The Brotherwise Dispatch VOL.2, ISSUE #1, DEC/2009 - FEB/2010
ADVANCED NEO-LIBERAL CAPITALISM – a term which combines Marcuse’s take on advanced capitalism with Chomsky’s take on neo-liberal globalization. “ . . . domination – in the guise of affluence and liberty – extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all authentic opposition, absorbs all alternatives. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.” Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1964) p.18. “The assaults on democracy . . . lie in the power of corporate entities that are increasingly interlinked and reliant on powerful states, and largely unaccountable to the public. Their immense power is growing as a result of social policy that is globalizing the structural model of the third world, with sectors of enormous wealth and privilege alongside an increase in ‘the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings’.” Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, (New York, Seven Stories Press, 1999) p.93.
BEWILDERED HERD – when a population is distracted from its real interests and becomes preoccupied with meaningless pursuits and unproductive ambitions. Those kept in a constant state of fear, anxiety and disorientation. Those who refuse to investigate truth independently or think critically and are the most susceptible to propaganda and disinformation.
BLACK LIBERATION THEORY – critical theory grounded in the intellectual rebellion, spiritual reality, socio-political revolt, emancipatory impulse and lived experience of human beings of African descent in resistance against western imperialist oppression and racist dehumanization.
EXISTENTIAL LIBERATION THEORY – an inherently rugged and unfixed method of critique which combines philosophy, social theory, cultural criticism and historical consciousness grounded in the human condition of constitutive self-determination and spiritual revolt, as reflected in two central concerns of Black existence; human ‘being’ and human liberation.
HEDONISTIC LIBERALISM – cultural norms and social practices which distract from and even discredit qualitative potentialities for human emancipation through emphasis on innumerable socially sanctioned quantitative possibilities for personal gratification, trivial activities and meaningless pursuits.
HIP HOP INTELLECTUAL – eMCee, graffiti ‘writer’, b-boy(breakdancer), DJ/producer, journalist, writer, poet, teacher, etc. who grasps Hip Hop aesthetics as cultural resistance to oppression and choses to function as the critical conscience of the postmodern lumpenproletariat.
HYPERBOURGEOIS – those who constitute the thoroughly assimilated, economically advantaged and socially privileged population in an advanced neo-liberal capitalist society. Those who accept or are deemed acceptable by the standards and value system of the ruling power elite. Those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Those who live in a postmodern world, where actual reality is stagnant and buried under media driven hyperactivity, rampant consumerism, and hedonistic liberalism. The ‘hyperbourgeois’ is like a well-fed hamster in a comfortable cage who runs tirelessly on a shiny treadmill proud of its incredible pace while going nowhere. “What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (New York, Grove Press, 1967) p.224-5. The hyperbourgeois are direct descendants of the ‘middle-class’ Fanon describes above.
NEO-COLONIAL AMERICAN GHETTO – term which re-emphasizes the suppressed reality of domestic colonialism as experienced by Black people in America. “It is because of the fact that Black people in the United States are also colonized that Fanon’s analysis is so relevant to us.” The Black Panther Party, in adopting this Fanonist “perspective . . . gave it a uniquely Afro-American content.” Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero, (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 1969, 2006) p.176. Cleaver then further elaborated on this “uniquely Afro-American content” from exile – “We regard this as the advent of the neo-colonialist phase of our peculiar situation in the United States because it corresponds to the moment the colonial power decides to grant a measure of independence to the colony and replace the colonial regime with a regime of puppets. And this is what they’re doing now in the United States by pulling certain levels of the Black bourgeoisie into the power structure and developing for them a vested interest in the capitalist system.” The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip S. Foner, (New York, Da Capo Press, 1970, 1995) p.109. “From the beginning the American Negro has existed as a colonial being. His enslavement coincided with the colonial expansion of European powers and was nothing more or less than a condition of domestic colonialism.” Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?, (New York, William Morow & Company, 1968) p.76.
NEO-CONSERVATIVE EUNUCHS – those who sacrifice their intellectual integrity and moral insight to curry favor with the ruling power elite. Lapdogs of the oppressor, subservient to the status quo, those who lack the ‘balls’ to stand up against injustice. Apologists and watchdogs of the ruling power elite.
NIHILISM – the absence of values, morality and meaning.
OLD WORLD ORDER – a world of rival nation-states ordered according to the principles and interests of western imperialism. Nationalism, racism and materialism are the holy trinity of the old world order, and are regarded as the ultimate source of values and morality.
ONTOLOGY – study of the nature of existence and structure of reality, study of ‘being’.
PHENOMENOLOGY – study of phenomena as it immediately appears to the consciousness without reliance on established dogma, prevailing doctrines, popular ideas, common prejudice and/or socially accepted understandings.
POSTMODERN LUMPENPROLETARIAT – those most ready for or most in need of radical change within the global context of a decaying old world order of western imperialism. Those who are severed from the means of production and detached from the mode of information and who constitute the maligned, marginalized and scapegoated population of an advanced neo-liberal capitalist society. Those who reject or have been rejected by the values and standards of the ruling power elite. Those who suffer the brunt of western imperialist oppression under an imposed spiritual silence, which allows for the disappearance of their humanity from the cleansed conscience and sanitized gaze of the hyperbourgeois. A transitional population of humanity which has been rendered sufficiently rootless through generation after generation of oppression within the current nation-state model of political organization. I developed the term from my interrogation of the writings of Fanon, Marcuse and Cleaver. “. . . that fraction of the peasant population which is blocked on the outer fringe of the urban centers, that fraction which has not yet succeeded in finding a bone to knaw in the colonial system. . . . It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpenproletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York, Grove Press, 1963) p. 129. “The opposition which escapes suppression by the police, the courts, the representatives of the people, and the people themselves, finds expression in the diffused rebellion among the youth and the intelligentsia, and in the daily struggle of the persecuted minorities. The armed class struggle is waged outside: by the wretched of the earth who fight the affluent monster.” Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1969) p.7. “. . . under monopoly capitalism the exploited population is much larger than the proletariat and that it comprises a large part of previously independent strata of the middle class.” Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1978) p. 34. “The Lumpenproletariat are all those who have no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of capitalist society.” Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero, (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 1969, 2006) p.177. One of the primary characteristics of the postmodern era is an ‘ahistorical’ social consciousness, or as Baudrillard puts it, “History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth”. Jean Baudrillard, Simulcra and Simulation, (Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1994) p.43. Within this postmodern context, the lived experience of the lumpenproletariat exerts a grounding and inherently human influence on those who have lost touch with the real. In his classic essay “On Lumpen Ideology” published in The Black Scholar, Vol.4 Number 3, Nov.-Dec. 1972, Eldridge Cleaver asks prophetically - “And who are we? Who is this ‘us’, still oppressed and longing to be free? Who are we that neither capitalism, socialism, nor third worldism provides for?” To which a Hip Hop intellectual who confronts advanced neo-liberal capitalist hegemony with his laptop in a crowded New York City coffee shop and his spiritual brother who confronts naked neo-colonial oppression with his AK-47 in a Brazilian ‘favela’ both respond, ‘we are the postmodern lumpenproletariat’. In orthodox Marxist theory the lumpenproletariat are irrelevant because they exist outside the boundaries of standard ‘class’ analysis. However, through interrogations of Fanon and Cleaver, it is clear that this ‘outsider’ status is a source of vital relevance in relation to any meaningful confrontation with western imperialism.
PRAXIS – the unity of theory and action, deliberate activity, decisive engagement, meaningful work or purposeful action. My understanding of ‘praxis’ is primarily Sartrean, check out Jean-Paul Sartre, Search For A Method, (New York, Vintage, 1963, 1968) and Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (London, Verso, 1960, 2004).
PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX – “The exploitation of labor by private corporations is one aspect among an array of relationships linking corporations, government, correctional communities, and media. These relationships constitute what we now call a prison industrial complex. The term ‘prison industrial complex’ was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit.” Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, (New York, Seven Stories Press, 2003) p.84.
RADICAL BLACK RIGHTEOUS MACHISMO – an expression of the human impulse of rebellion as channeled existentially by Black men in response to the inherent and specific racist dehumanization we have been subjected to under western imperialism. ‘Radical Black righteous machismo’ can be characterized by an urgent need to fearlessly confront oppression, an unrepentant affirmation of the humanity of Black people, an uncompromising sense of justice and an overriding concern with manifesting one’s manhood through courage and valor against overwhelming odds. One of the earliest recorded instances of radical Black righteous machismo is when Nat Turner was asked about any feelings of remorse or guilt about his vital role in the righteous insurrection of human beings against slaveholding tyranny by his interviewer Thomas R. Gray. “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?” Facing certain death, Nat Turner responds with calm conviction “Was not Christ crucified?” The Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern Controversy, Edited by John B. Duff and Peter M. Mitchell, (New York, Harper & Row, 1971) p.19.
RATIONAL ANIMAL – reductionist concept of human ‘Being’ as fixed, materialistic, sedentary and incapable of transcendence. Lowest common denominator of human existence. Embodiment of social Darwinism. An object among other objects in a sterile universe forever condemned to external causality and overdetermination-from-without.
RULING POWER ELITE – A term I picked up from Chomsky who picked it up from C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (Oxford University Press, 1956, 2000). Those who constitute the heavily armed, economically dominant, administrative power wielding population at the heart of the ‘state-corporate nexus’ within an advanced neo-liberal capitalist society. Those who control the means of production and the mode of information. Those who wield actual socio-political power and impose their will through administered bureaucratic mastery, shielded by media complicity and enforced through state sanctioned violence. Those whose dominance is dependent on the complacency of the hyperbourgeois, the ignorance of the postmodern lumpenproletariat and the continuous maintenance of racist divisions, religious discord and social disunity amongst humanity.
SOCIAL DARWINISM – the social application of and adherence to Darwin’s theory of natural selection to justify oppression, mystify injustice, and normalize the continuing necessity of economic exploitation. Appeals to social Darwinism redirect any independent investigation into the cause of oppression away from the systematic action or deliberate activity of the oppressor and towards some innate characteristic ‘weakness’ of the oppressed. Social Darwinism prevails wherever power takes primacy over justice and whenever there is no recognition of universal moral law. “In a culture that secretly subscribes to the piratical ethic of ‘every man for himself’ – the social Darwinism of ‘survival of the fittest’ being far from dead, manifesting itself in our dog-eat-dog economic system of profit and loss, and in our adversary system of justice wherein truth is secondary to the skill and connection of the advocate – the logical culmination of this ethic, on a person-to-person level, is that the weak are seen as the natural and just prey of the strong. But since this dark principle violates our democratic ideals and professions, we force it underground, out of a perverse national modesty that reveals us as a nation of peep freaks who prefer the bikini to the naked body, the white lie to the black truth. Hollywood smiles and canned laughter to a soulful Bronx cheer.” Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice, (New York, Delta, 1968, 1991) p.108.
STRUCTURAL-INERT – the constituted structural result of ‘praxis’. A ‘structural-inert’ condition occurs when deliberate action becomes embodied in passive structures which guide and order social relations. The term is derived from the Sartrean concept of the ‘practico-inert’. It was arrived at through an interrogation of Jean-Paul Sartre, Search For A Method, (New York, Vintage, 1963, 1968) and Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (London, Verso, 1960, 2004). I needed to create a concept which re-emphasized the importance of human praxis in relation to invisible socially structured oppression.
SUPERMASCULINE MENIALITY – a Cleaverist term which refers to the “personification of mindless brute force, the perfect slave”, someone who poses no threat to oppression through devotion to ignorance and misogyny. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice, (New York, Delta/Dell Publishing, 1968, 1991) p.192.
Excerpted from A. Shahid Stover, HIP HOP INTELLECTUAL RESISTANCE,(XLIBRIS, 2009)pp.113-119.