide to do something about it.

AI: A Prediction

I believe that the pervasion of artificial intelligence will eventually trigger extreme reactions from segments of the populace. Some will react to the impact of AI data centers on electricity costs and local ecologies. Others will be angered by the impact of AI on labor, not just the displacement of human workers, but the further deskilling of workers and their increased alienation from the process and product of their labor. Lastly, there will be some who will decry AI’s undermining of people’s connection to reality. That is, many people will find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between real photographs and AI-generated images, videos of actual human events and AI-generated fabrications, and the replacement of human relationships and connections with AI-based avatars. In fact, we already see these things occurring. These disaffected individuals and groups will posit that AI has occasioned a break of humanity from their social world, and will therefore conclude that AI’s societal impacts are intolerable.

I offer this to suggest that while much of the economy hinges on the success of artificial intelligence and while the so-called tech oligarchs increasingly bend the policy-making apparatus to their will, it is highly presumptive to believe that the ascent of AI will proceed absent any concerted human resistance. There will be resistance, some forms of which will be unpredictable. However, I think that it is highly plausible that many will consider AI to be a source of profound alienation, and thus an intolerable source of social and cultural malformation.

The future remains unwritten.

AI, Human Obsolescence, and Fascism

There was a report on Marketplace yesterday that included a statement from an executive at OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. He said that AI will help companies to improve efficiency. He added that it will also cost jobs.

From a policy standpoint, how will governments address the sudden obsolescence of workers from industries so affected? You may recall that many workers who were displaced by deindustrialization and globalization never fully recovered, to say nothing of local and regional economies.

Also, and perhaps more urgently, in an age of increasing political polarization, where politicians present themselves as proto- and neo-fascists, does not such economic dislocation serve as fertile ground for insurrectionary sentiments? While these new technologies may represent a boon for corporations, they could also produce profound instability in society as a whole.

I think that people were better off believing that the forests, the rivers, the lakes, and so forth were inhabited by divinities, ancestral spirits, and other spiritual beings. Once these beliefs were supplanted the forest became lumber, the river and the lakes became dumps, and generally, nature was reduced to commodity.

Empire in blackface

People are working overtime to make sure that Black people are the face of empire. After a while, some will realize how myopic a pursuit “representation” is in contrast to institutional capacity (i.e., power). However, given the current and salient neoliberal logics regarding what passes for “activism”, this may be a long-time in coming and will likely result from the continued delegitimization of the Black elite. I do question whether the same mental energies that went into rationalizing acquisitiveness and (gaudy) representation as a pathway towards group power will be easily redirected towards more productive paths.

The decadence of consumer culture on a warming planet

Popular media seeks to focus our attention on an innumerable number of unimportant things. You would hardly think that, as a consequence of resource scarcity and climate change, that the very survival of our species is imperiled.

Consumer capitalism is a maladaptive system. Sadly we will continue to confront this reality as the chasm between real imperatives and manufactured concerns widens.

Internal colonialism

I have always been puzzled about the debate as to whether the Black/African community in the US constitutes an internal colony. To me it was always obvious that we are an internal colony due to the form and degree of exploitation that we are subject to. Our community is subject to racialized containment, state surveillance, resource extraction, labor exploitation and suppression, systemic violence, ineffective/extractive institutions, cultural suppression and malformation, and co-opted leadership.

Racialized containment are the measures employed to restrict our movement within various areas within the US, such as restricting us to certain neighborhoods of the city or certain towns within a region. One one level we are surveilled as a consequence of hyper-policing and the carceral state. On another level our social movements have historically been subject to surveillance, infiltration, and disruption by the US government as in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program. One of the principle resources extracted from our community is our culture. It is, for instance, commodified by the entertainment industry. Additionally, our community is mined for intellects capable of servicing the dominant system. Further, we are variously displaced from our communities on the basis of racist hostility (via massacres) or capitalist accumulation (i.e., gentrification). Black labor is either eschewed (resulting in high levels of unemployment) or undervalued (resulting in high levels of under-employment) in the broader labor market. Institutions which are located within the community often are ineffective or facilitate the extractive ends of the state or corporate interests. Our culture is either suppressed in practice (consider the suppression of African culture during the era of enslavement) or policy (consider the restrictions on hairstyles or the regulation of Black speech in schools). Further, via the entertainment industry, cultural forms which originated with Black/African people are reconstituted into mediums that fetishize sex, violence, substance abuse, and materialism. Finally, those who are elevated as Black leaders, generally serve the interest of the state or capital.

This is internal colonialism.

Our petty bourgeois strivings

I know that many of us continue to celebrate African/Black people being installed as agents of the state apparatus, the same state that kept Africans in shackles during the era of chattel slavery, suppressed Black voting rights for nearly a century, sabotaged Black movements for sovereignty, assassinated Black leaders, and has consistently sought to inflict “on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

I am reminded in the midst of these celebratory moments of the wisdom of Malcolm X, who stated, “Racial unrest never occurs among the satisfied, bourgeois class of Negroes. They can easily be appeased and controlled and influenced just by continuing to drop crumbs on their table—the crumbs of tokenism. And this type of Negro that the so-called Negro leadership represents is a type that can be appeased and can be controlled with the crumbs of token integration.”

I think that Malcolm X’s criticism highlights the inadequacy of integrationism as a political strategy and ideology. In many ways one might say that he anticipated its devolution from appeals for structural integration to the present bifurcation of the African/Black community in the US, where the petty bourgeoise class continues to aspire to enjoy the bounty of capitalist exploitation, which the masses are increasingly dislocated by.

Ultimately, the performance of representation by powerful institutions is a paean to the aspirations of the Black elite. Such strivings do not equate to the imperative of self-determination for the masses, a self-determination whose actualization dismisses the very legitimacy of the dominant system itself.

The third option

Conservatives have thrown themselves headlong into nationalist designs, on the assumption that such a basis will provide for greater hegemony for domestic elites. They have been quite effective in mobilizing millions of Whites through appeals to fear and loathing, as well as the assurance that a better tomorrow, one resembling a halcyon past lay just beyond the horizon.

Liberals, by contrast, have demonstrated their commitment to global, neoliberal capitalism, and are increasingly mining the symbolic worth of individuals from racialized and oppressed groups, who become redemptive icons of a moribund social order.

The discerning, rather than aligning themselves with one or the other, should instead seek a third path. This path, clearly articulated by thinkers such as Malcolm X, would dismiss the two aforementioned possibilities. Instead, he would insist on the creation of an entirely different system, one wherein Africans were neither bogeymen or tokens, but one where we control our destiny.