Bulletin #727
Subject
:
Revolution from above, Resistance from status quo forces, and
Progressive Paths toward democratic
socialism from below.
15 December 2016
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The much tarnished legacy of
President Barack Obama could only by enhanced –short of subjecting himself to
public trial before an official war-crimes tribunal-- if he acted on a generous impulse and
offered amnesty for all political prisoners who are now incarcerated in
the US prison system. Caught in the historical moment where forces of status quo produce the “banality of
evil,” the last few weeks of the Obama administration offer a window period for
this US President to extricate himself from this quagmire and to enter on the
path toward a socialist future by implementing the revolutionary policy of
freeing political prisoners, many of whom could contribute much to a democratic
socialist society in North America. His alternative is to continue to promote
more war and more repression.
On the other hand, my own much
maligned research on “the uses of social science in US concentration camps
during WW II” (see my exchange with Roger Daniels in The Journal of Military
History) was published towards the end of the past century, in which I
focus on “the worm in the apple” rather than the superficial blemishes on the
surface of an otherwise perfect representation of la vie mort, as Daniels does in his work on these internment camps.
After my years of research on American militarism, I turned my efforts to
working within the French public education system and focused largely on
popularizing issues from post-WW II US foreign policy,
as well as selected events from the history of class struggles and resistance
to racism, sexism, militarism and economic inequality. This effort of swimming
consistently against the current stems from my democratic socialist education
in Texas, Wisconsin and California, where I was taught that public education
must have a revolutionary content and a radical method if it is to qualify as
“genuine public education,” and that the aim of intellectual competition is to better cooperate and not the
contrary, which is the common individual practice of cooperating within groups
in order to achieve more individual advantage for competitive activities, which have no positive effect on society. I invested heavily in my relationships with students, to
prepare them to participate in meaningful social exchanges in a future filled with uncertainty.
For more on the practice of this
socialist pedagogy, see the many scores of collective activities which
our Center
for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements (CEIMSA) sponsored for more than a decade-and-a-half at Grenoble University:
there were dozens of publications by scholars and students published with free
public access; more than 700 CEIMSA Bulletins were published regularly
and distributed to some 1500 readers on a weekly basis, bulletins containing
book reviews and commentaries which collectively reflect my own
intellectual/political odyssey from 2000 to 2016, while teaching US history at
Grenoble University in the tradition of radical pedagogy.
The CEIMSA web site, which I used as
an important pedagogical tool, grew to include :
Ateliers
Bilingues - Bilingual Workshops @
http://ceimsa.org/ateliers.html
CEIMSA : Liens – Links @
US Foreign Policy Documents @
http://ceimsa.org/ForPol.Index.html
Colloques/Conférences @
http://ceimsa.org/colloques.html
CEIMSA
Multimedia – Archives
@
http://ceimsa.org/multimedia/multimedia.html
Student
& Scholarly Publications
@
http://ceimsa.org/publications/
CEIMSA – Archives (2001 – 2016) @
Selected Books :
America's
Concentration Camps During World War II, Social Science and the Japanese
American Internment (1999) [reviewed by Roger Daniels
in 2000] @
A Strategy of Dominance:
The History of an American Concentration Camp (1995) [reviewed by Ronald Takaki
in 1999] @
The French Anarchist Labor Movement and 'La Vie Ouvriere' 1909-1914 (1992) @
Rebels
with Causes: A Study of Revolutionary Syndicalist
Culture Among the French Primary School Teachers Between 1880 and 1919 (1989)
@
Winning the opprobrium from a
certain class of ‘house intellectuals’ was never a deterrence
in my historical research projects, which were often critical of “identity
politics” and which always sought to clarify political motivations and
institutional constraints. The many colleagues and friends of CEIMSA along the
way were, of course, essential for the success of this project, which developed
as the years passed.
I have no regrets
!
On this same subject of social class
struggle, Fernand Braudel
comments eloquently when he writes on “superfluity and sufficiency” in chapter
3 of his book, The
Structures of Everyday Life :
Luxury then can take on many guises,
depending on the period, the country or the civilization. What does not change,
by contrast, is the unending social drama of which luxury is both the prize and
the theme, a choice spectacle for sociologist, psychologist, economist and
historian. A certain amount of connivance is of course required between the
privileged and the onlookers –the watching masses. Luxury does not only
represent rarity and vanity, but &also social success, fascination; the
cream that one day becomes reality for the poor, and in so doing immediately loses
its old glamour. . . . “When a food that has been rare and long
desired finally arrives within the reach of the masses, consumption rises
sharply, as if a long-repressed appetite had exploded. Once popularized [in
both senses of the word –becoming ‘less exclusive’ and ‘more widespread’] the
food quickly loses its attraction. . .
. The appetite becomes sated.” The rich
are thus doomed to prepare the future life of the poor. It is, after all, their
justification: They try out the pleasures that the masses will sooner or later
grasp.
This affords plenty of scope for
futility, pretentiousness and caprice. .
. . The moral is not surprising: every
luxury dates and goes out of fashion. But luxury is reborn from its own ashes
and from its very defeats. It is really the reflection of a difference in
social levels that nothing can compensate for and that every movement
recreates. An eternal ‘class struggle’.
This was a conflict waged not only by classes, but by
civilizations. Civilizations were incessantly eyeing each other, acting out the
same drama as the rich played in relation to the poor. But this time it was
reciprocal; and therefore created currents and led to accelerated exchanges,
from near and far. In short, as Marcel Mauss wrote,
‘it was not in production that society found its driving force: luxury is the
great stimulus’. According to Gaston Bachelard ‘the attainment of the superfluous causes greater
spiritual excitement than the attainment of necessities. Man is a creature of
desire and not a creature of need;”’ Jacques Rueff,
the economist, goes so far as to repeat that ‘production is the daughter of
desire’. Probably few would deny the existence of such drives and cravings even
in present-day societies with mass luxuries. For there is no
society without a hierarchy. And the slightest social prestige is
associated with luxury, today as in the past.
Does that mean one should accept the
view, advanced most forcefully by Werner Sombart,
that the luxury displayed by the princely courts of the West (of which the
papal court of Avignon was the prototype) laid the foundations of early modern
capitalism? Or rather should one say that before the innovations of the
nineteenth century, the many forms of luxury were not so much an element of
growth as a sign of an economy failing to engage with anything, one that was
incapable of finding a meaningful use for its accumulated capital? In this
sense, one could suggest that a certain kind of luxury was, and could
only be, a phenomenon or sign of sickness peculiar to the ancien
régime; that until the Industrial Revolution it was (and in some cases still is) the
unjust, unhealthy, conspicuous and wasteful consumption of the ‘surplus’ produced
by a society with fixed limits on it growth. In reply to the unconditional
defenders of luxury and its creative” capacity, the American biologist
Theodosius Dobzhansky has written: ‘I for one do not
lament the passing of social organizations that used the many as a manured soil in which to grow a few graceful flowers of
refined culture.’(pp.184 & 186)
Contempt for any system that would promote
democratic equality is not new. As the traditional
control mechanisms over the population weaken, structural changes become imperative:
will these changes involve authoritarian corporatism
from above, or democratic socialism
from below? These are questions that only the future can answer.
The 14 items below will
inform CEIMSA readers of the top-down revolutionary process which we find today
being orchestrated to bring ‘democracy’ under control, a necessary step to
protect capitalist interests, as the world changes in favor of working-class
interests.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
---------------
Professor emeritus of
American Studies
University
Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced
Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of
California-San Diego
a.
Eddie Conway Reflects on the 50th Anniversary
of the Black Panther Party
Conway says the lessons and legacy of the Panthers are more
relevant than ever
===========
b.
‘Fake
News’ ? : The Agenda of Corporate Media Is Regime
Change' in Syria
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46018.htm
Video
Independent journalist Eva Bartlett sets
a smug reporter straight during a UN Syria Mission press conference.
===========
c.
Slaughter or
Liberation?: A Debate on Russia's Role in the Syrian War
& the Fall of Aleppo
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/14/slaughter_or_liberation_a_debate_on
===========
d.
There is More Than One Truth To Tell In The Awful Story of Aleppo
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46039.htm
Our political masters
are in league with the Syrian rebels, and for the same reason as the rebels
kidnap their victims – money
by
Robert Fisk
===========
e.
Obama Calls for Investigation into Russian Hacking,
Still No Evidence Made Public
Part 1 : http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=17896
&
Were the DNC Emails Hacked or Leaked?
Part 2 : http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=17910
Former FBI
agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley says accuracy in the report must be put
above all else because the results could have grave consequences for foreign
policy and that . . . we've heard from the FBI and the CIA, but it is the NSA
that would be the critical agency because of how it monitors communications
===========
f.
What lies behind the victory of Donald Trump?
Rise of white anger?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF4_TDbernA
===========
g.
John Pilger talks on RT
about Trump, Very Interesting Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQK19h24TcM
===========
h.
Noam Chomsky on the new Trump era - UpFront special
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB54XxbgI0E
===========
i.
Wall Street Is Europe’s Landlord. And Tenants Are
Fighting Back.
by Liz Alderman
===========
j.
How To
Instantly Tell If Russia Hacked the Election
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/12/tell-russia-hacked-election.html
by WashingtonsBlog
===========
k.
Michael
Hudson on the Orwellian Turn in Contemporary Economics
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=17705
Economist Michael Hudson sits down with Sharmini Peries to talk about the
elections and his new book 'J is for Junk Economics'
===========
l.
Obama
and the Decline of the Left in Latin America
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17841
Obama's presidency treated the prospect of
democratic nationalism in Latin America similarly as other US presidents, and
nearly everybody who was allied with Chavez is now gone, says Consortium News
contributor Ted Snider
===========
m.
Israel's Defense
Minister Outlines Plan to Divide Syria and Iraq along Sectarian Lines
http://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa-south-west-asia/1381-avigdor-liberman.html
by
American Herald Tribune Staff
===========
n.
The
General's Son: From Privileged Zionist to Activist
for
Palestinian Rights
On Reality Asserts Itself,
Miko Peled tells Paul Jay
that he's come to understand that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands
began in 1948 and he broke with the liberal zionist
belief in the "secularization of the bible" and the mission of a
Jewish state; he says BDS is an effective strategy that should be supported