Bitterly Divided

Will true pleasure only exist after the revolution, or will it be indispensable to lead to the revolution?  

Ever since the project of universal emancipation through communist revolution existed there has been a tension between two approaches – a dichotomy of views of people who ostensibly want to reach the same goal. On the one hand we find a view that could be summarized as: Only the revolution will bring about real pleasure and fulfillment, and we have to be ascetic cadres to reach it. The other side seems to declare that: Only by developing pleasures and following our desires will the revolution even become a possibility. If we look back at the two main phases of revolutionary struggles in the last century (ca. 1917-1923 and ca. 1967-77, depending in which country), we can easily see that for many revolutionaries the idea that hedonism and revolution should go together was present and central to the whole project.

Closely related to this is the way the role of work is seen. Marx says in the third volume of Capital: “The empire of freedom begins indeed only there, where work which is defined by misery and external expediency, ceases…” (“Das Reich der Freiheit beginnt in der Tat erst da, wo das Arbeiten, das durch Not und äußere Zweckmässigkeit bestimmt ist, aufhört.”) He leaves no doubt that the empire of freedom is always built on an empire of necessity, but also that it is the human goal to achieve the most freedom possible. And this must include the abolishment of wage labor. 

Hedonism and Revolution: The Barricade and the Dancefloor

Not only is this shaping up to be the most expensive Olympics in the history of the games, with $51 billion of new development, it is also arguably one of the most destructive. Five thousand acres of pristine forests have been felled, while wetlands that served as important stopovers for migrating birds have been filled in. Landslides and waste dumping threaten the watershed, which feeds into the Black Sea. Building within national parks in Russia used to be limited, but that regulation was reversed in order to make way for some games facilities, hotels, and roads. Some observers note that the Olympics have provided an opportunity for developers to cash in on what they hope will be a profitable tourist destination in the future.

The construction projects have also left local Sochi-ers in the lurch, facing frequent power shortages, land subsidence, flooding, and widespread pollution. 

A road and a railway were built along its undeveloped left bank, connecting Sochi's airport with Olympic skiing venues upstream.

Of the damage done to Sochi's wilderness, "the river is the biggest shame," said Igor Chestin, head of WWF in Russia.

The river is the spawning site of one-fifth of Russia's valuable Black Sea salmon.

"Its value as a fishery has been lost due to the change of the shape of the river, and years of pollution" since Sochi was picked as the 2014 Winter Olympics host in 2007, Chestin said. 

In a interview with TIME, Suren Gazaryan, a zoologist and member of the environmental campaign group, Environmental Watch of the North Caucasus (EWNC), said that “Sochiorganizers have failed on all their green promises.” Gazaryan explains, that the “construction process for the Games has been hugely damaging for the region. He and the ENWC have documented evidence of illegal waste dumping, construction that has blocked the migration routes of animals such as the brown bear, limited access to drinking water for locals and a generally decreased quality of life for many in the city of Sochi.”

The damage done to the Mzymta, Sochi’s largest river, which flows from a lake in a Caucasus reserve down to the Black Sea is “the biggest shame,” said Igor Chestin, head of the Russian chapter, of the World Wildlife Federation (WWF). The river was the spawning site of many Black Sea salmon, which have now disappeared, or died as a result of water contamination.

“The most dangerous and important part of the damage is the biodiversity lost in the area,” says Gazaryan. “Parts of the national park have been completely destroyed. This area was the most diverse in terms of plant and animal life in Russia.” Official reports by Sochi National Park show that brown bears, and various reptiles, can no longer be found in the area.

In an attempt to try and compensate for the destruction of the land, and the homes of its wildlife, Russia created an Ornithological Park, and planted 1.5 million new trees – three for every one that was cut down in the Sochi National Park, to make way for Olympic sites. Gazaryan says that much of the planting programme had been “pointless.” “The planting could never substitute for the loss of established forest, which is a complex ecosystem,” says Gazaryan. “[T]hese are ecosystems, not a Lego set that you can take apart and then rebuild somewhere else.”

“It’s a profanation,” said Vladimir Zubakin, president of the Russian Bird Union (RBUC), of the human made park. The wetlands were a paradise for up to 65 species of birds, but now the former wetlands lie buried under two metres (6.5 feet) of crushed rock. “They have been lost to the Olympic steamroller,” said Zubakin. “They say it looks pretty now, but birds actually prefer mud.”

The real meaning of the Korean War. Stopping Communism reaching Kansas. Growing up in Kansas, I breathed a sigh of relief to have been saved from the horrors of communism.   Then those dirty Reds got me anyway!

...whatever the US was fighting for, from 1950, when the war broke out, to 1953, when it ground to a halt, democracy hardly described the American cause.

We were fighting on behalf of Syngman Rhee, the US-educated-and-sponsored dictator of South Korea, whose vibrancy was demonstrated by the large-scale slaughter of his leftist political opponents. For 22 years, Rhee’s word was law, and many thousands of his political opponents were murdered: tens of thousands were jailed or driven into exile. Whatever measure of liberality has reigned on the Korean peninsula was in spite of Washington’s efforts and ongoing military presence. When the country finally rebelled against Rhee, and threw him out in the so-called April Revolution of 1960, he was ferried to safety in a CIA helicopter as crowds converged on the presidential palace.

...the liberals came out in support of the war, with The Nation and The New Republic leading the charge: the antiwar Republicans were "isolationists" and their alliance with "legalists," sniffed TNR, revealed a natural affinity, while progressives were burdened with no such sentimental attachments to the Constitution. The editor of The Nation red-baited Col. Robert McCormick‘s fiercely conservative Chicago Tribune for being on the same side as the American Communist Party. What’s interesting is that the CP’s former fellow-travelers, such as Henry Wallace, Corliss Lamont, and the principals of the Progressive Party – which had run Wallace for President with fulsome Communist support – rallied behind Truman, reveling in the idea of a UN-sponsored war on behalf of "collective security." Obama, it seems, commands a similar ability to inspire the left to throw its vaunted antiwar credentials overboard.

'Good' and 'bad' war - and the struggle of memory against forgetting

...a Georgia county judge ruled that Sentinel Offender Service had illegally extended the sentence of Mantooth and potentially thousands of others who were required to pay the firm monthly probation fees, and was illegally ordering electronic monitoring for misdemeanor offenders — prohibited by state law — while charging probationers for their own monitoring.

Other named plaintiffs in the pair of cases were hauled off to jail and/or subjected to electronic monitoring for alleged probation violations six years after their probation had ended for minor offenses like possession of marijuana and no proof of insurance.

Sentinel Offender Services has become notorious for using every means available to extract funds from low-level offenders, motivated by profit rather than the public interest in supervising and rehabilitating these low-level offenders. Those in Columbia or Richmond counties who cannot pay fines associated with minor offenses like speeding or public intoxication are placed on private probation, which carries monthly fees of $34 to $44. They are also charged additional “start-up” fees, photo fees, and electronic monitoring fees. When they cannot afford to keep up with these fees, they end up in jail,unfamiliar with a state law that prohibits incarceration for inability to pay.

 A report from the Criminal Justice Review explained that “Private agencies…rely on the probationer’s paying a supervision fee to remain solvent.” Solvency, however, is hardly a concern for many of these corporations, some of which have amassed tens of millions of dollars annually off the fees they charge probationers.

IN LATE 2010 police in Childersburg, Alabama ticketed both Kristy and Timothy Fugatt for driving with expired license tags. They were fined $148 each, plus another $198 for Mrs Fugatt, whose license had expired. They could not afford to pay, so they were placed on probation under the supervision of Judicial Correction Services (JCS), a private company that manages probationers for roughly 200 misdemeanor courts in the south-eastern United States.

JCS also charged each of them a $45 monthly service fee. When they fell behind on their payments, they were charged more fees and threatened with jail. In February 2012 they claim that a Childersburg policeman arrested them at their home, threatened them with a Taser, told them their children would be placed in state care and took them to prison. They were released only after relatives brought $900 to the Childersburg jail. (Robert McMichael, the head of JCS, refused to comment on any of these allegations.)

1. Sentinel Offender Services: Sentinel is the richest probation company in the country, bringing in $30 million in 2009. The company has faced a number of lawsuits alleging its employees demand onerous payments from poor probationers. The company also issues arrests warrants when probationers cannot pay, without legally mandated consideration for defendants’ financial situation. Sentinel has even extended the probationary sentences of thousands — illegally — in order to wrest more money from them.
A Georgia court recently ruled that the company would have to refund “perhaps thousands” of payments to former probationers who had the unfortunate luck to be supervised by a company that, as the ACLU reports, “links its probation officers’ performance evaluations to the amount of money collected from probationers.”

2. Judicial Correctional Services: This probationary company was founded by an Alabama circuit court to be operating “debtor’s prisons” in collusion with the local municipality of Harpersville, Alabama. In the event that a probationer couldn’t pay his court fees up front — which happens often in the fourth poorest state in the country — the court would turn the indigent person over to JCS.
People who couldn’t pay their monthly fees to the company were thrown in jail without a trial at the urging of JCS. The Harpersville court would then heap even more fines and fees on top of desperate defendants.
The circuit judge who ruled against Harpersville was so disturbed by the JCS-judiciary collusion that he accused the local court of “violating almost every safeguard afforded by the United States Constitution [and] the laws of the state of Alabama.” Despite the ruling, JCS continues to operate in 69 cities throughout four different states, and is looking to spread even further.

3. Detention Management Services: Although Sentinel officially bought out DMS some years ago, the company merits a mention for its role in expanding the probation syndicate in Georgia. Other states wanting to expand private probation will likely model their legislation on a bill that was propped up by DMS money.
The firm paid $75,000 in 2003 to Bobby Whitworth, chair of Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles, to draft and lobby for legislation that expanded the power of probation companies by “transfer[ing] supervision of approximately 25,000 misdemeanants from the State Department of Corrections to the individual counties.” The transfer gave DMS and other probation companies more defendants to supervise, since only counties can contract out probationary services.
Whitworth was eventually jailed for receiving kickbacks, but the law he helped nurture still stands, and now a tight group of Georgian prison professionals are building up the probation business at a time of scarce funds for public services: “This [industry] is completely dominated by retired state probation people and wardens of state prisons,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They created this industry for themselves.”
A new bill sitting in the Georgia legislature would grant probation firms even more power by allowing them to set probationers’ “tolling” periods, which means more freedom to suspend and resume sentences with court approval. It would also give private probation officers increased “immunity from liability.” The law stands on the shoulders of the earlier measure that sailed through the legislature thanks in part to DMS funding. 

4. Providence Community Corrections: PCC is the probation-providing subsidiary of Providence Service Corporation, whose website extols the “high-quality” of its “human social services [and] collaborative care services.”
PCC was the subject of a 2011 lawsuit by a Tennessee woman who claimed the company’s employees “harassed and intimidated” her into paying an excessive amount of fees to the company. A judge dismissed the case in 2012 for undisclosed reasons, but a PCC outfit in Georgia received some attention a year later when one of its employees was arrested on charges of embezzling probationers’ fees. According to a local judge, PCC had already raised some eyebrows for its reported low collection rate and high number of unclosed probation cases.
Other probation firms like Sentinel have come under legal scrutiny for keeping cases open beyond what was originally mandated by a judge, in order to prolong the “payment period” throughout which defendants must pay penalty fees that compound over time. 

Predatory Probation Privateers Prey on the Poor

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Photo: Andrew Bardwell)Last April, in a column titled Debtors Prisons, Once a 19th-Century Relic, Again Wreaking Havoc in US, I wrote: "The jailing of people unable to pay fines and court costs is no longer a relic of the 19th century American judicial system. Debtors' prisons are alive and well in one-third of the states in this country." Last week, I received a Press Release from the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union that appeared to strike a blow against this appalling phenomenon.

The release stated that "the Supreme Court of Ohio distributed a new 'bench card' to all of the state's judges, giving much needed instructions to avoid the unconstitutional practice of sending people to jail when they owe the court fines and are unable to pay. The Ohio Supreme Court's "bench card" was a definite blow to what had become the routine jailing in several states of people who were not able to pay fines imposed for a relatively minor crime committed."

Now, however, a new report by Human Rights Watch has revealed another way that poor people are being unduly financially burdened and, in many cases, imprisoned for not having enough money to pay their court-imposed fines. According to Profiting from Probation: America's 'Offender-Funded' Probation Industry, privately owned companies handling the probation of offenders are "routinely jailing probationers" for not being able to pay fees owed to those companies.

Private companies are Profiting from Probation

"Every year, US courts sentence several hundred thousand people to probation and place them under the supervision of for-profit companies for months or years at a time," Profiting from Probation points out. "They then require probationers to pay these companies for their services. Many of these offenders are only guilty of minor traffic violations like speeding or driving without proof of insurance. Others have shoplifted, been cited for public drunkenness, or committed other misdemeanor crimes. Many of these offenses carry no real threat of jail time in and of themselves, yet each month, courts issue thousands of arrest warrants for offenders who fail to make adequate payments towards fines and probation company fees."

Putting people in jail for failure to pay their private probation handlers is part of what is called the "'offender-funded' model of privatized probation that prevails in well over 1,000 courts across the US.""Offender funded" is exactly what it sounds like; "Courts in some US states charge offenders fees to help defray the costs of running a probation service."

Profiting from Probation is a 72-page report that is "based largely" on more than 75 interviews with people in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi during the second half of 2013. "It shows how some company probation officers behave like abusive debt collectors. ... explains how some courts and probation companies combine to jail offenders who fall behind on payments they cannot afford to make, in spite of clear legal protections meant to prohibit this.... [and] argues that the fee structure of offender-funded probation is inherently discriminatory against poor offenders, and imposes the greatest financial burden on those who are least able to afford to pay."

Although it may be difficult to imagine in the twenty-first century, "the business of many private probation companies is built largely on the willingness of courts to discriminate against poor offenders who can only afford to pay their fines in installments over time."

Offenders caught in a catch-22

Offenders are caught in a catch 22: If they could afford to fully pay their fines, they wouldn't be sentenced to probation, and would subsequently not be subject to the costs of paying for probation supervision by private companies. Some offenders take years paying out these fees and wind up paying significantly more than the original fine.

For stealing a can of beer from a Georgia convenience store, Thomas Barrett pled guilty and was fined $200. Over time he discovered that he owed his probation company $1000, more money than he made in a month. In Mississippi, a middle-aged woman was fined $377 for driving without a valid license, and her company probation officer threatened to jail her because she owed the company $500 in unpaid supervision fees.

The report points out that financially strapped counties and municipalities have turned to private companies to run their probation programs. "Many courts have repurposed probation into a debt collection tool and are primarily interested in the services of probation companies as a means towards that end. In what is euphemistically referred to as "pay only" probation, people are sentenced to probation for just one reason: they don't have money and they need time to pay down their fines and court costs. Pay only probation is an extremely muscular form of debt collection masquerading as probation supervision, with all costs billed to the debtor. It is essentially a legal fiction and it is the cornerstone of many probation companies' business."

A growing predatory industry

Judicial Correction Services and Sentinel Offender Services are the two companies most often cited in the report and are, according to Human Rights Watch, "arguably the most significant industry players, and ...the two firms that have been most widely implicated in alleged abuses."

The Georgia-headquartered Judicial Correction Services (JCS) is, relatively speaking, "an industry giant." In 2011, it was acquired by Correctional Healthcare Companies, a "privately held corporation that also focuses on the provision of healthcare services to prisons and bills itself as a provider of 'integrated healthcare solutions' to the criminal justice system 'including inmate healthcare, outpatient treatment, mental health, behavioral programming and treatment case management services." In 2012, the private equity group GTCR acquired CHC.

By late last year, JCS was "operat[ing] in some 480 courts ... [in] Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi. ...At any given point in time JCS employees are supervising approximately 38,000 probationers."

Sentinel Offender Services "is a privately held California corporation whose physical presence is largely based in Georgia, [and] is largely controlled by its founder Bob Contestabile and his son Mark Contestabile, who heads up the company's east coast operations." According to the report, "Sentinel claims to operate in 48 US states, mostly providing GPS monitoring and other services for government clients. The company's offender-funded probation supervision business operates exclusively in Georgia. There, the company works with 80 courts and supervises between 23,000 and 35,000 offenders at any given point in time. Sentinel boasts that it has supervised more than 500,000 probationers since 1992.

"Sentinel also provides electronic monitoring and other services to government clients in California and elsewhere. It operates a monitoring center in Irvine, California that tracks offenders on various forms of electronic monitoring for Sentinel's government clients as well as its own probation business."

Over the past few years, any civil liberties organizations have been working to make debtors prisons truly a thing of the past. It is now time to shine the spotlight on predatory probation privateers that are preying on the poor.

Multitude or Working Class

Antonio Negri speaks at the European Social Forum in Paris La Villette – Le Trabendo. November 14, 2002. Translation by Thomas Atzert.

AN OLD AND EARLY PUBLICATION FROM THE SOJOURNER TRUTH ORGANIZATION

NOEL IGNATIEV

TED ALLEN

My Debt and Obligation to Ted Allen

Wise began his career as a Youth Coordinator and Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism: the largest of the many groups organized in the early ‘90s to defeat the political candidacies of white supremacist, David Duke. From there, he became a community organizer in New Orleans’ public housing, and a policy analyst for a children’s advocacy group focused on combatting poverty and economic inequity. He has served as an adjunct professor at the Smith College School of Social Work, in Northampton, MA., and from 1999-2003 was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute in Nashville, TN. Wise is the author of six books.

The jail is full of blacks and they all act like thugs. This may sound a bit radical but if more people would arm themselves and kill these (expletive) idiots, when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.

 I’m really not prejudiced against race, but I have no use for certain cultures. This gangster-rap, ghetto talking thug ‘culture’ that certain segments of society flock to is intolerable. They espouse violence and disrespect towards women. The black community here in Jacksonville is in an uproar against me — the three other thugs that were in the car are telling stories to cover up their true “colors.”

Choosing Whiteness or Humanity: Jordan Davis and the 

Minimizing of Black Pain

@mychalsmith have u mentioned any of the 400-500 killed in chicago the past 4-5 yrs ?#dunntrial . you tired of chicago as well ?
— lonnie (@Wake_up_service) February 16, 2014

#DunnTrial now the trial is over we can go back to ignoring the real threat to black teens…other blacks. #chicago
— dominos guy (@jagdan2) February 16, 2014

#DunnTrial who mourns for the dozens of Black kids murdered by gangs in Chicago? Crump? Don Lemon ?
— Wilhelm II (@knightofgood) February 16, 2014

Lynchings were frequently committed with the most flagrant public display. Like executions by guillotine in medieval times, lynchings were often advertised in newspapers and drew large crowds of white families. They were a kind of vigilantism where Southern white men saw themselves as protectors of their way of life and their white women.

...tells us that white women allegedly raped by black men were often allowed to choose their attackers’ punishments and frequently helped mutilate, burn, and shoot the newly hung bodies. Instead of being called unwomanly for their public role in the bloodshed, female lynchers were praised as exemplary protectors of the race. As late as 1934, white women and children still attended lynchings as enthralled spectators, prompting the New Yorker to run this chilling illustration by Reginald Marsh. White women’s groups didn’t formally acknowledge that most lynchings had nothing to do with rape until after women won the vote, for which they had long felt in competition with black men.  

Felton was also known for her conservative racial views. In an 1897 speech she said that the biggest problem facing women on the farm was the danger of black rapists. "If it takes lynching to protect women's dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts," she said, "then I say lynch a thousand a week." She condemned anyone who dared to question the South's racial policies; when Andrew Sledd, a professor at Emory College, did just that in an article published in 1902 in the Atlantic Monthly, she was instrumental in forcing his resignation from the school.

...white women—all of us—are taught to fear men of color. We need to own that truth, own that shameful fear. Most importantly, we need to name it for what it is: deeply held and constantly enforced racism.

This juror’s comments cannot be divorced from our culture’s long-standing criminalizing of young black men, and white women’s related fears. As Mychal Denzel Smith pointed out here at The Nation and on MSNBC’s Up With Steve Kornacki, defense attorneys stoked this fear deliberately and broadly.

To my disgust, O’Mara literally invoked the same justification for killing Trayvon as was used to justify lynchings. He called to the witness stand Olivia Bertalan, one of Zimmerman’s former neighbors, who told the story of her home being burglarized by two young African-American boys while she and her children feared for their lives. It was terrifying indeed, and it had absolutely no connection to the case at hand. But O’Mara presented the jury with the “perfect victim,” which Trayvon could never be: a white woman living in fear of black criminals. Zimmerman had offered to help her the night her home was robbed. Implicit in the defense’s closing argument: he was also protecting her the night he killed Trayvon Martin.

They carefully made Martin—the victim—into that not-so-faceless bogeyman. Now, I don’t know what was in the jurors’ hearts—but the story the defense told and that juror B37 parroted is not a new one. It’s a story that ends with fear trumping empathy and humanity. 

 This kind of racist paternalism, the idea that women need to be protected from violent black men, underwrote much of this trial and was reflected in Juror B37’s deeply troubling words. Juror B37's comments reflect Defense Attorney Mark O’Mara’s racist bait that Trayvon Martin was an inherently suspicious, criminal, and perhaps violent character, simply because he was black, and that white women like her and defense Olivia Bertalan were better off because Zimmerman did what needed to be done to protect them. 

Never mind that George Zimmerman is the one with a history of domestic violence, who was charged with assaulting a police officer, who has been charged with felonies and misdemeanors multiple times. In that altercation, Juror B37's word reflect a construction of George Zimmerman as the “protector” of white womanhood. George Zimmerman seemingly racially profiled, shot, and killed a young black teenager, and Juror B37 seemingly saw nothing wrong with that because white women continue to internalize, normalize, and implicitly perpetuate the myth of black aggressive masculinity.

“Defending white womanhood” has long been a racist ploy to demonize and criminalize black men. Black men have been perceived as inherently violent and overly sexually aggressive for centuries. The stereotype of the brute black man, terrorizing white women and respectable communities, has been used to demonize and criminalize black men since the dawn of this white supremacist nation. The Scottsboro Boys. Ronald Cotton. Brian Banks. Emmett Till. The list of black men falsely accused or killed for violating the norms of decency against white women is as long as it is tragic, and it is not a problem solely of the past. 

The social analysis of the Anti-Lynching Association began with its perception of the link between racial violence and attitudes toward women. Lynching was encouraged by the conviction that only such extreme sanctions stood between white women and the sexual aggression of black men. This "Southern rape complex," the Association argued, had no basis in fact. On the contrary, white women were often exploited and defamed in order to obscure the economic greed and sexual transgressions of white men. Rape and rumors of rape served as a kind of folk pornography in the Bible Belt. As stories spread, the victim was described in minute and progressively embellished detail: a public fantasy which implied a group participation in the rape of the woman almost as cathartic as the lynching of the alleged attacker. Indeed, the fear of rape, like the fear of lynching, functioned to keep a subordinate group in a state of anxiety and fear; both were ritual enactments of everyday power relationships.

"The women," Ames proudly reported, "traced lynching directly to its roots in white supremacy."

When I wanted to change my name to disrupt the legacy of white supremacy I’d inherited as a white girl in Texas, I chose Jessie Daniel Ames as my namesake. I’d read about her in Jacqueline Dowd Hall’s book Revolt Against Chivalry.

Jessie Daniel Ames started an organization called The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), founded in November, 1930. To interpret this to mean that “not all white women were bad,” is too facile and misses the purpose and context of her organization. She started the ASWPL- quite late, it should be noted, in the ‘reign of terror’ known as lynching– precisely because the prevailing ideology was that lynching was justifiable because it served to protect white women who were believed to be besieged by brutish black men.

This theme – pure, virginal, victimized white women set upon by violent, rapacious, black men – was the central theme in the film Birth of a Nation (1915), screened at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson, who proclaimed it “history writ in lightening.”

The conventional norm among white women in the U.S. at this time was to ignore or dismiss this justification for the extra-legal murder of hundreds of black men each year as a problem that didn’t concern them. Ames, unusual for a white woman (and especially for one from the South), saw lynching as a practice that was centrally about the mythology of white womanhood, and she set about to change it. This installment in the Tuesday series on #troublewithwhitewomen is meant to do much the same, call into question the prevailing norms about white women, and point out the ways that the oppression of others relies not only on racism, but on the privileged structural position of white womanhood.

Historical Background on Lynching
Lynching, scholar Jennie Leitweis-Goff argues in her book Blood at the Root, is central to American culture. The facts about lynching are well known to historians, but most people with a high school diploma in the U.S. don’t know a thing about it, because it’s generally not taught in K-12 curriculum. I’ve written lots more about the definition, geographical patterns and historical context of lynching here.  The peak period of lynching in the U.S. was from 1882-1930 (note: after slavery and well into the 20th century), and estimates are that some 4,742 people have been lynched in the U.S. (through 1968). A few key points to keep in mind: lynching refers to any death outside due legal process and at the hands of a mob (many think it only refers to death by hanging, which is incorrect); white people were lynched, women (mostly black) were lynched, but by 1919 and the notorious “Red Summer” the practice was reserved almost exclusively for black men; lynchings happened in almost every state in the U.S., but predominated in the South, because this is where most black people lived during that time; and, class played a role, as research indicates that the number of lynchings went up as cotton prices went down.  There was also an element of macabre display to many lynchings, as Amy L. Wood notes in Lynching and Spectacle.  All that being said, white women, and a particular way of thinking about white womanhood, were central to the practice of lynching.

White Women’s Complicity in the Practice of Lynching
“White womanhood’ haunts lynching….,” Shawn Michelle Smith writes in her compelling book, Photography on the Color Line, She goes on in the chapter “The Spectacle of Whiteness,” to say this about lynching photography:

“[white womanhood]… is that phantom that is resurrected over and over again as a symbol of white racial purity defining the limits of the white lynch mob. …the figure of a threatened or raped white woman, evoked as the innocent victim of a ‘terrible crime,’ was conjured in attempts to justify lynching as the ‘understandable’ retribution of white fathers, brothers, and lovers. Ida B. Wells herself claimed to have believed this ideology at one time, before her extensive research revealed the cry of rape to be largely myth” (pp.129-30).

Indeed, it was Ida B. Wells who courageously began calling out the mythology of white womanhood promulgated in the service of lynching, a call that often fell on the deaf ears of white women. More often than listen to such claims, white women were actively participating in lynch mobs, as is clear in the many photographs Smith analyzes in her book. White men and women are present in the hundreds and thousands in these images. They have come to witness and to participate in these spectacles of racial violence with family and friends: they are dressed for an occasion; they meet the camera directly, unashamed, even gleeful.

In Smith’s analysis, lynching photographs work as defining images that make whiteness visible to itself. “Lynching photographs consolidate a fluid signifier; a pale crowd enacts and fiercely embodies whiteness” (p.140). And, this whiteness is deeply gendered, sexualized. It is the specific, repeated theme of “black man attacking white woman” that is the lynchpin – if you will – to inciting mob violence, as Dora Apel notes in her book, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and the Mob.

There are as many individual stories about lynchings as there are murdered black men (and women) in the historical record. This account, from Smith, about the lynching of Rubin Stacy, murdered in Fort Lauderdale, Flordia, on July 19,1935, captures the role of white women in inciting mob violence:

“According to the New York Times, as recorded in James Allen’s footnotes, [Rubin] Stacy, a homeless tenant farmer, had approached the home of Marion Jones [a white woman] to ask for food. On seeing Stacy, Jones screamed. Stacy was then arrested, and as he was being transported to a Miami jail by six deputies, a mob of over one hundred masked men seized and murdered him. Finally, Stacy’s corpse was hung in sight of Marion Jones’ home.” (p.130)

A white woman screamed, a black man died. This is the ‘logic’ of white supremacy. White womanhood, that ‘lily of the South,’ had to be protected at all costs was the prevailing ideology. All an individual white woman like Marion Jones had to do to activate the network of white fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins who would come to her “defense” and murder a black man who was asking for help was scream.

Lynching was a form of racial terrorism intended to subordinate black people following slavery, and in particular, black men. There were lessons in lynching for young white girls, too. Smith goes on in her analysis of the photograph of the lynching of Rubin Stacy (not posted here), writing:

“It is plausible that the young white girls who regard Stacy’s hanging corpse in the photograph are the children of Marion Jones. As they look at Stacy’s lifeless body, the girls are instructed in the nature of the white patriarchal power that ‘protects’ them, a power that will define their womanhood and confine it to the reproduction of white supremacy. If this is a lesson in white patriarchal protection, it is also a lesson of fatal consequences, of the wrath of white fathers and brothers, uncles and cousins roused by the sight of an African American man near a white woman’s house.” (p.130)

In many ways, it is the ‘fatal consequences’ to which Smith alludes that kept (and continues to keep) white women in line, conforming to and benefitting from white patriarchal protection. White women were not merely victims of patriarchal power; they gained power by supporting white supremacy. And they did so through families.

“Here’s the barbecue we had…” : Women’s Labor in Maintaining White (Supremacist) Familial Ties
White women actively participated in weaving together families knit with the thread of white supremacy. We can see this clearly in the messages written on the back of lynching postcards. Postcards of lynchings were sold in dime stores throughout the U.S. well into the 1950s and 1960s, and they continue to circulate today through sites like eBay. Featuring gruesome images of murdered corpses, mostly black men, on the front, the backs of postcards often carry casual familial exchanges, such as this one:

 (Image source;

handwriting reads: This is where they lynched a negro the other day.
They don’t know who done it. I guess they don’t care much. I don’t, do you?)

The notation follows the conventions of postcard greetings, but with a murderous twist. How can we understand these postcards, not only the images, but the inscriptions? Here again is Smith writing:

“The example provided by a Katy Election, one that records the lynching of Jesse Washington in Robinson, Texas on May 16, 1916, proves especially disturbing in this regard. A note scrawled on the back of this particular postcard in large, looping hand reads: ‘This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your sone Joe.’ By sending the postcard, Joe perhaps demonstrates to his mother how he participates in upholding the mythology of pure white womanhood, he ‘defends’ his mother. …. Joe looks directly out at the camera, perhaps anticipating the eyes of his mother….To what degree is the white supremacist’s ‘family album’ supported by such terrible, inverted relics?” (p.122)

(Image source;
handwriting reads: ‘This is the Barbecue we had last night
my picture is to the left with a cross over it your sone [sic] Joe.”

It is women who do the domestic labor of stitching together family relationships, keeping family albums, encouraging their children to keep in touch, send a postcard. And, it is that labor that is put to use in the service of white supremacy in these postcards.

Photographic postcards of lynching victims functioned to solidify the ties for a white community, reinforced through the spectacles of dead black bodies. Sentimental and material familial bonds were reconfirmed through images of white violence, reasserting a larger imagined (white) community.

Resistance to Lynching
People resisted lynching. The list of white women resisting lynching is a short one. The broad pattern of resistance to lynching was that some people, mostly black people, resisted much more than others. Ida B. Wells stands as a towering figure in the struggle against lynching. And, as scholar Koritha Mitchell points out in her book, Living with Lynching, popular lynching plays were mechanisms that African American communities used to survive day-to-day under the threat of actual and photographic mob violence. Professor Kidada Williams continues that legacy of resistance through her Lynching in American Life & Culture course. Acts of truth and reconciliation like this one continue. In Monroe, Georgia people gather every year to re-enact a lynching that took place at Moore’s Ford in 1946.  The patterns set by lynching have created a template in American culture that not only shaped our past but continues to reverberate in the present.

The Defense of White Womanhood Now
In September, 2013 Jonathan Ferrell, a former FAMU student, crashed his car near Charlotte, N.C., crawled out the back window looking for help, and then knocked on the door of the first house he saw. A white woman, thinking it was her husband knocking, answered. When she saw Ferrell she shut the door, hit her alarm and called the police.  Ferrell, who was unarmed, was shot 10 times by a Charlotte police officer.

In one account, Ferrell family attorney Chris Chestnut wondered Monday what role race may have played in Saturday’s shooting.”The officer is white, Mr. Ferrell is black. This might be more of a reflection of where we are as a country,” he said. But to my mind, this observation is partial one. The observation not made here is: The woman (Sarah McCartney) who called was white. Mr. Ferrell is black. The officer is white.  It is a reflection of where we are as a country that a white woman calls out, activating a network of white male protection, and a black man is dead.  Marion Jones screams, a mob gathers, Rubin Stacy is dead.

The brilliant Ta-Nehisi Coates, comes to the defense of the woman who called:

“There’s been some rage directed at the woman who called the police. I think this is wrong. You may believe racism is an actual force in our interactions–I certainly do–but you don’t know whether it was an actual force in this one. It’s important to recognize that this is both a woman and an individual. You might speculate about what she thinks of black people. I might speculate about whether she’d been a victim of sexual assault, or any other kind of violence. That also happens in America. But it would be better to speculate about nothing, since all we actually know is that this was a woman who was home with a young child, opened the door in the middle of the night, and found a dude standing outside.”

I disagree with Coates here. This is not about the individual racism of a particular white woman. It’s about the structural position that we find ourselves in as white women. When Sarah MCartney was frightened to find ‘a dude standing outside,’ she had a powerful resource at her disposal: white womanhood. It lends her credibility, victim status, protection at the hands of police. When she called the police, she did so from that cultural position and mobilized police. A white police officer arrived and interpreted the situation: white woman, in danger; black man, attacking. His protection of Sarah McCartney meant the death of Jonathan Ferrell, unarmed, asking for help.

It’s the template of white womanhood in American culture that’s been shaped by lynching, and it’s deeply ingrained.

JOHN BROWN AND HIS COMRADES FIGHTING WHITE SUPREMACY THEY GOT IT

     1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries,...point out and bring to the fore the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through,...always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.38

The South, after the [Civil] war [said Du Bois], presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades. Yet the [white] labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and the meaning of the labor movement in the United States.40

But their own position [that of laboring-class "whites"] vis-á-vis the rich and powerful...was not improved, but weakened by the white-skin privilege system.48

One no longer blames racism on....lower middle class or working class whites -- but assigns responsibility according to real power over the racist society. I do not mean to exonerate the hate-filled, rock-throwing racial bigot....But....[o]f far greater significance is the man in control. (xxxiv)

     The analysis [of the "white masks" problem] that I am undertaking is psychological. In spite of this it is apparent to me that the effective disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: -- primarily, economic; subsequently, the internalization -- or better, the epidermalization -- of this inferiority.63

Men make their own history [wrote Engels], whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end...it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions and of their manifold effects upon the outer world that constitutes history. The will is determined by passion or deliberation...[W]e have seen that the many individual wills active in history for the most part produce results quite other than those intended...[But] the further question arises: What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into the motives in the brains of the actors...? For the old materialism....nothing very edifying is to be found from the study of history....because it [the old materialism] takes the ideal driving forces that operate there [in history] as ultimate causes, instead of investigating what is behind them, what are the driving forces of these driving forces."79

"[W]hat we are talking about is NOT the "Negro question"...but (as some Negro publicists have previously put it) the 'white question,' the white question of questions -- the centrality of the problem of white supremacy and the white-skin privilege which have historically frustrated the struggle for democracy, progress and socialism in the U.S." (Letter from Ted Allen to Noel Ignatin [Ignatiev] in White Blind Spot[New York and Atlanta], October, 1969);

"A radical is one who understands...that the white-skin privilege is the Achilles Heel of the American working class." (Ted Allen, Can White Radicals be Radicalized? [New York and Atlanta, October 1969], p. 18).

THINK IT ENDED THINK AGAIN

The struggle against white skin privilege and white supremacy is key.

A Time to Mourn, a Time to Act: an Open Letter to the Ukrainian Left

Blood and Soil or Communal Power?

The dead of Kiev’s Maidan are not only Ukraine’s dead; they are the dead of “post-communist” Eastern Europe. It hurts everywhere, but differently. An open wound cannot be closed with words, yet one can shout in solidarity that this may be the other end of the post-communist transition, the so-called bad side of the “successful” EU integration. However, at both ends, the transition itself has been a historical disaster, ruining at different rhythms the dignity, livelihood, lives and futures of millions of people. Ukraine’s current predicament could make this disaster visible for all those who tried hard either to look elsewhere or to legitimize it with the rhetorics of market, development, nation-state and civilization. Or with “success stories” that were immediately abandoned the day they turned sorrow.

Yet the transition has actually succeeded: Eastern Europe has returned to the periphery or semi-periphery of global capitalism. This is the return of dependency and of the race to the bottom. Somebody from the region will always hit bottom, and it will not be Ukraine all the time. And outside the former socialist bloc things do not look any better: 25 years after “the fall of totalitarian communism”, as “the final triumph of Western liberal democracy” was proclaimed, the global state of democracy has radically worsened; structural inequalities, land-grabbing and resource-wars have multiplied, and the survival of the planet itself is nowadays an open question.

In the region, the horrible destruction wrought by the anti-communist, pro-capitalist reforms of transition, no matter whether a “right” or a “left” party in power, has produced invariably in every East European state the underdevelopment of health and education; mass poverty and mass immigration; select oligarchs, as well as a small middle class; and political, intellectual and media apparatuses largely alienated from the population and oriented towards the powers, canons and fashions that be. It has also produced very powerful military and security apparatuses, in both the West and East. And now the bubble has burst, not accidentally in the biggest country on the EU’s borders, apparently not big or powerful enough to avoid being sandwiched between major powers.

Ukraine’s own schisms may be collapsing the country internally, but many of Ukraine’s problems are international. It is only logical that the answer will involve a defense of the state, from different directions, although the actual victims cannot be reduced to the state apparatuses, and arguably have not been represented for a while by the state. The rise of far-right nationalists, against the background of the domination of cynical opportunists and local oligarchs, is an integral counterpart of the dream sold aggressively by the West in the same package with the counter-offer from the Russian East. That dream, which has captured in the past decades most local energies of betterment, has slowly expired throughout the region after the explosion of the crisis in the very centers of global capitalism. In the last three years, popular movements have exploded all throughout Eastern Europe, and all expressed an anti-systemic discontent. However, in spite of probable longer-term community-building effects, all movements failed to produce a common constitutional moment – most likely as a consequence of the historic annihilation of the left after 1989. Many such movements, whether from Ukraine or Romania, have come to be dominated or marred by nationalists and the far right. In the aftermath, autonomous groups have continued to work relatively isolated.  No popular front has emerged. Reacting to the wave of change, the local Eurocentric liberals have turned towards the left en masse, but going only so far as to deny their previous role, and to support issues of anticorruption, human rights, a purer modernization, and maybe Keynesianism. The response from the political systems has invariably been denial, repression, false choices of “lesser evils”, yet more developmentalism, reinforcement of vertical structures, sometime support of local capitalists, even more secretive and quick privatizations, and the shameless use of movements to gain advantages over adversaries in the formal political sphere.

In the intense moments of global transition, social uprisings could move things very quickly, either for the better or for the worst. In times of conflict, there is a dire need for building communicative powers. Unlike Latin America, in Eastern Europe, the traditional mediators of consensus (for better or for worse), religion and nationalism, have traditionally been claimed by forces of the extreme right, thus standing for the opposite of liberation. These same forces have also used the vocabularies of anticolonial struggle and autonomism to reinforce the obedient political imaginary of a fortress under siege, rather than to build the sovereignty of the people.  If the world is indeed transitioning towards another global system, such signs, as seen from the region, are not very encouraging. War, repression and sanctions are solutions only for the current vertical structures, political bodies and for the armed far right, all of which will continue to hurt the people. They all correspond to the common conception of power in modernity: power as domination, as opposed to power in the sense of serving the people. However, the discontents of the population are systemic, and keep on rejecting domination. In the struggle, members of parties and security forces will likely leave these structures if they continue to work against the people. And the EU had better think about the devastating effects of the UN embargo and sanctions on Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) begun in 1991-1992.

In Eastern Europe, nationalism is a readily available way to articulate the local pride and dignity destroyed by post-communist transition, with a repertoire strictly connected to and controlled by state aparatuses, and with lines of flight going always to golden mythical pasts. This kind of nationalism is a way of alienating people from their own contemporary culture and history. As soon as its symbols appear in a crowd of heterogeneous protesters, they have the unmistaken effect of stopping the process of bottom-up building. Instead of making way for a community of aspirations, they call into being a ring of masculinist pretenders. Furthermore, the invisible reference of local nationalist pride remains the West, and its modern project of the Nation-State – that is, internal projections of empire, not accidentally peppered with theological overtones. As long as that reference stays in place, the types of nationalism that emerge will continue to be only a mirror of contemporary Western racism. They will diminish the power of community.

A relational sense of the local, a sense of regional solidarity that counters the pressures from both East and West, and a familiarity with the struggles of other peripheries will offer not only more dignity, but also communicative power and concrete alternatives. Hopefully, the answer of the people will involve a claim for the communal rebuilding of power, rather than a retreat into fortresses.

IS IT POSSIBLE SHE KNOWS SOMETHING YOU (AND I) DON'T

The task of revolutionaries is not to organize the workers but to organize themselves to discover those patterns of activity and forms of organization that have sprung up out of the struggle and that embody the new society, and to help them grow stronger, more confident, and more conscious of their direction. It is an essential contribution to the society of disciplined spontaneity, which for (CLR) James was the definition of the new world.

The greatest defeat since...

YOU BETCHYA MARGE

...content will not contain misleading information or unsubstantiated claims", but instead be "evaluated for fairness and acceptability as being in the best interest of the public"

You don't need cybernetic eye implants and immersive propaganda portals to alter history. You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact. 

Look to your right, and you see happy Iraqis pulling down Saddam's statue and showering US Marines with flowers and candy. Was that exactly how it happened? Who really remembers? Now, you're walking on the flight deck of what they used to call an aircraft carrier behind a flight-suit-clad President George W Bush. He turns and shoots you a thumbs-up under a "mission accomplished" banner. 

A voice beamed into your head says that Bush proclaimed victory that day, but that for years afterward, valiant US troops would have to re-win the war again and again. Sounds a little strange, but okay. 

A few more paces down the digital road and you encounter a sullen looking woman holding a dog leash, the collar attached to a man lying nude on the floor of a prison. Your digital tour guide explains: "An unfortunate picture was taken. Luckily, the bad apple was punished and military honor was restored." Fair enough. 

Soon, a digital General David Petraeus strides forward and shoots you another thumbs-up. (It looks as if they just put a new cyber-skin over the President Bush avatar to save money.) "He surged his way to victory and the mission was accomplished again," you hear over strains of the National Anthem and a chorus of "hooahs." 

Past is prologue
Admittedly, we humans are lousy at predicting the future, so don't count on any of this coming to pass: no eye implants, no voices beamed into your head, no Amazooglebook. None of it. Except, maybe, that Iraq War timeline. If the present is any guide, government-sanctioned, counterfeit history is in your future. 

Let me explain ... 

In 2012, the Pentagon kicked off a 13-year program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, complete with a sprawling website that includes a "history and education" component. Billed as a "public service" provided by the Department of Defense, the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration site boasts of its "resources for teachers and students in the grades 7-12" and includes a selection of official government documents, all of them produced from 1943-1954; that is, only during the earliest stages of modern US involvement in what was then called Indochina. 

The Vietnam War Commemoration's educational aspirations, however, extend beyond students. "The goal of the History and Education effort," according to the site, "is to provide the American public with historically accurate materials and interactive experiences that will help Americans better understand and appreciate the service of our Vietnam War veterans and the history of US involvement in the Vietnam War." To that end, the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration offers an interactive historical timeline. 

By far the largest and most impressive offering on the site, the timeline spans 70 interactive pages with 830 individual entries that take a viewer from 1833 to 1976. The entries run the gamut from tales of daring and sacrifice from the official citations of Medal of Honor recipients to short offerings about changes of command. 

There are even couple-of-sentence accounts of relatively minor operations - like a December 20, 1969, sweep in Binh Duong Province by elements of the 1st Infantry Division, which captured 12 of 18 members of a North Vietnamese intelligence unit and 2,000 documents that "proved how much information the enemy had about American operations". 

It's an eclectic mix, but give credit where it's due: the digital chronology does mention casualties from the oft-forgotten first US attack on Vietnam (an 1845 naval shelling of the city we now know as Danang). For the next 131 years, however, mention of Vietnamese dead and wounded is, to put the matter as politely as possible, in short supply. Flawed history, though, isn't. 

History is bunk
Take the August 2, 1964, "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". It was a key moment of American escalation and, by the looks of the Pentagon's historical timeline, just what president Lyndon Johnson made it out to be when he went on television to inform the American people of "open aggression" on the part of North Vietnam. "The USS Maddox was attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin," reads the entry. A later one mentions "US Naval Vessels being fired upon by North Vietnamese on two separate occassions [sic]." Case closed. Or is it? 



The official story, the one that kicked off a cycle of US military escalations that led to millions of casualties in Indochina, went like this: the USS Maddox, a destroyer, was innocently sailing through the Gulf of Tonkin when it was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on August 2, 1964. 

President Lyndon Johnson, showing great restraint, refused to respond militarily. Two nights later, the North Vietnamese attacked again, targeting the Maddox and the USS Turner Joyand prompting the president to take to the airways to announce that "renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply". Johnson sought and Congress quickly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution - giving the president carte blanche to repeatedly intensify the war in the years to come. 

But as it turned out, there was nothing innocent about those US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin (as the President had implied). A claim of two separate attacks on US Navy ships turned out to be untrue and the congressional resolution had not been drafted in the wake of the supposed attacks, but had been written months before, in anticipation of an opportune incident. In addition, the single attack by those torpedo boats occurred in the wake of a maritime raid on the North Vietnamese coast - part of a covert program of attacks that Johnson had approved months earlier. 

After reviewing the history of the incident, it seemed to me that the timeline was on distinctly shaky ground, but I decided to get a second opinion and went to the man who wrote the book on the subject, Edwin Moise, author of Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. He did me not one, but two better. He also pointed out apparent errors in the July 11, 1964, entry, "Joint Chiefs of Staff Unveiled '94 Target List", and criticized the August 4, 1964, entry, which offers nothing more than a title: "Two US Aircraft Downed". 

"I think this is simply false," he told me by email. "I am not aware of any US aircraft downed that day and I think I would know." These planes, he suspected, were actually lost the following day while flying missions "in retaliation for the (imaginary) second Tonkin Gulf Incident on August 4th." The August 2 Tonkin Gulf entry, he added, was "not quite accurate" either and was only "marginally useful" insofar as it was "close enough to the truth to allow readers to go looking for more information". 

With that in mind, I turned to Fredrik Logevall, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam and author ofChoosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, a landmark study of American policymaking on Vietnam from 1963 to 1965. When it came to the Commemoration's take on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, he told me that "some context for this entry is sorely needed". 

"There's little doubt in my mind that the administration entered the month of August [1964] looking for a pretext to flex a little muscle in Vietnam," he added. "Finally, it should be said the administration misrepresented what occurred in the Gulf, particularly with respect to the alleged second attack on August 4th, which evidence even at the time showed almost certainly never happened." 

None of this essential context can, of course, be found anywhere in the timeline. Still, everyone makes mistakes, so I meandered through the Pentagon's chronology looking at other key entries. 

Soon, I found the one dealing with My Lai. 

On March 15, 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division's Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, ahead of an operation in an area they knew as "Pinkville." As unit member Harry Stanley recalled, Medina "ordered us to 'kill everything in the village.'" Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina's words only slightly differently: they were to "kill everything that breathed." What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn's mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: "Are we supposed to kill women and children?" And Medina's reply: "Kill everything that moves." 

The next morning, roughly 100 soldiers were flown by helicopter to the outskirts of a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai in South Vietnam's Quang Ngai Province and followed Medina's orders to a T. 

Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area's drinking water. 

What was first a "massacre" quickly became a "tragedy" and was then referred to as an "incident". General [William R] Peers, whose exhaustive inquiry into the events at My Lai remains the best source for what really happened there, was warned by his superiors not to use the word "massacre" at the press conference held on the publication of his report [in 1970].

More than 40 years later, the Department of Defense is still operating from the same playbook. The Vietnam War Commemoration's interactive timeline refers to My Lai as an "incident" not a massacre, the death toll is listed at "more than 200" instead of more than 500, and it singles out only Lieutenant Calley (who certainly had plenty of blood on his hands) as if the deaths of all those Vietnamese civilians, carried out by dozens of men at the behest of higher command, could be the fault of just one junior officer.

Given the Pentagon's take on the My Lai massacre, I was hardly surprised by the one-sentence timeline entry on Operation Speedy Express, which says little more than that the six-month operation in the Mekong Delta "yield[ed] an enemy body count of 11,000". This has long been the military's official position, but the Defense Department knows full well that it isn't the whole story.



In the early 1970s, a veteran who served in that operation sent a letter to the Pentagon (and then followed up with letters to other top Army generals) blowing the whistle on the systematic use of heavy firepower on populated areas which resulted in what he called a "My Lai each month". His allegations were bolstered by those of US advisers and Vietnamese sources, as well as by an internal report commissioned by the Army's acting general counsel, endorsing the whistleblower's contention that an obsession with what was called "the body count" likely led to civilian deaths. The veteran's shocking allegations were, however, kept secret for decades and a nascent inquiry into them was suppressed.

A later Newsweek investigation would conclude that as many as 5,000 civilians were killed during Operation Speedy Express. And a hush-hush internal military report, commissioned in the wake of the Newsweek story, suggested that the magazine had offered a low-end estimate. The document - also kept secret and then buried for decades - concluded:

While there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by US forces during Operation Speedy Express, it would appear that the extent of these casualties was in fact substantial, and that a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000).

Despite these findings, which have - in recent years - been aired in publications from the Nation to the Washington Post, the Vietnam War Commemoration ignores even the military's own estimate that as many as 60% of those killed in the operation may have been innocents.

Keep scrolling through the timeline and additional examples of dubious history regularly present themselves. Take March 15, 1969: "President Nixon ordered a B-52 strike on enemy bases in Cambodia. The first strike was made on 17 March and initiated a fourteen month bombing campaign labeled Operation Menu," reads the entry. Next to it, there's a picture of Nixon holding a press conference to announce the missions and point out the targets. Pretty cut and dried, right? Maybe not.



Operation Menu was a coldly titled collection of B-52 bomber raids against suspected Vietnamese enemy "base areas" - given the codenames "Breakfast", "Lunch", "Snack", "Dinner", "Dessert", and "Supper". As William Shawcross demonstrated inSideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia, it was kept secret from the American people, Congress, and even some top military brass via a conspiracy of silence, phony cover stories, the burning of documents, coded messages, and a dual bookkeeping system that logged the strikes as occurring in South Vietnam, not Cambodia.

Not exactly the kind of thing presidents tend to talk about on TV. (Even the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum's timeline describes the attacks as "secret bombings".) The image in the Commemoration timeline is actually from an April 30, 1970, press conference in which Nixon announced the "incursion" of US and South Vietnamese forces into Cambodia. It would take until August 1973, more than four years after it began, for the president to admit to the clandestine bombing campaign.

The covert attacks on Cambodia eventually became the basis for the first motion to impeach Nixon, and a resulting investigation revealed documents that proved the president himself had ordered its cover-up. The motion was voted down due to political considerations - in favor of articles of impeachment for the Watergate crimes and abuse of power, including wiretaps that resulted from the cover-up of the secret bombing - but 10 members of Congress who backed the motion filed a dissenting view that read, in part:

It is difficult to imagine Presidential misconduct more dangerously in violation of our constitutional form of government than Mr Nixon's decision secretly and unilaterally to order the use of American military power against another nation, and to deceive and mislead the Congress about this action.

FPL’s plans in Hendry County have already been delayed by legal challenges to the rezoning of the land proposed for the site. Minaya, of Everglades Earth First!, says their group is familiar with the proposed power plant in Hendry County. The model is identical to the FPL plant they fought in Loxahatchee, known as the West County Energy Center (WCEC). Between 2007 and 2009 over 50 people were arrested in blockades and protests against the WCEC, as well as at the Barley Barber FPL plant in Martin County.

Each of these massive power plants, also in the Everglades, are known to use over 20 million of gallons of water daily and emit thousands of tons of pollution including, SO2, NOx, mercury and chromium, as well as millions of tons of greenhouse gases.

The activists also say FPL has a history of environmental racism, citing long standing complaints against their facilities in the predominately Black community of Riviera Beach, where the company recently expanded a gas facility amidst community opposition.

Betty Osceola, of Trail, said environmental contamination is already a problem in the Everglades. The sugar industry has been blamed for mercury in the water which, according to Sierra Club Florida, can be harmful to unborn babies and can cause brain and nervous system damage.

“We can barely hunt and fish anymore. They are killing our land,” Osceola said.

The Hendry County FPL site sits on proven habitat and mating grounds for the endangered Florida panther. It is also home to other threatened or endangered creatures, including the crested caracara bird, snail kite bird, wood stork bird and eastern indigo snakes.

Matthew Schwartz, executive director of the South Florida Wildlands Association, said the FPL plant could be stopped if the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the Department of the Interior invoke the “jeopardy opinion” of the Endangered Species Act.

The provision directs federal agencies to refuse authorization and prohibit funding for projects that jeopardize the existence of any listed species.

“A project this size will lead to extinction. They can’t turn their backs on it,” Schwartz said.

Juno Beach police arrested 5 people at the Monday protest and the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office assisted in transporting them after they were taken into custody, the sheriff's office said.

The following is from Because We Must.


INTERVIEW: ORGANIZERS AND PROTESTERS FROM THE LOCKDOWN AT FLORIDA POWER AND LIGHT

On Monday, five activists locked down at the headquarters for Florida Power and Light in Juno while one-hundred other protesters held a subsequent action protesting a proposed power plant in Florida. We have the great pleasure of having spoken with two organizers of the action, one of which locked down alongside four other activists using U-locks on the site, and was subsequently arrested. In the following interview we speak with two individuals who were part of Monday’s action. Wiley, an organizer from Earth First! Journal was interviewed by Because We Must about the overall action, and filled us in on some essential background information about the company they organized against. Wiley as well has explained their tactical strategy for this action. Grayson, an activist from Everglades Earth First! and editor of the Earth First! Journal was one of the individuals who organized the protest and also locked down on site Monday. Grayson gave us a brief exit interview upon their release from custody. BWM: Can you summarize for people the protest on Monday, where it took place, and what it involved? Wiley: The demonstration on Monday took place at the headquarters of Florida Power and Light, one of the largest energy companies in the U.S. The headquarters are located in Juno, Florida, North of Palm Beach. The majority of the people involved in the protest held a legal (though unpermitted) rally outside of the headquarters. It was a very family friendly event—people held signs, danced, chanted, and found playful ways to disrupt the everyday business of the complex. Amidst the jubilant rally, five people sat down in front of a gate and locked their necks together with U-locks (bike locks), blocking the main entrance to the facility. As I write this those five individuals are in custody. There were over a hundred people who participated in the action in a variety of roles both on and off site. The action was the culmination of the Annual Earth First! Winter Rendezvous, which took place in a cypress swamp East of Lake Okeechobee over the weekend. There were quite a few people at the rally hailing from Palm Beach County, but there were also Earth First!ers from all over the continent who came here for the “Rondy”. It was cool especially to see people who are fighting fossil fuel infrastructure all over Turtle Island connecting their struggles and working together on messaging. BWM: Is there a reason you have targeted Florida Power and Light for this protest–do you have a history of action in Florida against this company? Wiley: The main thing that makes FPL a target right now more than any other time is their plan to build a power plant next to the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation. This project has already been challenged in court by members of the Seminole Tribe, and there are indigenous folks (Independent Traditional, Miccosukee) outside of the federally recognized reservation lands who also oppose the new plant. FPL wants to promote itself as the wave of the energy future, with its “Next Generation Clean Energy Centers.” But we think environmental racism, genocide, and development are old, dirty news for Florida. In addition to the new power plant proposal, FPL is working with Spectra to build a natural gas pipeline across Northern Florida and looking into building power lines across Everglades National Park. To summarize, FPL is totally evil and it would feel good to protest them even if it wasn’t timely. Between 2007 and 2009 over 50 people were arrested in a variety of blockades and other protests against the West County Energy Center and the Barley Barber plant in Martin County. The Hendry County plant will be modeled after the West County and Martin County Plants. A strong coalition is already forming among Hendry County Power Plant opponents, and we expect the resistance to be even fiercer this time around. BWM: Can you explain to us the significance of the location of the proposed power plant, and what kind of repercussions it’s construction might have to the environment and people nearby? Wiley: We already have an idea of what the impact to people and ecosystems would be like from the the West County Energy Center and the Barley Barber Plant. Each of those plants use over 20 million gallons of water daily, and water is the basis of all life in the Everglades. Imagine a giant straw (or three) sucking the water out from under the last remaining ancient cypress swamps. The power plants emit thousands of tons of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, including SO2, NOx, mercury and chromium which poison the air and increase rates of asthma and lung disease in surrounding communities. BWM: For people who may not be familiar, can you explain the tactic of locking-down and what it can achieve as far as goals and objectives are concerned when dealing with a corporation of this size? Lock-downs are a way of holding space for a long time (usually hours, sometimes whole days) with a relatively small number of people risking arrest. In some situations this tactic can be very practical for actually stopping construction or extraction where it happens. When extractive industries have work stoppages it can cost them thousands, sometimes millions of dollars. At a company headquarters, however, this tactic is mostly used in a symbolic way, to draw attention to the ecocidal criminals who like to hide in office buildings, country clubs, legislative offices, etc. It may still cost them a lot of money; the public image of a corporation is part of its bottom line. But essentially it is to create a really awkward spectacle that brings light to the bad decisions made by people in charge. Today FPL public relations people actually responded to the press and tried to defend themselves against our media. Our rag tag volunteer-run movement can put the second largest energy company in the country on the defensive, and that’s awesome. BWM: Aside from the five protesters who locked themselves together, what other forms of protest and types of tactics were employed on site? Can you describe the diversity of the day besides the lock-down? Wiley: I was pretty amazed by all the street theatrics that multiple affinity groups pulled together over a fairly hectic weekend of action planning. There were radical clowns, a “panther block” with cardboard masks, and a conga picket line. I wasn’t there for it, but I guess people were having wheel barrel races in front of the entrance gate. Earth First!ers are natural pranksters because usually when we’re not thinking about how the Earth is dying we’re trying to figure out how to pull the rug out from under people who take themselves too seriously. The last few big Earth First! protests I’ve been to have had a notable element of mirth. It’s obviously fun, but I think it’s also strategic. It diffuses tension and keeps more people around to support our friends who have made themselves vulnerable to the cops. And it makes a protest a party that everyone wants to be at. BWM: How are those people who did lock-down feeling about the day, what type of charges did they receive, and are they slated to be released, and under what conditions will they be let out of custody? Wiley: We have heard from them and it seems like they are doing ok. But they are still in jail and that obviously sucks.[**Editors note, all five activists are now released and awaiting further information about charges and outcomes. We'll keep people updated on ongoing support calls and ways to help those arrested.**] We’re expecting misdemeanour charges, and usually people who do things like this get out within 48 hours. Mostly we just don’t know yet. BWM: Is there any way that individuals outside of Florida can help you with your fight, or support your work? Wiley: Right at this moment it would help if people donated to the legal fund. Bigger picture—research Florida Power and Light and Spectra and organize against them in your own community. If you live in the Southeast especially it is likely that there are targets around—banks, subsidiaries, contractors, frackers etc, who are connected to the struggle down here. The things that we did today are most affective as a part of a larger campaign and movement, and we all need to participate in that. BWM: Grayson, as one of the individuals who locked down on Monday, how do you feel the protest went? Grayson: I think the protest went excellently. It brought attention to one of the dirtiest energy companies in the nation, Florida Power and Light, and made public their plan to build a giant new frack gas refinery adjacent to the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation, and to damage critical endangered panther habitat in doing so. The protest was covered by local media and spread widely online, and the exposure pressured FPL to respond with a shallow public statement declaring their concern for human life. Obviously they only felt the need to go on the defensive publicly because their actions and plans contradict such a concern. I was also pleased with the amount of disruption we were able to cause at FPL headquarters. The lockdown of the main entrance lasted over two hours and resulted in police closing off the road adjacent to the property–effectively shutting down the other two entrances that led out onto the street. Corporate executives may not open our letters or return our phone calls, but it’s hard to ignore frozen traffic and missed appointments. The support for our group and action was also better than we could have anticipated. Seminole tribal members and independent traditional people expressed thanks for our action and for our solidarity with them. We have strong reason to believe that this action will inspire more like it to come in the future. BWM: Since being arrested, how has the support for your group and your actions been? Is there anything you need from the community right now? Grayson: Thank you for asking this–good jail support is one of the most vital components in keeping our movements strong and consistent. It can also make all the difference in the mental and emotional state of those arrested. Our support has been amazing. Folks on the ground were available to answer our phone calls from inside the jail and update us on any information they had, as well as to share updates with arrestees who weren’t in contact with one another. They also called the jail constantly for updates on charges, bail and conditions. Thankfully, we were all released on our own recognizance (i.e. without bail). Although we don’t have bail to pay, we still have court dates to travel to (some of us from quite far away) and court costs to pay, so donations would of course be greatly appreciated. You can donate here https://www.wepay.com/donations/114656034.  BWM: What would you say to individuals who may be on the fence about using a diversity of tactics at demonstrations, the way your group did on Monday? Is this a positive or negative thing in your opinion? Grayson: I think I would ask such individuals to consider what their goals are, and how to best accomplish those goals in a way that doesn’t conflict with their message. For instance, Everglades Earth First! is attempting to stop a violent company from embarking on a project that endangers ecosystems, human health, and the territory of people who have been resisting colonialism for over 500 years. One strategy for halting construction of this refinery is to bring attention to these issues in the media. Non-violent direct action tactics like lockdowns inevitably draw attention to the inherent violence of the state, which uses weapons to protect similarly violent corporations. In my mind, the use of these tactics is a positive thing. It has a natural flow to it, and all the images just fall into place. All we had to do was sit down in the road–FPL and the cops did the rest for us. Of course, this is only one strategy, and I am by no means putting down others. Each group and individual should assess its own targets, goals, and boundaries, and then do whatever they feel comfortable with, and whatever they feel is necessary, to accomplish what needs to be done. BWM: Do you have any future actions planned, either on site or online that individuals might be able to participate in? Wiley: Yeah, probably! Everglades Earth First! has weekly meetings in Palm Beach County. If you live in South Florida and want to plug in, email evergladesearthfirst@riseup.net + + + + + UPDATE: All five people who were arrested are out of jail. All were charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Larry 'Key' Mitchell 2007

A retrospective view

These are the few photos taken of Larry during his years behind enemy lines.

I interpreted being locked up solely as a by-product of my skin color and not necessarily for breaking the law.

A cognitive social emergence

We were young and full of angst but we were also signifying an urban Black message to other and older prisoners that we were also Warriors! Young men in a state of rebellion, living on the coattails of arrested development, who had grappled with the abuses and elements of poverty, survived violence and had a hard time respecting those in leadership roles who demonstrate more caricature than character.

I didn’t view these groups and organizations as gangs or criminal enterprises, as the government tried castigating them as. In fact, within the scope of some of the historically government sanctioned lethal tactics used to suppress and murder Black activists, I view some of them as freedom fighters and unsung s/heroes in the canon of Black history.

Although some of us were bigger than Huey, we were noticeably younger, as he gave us a few tips on developing strength which, he emphasized, had as much to do with learning and reading material related to the plight of our ancestors and the conditions of our communities as lifting weights.

A tensely strained bow of oppression ultimately takes a revolutionary aim at the power of the oppressor.

A street-to-prison correlative

We had yet to crystalize an understanding of how capitalism is the driving force behind classism and how classism is the principle impetus of competition, fueling crime, violence and other components of social division we experienced in our own communities.

An investment toward liberation

Note this photo predates CDC adding R for Rehabilitation to its name.

Recriminating redemption

I’m impassioned with the belief that The Most High has my back and that something of profound significance can emerge from those of us who have been thrown into society’s waste baskets of retribution.

This is Larry’s most recent photo.

Race, cultural mores and poverty are used as social class indicators that are encased within a social caste system that lawfully targets those of a certain caste and gears them for a street-to-prison-pipeline and are the same class indicators used by prison officials to sustain a general population-to-SHU pipeline for prisoners.

CDCR’s gang management policies are abusively exploitive and are not chiefly about security, safety or the containment of violence, any more than political demagoguery sensationalizing crime is about public safety.

In conclusion

Prisoners can come together in peaceful protest and work together to end racial hostilities. Despite our ideological differences, pigmentation, individual struggles, personal opinions, background or geographical origins or how much time we have done or have left, we are all chained to an assembly line of injustice.

Hannah Proctor writes about revolutionary psychologies, neuronal ideologies and communist brains. She is working on a PhD on Soviet psychology and neurology at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Hannah Proctor’s presentation reflected on history as a tool to critique the present. Coming from a perspective of “critical neuroscience” she stressed that history provides the means to denaturalize the current moment and thereby enable imaginations of alternative futures; a project she deemed particularly pertinent in the face of a contemporary neuroscience that produces a conception of the human consciousness that is largely ahistorical and depoliticized. In contrast with this conception, she drew on the work of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist of the 1920s and ‘30s, whose work, she argued, could provide an alternative paradigm as it situates human consciousness as emerging in a social and historical context. Vygotsky’s original aim to bridge the dynamics between materialism and idealism, between object and subject through a “dialectical psychology” provided Proctor with an angle from which to question the contemporary object-centered neuroscience, and what she perceived as an equally apolitical social science (i.e. actor-network theory) that erases the distinction between object and subject. Instead, Proctor insisted on the importance of maintaining a political subject that has the capacity to resist domination and articulate radical critique, which to her also meant insisting that the world can still “consciously be altered”.

CHANGING OUR MINDS: A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE BRAIN

By Hannah Proctor & Michael Runyan, 4 February 2014

Image: From the Connectome project, grounded in recent developments in MRI technology which allow for non-invasive 

visualisation of the anatomical connections between different parts of the brain

Humans make their own history, but contemporary philosophy seems to be adapting the neo-colonial perspectives of neuroscience to dismiss the idea this could ever be a conscious and system-antagonistic process, argue Hannah Proctor and Michael Runyan

Looking at nature under the categories of the commodity form, science affords precisely the technology on which hinges the controlling power of capital over production. It cuts up nature piecemeal by isolating its objects of study from the context in which they occur, ignoring nature in its importance as the habitat of society.1

– Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour

Brain: The Final Frontier

'As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away, we can study particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.' So declared President Barack Obama in his speech launching the White House's BRAIN initiative, a $100 million project which aims to produce a dynamic map of the brain.2 Similar projects are also under way in the EU and China.3 The neurotech industry is booming. The race to unlock the mystery of the human brain has become a kind of inverted scramble for Africa. As with the protagonist in Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, who as a child gazed longingly at the mysterious blank spaces on maps of the earth before setting out to seek his fortune in colonial Africa, the impulse to map is historically entwined with the impulse to dominate.

We may be far from discovering how the grey mass in our heads functions, but we nonetheless live in a world saturated with biological explanations for human behaviour. Mental and nervous diseases are being diagnosed on a record scale, the volume of psychotropic drugs and profits of the pharmaceutical industry are growing exponentially.4 The Fifth edition of the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) was just published, an internationally recognised nosology, which exhaustively categorises psychic experience according to menus of symptoms, neat checklists that supposedly correspond to discrete conditions. The weighty tome piles taxonomy upon taxonomy and hurls them at our feet, considering supposedly abnormal behaviour in splendid isolation from the lives in which it occurs, as though mental disorders mysteriously oozed out of people from some internal reservoir of unknown origin.

In realms far beyond the medical sphere, the prefix is ubiquitous: neurolaw, neuromarketing, neuroethics. Novelists discuss John Donne's use of adverbs in relation to mirror neurons5, historians analyse the French Revolution by focusing on the evolutionary roots of emotions,6 and philosophers draw on neuroscientific case histories to bolster their claims about ontology.7 No-one could deny the numerous valuable applications of neuroscientific research – indeed, the people quickest to point to the limitations of our current understanding of the brain are often neuroscientists themselves – but we should question the tendency to describe all human feelings, thoughts and actions in purely neuronal terms.8 Rather than accepting a vision of subjectivity as identical with 'a bunch of neurons', we should question how such an understanding has come to be so widely accepted, examine the ideological positions it helps to uphold, and insist that it will never be sufficient for describing the qualitative richness of human experience, or to account for the palpitations of history that impact on that experience.9

Making History

‘Humans make their own history but they do not know that they make it' – Catherine Malabou's provocative polemic What Should We Do With Our Brain? begins by citing Marx.10 This ‘well-known dictum’ is repeated by Slavoj Žižek in his long discussion of the philosophical implications of contemporary neuroscience in The Parallax View.11 Neither author references the statement – so famous it transcends such conventions – but it appears to be a subtle alteration of a line from the beginning of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which should read: humans ‘make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.' Marx continues, ‘they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.'12 This is not intended as a pedantic Marxological jibe for the titillation of a tiny tribe of bearded old men with Lenin badges. Malabou’s modification, gamely parroted by Žižek, though seemingly minor, presents a fundamentally different understanding of human agency.

Image: A 'glass brain' rendering is used to present data captured by a Diffusion Tensor MRI:http://medvis.org/2012/10/04/eg-vcbm-2012-norrkoping-sweden-report/

For Marx, people can (and must) act consciously, they just cannot choose the historical circumstances in which they do so. Malabou contorts Marx’s phrase in order to make the claim that we are not conscious of the capacities of our own brains, which are nonetheless, she insists, an ‘agency within us'.13 Malabou identifies the brain’s capacities for creation, resistance and destruction, but despite these apparently disruptive properties, our brains remain irrevocably opaque. We might be 'living at the hour of neuronal liberation', but we do not and cannot know it.14

'The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living', Marx intones, but he insists that these ghosts might be exorcised through the discovery of a genuinely future-oriented revolutionary impulse that does more than merely parody the past.15 If, on the other hand, we follow Malabou's logic then we find that the nightmare is identical with the brains of the living; its weight cannot be lifted. Her vision of agency as inaccessible to consciousness, ultimately repeats rather than challenges the reigning orthodoxy of neuroscience, a strangely positivist position that, by conceiving of the world as driven by underlying natural processes, risks robbing humans of their capacity to consciously transform themselves and the world. But humans make their own history. We must insist on asking what we can do with our brains, rather than submitting to a paradigm that seems more concerned with finding out what our brains do with us.

Natural Disasters

Ernst Bloch noted that in the period of the Great Depression 'when Freud's Vienna became less carefree', there was a special psychoanalytic advice bureau established to deal with attempted suicides. The psychoanalytic patient was typically bourgeois and heretofore 'had to worry little about its stomach'. A sign hung on the wall that cautioned: 'ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS CANNOT BE TREATED HERE.' But this, for Bloch, neglected to probe the very real psychological impact of economic crisis, which he insisted was far more likely to drive someone to commit suicide than a broken heart alone.16 This sign might also serve as an epigraph to the DSM-V. But despite serving certain class interests, at least psychoanalysis is concerned with history, with causation, with the external events that might contribute to the development of neuroses.

Malabou declares that in the contemporary moment, ‘politics is defined by the renunciation of any hope of endowing violence with a political sense’.17 The aetiology of psychological conditions is obscured. Social conflict is now, she claims, 'without dialectic, as anonymous as a natural catastrophe'.18 But rather than attempting to combat this condition, she merely diagnoses it. Power remains anonymous, inaccessible and therefore, ultimately, undefeatable.

The riots that swept England in August 2011 were frequently presented as if they were the result of a chaotic range of forces detached from political or social causality. But the very existence of riots seems to self-evidently refute Malabou's insistence on the totally disengaged qualities she associates with contemporary subjectivity.19 Smashing, burning and looting might not have a single coherent intention, but they certainly do not imply a blithe acceptance of the status quo. Yet somehow by depicting the rioters as feral animals marauding through the streets hungry for Nike Air Max, the mainstream media overwhelmingly presented the events as coming ex nihilo, only explicable in terms of pathological immorality. As a recent Endnotes article notes: 'No agency here; no reason; no will; no morality; no community: just a big hole in society into which the bad ones fall.'20

Endnotes observe that the rioters were typically defined by pure criminality, understood not as a certain form of action, but as an ontological attribute.21 Amid the sanctimonious cacophony, the braying calls for martial law, various newspapers reported that the 'impulsiveness' of the rioters might be attributed to low levels of the neurotransmitter GABA in certain regions of the brain. A headline inThe Daily Mail bellowed: 'Some men may be more likely to riot because of their "impulsive" brains'.22This biological hypothesis framed the riots as a disaster whose origins could be sought in pre-existing natural structures. Here natural catastrophe is internalised, like a kind of cerebral plate tectonics.

The press cited research by scientists at Cardiff University, the results of which happened to be announced in a press release in the same week as the riots. The scientists responsible for the research were quick to condemn the casual deployment of their work in such a politically-charged context.23 But the episode demonstrates how easily neurological arguments can be mobilised as apparently authoritative, incontrovertible evidence.24 It proved less controversial to argue that imbalanced chemicals in people's brains cause dramatic social upheavals, than to suggest that such events might have anything to do with palpable social imbalances in the inequitable world beyond individual skulls. Criminality becomes an inherent biological disposition distinct from specific acts and their multifarious causes, an aberrant sickness in the supposedly natural habitat of society. But both mental and social disorders rely on some conception of order. You don't need Foucault to tell you where the criminal and the mad converge, how power is sustained by positing and punishing deviants.

Image: Jon Rafman, The 9 Eyes of Google Street View, http://9-eyes.com/ . The map defines what is valued and attempts to disavow what is not

Paul Gilroy has recently analysed the differences in rhetoric surrounding the British riot waves in 1981 and those in 2011. Both narratives relied on an understanding of criminality as pathological and downplayed empirical statistics testifying to exploitation, systemic racism, police harassment and economic deprivation. But Gilroy points to a shift in emphasis between the two moments: whereas in 1981 the discourse focused on intergenerational tensions within immigrant communities, by 2011 the burden of responsibility was placed on individuals rather than groups. This, he claims, corresponds with broader economic and social transformations: 'new norms specified by generalised individuation and privatisation were able to reframe the disorders as a brisk sequence of criminal events and transgressions that could be intelligible only when seen on the scale of personal conduct.'25

The increasing dominance of neuroscientific models as explanations of human behaviour can be seen as an important aspect in the trend towards individuation identified by Gilroy. By depicting human actions and desires as subtended by a material substrate, neuroscientific explanations participate in consolidating an ideological position that downplays historical contingency and human agency. The materiality of the brain is emphasised at the expense of the materiality of the world; a strange form of ahistorical materialism emerges. Neuroscientific arguments can provide extra ammunition for the already established tendency to de-contextualise events that threaten to disrupt the hegemonic order. And cloaked in the presumed neutrality of science, they often go unexamined.

Maps and Territories

After the launch of Google Street View, images circulated online of apparently incongruous things that appeared on the site. This meme derived its humour from the assumption that Street View depicted bizarre things that had no place on a map. But naked dancing, fires, parades, weddings, political protests, arrests and fast-food promotions requiring employees to dress-up as chickens happen, their exclusion from conventional maps is a limitation of that technology.

Conceived in the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit riots, as an attempt to avoid precisely the kind of interpretation that would frame the events some inexplicable catastrophe, William Bunge's Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution foregrounded the limitations of conventional maps. Through a forensic analysis of one square-mile of the city, the book attempts to unpick the underlying causes of the riots. Traditional maps prefer fixed Capital to people, depicting space without time; places without seasons, weather conditions, vehicles, animals, humans and times of day. As Bunge underlines, the limitation of the map is its occlusion of the vivid details of lived history; the technology itself is a value-laden part of the social fabric he hoped to critique. His own project thus aimed to restore the warm flesh of human history to the cold bones of conventional cartography. But how might such an approach be applied to the warm flesh of the human mind itself, without, in the process, transforming dynamic subjects into static objects detached from history?

Sigmund Freud always insisted that the mind resisted figuration. In The Ego and the Id (1923) he inserts a diagram showing how the different components of the psyche relate to one another. But he immediately undermines the apparent clarity of the image by pointing to its limitations, declaring that 'the form chosen has no pretensions to any special applicability'.26 A rather different diagram appears in his later lecture 'Dissection of the Psychical Personality'. Again, Freud is quick to dismiss his 'unassuming sketch',insisting that any attempt to draw a diagram of the mind is doomed to fail.27 'We cannot do justice to the characteristics of the mind by linear outlines', he claims, suggesting that modern painting might provide a better visualisation than line drawing, with its 'areas of colour melting into one another.'28

Even metaphors founder. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud attempts to describe the preservation of memories in the Unconscious by invoking Rome the 'Eternal City', in which fragments of ancient buildings distorted, destroyed or damaged over time, exist alongside the newest constructions. But he is forced to abandon the analogy, as it fails to capture the simultaneity of the Unconscious, in which the Piazza of the Pantheon could accommodate all the successive versions of the structures it has contained, including the emptiness that preceded them, in one space. Such attempts to describe the Unconscious, Freud is forced to conclude, are little more than an 'idle game', the only justification for which might be to demonstrate 'how far we are from mastering the characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms'.29

But now we are apparently closer to this mastery. Our brains are frequently represented as areas of colour melting into one another, rendered not in paint but liquid crystal. Glance through the magazines in any airport lounge or scroll through the news pages and you will encounter any number of these images: bright blotches emerging from a stark grey background like pools of lava or patches of lurid foliage on a mysterious and hostile planet. That red section on the left or green spot on the right signifies what happens when you participate in a riot, read Keats, tell a lie, choose a new washing detergent, dream, or take too much ecstasy.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) measures brain activity based on the flow of oxygen-rich blood in tiny regions of the brain; the more cerebral activity there is in a particular part of the brain, the more blood it requires. The magnetic properties of blood allow for images to be generated. An algorithm transforms heat into colour. These images are then reconstructed, correcting any distortions caused by head movement or other forms of 'noise'. The vibrant false-colour images we are familiar with result from extensive mathematical manipulation. Although the limitations of fMRI 'brain porn' are well-documented30 – one report even claims that it is possible to obtain dramatic fMRI images from dead fish31 – unlike in Freud's works, caveats rarely accompany these visions of the brain. They implicitly assume the appearance of transparent representations of consciousness, functioning as 'truth documents' in which the identity of map and territory is taken for granted.32Neurological evidence is increasingly being used in court, recalling the Victorian phrenologists who sought explanations for misconduct in skull contortions.33 These strange, alien-looking images, we are told, somehow coincide with us. But as Hilary and Steven Rose note:

Even when they attempt to be at their most social, their methodology is essentialist. The complexities of lived experience are reduced to toy problems amenable to experimental manipulation but in the process emptied of real life reference.34

Just as Bunge pointed to the limitations of conventional geographical maps, it is important to recognise what such images elide, to note the contexts in which they are deployed and to ask why and by whom they are being produced.

Alberto Toscano has discussed the opacity of High Frequency Trading images which, he argues, act as 'ciphers of our incomprehension more than visual articulations of relations open to cognition and intervention'.35 Despite the ubiquity of these images, the billions of transactions in our algorithmic and consumer markets, like the billions of neurons firing in the brain fundamentally resist representation. Rather than elevating science to something beyond our comprehension and therefore beyond reproach, acknowledging the fundamental resistance of the mind to even the most technically sophisticated and specialised modes of figuration is a recognition that something always exceeds any attempt to finally comprehend human nature. That something is the qualitative in all its quivering particularity, that scientific abstraction strives but never succeeds in eliminating.

Cerebral Economies

Susan Buck Morss credits French physiocrat François Quesnay with the first attempt to map the economy in 1758. Quesnay, like many early political economists, was a physician who employed biological analogies to describe the circulation of wealth, implying the financial system functioned like a natural phenomenon.36 Descriptions of the brain as an intricate unhierarchical network with billions of nodes firing information at super-fast speeds, clearly overlap with descriptions of contemporary Capitalism.

Image: The contemporary understanding of the brain is inextricable
from the network

In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello discuss the coincidence of descriptions of the brain with descriptions of the current economic configuration, noting that such vocabularies serve to naturalise the present social situation, making it seem impervious to change, and thus undermining the human capacity to intervene in the course of history.37 Malabou expands on this insight, observing that representations of the brain in the 'mainstream press'38 accord with the economic reality of 'part-time jobs, temporary contracts, the demand for absolute mobility and adaptability, the demand for creativity',39 justifying an economic system that places ever greater pressures on people to accommodate increasingly precarious conditions. But her neat distinction between popular and scientific understandings of the brain, ultimately fails to explore the socially and economically embedded nature of scientific research itself.

The question of the entanglement of neuroscientific methodologies and findings with the capitalist economy remains to be adequately posed. Crucial to this question is the reliance of neuroscientific research on economic structures and political institutions. As Martin Hartmann declares:

We are presently witnessing […] the rise of a form of 'neurocapitalism' that binds pharmaceutical interests, neuroscientific research, and the pressures of a growing commodification of the self together in a rather unhealthy alliance.40

Research methodologies reflect political and social categorisations, and the results of that research can be harnessed for various ends.

Brain Power

The convergence of brain and computer has created a feedback loop between the two: our cultural reading of neuroscience is completely dependent on the computer, while the development of artificial intelligence systems mimics the functionality of the brain. Network models, functioning at the scale of the corporate internet, can be used to understand how brains function, but can also simulate it in order to create new artificial intelligences.41 The connectome, a comprehensive dynamic map of neuronal connections in the brain, is seen not only as the representation or image of the brain but crucially as a dataset.42 Massive amounts of parallel computing power is used to process, analyse, and classify the world into datasets specifically tailored to add intelligence to our devices. Our increasingly ergonomic smartphones are now relying on it for image and speech recognition as major players like Google hope that the concept can be deployed beyond the revenue model of their core services. We may be far from being able to upload information to the brain but neuromarketing is a burgeoning industry, using technologies like eye-tracking and predictive and behavioral analytics, in order to model, guess and eventually guide what, when and how we consume.43 Attention pays, it has become a marketable commodity in its own right.44 But the gamble of neuromarketing is more insidious, for it hopes that neurotechnology will eventually be able to access our desires, no longer understood as delving into the subconscious but as mining data from the subcortex.

Obama's speech inaugurating the BRAIN initiative emphasised America's apparently exceptional capacity for innovation, framed in relation to economic growth and job creation: 'Ideas are what power our economy. It's what sets us apart.'45 Like brain tissue following an injury, in the wake of a serious economic crisis Americans adapt to external circumstances by creating new connections that seek to repair and overcome the damage caused by supposedly unforeseen external events. Obama cited the success of the Human Genome Project, which he claims brought $140 to the US economy for every $1 spent. But this neat cost-benefit analysis fails to acknowledge the limitations of the project that has not only failed to live up to its promise in terms of medical application46 but has also opened the floodgates for 'the global commodification of bioinformation,'47 where patent wars are fought to turn life into intellectual property. Meanwhile, government DNA data banks are growing, and venture capitalists are profiting from retail genomics – 'Knowledge is Power', proclaims one such website which offers DNA testing for $99.48

$50 million of the $100 million being pledged for the BRAIN initiative will come from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). The only part of Obama's speech pertaining to military applications of neuroscience was a reference to helping veterans with PTSD. This, of course, is already value-laden – focusing on ameliorating the effects of supposedly inevitable trauma rather than protesting at the violent events that produce traumatic responses in the first place – but neuroscientists are also involved in research aimed at enhancing performance on the battlefield, controlling weapons in new ways, and on monitoring, torturing and attacking the enemy. Neuroscience might indeed provide new and important methods for healing people, but it might equally facilitate surveilling them, profiting from them or even killing them more effectively.

Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar's seminal Laboratory Life established the importance of reconnecting scientific facts to the mundane sites from which they emerged, ripping open black boxes to reveal the swirling tangled mess they contain. But Latour's emphatic prioritisation of the local over the global has less to offer a project intending to identify the complex relations between scientific knowledge and structural forms of oppression.49 Here a totally different angle is provided by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who locates the conceptual foundations of modern science in the historical emergence of the commodity form, arguing that abstraction originates in the act of exchange. The formal qualities of economic (real) abstraction engender the (ideal) abstract categories of quantifying natural science, which subsequently becomes an internalised aspect of human cognition. Nature is thus ahistoricised, approached as if ruled by ideal standards. Sohn-Rethel's eccentric thesis provocatively suggests that notions of timeless universal logic might be tied to historically contingent economic forms. It is not simply that scientific research is motivated by profit-making, but the very way objects are observed and understood is conditioned by economic structures. But how then does experience of the world modify our cerebral structures?

Paying Attention

Celebrated neuroscientist Susan Greenfield recently published 2121, a turgid science fiction novel set in a future in which humans have lost their capacity for understanding, compassion and contemplation. The erosion of human individuality was caused by increased use of social media and digital technologies. Computer interfaces re-modelled people's brains, reducing humans to sorry creatures seeking quick thrills but drained of any capacity for real feeling. It might seem easy enough to dismiss Greenfield's misty-eyed attitude and the hysterical tabloid news articles this kind of work has spawned, especially as she has admitted that her proclamations are not based on actual research,50 but the same basic sentiments can be found in more surprising places too.

Doyen of network theory Manuel Castells has recently turned to neurological arguments to support his theories about social structures, declaring glibly: 'We are networks connected to a world of networks'.51 A specific autonomist-influenced strain of contemporary theory is quick to make bold pronouncements about post-Fordism's apparently unique capacity to sculpt the brain in its own image. But claiming that 'the possibility for neural sculpting' is exceptionally great under 'conditions of networked and distributed systems', takes for granted the particular vocabularies and visualisations of the brain those systems produce.52

Franco 'Bifo' Berardi – and he is far from alone53 – notes that emerging networked business practices function like a brain: 'pieces of information... resemble the interconnected neurons in the brain.'54 And this is more than a mere analogy: the biological and the digital are becoming interwoven. We are post-human. We are cyborgs.55 Now machinic evolution is beginning to outpace humans who are left desperately panting to catch up. The progressive merging of organic and digital systems has led to an 'infernal mutation' of the human brain.56

It is a familiar story: in a world of abundant information our ability to process it all is apparently diminishing. We are overwhelmed by stimuli, glued to our screens, scrolling wildly between tabs, constantly switching interfaces, dreaming in Tweets, sucking in information in ever tinier chunks. It is all too much, too fast. We are saturated. The more we are connected, the less we connect. We are exhausted yet we cannot sleep. We can no longer concentrate, reflect, understand. We are even, Berardi insists, incapable of love. Our brains are re-wired by this constant information assault but they begin to crack under the pressure to accelerate. New pathologies and their attendant acronyms – ADD, PTSD, ADHD, etc – proliferate.

Where Berardi departs from the typical Daily Mail article is in his insistence on the economic dimension of these new neuroses: 'From the time when capitalism connected to the brain, the latter incorporated a pathological agent, a psychotic meme that will accelerate pulsations even to tremors, even to collapse.'57 In his narrative, brain is replacing brawn, contemporary cognitive capitalism therefore relies on neuronal harmony, more than previous modes of production: 'Your psychic suffering didn't matter much to capital when you only had to insert screws and handle a lathe.'58 But in practice the new subjectivities Berardi discerns seem to emerge with new hyper-fast technologies rather than the market they now propel. Of course, the two are intrinsically linked but Berardi does not provide a cogent account of how subjectivity is produced by particular economic configurations.

Berardi does align psychological with economic crisis, but he focuses on the psychologies of the speculators themselves, wired up on Adderall in some Manhattan skyscraper. This recalls Bloch's comment about the Viennese bourgeoisie who rarely needed to think about their stomachs. The mental well-being of many people will certainly be impacted by the experience of economic crisis, but more likely those who get left behind than those with the luxury of being able to keep up. Berardi does not question the new categories for understanding psychological suffering, treating them as transparent descriptions of new forms of psychological experience rather than ideologically mediated. Obfuscating the economic and social explanations for particular forms of behaviour, such descriptions place the onus on individuals to adjust to the world, rather than suggesting that the world itself might be the thing that needs changing.

Changing Our Minds?

For Michel Serres, the last space left to explore is that traversed by the imagination, a ruined, incommensurable, unmappable space 'constellated by symbols, charted by phantasms'; an 'initiatory, fabulous and extraordinary' landscape explored by the solitary remembering subject who he likens to Moses in the desert, Orpheus in the underworld or Alice in Wonderland.59

But these intrepid adventurers, like the vaunted scientific-discoverer, are isolated individuals on solitary quests. Instead, perhaps the vast and unmappable terrains of the imagination, spilling out from our minds into the world, might be explored collectively. We need to challenge a scientific paradigm that treats humans as biologically determined, isolated entities who are governed by the chemicals in their heads. Of course, it might be the case that when we imagine something synapses fire in a certain region of our brain, but in what way does knowing that really help us to create new worlds (or to destroy existing ones)?

Hannah Proctor is a PhD student at Birkbeck College, University of London. She works on the history of Soviet psychology and neurology. She is currently collaborating on a film about Post-Communist Eastern Europe. @hhnnccnnll –twitter/tumblr/instagram

Michael Runyan <m1r320 AT gmail.com> recently completed an MA at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. He lives in Berlin

Footnotes

1 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, London: Macmillan Press, 1978, p.80.

2 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/02/remarks-president-brain-initiative-and-american-innovation

3 https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en_GB and http://www.brainnetome.org/en/

4 Interestingly though, major pharmaceutical companies have announced the withdrawal of funding to develop new drugs for schizophrenia and depression. See Hilary and Steven Rose, Genes, Cells and Brains, p.249.

5 A.S. Byatt, 'Observe the Neurons: Between, above, below John Donne', Times Literary Supplement, 22 September 2006. Ian McEwan's Saturday, Vintage, 2006, is an example of recent literature enamoured with neurology.

6 Lynn Hunt, 'The Experience of Revolution', French Historical Studies,Vol. 32, No. 4, Fall 2009, pp.671-678.

7 Paul Churchland is the most obvious example. See also, Thomas Metzinger's Being No-one: The Self-Theory Model of Subjectivity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

8 For works offering critiques of the current neuronal paradigm see: Suprana Choudury and Jan Slaby (ed.) Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012; Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinistis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, Durham: Acumen, 2011; Fernando Vidal, ‘Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009, Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007; and Hilary and Steven Rose, Genes, Cells and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology, London; Verso, 2012.

9 'You are nothing but a bunch of neurons', Francis Crick famously declared in The Astonishing Hypothesis, London: Schuster and Schuster, 1994.

10 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? Sebastian Rand (trans.), New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p.3.

11 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 2006, p.209.

12 Karl Marx, The 18^thBrumaire of Louis Bonaparte,http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm. We do not believe this discrepancy is a translation issue. Marx’s original German reads: ‘Die Menschen machen ihre eigene Geschichte, aber sie machen sie nicht aus freien Stücken’, this is translated into French as ‘Leshommes font leur propre histoire, mais ils ne la font pas arbitrairement’, whereas Malabou’s French reads: ‘...mais il ne savent pas qu’ils la font’. Catherine Malabou, Qui faire de notre cerveau?, Paris: Bayard, 2004, p.16.

13 Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, p.8.

14 Malabou, ibid.

15 Karl Marx, The 18^thBrumaire of Louis Bonaparte,http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

16 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1, Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knights (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, p.66.

17 For a detailed critique of Malabou's recent work on destructive plasticity see, Hannah Proctor, 'Review: The Post-Traumatic Condition', Radical Philosophy, 177, January 2013.

18 Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012, p.161.

19 Malabou claims the 'new wounded', a term that applies literally to brain injured people and figuratively to contemporary subjectivity in general, are defined by affectless detachment: 'beyond sorrow, [they fall] into a state of apathy that is no longer either joyful or despairing. They become indifferent to their own survival.' Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity , Polity, Cambridge, 2012, p.27.

20 'A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats', Endnotes III, November 2013, pp.74-75.

21 Endnotes III, p.84

22 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2024173/Rioters-lower-levels-brain-chemical-keeps-impulsive-behaviour-control.html.

The Sun retracted its article following a complaint from the scientists. Pieces citing the research also appeared in the Indian, Russian, Malaysia, Polish and Finnish press.

23 http://www.ucl.ac.uk/neuroscience/documents/dr-sumner-interviewhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/aug/22...

24 This was not the only example of neuroscientific arguments being used to draw conclusions about the riots. Unlike the example cited above, which was denounced by the neuroscientists themselves, some scientists did publish work which linked the rioters behaviour to inherent neurological structures. See, for example:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-empathic-brain/201108/the-london-riots-when-the-empathic-brain-switches and http://www.nancymucklow.com/2011/08/uk-riots-and-the-asperger-brain/ . A recent research project conducted by Queen Mary University aimed to explore 'whether gang violence is related to psychiatric illness': http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/items/smd/103702.html . A more nuanced discussion, alert to the dangers of de-contextualising the events is:http://www.madmobsandenglishmen.com/

25 Paul Gilroy, '1981 and 2011: From Social Democratic to Neoliberal Rioting', South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013, 112(3):550-558, p.555. Endnotes' narrative also relies heavily on Gilroy's indispensible There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, University of Chicago Press, 1987.

26 Sigmund Freud, 'The Ego and the Id', The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud : Early psycho-analytic Publications Vol. 1X, 1923-1925, the ego and the id and other works, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (ed. and trans.), London: Vintage, 2001, pp.3-67, p.28.

27 Freud, 'New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis' Standard Edition, Volume XXII (1932-1936): New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, ed by James Strachey; Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, London: Vintage, 2001, pp.1-182, p.72.

28 Freud, 'New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis', p.78.

29 Sigmund Freud, 'Civilization and its Discontents', Standard Edition, Volume XXI (1927-1931), in,The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works, James Strachey; Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (eds.), London: Vintage, 2001, pp.1-182, p.72.

30 See, for example, William R.Uttal, The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain, Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 2003.

31 C.M. Bennett, A.A. Baird, M.B. Miller and G.L. Wolford, 'Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in Post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument for Multiple Comparisons Correction', Society for Neurosciences Abstracts, 2009, quoted in Genes, Cells and Brains, p.254.

32 This characterisation of mapping appears in M. Dodge, R. Kitchin and C. Perkins ed., Rethinking Maps , London; Routledge, 2009.

33 fMRI is now being used as a form of lie detector: http://www.noliemri.com/

34 Hilary and Steven Rose, Genes, Cells and Brains, p.245.

35 Alberto Toscano, 'Gaming the Plumbing: High Frequency Trading and the Spaces of Capital',Mute, 16 January 2013, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/gaming-plumbing-high-frequency-trading-and-spaces-capital

36 Susan Buck-Morss, 'Envisioning Capital', Critical Inquiry, 21.2, 1995, pp.434-467. This use of biological metaphors might be contrasted with Marx's use of language in Das Kapital. Keston Sutherland discusses Marx's use of the term 'Gallerte' as a metaphor for abstract human labour. Unlike the term 'congealed' familiar from English translations of Marx which suggests a natural process, Gallerte, a 'tremulous mass' derived from boiling animal substances, is, Sutherland insists, emphatically disgusting, an unnatural excrescence that, once created, cannot return to its original state. Keston Sutherland, Marx in Jargon:http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_1.1/KSutherland.pdf

37 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism , London; Verso, 2007, pp.149-50.

38 Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, p.3.

39 Malabou, ibid., p.4.

40 Martin Hartmann, 'Against First Nature: Critical Theory and Neuroscience' in Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby (ed.), Critical Neuroscience, p.82.

41 http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513696/deep-learning/

42 http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0010042;jsessionid=7419E7E46FD22CCE8383775809283467

43 http://iiiii.ir/press/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/8.pdf

44 See, Tiziana Terranova, 'Attention, Economy and the Brain', Culture Machine, vol. 13, 2012, pp.1-19.

45 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/02/remarks-president-brain-initiative-and-american-innovation

46 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/health/research/13genome.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

47 Hilary and Stephen Rose, Genes, Cells and Brains, p.183.

48 https://www.23andme.com/store/cart/

49 For a discussion of the political limitations of Bruno Latour see, Benjamin Noys, 'The Discreet Charm of Bruno Latour, or Critique of Anti-Critique, Presented as a Paper at Centre of Critical Theory, Nottingham, December 8 2011.

50 For a scathing review of Greenfield's venture into fiction, see:http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/07/susan-greenfield-novel-2121-review Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think (London; Atlantic Books, 2011), a Pulitzer Prize exploration of the cognitive impact of the internet, already popularised the thesis that technology is not only eroding concentration, but sapping our compassion.

51 Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p.139. Castells rather alarmingly declares that: 'power is constructed, as all reality, in the neural networks of our brain', as though coercion had no existence beyond cognition. p.145.

52 Warren Neidich, 'Sculpting the Brain and I Don't Mean Like Rodin' , Shifter 16, April 2010, pp.173-187, p.174. For more examples of this theoretical tendency see the collection Cognitive Architecture: From Bio-politics to Noo-politics, Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, (eds.), Rotterdam: 010, 2010.

53 See, for example, Mark Fisher's comments in a recent interview with Bifo, Bernard Stiegler's recent work and Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, London: Basic Books, 2010.

54 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of post-alpha generation, Arianna Bove (trans.), London; Minor Compositions, 2009, p.36.

55 An overview of literature dealing with the increasing convergence of the biological and the digital, much of it far more nuanced than Bifo's work, is beyond the scope of this discussion. The following texts all provide important insights into hybridity, albeit without necessarily focusing specifically on the neuronal: Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect, Cambridge; Polity, 2012,, N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999, Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Catherine Porter (trans.), New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, Eugene Thacker, Biomedia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004.

56  Berardi, op. cit., p.37.

57 Ibid, p.38.

58 Ibid, p.43.

59 Michel Serres, 'Jules Verne's Strange Jouneys', Yale French Studies No. 52, Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy, 1975, pp.174-188, p.176.

Info

Aesthetic Education Expanded is a series of 12 articles commissioned by Mute and published in collaboration with Kuda.org, Kontrapunkt, Multimedia Institute, and Berliner Gazette. It is funded by the European Commission. A central site with all contributions to the project can be found here: http://www.aestheticeducation.net/ 

The series looks at the contemporary afterlife of the project of ‘aesthetic education’ initiated in the 19th century, from the violent imperatives of training and ‘lifelong learning’ imposed by capitalism in crisis to informal projects of resistance against neoliberal pedagogy and authoritarian repression.

Expanding the scope of the aesthetic in the tradition of Karl Marx to include everything from anti-austerity riots and poetry to alternative and self-instituted knowledge dissemination, the series encompasses artistic, theoretical and empirical investigations into the current state of mankind’s bad education.

Rape is so common in South Africa that we have developed a “rape culture” that allows us to dismiss, joke about or condone rape. Rape has been normalized to such an extent that victims - which now include little babies - are blamed when the crime has been committed against them. How did we lose our humanity to such an extent?    ----Deejay Manaleng

Every day I live in fear that I will be raped...I live with my partner and we live alone. Many guys in my neighborhood know this and at any time they can come and kick down our door and rape us. They usually come in gangs and we would be powerless to stop them...Lots of my friends have been raped for being lesbian. It’s not an unusual thing...

The attitudes towards LGBTIs can be attributed to our patriarchal society, which is entrenched in South Africa.

(In South Africa) one in every two women will be raped in her lifetime. Twenty per cent of men say the victim "asked for it", according to a survey by the anti-violence NGO, CIET. A quarter of men in the Eastern Cape Provinces, when asked anonymously by the Medical Research Council, admitted to raping at least once – three quarters of whom said their victim was under 20, a tenth said under 10. A quarter of schoolboys in Soweto described "jackrolling"– the local term for gang rape – as "fun".

Women’s bodies have been the locale of war since the inception of patriarchy - a misogynistic trend that saw the female body become the site of restraint, control and oppression....

In South Africa the war on women is nothing less than a national calamity as women and children have become victims of a current crisis of masculinity. Whether it is centered on white paranoia, privileged entitlement or economic desperation, the rage is turned onto women...

The fact that these victims and perpetrators are from different social strata and race categories challenges our society to re-examine their prejudices about who exactly it is that is capable of murder, rape and violence.  The truth is that misogyny and violence against the feminine knows no class or race or cultural barriers.  It exists wherever men and women exist....

Patriarchy plays out in various degrees of cruelty and oppression in different countries.  Each continent has its own homespun modes of violence imposed upon women to control and dictate to them how far they develop, how sexual they are allowed to be, how self-realized and authentic or empowered they are given the permission to become.

In the West it is seen in world domination patriarchal practices, in church structures where institutionalized misogyny is rife -- as it is in the corporate and governmental structures. It is also seen in incidents of rape and domestic violence.

And let us not forget that Europe remains the biggest consumers of the flesh trade in the trafficking of women and children through an entrenched sex slave industry, which reveals a lot about what a repressed patriarchy is capable of becoming.  The realities of this underground world of subjugation and horror has not even begun to be revealed because the truth is there are very few survivors of this well-oiled and well-hidden machinery of systematic rape.

It is clear that sexual violence is becoming an instrument for corporations and capitalist interests in a self-serving partnership between Western and African patriarchy – generating an apocalyptic landscape in which the war on women manifests in alarming levels of rape brutality in what plays out as a perturbing and terrifying echo of colonialism.

Surely it is time that we, as a society, get it together to tackle this problem head-on and determinedly.  It is men who have declared war on women and it is women who spend an inordinate amount of their energy protecting themselves from this onslaught of male violence.

We need to rise up at every occasion and form a unified voice around ending rape and violence on all women – whether a black lesbian killed in a township by homophobic gangsters or a top white model shot to death by her celebrity boyfriend – the reaction needs to be the same.

We need to form mass protest women’s movements to scream out that enough is enough.

We need to pick up pots and pans, drums, our primal screams, our banners, our outrage and gather outside magistrate’s courts and police stations to show our rage. We need to join those voices that are working to make sure government hears our demands loud and clear and we must find ways to make sure they can no longer ignore the state of emergency that needs to be declared for the women of South Africa.

We need to fight this war within the wider issue of social causes and demand a world in which communities are given services that create safer environments for women.

We also need to work together to dismantle the hold that patriarchy has over our language, our popular culture, our media, judicial systems and institutions of learning. This is all part of the battle.

Misogyny is institutionalized. It is entrenched in our daily lives and it is invisible to those who have been handed this so-called ‘god given’ right to claim procurement and superiority over women.

And for those men, who are already bleating that not all men are the same, consider this: only one man in about 250,000 will speak out against rape.

Until this changes, the silence of the majority of men about the reality of this war on women implicates the male collective.

Now is the time in which both men and women must rise up and end this war on women's bodies, women’s psyches, women’s intellect, women’s emotions and women’s vaginas.

Pepe Hendricks

The nuclear blast created a flash of light brighter than a dozen suns. The light was seen over the entire state of New Mexico and in parts of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico. The resultant mushroom cloud rose to over 38,000 feet within minutes, and the heat of the explosion was 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun! At ten miles away, this heat was described as like standing directly in front of a roaring fireplace. Every living thing within a mile of the tower was obliterated. The power of the bomb was estimated to be equal to 20,000 tons of TNT, or equivalent to the bomb load of 2,000 B-29, Superfortresses!

After witnessing the awesome blast, Oppenheimer quoted a line from a sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita: He said: "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." In Los Alamos 230 miles to the north, a group of scientists' wives who had stayed up all night for the not so secret test, saw the light and heard the distant sound. One wife, Jane Wilson, described it this way, "Then it came. The blinding light [no] one had ever seen. The trees, illuminated, leaping out. The mountains flashing into life. Later, the long slow rumble. Something had happened, all right, for good or ill."

The cloud traveled to a great height first in the form of a ball, then mushroomed, then changed into a long trailing chimney-shaped column and finally was sent in several directions by the variable winds at the different elevations. It deposited its dust and radioactive materials over a wide area.

The Trinity test also resulted in at least one hot spot in Indiana, over 1,000 miles away. One month after the test, the customers of the Eastman Kodak Company complained of buying fogged X-ray film. After an investigation, a physicist at Eastman Kodak determined that packing material that had been made from corn husks at a plant in Indiana had become radioactively contaminated. He deduced that the origin of the contamination was from an atomic explosion. The physicist's knowledge of the secret project was not altogether surprising: the Kodak Company ran the Tennessee Eastman uranium processing plant at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Nobody told anybody living in New Mexico...anything.  The War Department said everything was fine.  Not to worry.

   
Live Science reports;

Currently, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission states that members of the public should not receive more than 2 millirem (about 0.002 Roentgen) of radiation in any one hour from external radiation sources in any public area. The exposure rates following the Trinity test were more than 10,000 times this recommended dose level.

That's ten thousand, folks.

Did I mention that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) lies in the midst of New Mexico's Indian Country  - where by the way  LANL for the next 70 years still designed, built, tested, and disposed of radioactive and other toxic waste in what was once a pristine environment filled with sacred sites and rich grazing lands that for hundreds, if not thousands, of years supported (but no longer can) a subsistence lifestyle for Pueblo peoples and other later-coming immigrants. 

Research conducted and reported on in Health Physics notes as of the of 2010, "Evaluations of Trinity fallout published to date have not addressed internal doses to members of the public following intakes of contaminated air, water, or foods."

No one gave a hoot what happened to a bunch of Indians, Mexican  Americans, ranchers, and other desert sorts scattered about the New Mexico plains and plateaus.  No one with any authority gave a damn. 

They pretty much still don't.

The following is from Indian Country Today.

Los Alamos National Laboratory/Wikimedia Commons

Trinity Site explosion, 0.016 second after explosion, July 16, 1945. Note that the viewed hemisphere's highest point in this image is about 200 meters high.

H-Bomb Guinea Pigs! Natives Suffering Decades After New Mexico Tests

TANYA H. LEE

3/5/14

Much has been made of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on two now-infamous cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the health-nightmare aftermath.

But only now is the spotlight being put onto those who had the actual first atomic bomb dropped in their vicinity—it was the Americans’ own people, Turtle Island’s original inhabitants, the Indigenous Peoples of the southwest. The world's first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico—home to 19 American Indian pueblos, two Apache tribes and some chapters of the Navajo Nation. Manhattan Project scientists exploded the device containing six kilograms of plutonium 239 on a 100-foot tower at the Trinity Site in the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) Valley at what is now the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range. The blast was the equivalent of 21 kilotons of TNT. At the time an estimated 19,000 people lived within a 50-mile radius.

It has taken nearly 70 years, but the National Cancer Institute is launching a study to determine how much radiation the residents of New Mexico were exposed to that fateful day, and what effect it could have on their lives.

What people reported seeing at 5:30 that morning was a flash more brilliant than daylight followed by a green (or red or violet or blue, depending on who is recounting the story) glow in the sky. No one knew what had happened, no one knew how to protect themselves from the effects of this new technology, and no one knew that it would be almost 70 years before the government would investigate what those effects were.

"No one was told, everything was top secret, and that's the mistake,” said Marian Naranjo, Santa Clara Pueblo, director of Honor Our Pueblo Existence, an area community group. “Because when you look at what people here in New Mexico were doing during 1945, they were farmers. And in July you get up at the crack of dawn to go out and do your work."

The Trinity test was conducted to determine whether the plutonium bomb intended for Nagasaki would act according to theory. It did. But the Department of Defense changed the design of the bomb anyway.

"From the Trinity test they determined that they were going to have to drop the bomb from a higher altitude or detonate the bomb at a higher altitude than they did at Trinity,” said Tina Cordova, Santa Clara Pueblo, head of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders’ Consortium, an activist group that has been pushing for just such a study for more than 10 years. “At Trinity they put it on a platform 100 feet in the air, and at Nagasaki they detonated it much higher in the atmosphere because at Trinity what happened was that they didn't create a very large blast field but created a very expansive radiation field. At Nagasaki they wanted a different effect; they wanted to create a large blast field, and they weren't necessarily interested in creating a radiation field."

The government briefly monitored the radiation levels at several sites near the blast with the relatively crude instruments that were available at the time and according to the extremely lax standards of the time.

"So they detonate the bomb at Trinity and they leave,” said Cordova, a cancer survivor. “They never come back and tell the people to take care of how they live, what they consume, what they eat, drink. Nothing."

Contemporary reports from both American Indian and government witnesses describe a light ash that rained down for four or five days after the detonation. It went everywhere—onto people's clothes and bodies and into their homes, into the cisterns they used to collect rainwater for drinking, on the crops they would feed their families, on the forage their animals would consume, and into the watershed from which the animals they hunted drank.

Manhattan Project Searchlight Station L-8 crew who were cooking steaks over an open fire a few hours after the blast buried the steaks and left the area after the food became contaminated by fallout.

"The dust could be measured at low intensities 200 miles north and northeast of the site on the 4th day,” said Colonel Stafford Warren, chief of the Manhattan Project's Medical Section, in a July 21, 1945 statement. “There is still a tremendous quantity of radioactive dust floating in the air. It is this officer's opinion that this site is too small for a repetition of a similar test of this magnitude except under very special conditions. It is recommended that the site be expanded or a larger one, preferably with a radius of at least 150 miles without population, be obtained if this test is to be repeated."

Henceforth, the U.S. conducted almost all of its nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site and in the Pacific. No other test was ever conducted in New Mexico. Still, there would be no picking up and leaving for the people whose ancestors had lived on this land and who, in any case, did not know they were in danger.

The radiation field was as extensive as it was because the blast was so close to the ground that it picked up the soil, which was drawn up into the mushroom cloud by hot air currents. Then there was a huge lightning and rainstorm the night after the test, which would have caused radioactive particles trapped in the cloud to fall to earth. The wind also helped disperse the particles.

The radioactive cloud “slowly assumed a zigzag shape because of the changing wind velocity at different altitudes,” Los Alamos scientist Kenneth Grisen wrote in an eyewitness account now in the National Archives. “A sort of dust haze seemed to cover the area."

That observation echoed in reports by Cyril S. Smith and Philip Morrison.

"The obvious fact that all of the reaction products were not proceeding upward in a neat ball but were lagging behind and being blown by low altitude winds over the ground in the direction of inhabited areas produced very definite reflection that this is not a pleasant weapon we have produced," Smith said in his account.

Nowadays the United States Environmental Protection Agency readily acknowledges on its website the likely effects associated with long-term or chronic low-level radiation exposure. The longer the exposure the more likely that cancer and other illnesses will occur, according to the EPA’s website.

However, this is in hindsight prompted in part by what happened to the Navajo and other American Indians after the test blast. In New Mexico, American Indians would begin to experience many types of cancers—rare cancers as well as multiple primary cancers. Cordova said that her father, who was three years old at the time of the test, had two oral cancers and one gastric cancer, none of them the result of metastasis. He never smoked or drank.

"At one time I could name ten people who had brain tumors,” said Cordova, who grew up in Tularosa. “The town I grew up in is probably about 3,500 people. The normal incidence of brain tumors in the [general] population is about one in 5,000.  So that gives you some idea on the incidence of these things. Brain tumors are associated with radiation exposure."

Cordova is far from the only witness to these effects.

"A lot of the people here in New Mexico, men, women and children have been victims,” said Kathy Sanchez, San Ildefonso Pueblo, of Las Mujeres Hablan (The Women Speak), a network of local activists working in Northern New Mexico to protect their peoples and lands from the nuclear weapons industry. “We are losing many family and tribal members, and it is heartache and hardship as a consequence of radioactivity around us."

Mescalero Apache Tribal Council member Pam Cordova said her tribe has experienced the same thing.

"There have been a lot of deaths," she said, "and a lot of it is cancer related."

Bake sales sometimes pay for pain medications, but most often people simply do not have the resources to take care of themselves in the face of such devastating diseases.

"People in these small communities are almost always underinsured or uninsured, and then they're left to deal with these horrific, horrific cancers with little to no insurance or means for taking care of themselves," said Cordova.

New Mexicans affected by the Trinity test are not eligible for remuneration under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which covers virtually all nuclear and uranium workers and so-called down-winders except those affected by the Trinity test, in part because no one has ever before formally studied what happened in New Mexico after Trinity.

But that could soon change.

Next: A Long Time Coming: National Cancer Institute Studies Nuclear Fallout