[Xmca-l] Re: My Hometown Minneapolis

Sat Jun 6 02:59:59 PDT 2020

JUNE 4, 2020Our History is Our Future
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Christopher Columbus on Santa María in 1492, oil – Public Domain

We can be sure that the public grandiloquence of Barack Obama grated
mightily on at least half of the country during his eight years in the Oval
Office. Now, we Libtards find every Trump tweet excruciatingly inane – or
horrifyingly inflammatory. As ever, it is the style, not the content, of
American political leadership that is in question. For Its neoliberal
ideology has been unwavering for four decades and is but the contemporary
version of an implicitly racist dedication to the well-being of the wealthy
that was fundamental to the founding of the Republic. Committed to the
economization of all facets of public and private life, we citizens are
remade as human capital: mini entrepreneurs whose only civic duty is
towards pumping up the GDP. This is what our government demands of us, and
we would be foolish to expect more from it than further destruction of the
public realm and further trivialization of the democratic process. Having
relinquished our individual roles as a necessary part of the Republic’s
sovereignty, our vote is rendered superfluous at a time of a viral
pandemic, unprecedented unemployment and expectations of further economic
dislocation likely to eclipse the melt-down of 2008.

On a weekend when the nation’s streets exploded in violent protest against
racialized police brutality, the President and the Vice President chose to
attend a manned rocket launch contracted by SpaceX, a private corporation.
Politics have been dethroned, the public realm abandoned and the public
good forsaken. Trump is ascendant, his sun-bronzed, narcissistic gaze
reflected in the ruddy glow of burning streets. His military, on high
alert, awaits its orders.

Our smoldering streets may no longer be safe for Trump’s ‘warriors’
attempting, around the country, to fully re-open the American economy. Many
will doubtless now enlist as his Law and Order ‘vigilantes’. Neoliberalism
demands the appearance of vibrant, life-sustaining markets. Trump has seen
the financial
indices decline as the epidemic curve has arced skyward, but his focus has
always been on economic rather than public health. He, and his ‘warriors’,
are quite prepared to sacrifice ‘flattening the curve’ for the sake of a
rising Dow but his calculus must now include appeasing his newly enrolled
‘vigilantes’ while not entirely disaffecting African Americans.

Neoliberalism, as the SARS-CoV-2 viral pandemic and the uprising
demonstrate, is this country’s comorbidity – a precondition making it
extremely susceptible to both viral disease and to the recapitulation of
long-ago racial injustice. In, The Road to Serfdom
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1944, Friedrich Hayek, the Anglo-Austrian economist, explicitly equates the
freedom of the individual with the unfettered workings of the market. By
way of contrast, he identifies the centralized economic planning evidenced
in National Socialism, Communism and Social Democracies as inevitably
trending towards totalitarianism. He suggests that governments restrict all
attempts to establish social objectives and by extension, any encouragement
of the citizen’s role in shaping these objectives. In other words, he
recommends abandoning both the social and the political realm in favor of
the invisible hand of the market, a goal that continues to inform
neoliberalism as it is practiced across Europe and the Americas, and is the
ruling ideology that has shaped the United States since the election of
Ronald Reagan in 1980. Hayek’s ideas, developed out of his deeply felt
reaction to German and Soviet totalitarianism, have had disastrous
consequences in the United States where the gross injustices of its past
continue to haunt its present, and where its best moments have been
enshrined in exactly the kind of social objectives, such as FDR’s New Deal
and LBJ’s Great Society, that Hayek spurns.

In the 1830’s, the two signature, home-grown horrors that have shaped
American history, the genocidal eradication of indigenous peoples and
slavery, coalesced in President Andrew Jackson’s ‘Indian Removals’ which
aimed to deport a number of surviving Indian tribes to west of the
Mississippi to make way for the establishment of further industrial cotton
plantations. This expansion of slavery
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partly funded by securitized bonds, sold in New York, London, Paris, and
other finance capitals, in a process that involved the financialization of
human flesh. The violence necessary to convert slaves into a fungible
commodity had existed for over two centuries, practiced in their initial
capture in Africa, in their transportation, and in their work. The stain of
slavery was then embedded in the capital generated by the cotton crop which
went on to be invested in the Industrial Revolution and formed the basis
for this country’s extravagant wealth. It is a wealth that has not been
shared by most of its citizens.

The highly visible murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, performed on
the street and reprised endlessly as viral videos on social media, go to
the heart of this country’s racialized hierarchies established in 1492 and
then compounded in 1619, with the arrival of the first shipment of African
slaves introduced to this country as stolen human capital. Neoliberalism
has made human capital of us all, but has vastly accentuated the wealth
divide because, as Piketty has shown, it is from investment and inherited
wealth that the rich are made – not from an honest day’s work. The majority
of the U.S. population, and certainly most African Americans, rely not on
wealth from inheritance or investments, but on the mythology of the
equitable rule of law and equal economic opportunity. As the looting
component of the uprising suggests, egregious racialized murder exposes an
awareness of this country’s endemic economic injustice.

Nick Estes writes in, Our History is the Future
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2019, “Indigenous elimination, in all its orientations, is the organizing
principle of settler society.” In documenting the Lakota tribes’ struggles
to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline passing under, and across sacred
indigenous lands, Estes lauds the ongoing struggles of native peoples to
resist a colonizing civilization that possesses an overbearing commercial
ethic which leaves little room for the recognition of other, non-material
values. Across the continent, indigenous peoples regarded the native soil,
along with its flora and fauna, as co-creators of their lives, and the
concept of its individual ownership was unthinkable. Genocide after
genocide has still not entirely eliminated their awareness of belonging to
the land – ever in conflict with those who so clearly prize the value of
individual ownership, property rights and, of course, the strange notion
that the land belongs to them.

It is in this country’s varied civilizational currents that the supreme
value of the almighty dollar emerged. As a nation, we have bought and sold
people, bought and sold the land’s natural beneficences, and now we have
sold our sovereign right to vote to corporations that exist only to give
succor to their owners and shareholders. The neoliberalism that was created
out of a fear of totalitarianism has now made societies beholden to a
totalized economy in which all is subsumed. Its values are those of the
market, entirely blind to the human concerns of a richly diverse population
many of whom it makes vulnerable to an ever increasing precarity in their
livelihood, housing and health care. The current pandemic, natural
disasters, debt crises, and recessions expose the venal character of this
prevailing ideology, while emergency relief and bailouts are leveraged by
the wealthy to expand capital in readiness for the next ‘recovery’ –
widening the corrosive gulf between the rich and everybody else.

As a Native American academic, Estes celebrates his peoples’ ongoing
resistance to the dominant culture, established shortly after 1492. By
declaring that “Our History is Our Future”, he is committing to a
continuance of this struggle. White members of the dominant culture can
find no such guidance in their past. We see our history reenacted in
violence and racial injustice entirely too often to wish it to be our future.
We suppress our past and fear our future for good reason.

Neoliberalism has obliterated the conditions for democracy by concentrating
wealth, eschewing the public good and causing civility to be drowned out by
over-amplified, profit-seeking media. The democracy that now struggles to
exist in this country, does so only as a fully financialized product
fertilized by corporate money featuring a roster of politicians pitifully
beholden to the special interests that support their reelection campaigns.
Estes is right to reaffirm his peoples’ history. Our salvation might be in
confronting ours.
Join the debate on Facebook
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More articles by:JOHN DAVIS
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*John Davis* is an architect living in southern California. Read more of
his writing at urbanwildland.org

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 3:58 AM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> IMHO
> David says, "Perhaps American-centrism and American-exceptionalism is in
> the way we read events rather than in the events themselves.” I am thinking
> about what Andy Blunden said, something to the effect that every experience
> is both mediated and un-mediated. Anthony seems to be looking for something
> more objective, something that transcends ideology. David K. might object
> that the facts of murderous and explotative British and French colonialism
> and the brutality of the Chinese regime are simply the facts, the kinds of
> facts that drive the passion and compassion of the people on the street in
> the U.S. Let cool heads prevail? That is the Cartesian take. The Spinoza
> turn in Vygotsky circles would conclude that without affect (passion and
> compassion) reason is impossible. Perhaps Anthony’s quest is Quixotic, laid
> out on the windmill. He’s certainly been a caballero about his trouncing. I
> admire him for that.
> Henry
>
> On Jun 5, 2020, at 3:10 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> (Is this thread American-centric? If so, 'twere a grievous fault. But
> grievously hath Haydi answered it--I don't think anybody can consider his
> dense, encyclopaedic blocks of text--the polar opposite of Anthony's
> American-centric orthography as well as Anthony's style and content--in any
> way American-centric....)
>
> Perhaps American-centrism and American-exceptionalism is in the way we
> read events rather than in the events themselves, Anthony. To me, the
> situation in and around Washington DC looks very much like the situation in
> and around Beijing in May1989. As in DC, Beijing had laws preventing the
> entry of the armed forces other than those of the Beijing Military
> Region into the city (the exclusion laws were actually written into the
> Chinese constitution by Mao, who was always afraid of powerful military
> opponents like Peng Dehuai and Lin Biao). The Beijing Military Region,
> however, was loyal to the people of Beijing and to the General Secretary
> Zhao Ziyang, and they opposed to a coup. So, as in DC, the "martial law"
> forces were called to the city perimeter where they halted for several
> weeks. As in DC, the provenance of the "martial law" forces were quite
> mysterious--they didn't carry insignia and it later turned out that these
> were forces personally loyal to two PLA warlords, the brothers Yang Baibing
> and Yang Shangkun. As in DC, there were different waves of demonstrators
> inside the city: someone put up artworks in the square (as the mayor did in
> DC this morning) and others told people to go home and organize and not
> stay to be massacred. And then, almost exactly thirty-one years ago, the
> unmarked shock troops went in shooting, and at least a thousand people
> died.  I hope that part is NOT like DC, but so far the "American
> exceptionalists" have been proved wrong on every single detail.
>
> Clorox on cloth? Gadzooks, Peg. Don't Americans have real N-94s yet? At
> the very height of the Daegu outbreak people had to resort to cloth masks
> (I don't think anybody used Clorox, though). Then the government brought in
> a rationing system so that health care workers could get PPE, and the
> extras are still rationed according to the numbers on registration cards:
> we go to the pharmacy twice a week to pick up our ration of three masks. No
> one is allowed onto a bus, a subway, or into a public building without one.
> Yesterday I went hiking for two hours and whenever I saw someone coming
> towards me they hastily put on a mask and bowed.
>
> (Do you know, the largest factory for PPE in the USA, and possibly the
> world until recently, is 3M in Minneapolis? There's a solid
> transitional demand for a general strike--Masks for all! Occupy 3M!)
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
> Outlines, Spring 2020
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!QBXazVXy1SkAkzqdJmb5h8ucrpgB-tU7Z_YKk7Qb_w584txYAx1JT319WFS2uXa7iTB9tw$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Xp_sgr0_UzNqr7vRI1XOMts503dCWTEnbJj5gRjnZG4dhhNbDC9HkM8UT-m4O5QGCUaqfQ$>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *Volume
> One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!QBXazVXy1SkAkzqdJmb5h8ucrpgB-tU7Z_YKk7Qb_w584txYAx1JT319WFS2uXZTX9ddEA$ 
>
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!Xp_sgr0_UzNqr7vRI1XOMts503dCWTEnbJj5gRjnZG4dhhNbDC9HkM8UT-m4O5QTbNA7-g$>
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 6:30 PM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Thank you, I'll take a look. Sounds similar to dialectics, little I know
>> of both.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, June 4, 2020, Richard Beach <rbeach@umn.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Anthony, the concept of “expansive learning” posits that objects/motive
>>> in activity are ideally always open to change/transformation—that they are
>>> never fixed given that as participants encounter new
>>> contradictions/challenges, they “learn to”/formulate new objects/motives.
>>> This requires learners to be open to exploring optional actions/tools/norms
>>> as they redefine/revise their ever expanding objects/motives.
>>>
>>> Coping with decades-long racist practices in Minneapolis, requires
>>> “expansive learning” to continually experiment with new objects/motives
>>> given that some of the tools/practices attempted in the past haven’t
>>> necessarily worked, although attempts were made to do so, only to be
>>> blocked by a timid political leadership
>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.startribune.com/in-2008-we-had-a-reform-plan-for-the-mpd-it-got-derailed-by-politics/570998162/__;!!Mih3wA!SLGpQj8PmApHqKlEeH3z-ohB8R76qeqnpglVMrj9N2HOiJRn_QxL9FXpHMmS9eXEdK2Cgg$>
>>> .
>>>
>>> For more on expansive learning theory, see attached reports:
>>> Engeström,Y., & Sannino, A. (2010). Studies of expansive learning:
>>> Foundations, findings and future challenges. *Educational Research
>>> Review, 5*, 1–24.
>>> Sannino, A., Engeström, Y., & Lemos, M. (2016). Formative interventions
>>> for expansivelearning and transformative agency. *Journal of the
>>> Learning Sciences, 25*(4), 599-633.
>>>
>>>
>
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