"In order to avoid civil war we must become

[resisting arrest with violence]

"'I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for 'bread', 'bread', and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism.....My cherished idea is the solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.' That was said in 1895 by Cecil Rhodes, millionaire, a king of finance, the man who was mainly responsible for the Boer War." ( V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, [1917]), Chapter VI)


http://www.dsp.org.au/dsp/LeninImp/Imperialism.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_rhodes

[this space for sale?]

Thread title inspired a topic that, at least for me, is more powerful than hatred of elites & the history of elites' ideologies and aggression:

The question of effective resistance.

I just started reading this site, but a common strangeness in resistance talk is that people tend to think in "dualistic" terms: "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." (Either you are with power or against it, in practice.) It's a good point, in terms of motivation and intention -- if you're not self-aware, and questioning the content of your own speech and actions, you're just recycling what already exists, and what already exists is part and parcel to the project of power -- but normally one's resistance to power can't be "pure" or exempt from some complicity with power.

Why: power determines the terms of conflict. If power didn't attack, employing a set of concrete strategies already in play within the rules it's established, as affecting access to capital (whatever kind of capital), there would be no need for resistance to that attack (obviously, since there would be no attack in the first place -- only perhaps a state of inequity. The attack is necessary either to create or defend the inequity, and always since capital is already accumulated on one side -- that of power, whose status is defined by its control of capital (could be material capital, intellectual influence, "say so" of any form) -- and that is where resistance comes into play. The nightmarish aspect in that is that since power already controls capital, and the goal of resistance is to abolish the inequity determined by capital, the goal of resistance is always to influence the thinking and behavior of "the powerful" so that capital can be redistributed fairly, or so that the outcome of competition over capital is no longer determined injust political ideology and practice.

If you don't speak the language of power, you just are not on its radar, and you're not influencing the people who depend on it (much). The trick is to take the language and strategies of power and to exploit or create ambivalences or equivocations in that language and purpose, which means complicity is a necessity rather than a thing to be avoided.

An example, maybe is useful....

Martin Lawrence.

If you know the history of minstrelsy and whites' representations of blacks - or simply of hostile stereotypical images and their political uses and functions - you know that there is a great deal of material in "Martin" that is justly called "contemporary blackface" or similar. It's not blackface because Martin Lawrence intends the Step 'N' Fetchit-esque material as a put-on, to please a white supremacist viewer or white supremacist ideology, but because it plugs into the existing tradition of degrading stereotypes, and the traditions of representations of blacks aimed at recycling existing, racialized power dynamics. The better that show does, the more that form of blackface recirculates and is re-normalized for a contemporary viewership -- the more the evolution of minstrelsy passes for "normal" and acceptable, and the more the political tradition of blackface for both black and non-black viewers is morally sanctioned.

On the other hand, as his celebrity increases, and his show's marketability increases, so does a material advance for black actors, comedians and producers, within an institution whose labor is racialized & exclusive -- definitely an anti-racist vector of motion, measured from a material standpoint.

The hard thing to realize is that there's no way any black comedian comes to prominence in pop culture, right now, without reiterating much of white supremacist logic and validating white supremacist desires, because of the current state of political culture. If a sitcom with mostly black actors is going to "make it," it's going to be racist and to be reiterating a great deal of white supremacist thinking and strategy, because if it doesn't it simply will be invisible to a popular viewership -- literally, they won't know what to make of it.

The Hattie McDaniel story, in other words, extends to all areas of resistance. The "House Nigger" has the potential to undermine "The Master's" equilibrium to the greatest degree. The "Bad Nigger" may create the threat and the impetus for "The Master's" turning to the "House Nigger" for solace, but ultimately the man in the house and the man in the field are on the same team, intended or not, whatever the nature of their regard for each other.

I know that people who already know this in their bones will find my post maybe annoying for its didactic tone, and the obviousness of its content.

I just saw that this thread was not getting responses, and it made me thinking about this topic (I first guessed the content of the thread to be something like, "Why we must become anti-Imperialist Imperialists), so I ventured to hijack with the best of intentions.