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Judith Butler on Hamas, Hezbollah & the Israel Lobby (2006)

Published March 28, 2010 Antisemitism , Nationalism , Theory , Zionism/Israel/Palestine 43 Comments
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This is Judith Butler’s reply to a bundle of four questions asked in Q&A during a 2006 teach-in at UC Berkeley about the war between Israel and Hezbollah.  Audience members asked:

1. Since Israel is an imperialist, colonial project, should resistance be based on social movements or the nation-state?

2. What is the power of the Israel Lobby and is questioning it antisemitic?

3. Since the Left hesitates to support Hamas and Hezbollah “just” because of their use of violence, does this hurt Palestinian solidarity?

4. Do Hamas and Hezbollah actually threaten Israel’s existence, as portrayed in some media?

Judith Butler:

“Ok, well, I would just briefly say: I think its imperative to figure out what the mechanisms are of the various lobbies in the US – the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League – how they work to help to formulate US foreign policy toward Israel. I think there’s no question we need an honest, rigorous appraisal. I think there are some versions of it that strike me as perhaps a little too easily subscribing to conspiracy theories, and I think that there can be an antisemitic version, and there can be a really useful, critical version as well. I have no doubt it’s a very powerful lobby – I actually think of it as multifaceted – and I think we need more careful, rigorous analyses of it.

So you know the short answer is: one neither has to dispute the existence of such a lobby, or its power, to prove that one is not antisemitic; but neither does one have to accept every version of that, given that some versions are, I think, problematically bound up with conspiracy theories.

Similarly, I think: Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence. So again, a critical, important engagement. I mean, I certainly think it should be entered into the conversation on the Left. I similarly think boycotts and divestment procedures are, again, an essential component of any resistance movement.”

[[ audience claps]]

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Thanks to Camila Bassi for pointing out this video in her essay “The Anti-Imperialism of Fools’: A Cautionary Story on the Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard of England’s Post-9/11 Anti-War Movement”

NOTE: The questions start at 10:30 and Butler starts her answer at 14:55. [June 2012: video is no longer at original link, but is now available on youtube]

description from URL where video was originally available at:

(http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1054740516888584797#):

Berkeley Teach-In Against War – Part VI – Question and Answer Session

Concerned about the devastation currently being inflicted on the people of Lebanon and Palestine by the Israeli Military Forces and with the very limited and biased reporting on these conflicts presented by most American media networks, we have organized a teach-in on the UC Berkeley campus in order to give students, faculty, and the Bay Area community at large a chance to gain a greater understanding of these events and to participate in an open discussion on their significance for both Americans and the people of the Middle East. During the first hour of this two-hour event, four scholars with expertise in the Middle East will present short analyses (15 minutes each) of the historical and political dimensions of this conflict, focusing on the following themes:

1. The role US foreign policy has played in enabling and authorizing the Israeli bombardment;

2. The origins and historical development of Hezbollah, and the role of this movement within Lebanese social and political arenas;

3. The shifting political alignments within Israel, and their relation to the current war on Lebanon and to Israel’s role in the region more broadly;

4. The impact of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank on the lives of Palestinians and the political landscape of the Palestinian society.

The second hour of the teach-in will be reserved for audience questions and comments. Confirmed speakers are UC Berkeley Professors Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature), Beshara Doumani (History), Charles Hirschkind (Anthropology), Saba Mahmood (Anthropology), as well as Zeina Zaatari, Program Officer for the Middle East and North Africa, The Global Fund for Women.

The teach-in took place in 145 Dwinelle on September 7th

http://www.btiaw.org

Nettlau on Bakunin and syndicalism (1914)

Published March 16, 2010 Anarchism , Theory Leave a Comment

Here Bakunin’s Socialism sets in with full strength: mental, personal, and social freedom to him are inseparable – Atheism, Anarchism, Socialism an organic unit. His Atheism is not that of an ordinary Freethinker, who may be an authoritarian and an anti-Socialist; nor is his Socialism that of an ordinary Socialist, who may be, and very often is, an authoritarian and a Christian; nor would his Anarchism ever deviate into the eccentricities of Tolstoi and Tucker. But each of these three ideas penetrates the other two an constitutes with them a living realisation of freedom, just as all our intellectual, political and social prejudices and evils descend from one common source – authority. Whoever reads “God and the State,” the best known of Bakunin’s many written expositions of these ideas, may discover that when the scales of religion fall from his eyes, at the same moment also the State will appear to him in it horrid hideousness, and anti-Statist Socialism will be the only way out. The thoroughness of Bakunin’s Socialist propaganda is, to my impression, unique.

From these remarks it may be gathered that I dissent from certain recent attempts to revindicate Bakunin almost exclusively as a Syndicalist. He was, at the time of the International, greatly interested in seeing the scattered masses of the workers combining into trade societies or sections of the International. Solidarity in the economic struggle was to be the only basis of working-class organization. He expressed the opinion that these organisations would spontaneously evolve into federated Socialist bodies, the natural basis of future society. This automatic evolution has been rightly contested by our Swiss comrade Bertoni. But did Bakunin really mean it when he sketched it out in his writings of elementary public propaganda? We must not forget that Bakunin – and here we touch on one of his shortcomings – seeing the backward dispositions of the great masses in his time, did not think it possible to propagate the whole of his ideas directly among the people. By insisting on purely economic organisation, he wished to protect the masses against the greedy politician who, under the cloak of Socialism, farms and exploits their electoral “power” in our age of progress! [[7]]

…

I say again: it is preposterous to think that Bakunin would have been a syndicalist and nothing else – but what he would have tried to make of Syndicalism, how he would have tried to group these and many other materials of revolt and to lead them to action, this my imagination cannot sketch out, but I feel that things would have gone otherwise, and the capitalists would sleep less quietly. I am no admirer of personalities, and have many faults to find with Bakunin also on other grounds; but this I feel, that where he was rebellion grew round him, whilst to-day, with such splendid material, rebellion is nowhere. South Africa, Colorado, are ever so hopeful events; but think what a Bakunin would have made of them – and then we can measure the value of this man in the struggle for freedom. [[11]]

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Max Nettalu, “Michael Bakunin” in Writings on Bakunin (London: Carl Slienger, 1976), pp 7, 11.

The book’s notes indicate that the essay was originally published in Freedom, June 1914.

Frere Dupont on “Leaderless Leninism”

Published February 12, 2010 Marxism , Theory 1 Comment

In the end the band of brothers that is the historic-formal party is capable only of reproducing the received structuring of an apparently neutral ‘effectiveness’ in decision making – and by such means, enters competitively for its share in the marketplace of established interests. I would suggest, as an alternative to the leaderless leninism of those who would diverge partially from the party-form (substituting unions, federations, networks, fora and other forms) that another step is required, i.e. a disinvestment from formal structures of decision-making altogether. In place of structure there should be initiated attempts at de-structuring, this would take the form of negative interventions aimed at relaxing the hold within organisations of those determining factors which have thus far caused the proletariat to consistently decide wrongly.

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from Frere Dupont, “The Most Average Length Suicide Note in History” (draft)

Hardt & Negri on anarchists (2000)

Published January 23, 2010 Anarchism , Marxism , Theory Leave a Comment

“You are just a bunch of anarchists, the new Plato on the block will finally yell at us. That is not true. We would be anarchists if we were not to speak (as did Thrasymacus and Callicles, Plato’s immortal interlocutors) from the standpoint of a materiality constituted in the networks of of productive cooperation, in other words, from the perspective of a humanity that is constructed productively, that is constituted through the “common name” of freedom. No, we are not anarchists but communists who have seen how much repression and destruction of humanity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments. We have seen how all this is being re-created in imperial government, just when the circuits of productive cooperation have made labor power as a whole capable of constituting itself in government.”

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Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p 350. [Italics in the original.]

Juan García Oliver: “revolutionary syndicalism serves the proletariat, whereas anarchism is one brand of humanism”

Published January 15, 2010 Anarchism , Theory 1 Comment

Q. Given how your life developed, that was a significant discovery.

A. Yes, especially as it was during that [[waiters’]] strike that with other comrades from the trade, young men, we had set up an anarchist group that affiliated itself to the Barcelona Local Federation of Anarchist Groups. That federation bore the name “Bandera Negra” [Black Flag], borrowed from the title of the newspaper it published. In Barcelona there was another federation of groups as well, the “Bandera Roja” [Red Flag]. “Bandera Negra” was, let us say, a classic receptacle for anarchist ideas and was against revolutionary syndicalism. “Bandera Roja” claimed to be close to revolutionary syndicalism but it was, all in all, syndicalism pure and simple, with all that that implies… I imagine we’ll be returning to this theme as our interview proceeds.

Continue reading ‘Juan García Oliver: “revolutionary syndicalism serves the proletariat, whereas anarchism is one brand of humanism”’

Claude Lefort: the “abolition of power” as totalitarian

Published November 23, 2009 Anarchism , Marxism , Theory 2 Comments

Whoever dreams of an abolition of power secretly cherishes the reference to the One and the reference to the Same: he imagines a society which would accords spontaneously with itself, a multiplicity of activities which would be transparent to one another and which would unfold in a homogeneous time and space, a way of producing, living together, communicating, associating, thinking, feeling, teaching which would express a single way of being. Now what is that point of view on everything and everybody, that loving grip of the good society, if not an equivalent of the phantasy of omnipotence that the actual exercise of power tends to produce? What is the imaginary realm of autonomy, if not a realm governed by a despotic thought?

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from Claude Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, edited by John B. Thompson. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p 270.

Fredy Perlman on Paul Baran (1965)

Published October 9, 2009 Anarchism , Marxism , Primitivism , Theory 1 Comment

FREDY PERLMAN

This is the reaction to the news of Paul Baran’s death of an American pursuing graduate studies in economics at the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

The MONTHLY REVIEW with the news that Paul Baran is dead arrived in Belgrade yesterday (May 15th).

To those of us who were young enough to consider Baran a teacher and not a colleague, he was what Thomas Mann called an “archetype.” Offered the narrow experience of the “well defined scientific project,” we are able to resist only because of the force of Baran’s profound experience. His esteem for the critical intellect, his demonstration that the field of this intellect is not an academic discipline but the world of suffering and struggle, his proof that today as well as in the time of Vico, Hegel, and Marx, man can grasp and change what man constructed, are the instruments with which we evaluate all other “methodologies.”

Continue reading ‘Fredy Perlman on Paul Baran (1965)’

Jünger on Heidegger: “If only he hadn’t done those stupid things – for which, however, I don’t reproach him…”

Published September 10, 2009 Fascism , Philosophy , Theory 2 Comments

Hervier: À propos of traveling, you talk about Heidegger, who was more of a homebody. You know that he was once invited to give a lecture in Rome, where he was supposed to spend a week. But the lecture was such a big hit that he was asked to give a second one, and he spent his entire stay indoors, preparing the lecture.

Jünger: Yes: in Seventy Wines, I quote a letter that Heidegger wrote me, saying that he is like an old Chinese, he prefers staying at home. My brother Freidrich Georg was closer to Heidegger than I, and he always had anecdotes about him. One day, Heidegger was stung in the back of the neck by a bee, and my brother told him that that was excellent for rheumatism. Heidegger didn’t know what to answer. I have a whole pack of letters he sent me, and he also presented me with two unpublished essays in a very beautiful penmanship. He gave seminars on The Worker and Total Mobilization. If only he hadn’t done those stupid things – for which, however, I don’t reproach him; it is not the job of the philosopher to have clear political thinking. Besides, the situation was not such that one could say: “I want to preserve things as they are.” He thought something new was coming, but he was dreadfully mistaken. He did not have as clear a vision as I did.

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from The Details of Time: Conversations with Ernst Jünger, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (NY: Marsilo Publishers, 1986/1995), p 55.

John Zerzan – Five Theses on Workers’ Councils

Published January 23, 2009 Anarchism , Primitivism , Theory 1 Comment

Dear DB’ers,

There are so many ways to run the world. This journal, in fact, fairly teems with schemes of governance. And yet don’t we all know, on some level or other, that running the world is not the challenge that will heal us and the planet? A world that doesn’t need running offers the only qualitative difference form today’s hyper-alienated one.

In the spirit of the excellent critique of democracy from Echanges’ (DB 62), I submit the following very brief objections to the direct democracy of workers’ councils.

(a) The Adorno-type objection to ideological imposition on the future, which says that the shape of freedom is not concretely theorizable because that blue-printing closes off other (possibly more radical) departures.

(b) As a definition of anarchy, councilism is rejected: if emancipation consists of no rule, rule by councils is not emancipatory. (Anarchy is not democracy insofar as it disallows any form of government.)

(c) The critique of technological civilization and division of labor seeks to dissolve production; councilism is a means of directing industrial production. A world in which technology is absent has obviously no need of such coordination of specialization and economy.

(d) If the condition of worker is to be abolished, as it is already being refused in partial ways, workers’ councils are backward because they perpetuate it in their fundamental workerism.

(e) If representation is a negative value, councilism fails on a strictly ‘organizational’ level. To be represented is a humiliation. Further, delegates and recall have always been, in practice, direct routes to bureaucratization and the  rule of experts (consult all trade union history).

John Zerzan
Eugene, OR

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Letter to Discussion Bulletin #63 (Jan-Feb 1994), page 20.

Henri Lefebvre – “The Spontaneous”

Published January 16, 2009 Marxism , Philosophy , Primitivism , Theory Closed

The category of the ‘lived’ permits us to rehabilitate the category of spontaneity, which has long been disparaged, thanks to the attitude both of rationalist and of transcendentalist philosophy. Neither culturalism nor structuralism can admit the spontaneous and the unformed.

However, the rehabilitation of the ‘spontaneous’ does not rob critique of its rights. Quite the opposite. Are we about to make an apology for the spontaneous which would fetishize it? [fn11 – This is implied in the work on the ‘non-directive’ by the American psycho-sociologist Rogers and his school in France, for example.] Certainly not. Spontaneity has no privileges in any domain, be it everyday life or politics. When it is lacking, ‘something’ fundamental is missing; there is a gap, like a sterile little vacuum in the tissue of life. However, spontaneity is not always creative every time, with every risk it takes. It makes mistakes, and it fails more frequently than rational prognostication and calculation. Neither the idea of it nor its reality offers a criterion for existence or for value. Authentic per se (but how can we know this?), it eludes control and integration. And yet it imitates and mimics itself. In the spontaneous, it is difficult to make out what are dramas, dramatizations, de-dramatizations or super-dramatizations (which procedures of social control and integration encourage, and then repress). In periods of intense ideological control, the spontaneous and the non-spontaneous become merged, as do the natural and the artificial. This means  the members of a particular group discover ideologically saturated values, norms and symbols ‘spontaneously’.

To put it another way, whether it be in our consciousness or in the outside world, we never attain pure nature or an unconditional ‘being’. The spontaneous is already part of the social, although it is not the social per se. Everyday life gives it a place and a consistency and is the level on which it expresses itself. The spontaneous is nothing more than an element of the social, on a certain level. As such, it exists. It is active, it grows, it withers away, and as such it dies, in everyday life.

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from Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore (London & NY: Verso, 2002), pp 218-19.

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