Food Riots: Crisis of Capitalism and The Monetization of Human Needs

Haiti, Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Senegal, Mauritania. These are just some of the countries that have been faced by riots, strikes and demonstrations over the soaring prices of food and fuel around the world. Even in New York City, the food pantries are reporting shortages. The rising cost of oil, the diversion of food crops like corn into the production of biofuels, climate change leading to lessened harvests - these are some of the prime causes of this global crisis on the bread lines and picket lines.

Food insecurity is increasing all over the world and in the Afrikan world in particular. Oppressive neo-colonial governments are being pressed to suspend some of their taxes on basic provisions, but this will surely not solve the problem in the long run, as food and fuel prices won’t be going down any time soon. The unrest is sure to develop into more stringent forms of chaos, violence, and war. Access to water, fuel, and food for rural poor and urban poor alike, let alone land, have exacerbated the situations in Kenya, Darfur, and elsewhere. Now the situation is pressing more tightly with broader reach around the developing world, a situation that has been building for quite some time.

This critical point of the global food crisis - in which even the UN World Food Program faces the choice of making serious cuts if it can’t raise money from international donors - has roots in the crisis of imperialism and western capitalism. Oil prices have skyrocketed since the start of the Iraq war, from some $25 per barrel in 2003 to over $100 per barrel now, creating record profits for the multinational petroleum corporations like BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon, etc. Thus the transportation of food around the world, the petroleum needed to assist in growing staples, and so on have also risen in cost. And staple food crops are being increasingly diverted towards use as fuels for vehicles, also raising prices of staples.

The global economy, and the trade in oil, has been pegged to the US dollar, now plummeting in value due to the sub-prime lending crisis, the deepening collapse and recession of the American economy, and the loss in confidence in American financial institutions and governance around the world. The currencies of many third world countries are also pegged to the US dollar in exchange rates, and thus especially for poor oil-importing countries, their buying power has also been reduced, and inflation is occurring across third world economies.

These global recessions and crises need not be cyclical. Radical measures based on revolutionary thinking must be taken by the masses to redress and correct economic injustices and imbalances once and for all. For too long in the third world we have been working at export-oriented primary commodity economies based on selling cash-crops, raw materials, and sometimes basic manufactured goods to the West in exchange for their money. Well, we can’t eat their money. Money is immaterial. Its value is based on little more than historical agreements and precedents, and words on legal papers and in bank vaults. If we can overcome our lust for this nonexistent commodity called money, and begin to organize our communities and economies around meeting human needs and indigenous food security, humanity can begin to chart a new course for the better, based on egalitarianism, sharing, pragmatism, justice, and community.

Countries filled to the brim with coffee beans (bound for Starbucks coffee houses in the West), like Ethiopia, now face starvation once again. If the Western-defined and controlled formless commodity of money wasn’t what was valued, but instead the simple and practical virtue of meeting local human needs first, Ethiopia’s prime lands would be growing the best, most nutritious foods, in the most sustainable way, for Ethiopians, and other Afrikans. But instead land in Ethiopia is in the hands of the West, by way of how this land grows massive amounts of coffee to be exported to the Western coffee corporations on the West’s terms in terms of commodity prices it determines based on its whims and the demands within its markets. That economic model is anti-human, and anti-Ethiopian, given that Ethiopians starve today, while those elites who perpetuate such models and land-usage systems in Ethiopia are among the only Ethiopians eating well today.

For we as Afrikans, who suffer the hardest under the regime of food insecurity and inflation of today’s crisis-level zeitgeist, it is imperative that we blaze forward new ways of being human, using land, and meeting human needs. These ways must be charted and mastered and promoted outside the capitalist market economy altogether. The current neoliberal standard would have us monetize even our drinking water, and perhaps one day even the air we breath. We cannot stand for that, and must be radical enough to say that we can be communal stewards of the land, sustainably grow the best food for our needs, preserve the quantity and quality of the local water table, and do all of this independent of money. To move this radically, we must overturn our greed and selfishness as individuals and ethnic groups. It seems like a tall order for Afrikan peoples.

But I assert that it not only can be done and is totally within our human potential, but it must be done to stave off an otherwise certain mass starvation and new chapter of unprecedented strife across the world, particularly the Afrikan world. These cyclical crises can be interrupted in their tracks through the revolutionizing of how we see economics and money, and through the further evolving of our Afrikan selves away from greed and lust for this artificial, deceptive commodity called cash money - defined now by the West, with which it bats black people around like strong winds.

Brain Drain - Irreversible Short of Revolutionary Thinking

On March 3, 2008, a conference on Afrika’s brain drain (particularly of medical professionals) opened in Kampala, Uganda. The conference aimed to highlight the desperate medical needs of the continent, and how the lure of better pay in the West prevented Afrika from meeting those needs. I have heard that there are as many or more Nigerian doctors in the West than in Nigeria. In any case, the brain drain, dealt with here with respect to health professionals in Afrika, has created lopsided imbalances in doctor-to-population ratios, and has resulted in the biggest health care shortage of all world regions. The conference highlighted that a global action plan is necessary to “manage” the migration, which cannot be halted. But I think our planning around the problem of the brain drain in the third world, Afrika in particular, must take a far more critical and revolutionary cast than this talking shop would allow.

Afrika is losing fastest its citizens with the skills most readily desired in the West - including engineers, doctors, lecturers, writers, nurses, therapists, musicians, and others in the creative and professional fields, whose training often comes at great expense to their home countries. But these countries can’t compensate, or in many cases permit to operate in freedom, such professionals to the levels expected in the West. And in the West, the fiscal priorities of governments no longer include training domestic health-care professionals, engineers, and other professionals. Thus in much of America, doctors and nurses frequently come in dark skin and bear international accents - be they Indians, Jamaicans, Nigerians, etc. It is cheaper to import professionals than to invest in education. If not for immigrant professionals in the contemporary economies of the US, Canada, the UK, or France, these countries would likely face labor shortages in critical areas like health-care, infrastructure, university staffing, and so on.

The West is currently winning the war over the world’s best and brightest workers. Immigration schemes in the US, Britain and France privilege the most highly trained and certified candidates. When Afrika tries to fill its shortages of professionals by employing expatriate staff, she winds up spending over $4 billion a year, according to a This Day (Lagos) article from April 26, 2007. And since 1990, Afrika has been losing 20,000 professionals per year to more developed countries.

There is an even more desperate exodus to highlight, of ordinary Afrikans leaving the continent for Europe by any means - a dangerous boat ride to the Canary Islands, a long trek across the Sahara to Morocco to jump the fence into Melilla and Ceuta, Somali and Ethiopian boat-people bound for Yemen, and so on. But the root of the problem is the nature of global capital itself, the geographies of wealth, power and influence established by Western imperialism. The global centers and the peripheries - and most of us, especially Afrikans, are living in the peripheries - are in a dialectically opposed relationship based on who defines wealth and who is supposed to produce wealth for its definers.

Our economies, based on primary commodity exports, are chasing after what Western economies are willing to give of their prestigious currencies for our unprocessed goods. Our cocoa, coffee, diamonds, gold, petroleum, coltan, etc. - their prices are all controlled in the West, and are subject to the rise or fall of demand for them in the West. Thus our economies are controlled by the West, to the extent that we continue in this totally economically unimaginative, uncreative and slavish direction, which directly continues neo-colonialism and permits neoliberalism.

In such a regime, how can lasting wealth ever be generated among the masses, and within the broader economy such that it can retain its professionals, indeed all its workers who are all of equal worth, by compensating them well, by providing them with free, democratic, protected spaces in which to work, by having jobs available at all, jobs which contribute to Afrikan economies and Afrikan people’s well-being, not Westerners? How long will we listen to the dictates of “comparative advantage” within structural adjustment philosophy, which bids us keep doing what we are good at (selling cash crops and minerals, etc.) to get wealthy, while eliminating public expenditures on health care, education, etc. and introducing user fees that very few Afrikans can pay?

If you want to stop the brain drain, you will need a revolution, both in economic structure and in the ideology which socializes Afrikans. We must learn to stop seeing everything Western as prestigious and come to have full faith in and love for ourselves. That means we will be dedicated to using our skills, whatever they may be, first and foremost for the benefit of other Afrikans, and not merely seek for jobs offered in the West or by white bosses. And the economic structure has to use Afrikan resources for the benefit of Afrikans first, meaning we Afrikans will use our own raw materials and process or manufacture them into something useful to us first.

I’m not interested in “export-led growth” or the free-market and whatever GDP numbers are supposed to show us. They say Afrikan economies are now growing at x percent a year. Which Afrikans are getting richer then? Mainly those running banks, and running tel-com companies, and running churches, and doing crime. The rest are starving or leaving Afrika in droves, including doctors, nurses, engineers, laborers and farmers. The news is not good.

Revolution - in economic policies, in consciousness, all around - must govern how we think and plan towards stopping this “brain drain.” Afrikans must realize that we are continuing to sell ourselves out, if we do nothing to overturn the fundamental contradictions of capitalism and the global economic structure and the geographies of wealth and exploitation. Afrika and the third world must overthrow the maquiladoras and plantations of the West, the mines, etc. and assume self-sufficiency, self-confidence, and commitment to our own peoples and lands. We must overthrow our notion of what money is, indeed we should get rid of money all together, or at least stop holding in such high prestige and value these currencies imposed on us by the West, on which most Afrikan currencies are based, their values pegged to them without afterthought. Humanity, progress, the beauty of a just and healthy Afrikan society and a clean Afrikan community and nation with great infrastructure and health and education - these things must come to be the prime motivators of Afrikan peoples, not cash money, especially all this money based on Western currency, and ultimately hoarded and locked up in the West itself.

If not revolution, Afrika will only become further ghettoized by the further emaciation of its own knowledge and skills base, the crumbling of its own already blasted universities, and so on. Then, these neo-colonial governments will spend billions on NGOs and expatriates from the West to look like they are doing something, when these foreigners only further alienate us from our will to act independently and see ourselves as capable of whatever is necessary to rescue ourselves.

Afrikans need to believe in and work for ourselves, or at least build towards that reality. There is no reason, no rule in the universe, that Afrikans in Afrika cannot have the highest living standards in the world, based on our great material resources, and on our human resources - and the most important resource of all is the human resource.

Kenya’s Ashes - Far from Uhuru

Demonstrators beat a man as they protested an overnight police crackdown on people who had not paid their rents in Mathare, a slum in Nairobi. The police descended on Mathare and evicted dozens of families in the Luo ethnic group who had refused to pay rent over the past months. Landlords have been unable to collect rents since the disputed presidential election in December, which the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who is a Luo, lost.

Photo: Anne Holmes/Reuters

Not yet Uhuru.

It is taking all too long for we as Afrikans to humanize our relationships with one another. In the realms of politics, economics, culture, and society, too many Afrikans have riven fault-lines and raised high ridges between other Afrikans that blockade true collaborative progress, the only progress worth a damn.

Kenya broke down. It wasn’t just because of an election. That was just the catalyst, the match strike over the existing pool of nitro. That pool was formed out of the simmering hatreds born of injustice and perceived and real preferential treatment of some groups over others, of one class over the many. The presence of injustice is the womb of upheaval. A violence with no revolutionary content whatsoever can only be described as ferociously repulsive and anti-human to the last ends of rationality. A riot is not a rebellion.

The image above represents the mass desperation to be known by any modern human being living in the world with half an eye open. Fresh eyes open, cougars on the balcony! In desperation man dismembers man, then becomes more desperate and dismembers himself in the process. Knowing this I only resolve to soldier up even more, and make all my actions and relations with others, especially other Afrikans, humanizing ones.

Machetes can cut down succulent fruits from tall tree limbs, or they can slice half the face off a teenage Afrikan in the wrong place and time. Machetes have their proper uses. Against other innocent Afrikans is not one of them.

Odinga, Kibaki - their responsibility for the disaster of Kenya in 2008 - over 1,000 dead, hundreds of thousands displaced - is profound indeed. But to what end this madness now? We see the culmination of a scientific process - the spread of chaos from the seed called injustice. We shouldn’t grow valentines-day flowers for European lovers now. We shouldn’t grow coffee beans for Starbucks now. We must first feed one another, love one another, and figure out what the whole significance of being a human being is. Hatred is a big black bag over our heads in situations like this.

Who can know the mysterious usage of our humanity? One answer: the collective masses engaged in struggle, challenged by the revolutionaries among them to keep evolving and stay creative and amazing. Our humanity - at its best - is built around the humanity of others, where constant reinforcement, material, social, psychological, and otherwise, are the norm. We will get a lot further ahead, and do so more quickly, by being human beings and growing together. After all, we’re all in the same boat.

Yet Another Blog…

I’ve started my third blog, Hip Hop Dharma, which branches off the last entry to allow me to do really free-associative thinking on hip hop, the arts, my arts, the real world/ samsara/ the burning house, and other juju/ kensho shit. Take a look. This definitely relates to Afrikan revolution, and to being human.

Hood Realism to Dialectical Materialism?

As a student of hip-hop, I am interested in the nominally realist view of the world expressed in some of the music that some construe as nihilistic or pessimistic. GZA, Nas, and perhaps Raekwon are significant proponents of a worldview I provisionally refer to as ‘hood realism. Hood realism is a worldview that takes the world for what it is, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get outlook, without superimposing, or having much tolerance for, romanticism, unselfish idealism, heavy metaphysics, or other potentially comforting but immaterial or impractical bullshit. It recognizes that the world is cold, unjust, brutal, harsh, violent, and unforgiving to all but those who brusquely go out and “get theirs,” sometimes by any means. As a hardcore atheist, scientific realist and naturalist, and dialectical/ historical materialist who only - and unapologetically - cares about shit that’s in this material world/ universe, in this impermanent and inconsequential life, and no other, I am increasingly interested in how the worldview I refer to as hood realism can potentially translate more avowedly into a scientifically-based social, political, economic, and material understanding of the world among a vaster body of Afrikan peoples, which I strongly assume would help us move forward much more quickly, constructively and decisively than under the religious/ metaphysical delusions which socialize most Afrikans today.

The GZA joint “I Gotcha Back” from the Liquid Swords album possesses much content relevant to hood realism. I quote it in full, emboldening critical lines:

Chorus: GZA and RZAI gotcha back, but you best to watch your front
Cause it’s the niggaz that front, they be pullin stunts
I gotcha back, but you best to watch your front
Cause it’s the niggaz who front (they be pullin stunts)

Lyrics:

I was always taught my do’s and don’ts
For do’s I did, and for don’ts, I said I won’t
I’m from Brooklyn, a place where stars are born
Streets are shot up, apartment buildings are torn
and ripped up, stripped up, shacked up and backed up
from fiends, cause the bosses on the scene, they got it cracked up
Kids are slingin in my lobby
Little Steve and Bobby
Gettin paid but it’s a life-threatening hobby
Yeah, they still play hide and seek
The fiends seek for the crack, and they hide and let the cops peep
Grown folks say they should be out on their own
Before the gangs come and blow up their mom’s home
Because they lifestyle is hectic, so fuckin hectic
Blaow! Blaow! Blaow! Bullets are ejected
My lifestyle was so far from well
Coulda wrote a book with a title “Age 12 and Goin through Hell”
Then I realized the plan
I’m trapped in a deadly video game, with just one man
So I don’t only watch my back, I watch my front
Cause it’s the niggaz who front, they be pullin stunts
Back on the Ave of Lavonia and Bristol with a pistol
Stickin up Pamela and Crystal
You know your town is dangerous when you see the strangest
kid come home from doin the bid and nuthin changes
What is the meaning of CRIME (what?)
Is it Criminals Robbin Innocent Motherfuckers Everytime?
Little shorties take walks to the schoolyard
Tryin to solve the puzzles to why is life so hard
Then as soon as they reached the playground, blaow!
Shots ring off and now one of them lay down
It’s so hard to escape the gunfire
I wish I could rule it out like an umpire
But it’s an everlasting game, and it never cease to exist
Only the players change, so…

—–
I like how GZA highlights a world where oppressive conditions are overwhelmingly real and seemingly changeless, where danger is the norm. This is the world as seen by an Afrikan youth in a ghetto in America. It’s qualities are immutable, even in a media otherwise saturated by the mores and escapist whims of a cultural la-la land.

Inspecta Deck backs up these perceptions in the second verse of the famous track “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)” from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers):

It’s been twenty-two long hard years of still strugglin
Survival got me buggin, but I’m alive on arrival
I peep at the shape of the streets
And stay awake to the ways of the world cause shit is deep
A man with a dream with plans to make C.R.E.A.M.
Which failed; I went to jail at the age of 15
A young buck sellin drugs and such who never had much
Trying to get a clutch at what I could not… could not…
The court played me short, now I face incarceration
Pacin — going up state’s my destination
Handcuffed in back of a bus, forty of us
Life as a shorty shouldn’t be so ruff
But as the world turns I learned life is hell
Living in the world no different from a cell
Everyday I escape from Jakes givin chase, sellin base
Smokin bones in the staircase
Though I don’t know why I chose to smoke sess
I guess that’s the time when I’m not depressed
But I’m still depressed, and I ask what’s it worth?
Ready to give up so I seek the Old Earth
Who explained working hard may help you maintain
to learn to overcome the heartaches and pain
We got stickup kids, corrupt cops, and crack rocks
and stray shots, all on the block that stays hot
Leave it up to me while I be living proof
To kick the truth to the young black youth
But shorty’s running wild smokin sess drinkin beer
And ain’t trying to hear what I’m kickin in his ear
Neglected, but now, but yo, it gots to be accepted
That what? That life is hectic

———–

Again, this verse stresses the impossibility of escaping the harshness of the real world, short of getting intoxicated on heavy drugs. As Malcolm X once declared to us, we are trapped! Trapped in the poisons of drugs, alcohol, and poverty itself, such as to keep us from seeing what is real, definitively. The escapism of the store-front church, the corner drug merchant and his whares, the corner bodega and its miserable food, or the every-other-block liquor joint, are among the poisons that keep us from waking up into fully accepting and thus being able to overturn our ugly reality. Because only those who fully face reality itself have any real chance of changing it. Which is why I take what I refer to as hood realism, and the glimpses there are of it in hip-hop - the music of my generation - very seriously.

Nas, in his track “Black Zombies” on the album The Lost Tapes, beautifully reminds us of how lost Afrikan peoples are on all levels (politically, educationally, spiritually, economically, etc.) in this matrix, this construct of contemporary capitalism, and being the victims of that global economic regime. I quote in full, highlighting important lines:

[Nas]
Yo, you believe when they say we ain’t shit, we can’t grow?
All we are is dope dealers, and gangstas and hoes?
And you believe when they be tellin you lie, all on the media?
They make the world look crazy to keep you inside?
Why you listen when the teachers at school
know you a young single parent out strugglin, they think you a fool
Give your kids bad grades and put ‘em in dumber classes
Killin shorty future, I wonder how do we last it
Underground in they casket? Ancestors turnin
I’m learnin somethin every day, there is no Lazareth
Words like God is Greek or Latin
So if you study Egypt, you’ll see the truth written by the masters
My niggaz is chillin, gettin high, relaxin
Envisionin, ownin shit, yo it can happen
What do we own? Not enough land, not enough homes
Not enough banks, to give a brother a loan
What do we own? The skin on our backs, we run and we ask
for reperations, then they hit us with tax
And insurance if we live to be old, what about now?
So stop bein controlled, we black zombies

[Chorus: (sung)]
Walkin talkin dead, though we think we’re livin (black zombies)
We just copy-cat, followin the system (black zombies)
Walkin talkin dead, though we think we’re livin (black zombies)
We just copy-cat, followin the system (black zombies)

[Nas]
Aiyyo we trapped in our own brain, fuck behind bars
We’ve already gone insane
They’ve already gave up, cut our own heads offs
Stab our own backs and dream too much
without fulfillin reality; too greedy and
can’t have one or two chains, we need three of dem
Can’t have one or two guns without squeezin ‘em
on our own people and, fuck black leaders
cause whites ain’t got none leadin them, the rhythm is cosmic
Nas is divinity, the deity’s prophetless
All get down and get up
Victims walkin ’round with Down’s Syndrome, all stuck
Faintin, shoutin, catchin Holy Ghost in church
Scared to do it for ourselves ‘less we see somebody doin it first
We begged, we prayed, petitioned and demostrated
Just to make another generation - black zombies

[Chorus]

[Nas]
You scared to be yourself, cause you in a trance
Feel free, hear the music and dance
If you cared what they think, why wear what they wear, just for you
Dumb niggaz with long beards like they Arabs or Jews
or from Israel, (?)bish’meal Allah, el-rachman, el-Rahim (?)
Islam’s a beautiful thing
And Christian and Rastafari, helps us to bring
peace against the darkness, which is unGodly
So what’s the black man’s true religion, who should we follow?
Use your own intuition, you are tommorrow
[roaring] .. that’s the sound of the beast
I’m a Columbia record slave, so get paid
Control your own destiny, you are a genius
Don’t let it happen to you like it did to me, I was a black zombie

[Chorus]

[Nas]
Wake up! Black zombies in a spell for more than fo’-hundred years
Ghetto niggaz won’t have it no mo’, can I get a witness?
Why listen to somebody else tell you how to do it
when you can do it yourself; it’s all in you, do it, do it
Do it niggaz..

—————-

Nas’ verses are mission-critical here. He not only highlights are embarrassing shortcomings, but he is also advocating for us to think for ourselves and to be our real selves. He is critical of the bizzare and culturally alien religions many Afrikans are tied up into, advocating instead the natural and free use of our own beautiful and fully-endowed intuition. He recognizes how the schools deliberately fail us, how we fail economically by being dependent and not owning our own homes, banks, etc. And he highlights how we have often failed to be innovative, independent-minded, and risk-taking to change our condition, instead relying too much on “black leaders” or awaiting the safe example of other groups and peoples before acting. This is the positive potential of a worldview of hood realism, which uses examples from the cold world we live in to exort us to use common sense to face it and change it for the better, out of our own natural and organic initiative.

Raekwon’s verses have often served to remind us how materialistic man is, which is fine inasmuch as forcing us to remember that material conditions and necessities (and modes of production) define the actions of human beings. Material conditions and modes of production include the illicit drug economy, the only one left in our community after de-industrialization and the criminalization of the youth and imposition of such desperate conditions that the youth can only meet their material needs at the expense of one another (horizontal or “black on black” violence). His refrain verses from some of his tracks on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx are demonstrative of this notion:

from “Incarcerated Scarfaces:”
Now yo yo, whattup yo, time is runnin out
It’s for real though, let’s connect politic - ditto!
We could trade places, get lifted in the staircases
Word up, peace incarcerated scarfaces

and from “Knowledge God:”
Yo why’s my niggas always yellin that broke shit
Let’s get money Son, now you wanna smoke shit
Chill God, yo the Son don’t chill Allah
What’s today’s mathematic Son? Knowledge God

—————

In these verses Raekwon asserts the urgency with which poor Afrikans must escape their conditions by any means. He says time is running out - and it sure is! He says it’s for real, and we have to connect politic - ditto! We have to analyze reality and analyze political realities, as well as real-politic - another notion for the politics of getting over by any means, which is the way of much of the world today. And then he asks frustratedly, “why’s my niggas always yellin that broke shit?” Why we just complaining about our poverty? We can’t just complain. He continues, “let’s get money son, now you wanna smoke shit!” He’s stressing that we must make moves to get material resources! And you can’t do that by smoking shit, by reverting back to your old escapist habits. Don’t smoke shit, change shit! And you can’t do both!

In the track “Motherless Child” from Ghostface Killah’s album Ironman, Raekwon asserts the end-result of real-world analysis in simple terms:

Rich man, poor man, read the headlines
Nigga getting murdered for spot and bigger dimes
Jobs and drug wars
Living by gun law
Jailcats come home and want to take yours
As the young one, growing up broke me and my people
as the self, huh, I guess we all in the same boat
Think it, plus drinkin that 90-proof
Playin’ on the roof sayin’
we need a next man to shoot…

—————–

Raekwon wants us to read the headlines, regardless of our class position: this is the reality! We are killing each other to get over, whether it’s for jobs or drug turf. Whether in the legal world or the illegal world, we all live by gun law. And if you are a sensitive black youth like Raekwon, you look around you, “read the headlines,” and see that we as a people are all in the same boat. Yet we revert to “that 90-proof” and the escapism of the drink, and keep doing the same thing over and over… Hence GZA’s statement that “it’s an everlasting game and it never cease to exist, only the players change…”

I think that the game CAN change if more of our people wake up to what the game really is and own up to our responsibilities as the played pawns we are or the revolutionaries we could be. Raekwon once again states in simple terms that this world right here is Hell, so who could believe in Heaven? This refrain from Heaven & Hell in Only Built 4 Cuban Linx:

What do you believe in? Heaven or hell?
You don’t beleive in heaven cause we’re livin in hell
(repeat 2X)
So it’s your life

————–

I think that the ability of hip-hop to perceive the dire straits of the world very clearly and unflinchingly can be a door-opener to using that perception in a more deliberately scientific way to inspire our people to change their own conditions concretely. The nihilism and pessimism many see in lyrics such as the ones I have highlighted here, to me, are refreshing signs that our people have a strong, natural urge to see the world as it is and nakedly share its nature and face it as it is. I’m always the kind of person that’s more comfortable with the real than with the fake, the mundane instead of the fantastic, science over religion, physics over metaphysics, Hell instead of Heaven. Hell is the world, Hell is our anger and frustration, our violence towards one another, the oppression we face and exist within, the illusion and escapism system that blinds us to the true nature of the socio-economic constructs which define our lives. But Hell gives people something to fight for. By seeing the nature of Hell clearly, we can come to terms with the means by which we can slowly convert it into Heaven. Human potential is such that it is within our power in our lives here in this world to transform conditions for the common good. Human beings created this Hell we all live in right now. Human beings can also undo it and create something far better.

But we also have to squarely see Hell for what it is. I am thankful to the rappers of my generation for being willing to show the world just what Hell is. It is up to folks, especially of the generation that sees the world in the vain of hood realism, to begin to move to a constructive realism, a scientific material analysis which can offer methods and means to make positive changes. The solution is in the problem, as the discipline of mathematics shows us. The five-percenter idiom, “what’s today’s mathematics?” can be a daily greeting that constantly reminds us to look at the world as it really is and search for the latent solutions within the problems.

The vigor of science, of dialectical and historical materialism, can be applied to hood realism to provide Afrikans in the ghettos of America, who are schooled in hip-hop, with powerful analytical tools with which to find avenues of transformation and revolution. Dead Prez, GZA or Nas might not necessarily be so far from Marx or Nkrumah. Let us draw more lines and make more links and think more critically. The naked brutality, the ugliness, the obvious contradictions - I need to always be reminded of that, so I can keep moving. It never depresses me because I also know where we need to go from there, on a scientific analytical basis, and motivated by deep humanism. Pessimism, nihilism? Nah, its school for those who might try to escape the wrong way. But we must add to that school constructive analytical lessons, too.

So thank you my rappers.

Here open the gates of Hell!
(Homage to Hell, the Great Bodhisattva!! - Hakuin)
hell is our best teacher

They Sold My Village to the Russians (Who sold it?)

The final segment of today’s Democracy Now! dealt with the current crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has hosted the deadliest war since the second imperialist war (aka WWII). Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo told us that 80% of the Congolese live on no more than thirty cents a day. Nita Evele of Congo Global Action spoke of how multinational mining corporations have made deals with Congolese elites, including the pliant President Joseph Kabila, who sell whole villages of the people, under whose feet precious minerals lay buried, to these multinationals and truly rob the Congolese. Greedy Congolese elites sell this village to that Russian mining firm, this parcel of pristine forest to that Canadian lumber company, or this river to that Belgian water utility or diamond-mining outfit.

Meanwhile, the proxy armies of Rwanda and Uganda, who had themselves formally invaded the Congo in 1996 and 1998 in a scramble for its mineral wealth, are responsible for grave crimes against humanity, including ferocious and unimaginable crimes against women, leading to hundreds of thousands displaced, and countless more unnecessarily sick, hungry, dying, and dead. The Congolese army and Congolese militias are also practicing such barbarism and inhumanity, often with impunity. This privatization, super-neoliberalism, super-neocolonialism, selling the birthright of a people for a fat silver platter, the rape of a people and their land, in whose mind are such undertakings just, sustainable, right, nice, etc.? But it is almost never about such ideals, is it? And how can we as Afrikans overcome the frequent treachery of those claiming to represent us?

We as a people must struggle for power, in and over ourselves, as well as against the whims of the individualistic, narcissistic, and deceitful men who would lead us into an abyss of 10,000 serpents, just so they can keep driving Bentleys and eating rich steaks. To be truly powerful requires an honesty with oneself, a self-criticism, and a level of critical thought that has seemingly been thrown out of the windows of school curricula and the memes socializing norms all over the world. As grassroots, well-meaning Afrikans of communal spirits and egalitarian, socialist economic mindsets, is there greed within us? Greed that could cause us to betray our own like every collaborator and neo-colonialist since the times of the construction of Gorée Island, the Berlin Conference, and beyond? Do we know ourselves well enough to negate those negative, atavistic, materialistic, egoistic tendencies out there in humanity that enable the sort of work that the Congolese soldiers under King Leopold carried out in the name of rubber? Are we done with the elements of the human condition within us that would reinforce private property?

As one of my teachers always stresses, one must study human behavior, human psychology, and the human condition, alongside human history, to keep in mind that the real world is largely cold, brutal, greedy, unforgiving, harsh, and thankless (and damn near always has been), and that for courageous women and men, we accept that and struggle against it as much as possible. I am no romanticist, but I do strive to be a soldier. A soldier that struggles against indiscipline in himself (falling into greed, selfishness, egoism, desire, treachery, laziness, uselessness, etc.) while also struggling against the villains of the world, the neo-colonialists, the capitalists and bosses, the money-masters, the white supremacists, the thieves, murderers, rapists, scoundrels, tribalists, slave-drivers, and the rest. In Buddhism, it is said that a person is his or her own worst enemy. I do not believe in karma and do not suggest that we do not continue to stress a dialectical material analysis of our situation and struggle materially against it in terms of redefining our mode of production and relationship with a system that commodifies everything, even rivers.

But I do agree with the notion that self-criticism is perhaps the most important sort of criticism. Even an anarcho-communist like me accepts the credo of a friend of mine, that “the subjugated are not absolved.” Those leftists who like to blame everything on “US Imperialism” are way off. On a collective level, we Afrikans need to highlight our own shortcomings and after so doing, eliminate them. On an individual level, we do need to confront the components of our character that could hold us back from growth, courage and unity with struggle, and henceforth eliminate them. Such self-criticism will only make us better and more efficient soldiers in the class war, in the war of ideas, in the war for revolution, for a total change in human values, for the betterment of the human condition, for Afrikan liberation, and for human freedom.

I know I’m a very straight edge person, seen by more than a few to be “hard” everywhere from New York to Accra. But I think the struggle for human dignity in this very oppressive and upside-down world requires fearless, do-or-die, reality-based, sincere, honest, egalitarian, unselfish, truly democratic, extremely healthy (physically and mentally), balanced, and hardcore people. People that willingly break down the real world and never shy away from its ugliness, nor explain it away with the bullshit of metaphysics, romanticism, religion, empty rhetoric, or the false comfort of the wish for a better tomorrow. People that also forthrightly check their own selves before they wreck their selves, or anybody else. Yes, the social circumstances of people largely define who we are, and we are not all necessarily born with the same capacity or ability as such and given limitations. But insofar as there are those of us that, because of our hyper-sensitivity, seek sincerely to change the world and will stop at nothing, not even death, to do so, such people must be able to be truly responsible, to claim full ownership of their own minds, and assert full mastery over the useless, ugly, non-beneficial, mindlessly self-gratifying, and destructive qualities out there in humanity that could arise if they live heedlessly and without mindfulness and simultaneous vigilance of their own selves and the world.

Revolution also means revolution inside. We gotta be the change we wish to see, to borrow a cliche. A revolution in human values must start in the human that wants that revolution. We must be committed to the elimination of both the turn-coats out there and the one that might be in us. I love discipline! Self-discipline, total sincerity, self-mastery. And a critical eye on the world, and a black eye on jake!

Cuckoos, Posh and Cocky

Absurdist rants blare over the loudspeaker, too busy and boldfaced to repeat. They scream sick sagas across the stock-tickers at Times Square, swishing quick at the pace of a switchblade flick. Shiny smooth-skinned Sudanese lost boys bumrush Broadway and 27th, selling gamy sneakers and fake Swatches. Meanwhile someone remembers Gary Grice saying, “but it’s an everlasting game and it never ceases to exist; only the players change.” He scratches his nose and marches on, soon to step into a deep murky puddle.

Poodles escape from a nearby firehouse, stashed there by a master dogfighter ducking multiple indictments. Shaking off the water from his leg, the junior policeman looks up to see them barking and sprinting, bouncing and wincing. He was on his way to deliver the latest subpoena to the dogfighting fireman. In this case, brutalized beings escaped a peculiar lock-up. Just this once.

A Wolof selling woof tickets to a lost boy in the Flower District suddenly hears ringing in his ears. Must be an oncoming seizure! And just as his nose was getting its first whiff of spring roses just in from a Kenyan shipment. It can’t be enjoyed, not even unfair-trade aromas. The lost boy grips the writhing, epileptic Wolof as his last ounce of compassion for the trickster finds expression. The wet-footed patrolman sees the commotion, an opportunity to find out if these guys are documented. Bag sellers close shop. Suffering continues.

Except for a few free poodles.

More on Neoliberalism, Polyarchy, and False Democracy

This is excerpted from my just completed MA thesis:

… As a concept, neoliberalism, according to Robet McChesney in his introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, refers “to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit.” And neoliberalism – whose rise he associates with the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – goes further than just to stress economic policy:

“It is precisely in its oppression of nonmarket forces that we see how neoliberalism operates not only as an economic system, but as a political and cultural system as well. Here the differences with fascism, with its contempt for formal democracy and highly mobilized social movements based upon racism and nationalism, are striking. Neoliberalism works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaningful participation in decision making. As neoliberal guru Milton Friedman put it in his Capitalism and Freedom, because profit-making is the essence of democracy, any government that pursues antimarket policies is being antidemocratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy. Therefore it is best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit political debate to minor issues. (The real matters of resource production and distribution and social organization should be determined by market forces.)”

Neoliberalism goes beyond issuing structural adjustments. It puts pressure on developing (as well as “developed”) societies to practice a superficial form of democracy at best, so that when it comes to such fundamental issues to a society as its very means of production and wealth distribution, the masses are left out of the discussion, let alone the drawing board. Elections in many third world countries, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, and even perhaps in the United States itself, are often superficial affairs whose primary campaign features are veiled promises of ethnic nepotism, shallow populist theater, and vagaries about opposing corruption. This should come as no surprise given that in the current world order, questions about models of production, development choices, and class conflict are to be left to the tiny cabal of the world’s economic taskmasters and social engineers. Neoliberalism is thus a practice of engaging in economic corporate-finance capital totalitarianism behind a wall of falsely comforting, superficial, and practically insignificant democracy and “people’s choice.”

In his essay “Promoting Polyarchy in Latin America: The Oxymoron of ‘Market Democracy,’” William I. Robinson makes reference to the problem of false democracy through the notion of polyarchy. For Robinson, polyarchy in its basic sense is the notion that democracy is not so much about serving the will of the people, but rather having people merely make decisions accepting or refusing those who are to rule them, in a rather passive manner.

“Polyarchy is not dictatorship, and the distinction between the two should not be derided. But the trappings of democratic procedure in a polyarchic system do not mean that the lives of ordinary people become filled with authentic or meaningful democratic content, much less that social justice or greater economic equality is achieved. This type of ‘low intensity democracy’ does not involve power (cratos) of the people (demos), much less an end to class domination or to substantive inequality that is growing exponentially under the global economy… In contrast to more popular conceptions of democracy, which see political power as a means for transforming unjust socioeconomic structures and democratizing social and cultural life, the polyarchic definition explicitly isolates the political from the socioeconomic sphere and restricts democracy to the political sphere. And even then, it limits democratic participation to voting in elections.”

It is also worth noting that for Robinson, polyarchic elites are often inherently transnational in their outlook, where transnational means their ideological peers and class kin are elites in the West and other countries, not the masses of their own countries. This is as true for American elites as it is for Columbian, Mexican, South African, Haitian, or Nigerian elites in the neoliberal world order.

Bibliography:
• Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
• McChesney, Robert W. “Introduction.” In Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, by Noam Chomsky. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
• Robinson, William I. “Promoting Polyarchy in Latin America.” In Latin America After Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in the 21st Century?, edited by Eric Hershberg and Fred Rosen. New York: The New Press, 2006.

New Blog: Afrikan Raw Vegan Talk

I have begun a sidekick blog to this one, dedicated mainly to raw veganism in the Afrikan community. It is accessible at either http://afrikans.wordpress.com or http://afrikanvegantalk.blogspot.com (they mirror each other). I will still mention such lifestyle matters up here occasionally anyhow. But I hope intra-Afrikan sharing and collaborating on raw vegan issues can occur on the new blog.

African Supercorruption and the Class War

It was not difficult to predict the chaos that would engulf Kenya in recent days. I was in Nigeria in April 2007 during the gubernatorial elections, and saw nothing but chaos, arbitrary government fiats issued, utterly and absurdly meaningless and substanceless jokes of candidate’s debates, etc. This is the facade of democracy behind which the supercorrupt hide. The daily corruption in the Afrikan world is everywhere a crime against humanity. It is a key weapon of the class war between Afrikans. And this corruption is not even fairly captured by the measly word “corruption.” Seeing the grave consequences of the corruption of Afrikan governments, I call such practices supercorruption. And supercorruption happens all over the world. It is said that the world is ruled by fascism and organized crime. What are fascism and organized crime but the fullest realizations of supercorruption?

During my stay in Ghana I met an Afrikan woman born in London of Jamaicans who was teaching economics at the University of Ghana, Legon. This woman told me that one thing she disliked most about Ghana was lack of discipline. I agree with her completely, and believe in applying discipline to every aspect of life every second of every minute of every day. As more humans move from frivolity, waste, mediocrity and softness to some hardcore irrepressible discipline and hardness, the world will be an ever more awesome place to live. But just in the practice of running a society regardless of size, indiscipline makes for disgusting outcomes.

Indiscipline is what you can expect from every ugly, overweight, universally male, consistently sleazy, grotesquely thieving, commonly nepotistic, and ferociously stupid politician, bureaucrat, and other official flunky walking around the third world today, and the Afrikan world in particular. This includes the Afrikan community in the United Snakes. Elected officials in America who supposedly represent Afrikans are little more than vapid, obtuse “preacher leaders,” and other niggers who fully identify with the interests of white capital. They have shown that they can literally bomb the hood (i.e. Philly, from the 80s to today) and sell the very land from under the feet of the black masses to grimy developers and slumlords, just as easily as any paleface mayor or state senator or other official vermin, if not more easily. In Afrika it can be all the more brutal.

I observe the recent events in Kenya to be classic examples of Afrikan supercorruption in service of the class war. Of course, ethnic politics in Kenya have long privileged the Kikuyus over other groups. Though Kenyans are universally poor, Kikuyus have come to be resented by the rest for their perceived “getting over” on the rest of the Kenyans. And the pro-poor populist Odinga can’t be allowed a political inch for talking in other than the vapid language of “development” heard from rival Kibaki. I am not a Kenyan so I am no expert. But this sort of thing has happened in Haiti, which I have studied more closely. And it looks like police chumps are having a trigger-happy field day killing poor slum-dwellers by the hundreds. They easily presaged such anti-human and anti-poor people brutality during the Mungiki raid in June 2007. Such totally niggerish deeds are magnificent strategies for class warfare.

What I am aware of is that what the West calls “democracy,” the sort of democracy fit for a third-world country or society, is tailor-made for supercorruption. This is because we live in a world operated by neoliberalism, a political tendency calling not only for free-market fundamentalism and the privatization of everything, but also for the maximum trivialization and marginalization of the potential of democracy. Democracy can only mean voting for whatever candidate has been put in front of you, choosing which one will rule your ass. Democracy can never have anything to do with choosing ones mode of production, ones economic practice, the structure and stratification of society, and other issues of extreme importance. Those questions will forever remain in the domain of hidden elites with economics degrees who worship capitalism on an alter of private corporate dollars and the profiteer’s dick. They are class warriors of one kind, the super elites of the world who will fight tooth and nail, and with a fountain pen no less, to keep their illegitimate and baseless privilege.

So when there is an election, ethnic nepotism, vague promises about fighting corruption, and entreaties for foreign investment are what you hear, and little else. There is no substance to such an affair. At the debate the candidates appear dumber than moth smoke. I don’t want anything to do with that bullshit. I think at this point I may be a full-blown anarchist, an anarcho-communist or anarcho-communalist or whatever it is one should be called for rejecting all official forms of authority (from crack-pot preachers to piss-pot councilman) in favor of building human collectives of communalism, mutual aide, egalitarianism, equality, non-patriarchy, full rejection of hierarchy, no elitism, no exploitation, no social engineering, common ownership of everything. But the government? Fuck a government, unless its our shit. Fuck the US government, fuck the Nigerian government, fuck the Haitian government, fuck the Congolese government, fuck the South African government, fuck the Kenyan government, fuck the Jamaican government, fuck ‘em all. They are into polyarchy - the reduction of democracy to the charade of the mere imagery of voting for absolutely nothing. Human beings need to take power, not vomit-inducing politicians whose one function is to continually steal the resources, labor, and hope of the masses. They are knee-deep into the class war, and they know what they do and stand up and fight, or at least send police shitbirds to stand up and fight class war for them. We ought to do likewise and recognize that we are in this war and need to reciprocate some shit. I sure hate a rich man, a filthy rich nigger in the middle of Afrika, who could only have gotten his riches at the expense of everyone else. Death to such niggers! Class war ho!

Corrupt police? Corrupt politicians? Corrupt contractors? Corrupt bureaucrats? Sitting in your air-conditioned offices and spewing nothing but vapid sleaze to the media? Corrupt media for that matter? Please DIE! Fuck you Musharraf! Fuck you Kabila! Fuck you Mubarak! Fuck you Zenawi! Fuck you Kibaki! Fuck you Bush! Fuck you Brown! Fuck you Sarkozy! Fuck you Obasanjo! Fuck you Yar’Adua! Fuck you Corey Booker! Fuck you Kufuor! Fuck you Mbeki! Fuck you Preval! Fuck you thieving no good human rodent rapers!

Y’all can eat a bag of dicks!