Stuart Hall ‘taught me how Britain was founded on race and class – and how the media were central to those structures’.

By Arun Kundnani

al-Jazeera 

March 2, 2017 – I first started reading Stuart Hall, the cultural theorist, in the early 1990s as an undergraduate student in Britain. The heyday of overt tabloid racism was over by then, but new styles of racist reporting were emerging.

On the one hand, cultural identity was an increasing focus, with much of the media echoing the idea that the presence of blacks and Asians undermined a cohesive sense of Britishness. On the other hand, the small number of refugees arriving in Britain were vilified as scroungers and cheats.

When a few hundred gypsies settled in Dover on England’s south coast, fleeing neo-Nazi gangs in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Rupert Murdoch’s best-selling Sun newspaper called them "Slovak Spongers" and "Giro Czechs" (a pun on a common term for welfare payments) and suggested "teaching the gypsies two words, the second one being off".

This kind of media coverage, of course, continues to this day. It is easy to denounce, but harder to cogently analyse it. Hall’s work helped me to get beyond simplistic explanations that put the blame on an inherent English racism or mechanical pursuit of profit.

Hall’s starting point was Marxism. But he followed another African-Caribbean scholar, Frantz Fanon, in his recommendation that Marxist analysis be "slightly stretched" in dealing with questions of race and colonialism. To understand the Jamaican society in which he had grown up, Hall combined the Marxist categories of class and capitalism with insights into the role of culture in colonialism. When Hall settled in England in 1951, he used the same approach to understand how racism functioned there.

To the columnists who supposed that Asian and black immigration to Britain was an alien cultural disruption that undermined a previously stable society, Hall’s response was that Britain had not become multicultural because of postcolonial migration.

Multiculturalism had been there much longer as an integral part of Britain’s imperial project. "It is in the sugar you stir; it is in the sinews of the famous British ‘sweet tooth’; it is in the tea-leaves at the bottom of the ‘British’ cuppa," noted Hall. There was no British identity that did not include the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the tea plantations of Asia, the slave and the coolie.

Hall’s 1978 book Policing the Crisis, co-authored with his colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, had the biggest impact on me. It presented a picture of Britain in the 1970s as caught in a crisis of authority. The state, forced to intervene more aggressively to hold together a fracturing society, became more naked in its coercion. And a media-constructed image of black crime became a signifier of this deeper crisis. The component parts of Thatcherism were being laid out.

In Hall’s account, racism was not just a matter of individual attitudes and biases. Race was a key constituent of the social and economic structure, a "principal modality" by which class society was experienced and made sense of. Race, he said, was not a marginal concern but right at the centre of British life. At the same time, its significance was never self-contained or transparent; it was a screen on to which deep anxieties were projected and worked through.

One way this happened was through the news media. The conventional approach to analysing the news is to ask whether journalists select and frame events objectively or with bias. Hall’s argument focused instead on how news can have meaning to us only if it aligns with our unconscious "cultural maps" of the social world.

The main ideological function of the news, he argued, is not its alleged liberal or conservative bias but its fidelity to the deeper consensus within which party politics takes place. This happens because the news sources its meanings from the social and political institutions that underpin that consensus, such as the police, the courts, the university, and so on.

No wonder, then, that racism was found in the news as much as on the streets – in both cases, it derived from the same deeper structure that Policing the Crisis had identified. Applied to the 1990s, this method of analysis could explain why refugees, for example, were being treated as such a threat: they too were a screen on to which anxieties deriving from the crisis of Thatcherite Britain were being projected.

It was never Hall’s style to provide final answers. In the 1980s and 1990s, his analysis shifted as he began to view the social world as pure flux: representations floated free of any referent; politics was reduced to the construction of identities.

Ironically, his writing in these later decades, which were more politically stable than the 1970s, pictured society as having no solid foundations. For me, reading Policing the Crisis out of its time in the 1990s taught me how contemporary Britain was solidly founded on race and class – and how the media were central to reproducing those structures.

Arun Kundnani is scholar-in-residence at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. He is the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror and The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st-Century Britain. He writes for The Guardian, Nation, Intercept and The Washington Post, among other publications.

This article forms part of an online project by Al Jazeera English’s media analysis show The Listening Post. Follow #MediaTheorised

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policies.

Interfaith meeting with Muslims in Pittsburgh

By J.D. Prose

Beaver County Times

March 31, 2017 – BEAVER — If any two things bring Beaver Countians together, it’s food and religion, and Center Township resident Toni Ashfaq will incorporate both to educate residents about Islam during events in Beaver.

“There are a lot of misunderstandings, a lot of false information floating around,” said Ashfaq, a Muslim and the organizer of two Spread Hummus, Not Hate: Meet Your Muslim Neighbor gatherings Wednesday and Saturday at Beaver Area Memorial Library. “We just want people to meet us and see that we’re just like everybody else.”

A Wisconsin native and convert from Catholicism, Ashfaq said she and two friends — Julia Chaney, a Christian, and fellow Muslim Dr. Raniah Khairy, an OB/GYN specialist at Heritage Valley Beaver hospital in Brighton Township — began brainstorming ideas “just to kind of build bridges and promote understanding” because of the “current political climate.”

That brainstorming has resulted in the Spread Hummus, Not Hate gatherings at the library from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday and 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday. Ashfaq said they got the idea after learning of a group in Australia doing meetings.

“We thought it was a pretty catchy title,” Ashfaq said with a laugh. Just one gathering was initially planned, but after receiving an “overwhelming” response, she said a second one was added.

Islam has been distorted by politicians and certain media, she said, not naming anyone specifically. Regardless, Ashfaq said Muslims are “not in denial” about Muslims committing violence, but the media too often focuses solely on Islam.

“People get the wrong idea that those people represent the whole faith, and they don’t,” Ashfaq said, recalling a recent conversation in which she told a woman that equating terrorists with Islam would be akin to equating the Ku Klux Klan with Christianity.

Critics have accused President Donald Trump of fanning anti-Muslim sentiments with his proposed immigration ban, since halted by courts, that targeted Muslim-majority countries. He has argued that the ban is necessary to make sure terrorists are not entering the United States as refugees.

Ashfaq said she has not experienced any overt discrimination, but has seen an increase in people’s curiosity about Islam and Muslims.

“People are really starting to ask questions,” she said. “They are really wanting to understand.”

Most questions, Ashfaq said, concern sharia, Islamic canonical law; jihad, an Arabic word meaning “struggle,” but which has taken on the connotation of “holy war”; the treatment of women in Islamic societies; and how some Muslim women dress in public, which can include wearing a hijab that covers the head and chest. Those aspects of Islam, including its basic beliefs and similarities with Christianity, and a question-and-answer session will be on the agenda Wednesday and Saturday.

Ashfaq said she and her friends are hoping the events raise enough interest that others might want to organize similar gatherings to promote interfaith relationships and understanding.

“If you see somebody face-to-face, it’s harder to hate them,” she said.

A Pop Cultural Lens into the Feudal World

April 24, 2015

Doug Enaa Greene, via Red Wedge Magazine

On April 12, 2015 the wildly popular Game of Thrones returned to HBO for a fifth season. No doubt, this season, like all the others, will break ratings records and encourage endless speculation and debate by fans. The television series, based on a projected seven novel series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, has a devoted following among viewers who are willing to wade through intricate plots, an enormous cast of characters and a world as rich as our own. The series is set in a fantasy world resembling feudal Europe and on the surface feels like many other “sword and sandal” epics, such as Lord of the Rings. However, the series is more than beach side reading — drawing extensively on history, mythology and literature.

Part of the appeal of Game of Thrones (especially for Marxists) is that, unlike Lord of the Rings, there are few clear cut heroes or villains; instead everyone is a shade of gray and presents a harsh view of the feudal world and its sharp class divisions, bourgeois revolutions from above, subordinate status of women, and brutal realpolitik. [1]

A historical materialist analysis of Game of Thrones has been the subject of two essays “Can Marxist theory predict the end of Game of Thrones?” by Paul Mason and “Game of Thrones and the End of Marxist Theory” by Sam Kriss (focusing heavily on the collapse of feudalism with arguments we will discuss in detail below). Kriss’ essay also argues that part of the appeal of Game of Thrones is that the series undermines any idealization of feudalism where “its kings aren’t just cruel and stupid but powerless, trying to bat away rapacious financiers and ghoulish monsters with both flapping, ineffectual hands…[and that this] was the last time that all the mystical creatures that hid in the dark places of society were known, named, and understood.” By contrast, capitalism presents itself as rational, while it shrouds real social relations beneath commodity fetishism and the mysteries of the market. The use of Marxist analysis to fantasies such as Game of Thrones, as Kriss rightfully points out, “helps explain our own demon-haunted world.”

War of the Five Kings and the Breakdown of Feudalism

The main settings for Game of Thrones are the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos. Westeros is made up of seven kingdoms — the Kingdom of the North, the Kingdom of Mountain and Vale, the Kingdom of the Isles and Rivers, the Kingdom of the Rock, the Kingdom of the Reach, the Kingdom of the Stormlands and Dorne. The Seven Kingdoms have existed for thousands of years  largely as a feudal society and undergoing periodic dynastic shifts, civil wars and invasions (the dominant religion known as the “Faith of the Seven” forbids slavery).

One of the major plots of the series is a civil war by the noble kingdoms for control of the Iron Throne following the death of the King Robert Baratheon. The “War of the Five Kings,” which begins at the end of the first season initially involves five separate claimants to the Iron Throne (currently reduced to three by the end of season four) involves bloody battles, massacres and dynastic upheavals which devastate Westeros.

The roots of the war go back to season one when Eddard “Ned” Stark, the rather sympathetic and honorable Lord Paramount of the North, receives news that his friend Jon Arryn, his mentor and the current Hand of the King, has been murdered. Eddard is chosen by King Robert to replace Arryn as Hand of the King. Although Ned considers refusing, Robert needs a loyal friend in the capital, and also promises to wed his son Joffrey to Ned’s daughter Sansa (which would subsequently give the Starks a claim on the throne). However, Eddard only agrees to take the position when he receives a secret letter from his wife Catelyn’s sister, Lysa Arryn (Jon’s widow) that implicates the Lannisters in the death of her husband.

The Lannisters are one of the most powerful and wealthiest noble families in Westeros. They also possess a deserved reputation for ruthlessness and dishonor (and there is mistrust between them and the House of Stark). King Robert’s wife, Cersei, the current Queen, comes from the Lannisters. Upon hearing this news, Eddard suspects that there is a plot being raised against the King and accepts Robert’s offer in order to investigate Jon Arryn’s death.

While in the capital of King’s Landing, Ned learns that Jon Arryn took an interest in Robert’s bastard children. Through further investigation, Ned discovers that all the bastard children (like the Baratheons) possess black hair. However, all of Robert’s children have blond hair like the Lannisters. This convinces Eddard that the King’s children are not his, but are actually the product of Cersei’s incestuous relationship with her brother Jamie (a member of the King’s Guard). This means that the children have no claim to the throne. With the King away on a hunting trip, Eddard confronts Cersei, telling her he knows the truth, and warns her to flee the capital before Robert returns as Ned will tell him the truth.

Robert is mortally wounded on his hunt and dies, but not before naming Eddard as Protector of the Realm, to rule until Joffrey can come of age. Eddard moves quickly, writing to Robert’s elder brother Stannis (the rightful claimant to the throne), urging to take power. Robert’s other brother, Renly, leaves the capital before the King’s death–fearing a bloodbath. Eddard ignores the suggestion of his ally Petyr Baelish “Littlefinger” that they take advantage of the situation to gain more power. Eddard doesn’t believe that he has a legitimate claim to the throne, but rather plans to arrest Cersei and her children once the king is dead (Eddard refuses to shed blood while Robert is dying). This gives Cersei a chance to make her own plans. After Robert dies, when Eddard attempts to have her arrested, the Guards and Littlefinger betray him. Eddard is taken into custody and is later publicly executed by King Joffrey. This goes against the express wishes of Cersei, who wanted to have Eddard banished and potentially bargain with Eddard’s son Rob who is raising an army to rescue his father.

Following the death of Eddard, the “War of the Five Kingdoms” begins. Although Joffrey is crowned King, his claim is disputed by Stannis and Renly Baratheon (who are both making separate claims) due to him being the product of incest. Stannis claims that the throne is his by right since he is the elder brother of the King. Even though Renly is second in line, he believes that he would make a better King than Stannis. Eddard’s son Rob Stark is crowned “King in the North” by his men and wages his own war with the Lannisters, but doesn’t declare allegiance to either Stannis or Renly. At the same time, Balon Greyjoy,ruler of the Iron Islands, who had lived uneasily under Robert Baratheon, declares his independence once more.

The war rages on with shifting alliances and assassinations of key players. Although Rob Stark is military successful against the Lannisters and dubbed the “Young Wolf,” he makes a number of errors such as breaking a promise to wed into the House of Frey (one of his key allies) when he falls in love with Talisa Maegyr (a noble from the Free City of Volantis). Robb is unable to secure an alliance with Renly (who is assassinated by Stannis) or the Iron Islands (Theon Greyjoy in fact sacks Robb’s home of Winterfell). Robb’s missteps allow for Tywin Lannister (Cersei’s father and the true power behind the Iron Throne) to make an alliance with the Freys, who proceed to have Robb killed when he attempts to mend fences.

Joffrey’s claim to the Iron Throne is most directly threatened by Stannis, who has his brother killed and leads a massive fleet and invasion force to King’s Landing. Despite being on the verge of victory, Stannis’ forces are beaten back by the clever tactics of Tyrion Lannister and soldiers from the House of Tyrell (Margaery Tyrell is the widow of Renly and once she is betrothed to Joffrey, this cements the alliance between the two houses). Although Stannis is beaten off, he returns to his home base of Dragonstone and after securing financial support from the Iron Bank of Braavos, he raises a new army and lands in the far north.

The war not only redraws the political map of Westeros, but it also brings immense suffering to poor peasants. Peasants find themselves pillaged and raided to feed the various armies. All of the factions sack cities, rape women and massacre prisoners. The breakdown in social cohesion in the Seven Kingdoms means that there are various outlaws who can act with impunity and that the Lords pledged to protect the peasantry are unable to do so. Forces such as the Brotherhood Without Banners arrive in order to protect “smallfolk” and deserters against all who would threaten them. Although initially allied with the Lannisters, the Brotherhood winds up acting as a guerrilla band behind Lannister lines, infuriating Tywin and other commanders.

As the Seven Kingdoms are laid to waste by civil war, they risk mutually assured destruction from beyond their borders. On the far northern border of the Seven Kingdoms, there is a monumental fortification known as the Wall, which stretches for 300 miles along the border and is 700 feet tall and made of solid ice. The Wall was reported constructed thousands of years ago to protect the Seven Kingdoms from the White Walkers, monstrous beings who once ruled Westeros, but were driven away. Now most people in the Seven Kingdoms believe that the White Walkers were little more than myths to frighten children. The Wall is manned by the Night’s Watch, who’s members swear allegiance only to the Watch and do not take part in the civil wars of Westeros. Although the Watch was once considered an honorable institution, it is now a place to send outcasts, misfits and prisoners. And the Watch,  is also understrength, numbering less than a thousand men with run down defenses with their requests for aid from King’s Landing ignored.

By the time of the television series, the Watch is fighting off the wildlings or the “Free Folk.” The wildlings are free folk who live north of the Wall, coming from many different tribes and cultures. They practice a different religion than the people of Westeros “Old Gods of the Forest.” The wildlings have a much more fluid social structure with no differentiation between lords and peasants farmers. Men and women alike go into battle together And while the wildlings do at times unite and follow a “King-Beyond-the-Wall” (currently Mance Rayder) into battle, the position is not hereditary, they don’t have elaborate rituals and ceremonies for royalty. Nor do the wildlings have laws or a state of their own. The Free Folk also mock the people of Westeros as “kneelers” for accepting royalty and nobility.

During the War of the Five Kings, the wildlings are moving south because of the White Walkers and the onset of winter. They engage in several skirmishes and major battle with the Night’s Watch in the hopes of getting past the Wall and to safety. Although the wildlings nearly succeed in taking the Wall, the arrival of Stannis Baratheon and a fresh army is enough to stop their attack and take Rayder prisoner.

The mode of production in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros most clearly resembles what Marxists would characterize as a feudal society. Feudalism is characterized by small farming, based on traditional land ownership with clearly defined rights and duties for every member of society from the peasants to nobles to the King. Yet feudalism is very much a class society. As Marx once said, “Hierarchy is the ideal form of feudalism; feudalism is a political form of the medieval relations of production and intercourse.”[2] For instance, the peasants in Game of Thrones are not slaves, but they are expected to surrender a portion of their labor to the lord (say by working for the lord’s land five days out of the week while working on his own plot for the other day) in exchange for protection. The noble lords themselves thus gained their primary means of wealth from the peasantry who are the main producers. Feudal society in Game of Thrones does not operate according to market principles, but rather according to tradition and custom. The peasants are concerned with producing goods for the nobility and for maintaining their own subsistence. The nobility by contrast were interested in their own luxury or increasing their lands and political power – not surplus accumulation.

Unlike capitalist society, where there is relative autonomy between the state and the economic base, under feudalism the state and economy where fused. Marxist historian Perry Anderson describes the relationship in the following way:  “Agrarian property was privately controlled by a class of feudal lords, who extracted a surplus from the peasants by politico-legal relations of compulsion. This extra-economic coercion, taking the form of labour services, rents in kind or customary dues owed to the individual lord by the peasant, was exercised both on the manorial demesne attached directly to the person of the lord, and on the strip tenancies or virgates cultivated by the peasant. Its necessary result was a juridical amalgamation of economic exploitation with political authority. The peasant was subject to the jurisdiction of his lord.”[3] Thus while the state of feudal society performs the same function as the state under capitalism, it is far more fragmented as demonstrated in Game of Thrones – the noble families are all jostling for influence in order to increase their lands and hence their power leading to intrigue and wars.

However, it is clear from the War of the Five Kings that the feudal state in Game of Thrones is incapable of defending the common interests of the Lords or the social cohesion of their system. For instance, the Night’s Watch is left alone (with the notable exception of Stannis) to fend off the threat of the wildlings and the White Walkers. Even though the various factions of the civil war have raised enormous armies, they are not being used to defend the common interest of the nobility, but rather the particular interests of different Houses.

Another further point of note is that the feudal society in Game of Thrones is stagnant in terms of technology and state structure (despite periodic dynastic changes). Paul Mason argues that this is a  problem that “fantasy fiction adopts the conceit of a feudalism that is always in crisis but never overthrown.” And he does have a point, feudalism in Westeros has lasted for thousands of years with little appreciable advance in technology or change in the basic mode of production (aside from the abolition of slavery). And while commodity production does exist on the margins of Westeros, notably trading routes in the ports such as Kings’ Landing and the Iron Bank of Braavos, only the former is prominent (since they have funded the Lannisters’ war). However, the replacement of feudalism in Westeros by capitalism, which Mason predicts will occur in the series, remains an open question.

Although the War of the Five Kings remains in progress in Game of Thrones currently, it is possible to speculate on the war’s outcome for the feudal system. Westeros is certainly in crisis, with the signs of “debts accumulated under a corrupt patronage system, whose sources of wealth dried up, destroyed the system in the end” as Mason argues, portending the end of feudalism. And certainly, the Iron Throne as it is currently organized is incapable of protecting the common interests and property of the nobility. By contrast, Kriss says that Mason’s account of the crisis of feudalism is actually a crisis of capitalism. In fact, Kriss says that Mason neglects the role of class struggle and that “The real crisis of feudalism had very little to do with corruption and aristocratic profligacy, and everything to do with collective action on the part of the toiling masses.” And certainly in Europe, following the Black Death, facing a population shortage the peasants were able to obtain higher wages, rights to land, etc which prompted the rulers to turn to primitive accumulation and to undermine peasant rights — all of which ultimately led to the development of capitalism.

Yet there are problems with Kriss’ statement that the crisis of feudalism had everything to do with the collective action of the masses. Certainly, there is the Brotherhood Without Banners who are fighting all the Kings. Yet the growth of market forces and the decline of feudalism can just as easily be brought about by outside forces. For instance, the crisis of feudalism in Japan came with the arrival of trading ships of Commodore Dewey and the threat of imperialist takeover. To forestall such a fate, the rulers of Japan instituted the Meiji Restoration to develop capitalism. A crisis of feudalism can lead to a decline in living standards for the masses, as it did in Japan with the Meiji Restoration. So contrary, to Kriss who says that the crisis of feudalism allowed peasants to get what they wanted such as higher wages, and he is certainly correct that this occurred in Europe following the Black Death, and as the example of Japan shows this was not always the case. Perhaps the Iron Bank would back a claimant to the Iron Throne, such as Stannis, who would bring a revolution from above?

Returning to the Seven Kingdoms, Mason says that with the Lannisters broke and indebted to Iron Bank, commerce needs to take hold in order to curb the power of the monarchy: “But for this to happen you need the rule of law. You need the power of kings to become subject to constitutional right, and a moral code imposed on business, trade and family life. But that won’t happen in Westeros, where the elite lifestyle is synonymous with rape, pillage, arbitrary killing, torture and recreational sex.” While Mason says this won’t occur, it could plausibly be argued that the loose structure of the monarchy would need to be replaced by something like an absolutist state by the victor in the war.

In order for the lords to strengthen their hold on the peasantry and ensure surplus extraction, the powers of coercion would have to be displaced upwards towards a centralized and militarized monarchy — breaking with the previous fragmented powers of the nobility. At the same time, as occurred in our world, the emergence of Absolutism in the Seven Kingdoms could open the door for commodity production on the margins of the feudal economy to develop on their own terms with the creation of wage laborers and the bourgeoisie.

However, as we shall see there are other forces that could lead to a transition to capitalism (not considered by Mason or Kriss) in the world of Game of Thrones.

The Role of Women

Eddard Stark: “A little Lady shouldn’t play with swords.”

Arya Stark: “I wasn’t playing. And I don’t want to be a Lady.” (“Lord Snow”)

The place of women in the feudalistic world of Game of Thrones generally resembles that of medieval society in Western Europe. Women are not allowed to own or inherit land and title, only men can do so. Women are under the authority of either their fathers (if unmarried or widowed in the case of Tywin and Cersei Lannister), their husbands (Ned and Catelyn Stark) or their sons if they have come of age (Robb and Catelyn Stark). Women are not allowed to marry for love, especially if they come from a prominent family, such as in the case of Cersei, but to secure political alliances or increase the power of their houses. A marriage for love or breaking a promise to marry into a family can be seen as a grave insult and have disastrous political consequences (as Robb Stark learned too late when he broke his promise to marry into the House of Frey). Furthermore, women are expected to dress beautiful, be caste until marriage, and bear children. In war, women are routinely killed and if they have the bad luck to survive, they are raped by soldiers.

However, there are number of women who break with the predominant gender roles in Game of Thrones. For instance, Arya Stark is the youngest daughter of Ned and Catelyn Stark. As a noble-born girl, she is expected to learn knitting and act like a lady. However, Arya is very much a “tomboy” and interested in warfare and archery (she is a better shot than her brothers). Although Arya torments her more proper sister, Sansa and is a constant headache for her mother, both her father and brother Jon help to foster Arya’s interests. Jon gives Arya a sword before departing for the Night’s Watch, which she promptly names Needle. When Arya goes to King’s Landing, her father hires a trainer Syrio Forel to train her as a warrior with “dancing lessons.” Despite this, Ned hopes that Arya will eventually accept her place as a lady:

Eddard Stark: You will marry a high lord and rule his castle, and your sons shall be knights and princes and lords.

Arya Stark: No… that’s not me.  (“Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things”)

Syrio Forel doesn’t mind that Arya is a girl, but he teaches her how to fight with stern lessons. And ultimately, when Ned is arrested for treason and the Lannisters send in soldiers to arrest Arya, Syrio sacrifices his life so she can escape (Arya kills a stable boy during the effort). Arya manages to escape King’s Landing just before witnessing her father’s execution with the help of a member of the Night’s Watch, Yoren. In order to return home to Winterfell, Arya has her hair cut short and poses as a boy and a recruit to the Night’s Watch with several other boys.

Arya manages to do this quite well since she already acts more like a boy than girl. The only thing that could give her away is when she has to go pee, so Arya sneaks off into the woods. Arya and her group of friends are captured by Goldcloaks (in service of the Lannisters). During captivity, Arya watches as many of her friends are systematically tortured and killed. Arya becomes hardened by the experience, vowing revenge each night before she goes bed, reciting the names of all the people she plans to kill like a prayer.

The Goldcloaks take Arya and the other prisoners to Harrenhal where Tywin Lannister discovers that she is a girl posing as a boy. Recognizing that Arya is clever and intelligent, Tywin makes her his cup bearer. Although Arya performs her duties, Tywin keeps an eye on her and discovers that she is a northerner, literate, and knowledgeable about history (more so than his advisers). Tywin tells Arya that “You’re too smart for your own good–has anyone told you that?” (“A Man Without Honor”) This is a telling remark on how much Arya is diverging from her expected gender role as a lowly-born cup bearer.

Eventually, Arya is able to escape Harrenhal by enlisting the help of Jaqen H’ghar, whom she had befriended earlier. Jaqen is actually not his name, but an assumed identity since he is a member of the Faceless Men of Braavos. Once free, Arya watches more friends die at the hands of the Brotherhood Without Banners. When she is captured by the brutal warrior Sandor Clegane “The Hound.” (one of the men she vowed to kill), Arya witnesses the massacre where her brother is murdered. The experience makes Arya grow ever more hardened. Arya kills willingly and without remorse. When the Hound is wounded in a vicious fight with Brienne of Tarth, he begs Arya to kill her in order to put him out of his mercy. Yet Arya leaves him to bleed to death, exacting her revenge. She later leaves Westeros on a ship for Braavos.

The experience of Arya is not only of a girl who questions her perceived gender role as a noble-born lady, but in order to survive alone she has to become willing to endure and adapt. Arya is willing to kill without hesitation and cuts herself off from all attachments. Her enthusiasm to engage in battle is so extreme that she has to be reigned in several times.

Another example of a woman who violates her gender role in Westeros is Brienne of Tarth. Brienne is not only a knight from a noble house. She is not even looked on as a man – considering that she tall, heavily built with short hair. Her physical appearance is something that is continually mocked on by men. Although there is no formal prohibition on a woman becoming a knight, since men are warriors Brienne does so anyway. And as a knight, Brienne is not only a better warrior (able to best renowned fighters such as the Hound), but follows the code of chivalry better than most men. For example, know matter whom Brienne pledges fealty to, Renly, Catelyn Stark, or Jaime Lannister, she makes every effort to stay true to her vows. This is something recognized by Jamie Lannister, who initially despised her but Brienne did all in her power to protect him on the route back to King’s Landing because she swore to. As a reward, Jamie gave Brienne a sword as a gift, which she appropriately names:

Jamie Lannister: They say the best swords have names. Any ideas?

Brienne of Tarth [Thinks for a moment] Oathkeeper. (“Oathkeeper”)

Even among those most expected to play traditional gender roles, such as Queens and princesses, there is a continual violation of them. For instance, Cersei Lannister is Queen and later regent for her son Joffrey, yet she seeks out greater power and independence for herself. She is smart and ambitious, but not particular good at playing politics. And in perhaps what is the greatest violation of a woman’s role in Westeros, to be a faithful wife and mother, Cersei bears three children with her brother Jaime — the knowledge of which helps to cause the War of the Five Kings. Margarey Tyrell, who initially is married to Renly, then Joffrey and later betrothed to Tommen (who becomes king after Joffrey’s death) is a skillful manipulator who hides her ambition with a compassionate side has one goal in mind:

Petyr Baelish: “Do you want to be a queen?”

Margaery Tyrell: “No. I want to be the Queen.” (“The Ghost of Harrenhal”)

Perhaps an interesting example of a woman in Game of Thrones who most clearly embraced her gender role and learned the brutal realities of being a woman in a misogynist society is Sansa Stark. Sansa, the elder sister to Arya, loves to knit, wear dresses and believes all the stories she hears about chivalry. Once Sansa is betrothed to Joffrey, she believes this to be a fairytale ending. However reality soon sets in after her father Ned is killed for treason before her eyes on Joffrey’s orders. Sansa soon finds herself a prisoner in King’s Landing, subjected to abuse and torment at the hands of Joffrey. She is nearly raped at several points.

However, Sansa learns the reality of the way the world is, which is told to her by the Hound:

Sandor Clegane: He can die just fine on his own. I can take you with me. Take you to Winterfell. I’ll keep you safe. Do you want to go home?

Sansa Stark: I’ll be safe here. Stannis won’t hurt me.

Sandor Clegane: Look at me. Stannis is a killer. The Lannisters are killers. Your father was a killer. Your brother is a killer. Your sons will be killers someday. The world is built by killers. So you’d better get used to looking at them. (“Blackwater”)

Sansa learns to endure and keep her true feelings well guarded as opposed to lashing out like Arya. When Sansa is tortured and humiliated by Joffrey, Tyrion comes to her rescue and stops the abuse. Sansa maintains public loyalty to Joffrey, even when with Tyrion (who has no love for his nephew). In observing Sansa’s facade, Tyrion remarks:

Tyrion Lannister: You may outlive us all, Lady Stark. (“Garden of Bones”)

Even when Sansa is married to Tyrion, a dwarf she finds grotesque, she keeps up the act and never lets on. Although she will never openly love Tyrion, Sansa is prepared to play the role of a loyal wife. However, Tyrion realizes how unhappy Sansa is in their marriage and promises that they will not have sex unless she wants to. Incidentally, Tyrion is one of the few characters in King’s Landing who treats her respectfully.

However, Sansa eventually escapes from King’s Landing after King Joffrey is poisoned at his wedding feast and Tyrion is framed for it. The architect of her rescue and the murder of the King is Littlefinger, who wanted revenge of Joffrey for killing Sansa’s mother Catelyn (who he also loved). Petyr’s words help Sansa to come to a growing maturity about the way of the world:

Sansa Stark: Why did you really kill Joffrey? Tell me why.

Petyr Baelish: I loved your mother more than you could ever know. Given the opportunity, what do we do to those who’ve hurt the ones we love? In a better world, one where love could overcome strength and duty, you might have been my child. But we don’t live in that world. (“Mockingbird”)

Littlefinger takes Sansa to her aunt Lysa in the Vale. Sansa disguises her identity and befriends her cousin, the sickly boy Robin. Although Littlefinger marries Lysa (giving him claim to the Vale), she believes that Sansa secretly loves her new husband. When Littlefinger kisses Sansa, Lysa is enraged with jealousy and attempts to kill Sansa. However, Littlefinger intervenes and saves Sansa and then has Lysa thrown to her doom. Following the death of Lysa, Sansa and Littlefinger are interrogated by the Lords of the Vale about the murder. There, Sansa reveals her true identity and lies saying that Littlefinger killed Lysa to protect her, breaking down in tears in the process. The Lords accept this explanation and Petyr is exonerated. Later, Littlefinger confronts Sansa about why she lied to protect him, her answer shows that how far she has come:

Petyr Baelish: The first time I saw you, you were just a child. A girl from the North, come to the capital for the first time. Not a child any longer. Why did you help me?

Sansa Stark: They would have thrown you through the Moon Door if they’d found you guilty.

Petyr Baelish: That’s not an answer.

Sansa Stark: [nonchalant] If they’d've executed you, what would they have done with me?

Petyr Baelish: I don’t know.

Sansa Stark: Neither do I.

Petyr Baelish: Better to gamble on the man you know than the strangers you don’t…. you think you know me?

Sansa Stark: I know what you want.

Petyr Baelish: Do you? (“The Mountain and the Viper”)

Despite beginning as a rather naïve and innocent girl, Sansa learns harsh lessons about the way the world works and the place of women in it. She learns to keep her true feelings guarded and to pick her allies with care. At the time of this writing, it seems that she is using Littlefinger in order to protect herself and to gain greater power.

Before moving onto the final woman of this section, a few words about the role of women in Game of Thrones. Although Brienne is an exception to the role of a warrior woman, there are cultures such as the wildlings where women fight alongside men (notably Ygritte) and among the Ironborn where women can captain ships (Yara Greyjoy). Throughout the history of Westeros, there have also been stories of women warriors such as Visenya Targaryen. And women can also rise in the Faith of the Seven becoming septas or members of the Silent Sisters. However, it is in the religion of  R’hllor, the Lord of Light, that the priestess Melisandre is able to rise to prominence and become a trusted adviser (and lover) to Stannis Baratheon.

The final woman who breaks with her gender role is Daenerys Targaryen. Daenerys (or Dany) begins the series as a young girl in her teens, who lives in exile. She is one of the two surviving children of  King Aerys II from the House of Targaryen, and the former ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. Aerys was overthrown shortly before Dany’s birth when Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark led a rebellion against his rule. Dany and her brother Viserys thus live in the Free City of Pentos across the Narrow Sea on the continent of Essos. Viserys, a vain, abusive and short-tempered man dreams of returning to Westeros and reclaiming the throne from King Robert. When Viserys loses his temper, he says to his sister:

Viserys Targaryen: You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you? (“Winter is Coming”)

As part of his scheme, Viserys has Dany married off to the Khal Drogo, Khalasar of 40,000 nomadic and fearsome Dothraki warriors. In return for the marriage, Drogo will give Viserys the men he needs to retake the Iron Throne. For Viserys, Dany’s feelings in the matter are not even considered, rather she is merely a means to an end. When Dany objects to the wedding, she is threatened by Viserys. However, Dany reluctantly goes through with the wedding, thus securing her brother’s alliance.
Dany is not willing to be a submissive wife or take orders from her brother. She begins to grow into her role, learning the Dothraki language, customs and commanding the men under her husband’s command. She also takes the advice of her servant, Doreah, learning how to pleasure Khal Drogo and to use her sexuality to her advantage:

Doreah : No, Khaleesi. You must look in his eyes always. Love comes in at the eyes. It is said that Irogenia of Lys could finish a man with nothing but her eyes.

Daenerys Targaryen : Finish a man ?

Doreah : Kings traveled across the world for a night with Irogenia. Magisters sold their palaces. Khals burned her enemies just to have her for a few hours. They say a thousand men proposed to her and she refused them all.

Daenerys Targaryen : Well, she sounds like an interesting woman. I don’t think that Drogo will like it with me on top.

Doreah : You will make him like it, Khaleesi. Men want what they’ve never had. And the Dothraki take slaves like a hound takes a bitch. Are you a slave, Khaleesi ? Then don’t make love like a slave. Very good, Khaleesi. Out there he is the mighty Khal, but in this tent, he belongs to you.

Daenerys Targaryen : I don’t think that this is the Dothraki way.

Doreah : If he wanted the Dothraki way, why did he marry you ? (“The Kingsroad”)

Dany grows steadily into her role with develops a new-found confidence as well. She grows to love Khal Drogo and becomes pregnant with his child. When Viserys attempts to regain his control, Dany stops him and shows her independence:

Daenerys Targaryen: I am a Khaleesi of the Dothraki! I am the wife of the great Khal and I carry his son inside me. The next time you raise a hand to me will be the last time you have hands! (“Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things”)

Dany’s threats don’t stop Viserys, who confronts Khal Drogo and demands that he honor the agreement and give him a crown or else he will retake his sister. Drogo winds up having Viserys executed by pouring molten gold over his head. Dany looks on coldly as he is killed and notes:

Daenerys Targaryen: He was no dragon. Fire cannot kill a dragon.” (“A Golden Crown”)

When word of Dany’s pregnancy reaches Westeros and King Robert sends an assassin to kill her, fearing a rival for the throne. However, thanks to Ser Jorah Mormont she escapes death. This infuriates Drogo reverses his earlier decision to break the agreement with Viserys and vows to cross over into Westeros and take the Seven Kingdoms. In order to raise money for the necessary ships to invade, Drogo begins raiding and taking prisoners. When Dany objects to the harsh treatment of prisoners, one of Drogo’s men objects and challenges Drogo in combat. Drogo defeats the challenger easily, but he receives a wound on the chest which grows infected.

Khal Drogo’s condition worsens and he falls from his horse (a sign of weakness among the Dothraki). Dany grows desperate to save her husband and has Mirri Maz Duur (one of the prisoners she saved) use magic to help him. The Dothraki object to magic and most of the men of the khalasar separate. Although the magic succeeds in saving Khal Drogo, causing the death of Dany’s unborn son in the process, Drogo is left in a vegetative state. Dany can’t understand why, but Duur says that this was done as an act of revenge for the destruction of her village.

Dany is distraught and has Drogo smothered with a pillow and gives him a funeral pyre. Duur and three dragon eggs, which Dany received as a wedding gift, are also placed on the pyre. Duur is burned alive and Dany steps into the fire, possibly meaning to kill herself. However, Dany survives the blaze and it turns out that she now has three young dragons on her. The Dothraki and Jorah Mormont are stunned and fall to their knees, proclaiming Dany their queen.

From this point on, Dany uses her skills as a leader, her lineage as the rightful heir of Westeros and the symbolism surrounding her dragons to build an army of devoted followers and soldiers in order to retake the Iron Throne of Westeros. Dany, perhaps more than other female character in Game of Thrones, is successfully able to overcome her gender role and become a ruler in her own right. The socio-economic and political implications of Dany’s quest to retake the Iron Throne are what we now turn to.

The Transition to Capitalism?

In season three, Dany and her entourage arrive in the city of Astapor in Slaver’s Bay of Essos. Slaver’s Bay is a fertile agricultural region with an economy centered around slavery. Although her dragons have grown, they are still quite small and no substitute for the army she needs to retake the Seven Kingdoms. In the city, she plans to buy an army of 8,000 Unsullied in Astapor. The Unsullied are eunuch-slaves who have been trained since birth to be regarded as some of the greatest soldiers of the world. Dany knows that slave soldiers would become a problem in Westeros, which has outlawed the practice (and which Dany finds abhorrent). After consulting with her advisers, Dany realizes that she has no other way of acquiring an army.

Dany continues with her negotiations to buy the army and the only thing she has to offer for all the Unsullied is one of her dragons. Even though Dany’s advisers are opposed to the bargain, since the dragons are key to her army, she reluctantly agrees to sell Drogon. On the day of the exchange, Dany sells her dragon to the masters of Astapor for the Unsullied. Once Dany is assured that the Unsullied are under her command, she orders them to kill all the masters of Astapor, free all the slaves, but to harm no innocents. After Astapor is sacked, Dany tells the Unsullied that they are free to do as they wish — to leave unharmed or to under her fight command. After a moment of quiet, the 8,000 Unsullied pledge their allegiance to Dany and march out of the city.

Shortly afterward, Dany moves against the city in Slaver’s Bay — Yunkai. She initially offers mercy to the masters of Yunkai, saying their lives would be spared if all the slaves were freed. However, the masters refuse this offer and Dany promises that no mercy will be shown to them. Despite the reputation of Yunkai as an unconquerable city, Dany’s soldiers are able to take it and liberate the slaves. Dany addresses the freed slaves who now revere her as “Mhysa” (or Mother) and embrace her.

After this victory, Dany and her army move onto the largest and most powerful city of Slaver’s Bay — Meeren — which possesses great wealth and enormous slave population (three slaves to every freed person). Rather than take Meeren in a frontal assault, Daenerys encourages the slaves within to rise up. She bombards the city with barrels containing the broken chains of slaves, to tell the enslaved that she is a liberator. Daenerys then has the commander of her Unsullied, Grey Worm, smuggle weapons into Meeren who arms the population. Very quickly, the slaves rise up, slaughter the masters and take control of the city.

When Dany enters the city, she has 163 masters crucified outside of the city in retaliation for the  Masters of Meeren crucifying the same number of slaves en route to the city as a warning. Daenerys answers the objection of her advisers that she should treat the masters with leniency as follows:

Daenerys Targaryen: Remind me, Ser Jorah, how many children did the Great Masters nail to mileposts?

Jorah Mormont: 163, Khaleesi.

Daenerys Targaryen: Yes, that was it. [nods to the Unsullied]

Barristan Semly: Your Grace, may I have a word? The city is yours. All these people, they’re your subjects now. Sometimes it is better to answer injustice with mercy.

Daenerys Targaryen: I will answer injustice with justice. (“Oathkeeper”)

Following the liberation of Meeren, Dany learns that her soldiers have captured 93 ships which would be enough to take her army to King’s Landing (which she could probably take, but not all of Westeros). Dany is also disheartened to learn that in Yunkai the masters have restored slavery and vowed revenge against her. In Astapor, the ruling council she installed has been overthrown. This dismays Dany and she is unsure of her ability to rule the Seven Kingdoms when she can’t hold Slaver’s Bay. Dany decides to stay in Meeren and gain some experience as a ruler.

Dany finds that ruling Meeren is more difficult than she expected. For one, she hears petitions from her subjects, learning that she crucified a master who had actually opposed brutality towards slaves (his son asks to bury the body). She also sends soldiers of her army to retake Yunkai and end slavery there once and for all. She also has to use one of her elite units, the Second Sons, to keep order in Meeren from killings and robbery. And Dany’s dragons also cause her headaches, killing livestock and children which causes her to lock two of them up. And she discovers that her trusted adviser Jorah Mormont was spying on her for the Iron Throne back in Westeros (Dany has him exiled).

Perhaps most distressingly for Dany is that freedom has left the former slaves in a precarious condition. For instance, privileged house slaves and former tutors such as Fennesz find it difficult to make their way in the world and miss the security that come from being slaves. Now that Fennesz is free, he is forced to live on the streets where ex-slaves are fighting each other. Fennesz eventually petitions Dany to allow him to sell himself back to his employer:

Daenerys: I have outfitted mess halls to feed all former slaves and barracks to shelter them.

Fennesz: I do not mean to offend, your grace. I went to one of these places. The young prey on the old. Take what they want and beat us if we resist.

Daenerys: My Unsullied will make them safe again in short order my friend, this I promise you.

Fennesz: Even if they are safe, who would I be there? What purpose would I serve? With my master, I was a teacher. I had the respect and love of these children.

Daenerys: What is it that you want from me?

Fennesz: Your grace, I ask you to let me sell myself back to Master Mighdal.

Daenerys: You want to return to a man who owned you, like a goat or a chair?

Fennesz: Please, your grace, the young may rejoice in the new world you’ve built for them. But for those of us too old to change there is only fear and squalor. I am not alone. There are many outside waiting to beg the same-

Daenerys: I did not take this city to preside over the injustice I fought to destroy. I took it to bring people freedom. But freedom means making your own choices. I will allow you to sign a contract with your former master. It may not cover a period lasting longer than a year.

Fennesz: Thank you, your grace. Thank you.

Barristan: The masters will take advantage of this situation. The men serving them will be slaves in all but name. (“The Children”)

While Daenerys is not willing to countenance the rebirth of slavery in Meeren, she does recognize that ex-slaves need employment. Thus she allows for some primitive form of wage labor among the former slaves and their masters. And considering how little time has passed since emancipation, the slaves turned workers may find their conditions of employment to be little different than slavery. However, Daenerys is finding her own rule increasingly threatened as ex-masters in Yunkai and Astapor have openly revolted while she has few loyal administrators. Perhaps in order to secure her position and build a wider class base, Daenerys will be pushed into making alliances and concessions with the former masters, which could undercut her own popular support.

Dany has potentially unleashed social forces that she cannot control. She began liberating cities in Slaver’s Bay in order to gain the men and resources she would need to retake Westeros. As part of her strategy, Dany mobilized slaves to fight for their own liberation, but in doing so has alienated the former masters. So Dany may have helped Slaver’s Bay bypass a feudal stage of development, bringing it to the cusp of a “revolution from above” to establish primitive capitalism. And as part of Dany’s strategy and “revolution from above” to build the support she needs to move against the Seven Kingdoms, she will undoubtedly have to make compromises with the former ruling class (not unlike the Japanese Emperor during the Meiji Restoration). It is a point that is not considered by either Mason or Kriss who consider the possibility of a bourgeois revolution mainly within Westeros.

However, this brings up the question of what happens to the former slaves? While they may be willing to follow Dany and fight for her, they have their own dreams and aspirations that don’t include replacing one form of exploitation with another. Indeed, during the bourgeois revolutions in France and England, the end result may have been the establishment of capitalist relations of production, but the masses didn’t go into battle with that in mind. They were fighting their own revolution against oppression, privilege and bondage. And in the case of France, the Jacobin section of the radical bourgeois was willing to ally with the popular masses to push their demands even against the bourgeois system itself. It remains open at this point if Daenerys is willing or able to back support of former slaves or if she will solidify her rule by allying with the masters. Then again, the freed slaves may desire something beyond a bourgeois revolution and fight for their own emancipation and a people’s republic.

You Win or You Die: Political Realpolitik in Game of Thrones

In contrast to most fantasy stories, Game of Thrones does not have an idealized view of politics. There are no noble heroes who rally honorable knights to their banner in order to fight dark forces. Rather, politics in Game of Thrones resembles a Hobbesian “war of all against all” or the twisted Machiavellian paths of how to build and maintain alliances on the road to power, isolate opponents with different means (both fair and foul), and once in power how to maintain it. Throughout the series, those characters who understand the nature of realpolitik are able to succeed while those who don’t are ruthlessly crushed.

The clearest example of this can be found in the character of Ned Stark. As we discussed above, Ned is an honorable character who is always trying to do the right thing for the good of the realm. His problem is that honor prevents him from being able to succeed. For instance, when Ned discovers the truth about Jamie and Cersei’s incest, he decides to wait before exposing and arresting them. Rather than moving swiftly, Ned acts honorably and warns Cersei to leave the capital. The scene between the two is instructive on revealing how little Ned understands how politics works:

Eddard Stark: When the king returns from his hunt, I will tell him the truth. You must be gone by then, you and your children; I won’t have their blood on my hands. Go as far away as you can with as many men as you can, because wherever you go, Robert’s wrath will follow you.

Cersei Lannister: And what of my wrath, Lord Stark? You should have taken the realm for yourself. Jaime told me about the day King’s Landing fell. He was sitting on the Iron Throne, and you made him give it up. All you needed to do was climb the steps yourself … such a sad mistake.

Eddard Stark: I’ve made many mistakes in my life, but that wasn’t one of them.

Cersei Lannister: Oh, but it was. When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground. (“You Win or You Die”)

Indeed, Ned had lost his chance for power at the end of the Robert’s rebellion and he lost his chance to defeat Cersei by informing her in advance that he planned to arrest her. Cersei took advantage of Ned’s weakness in acting honorably (and relying on Littlefinger) by mobilizing her own forces and taking him prisoner. Cersei was correct, there was no middle ground in the game of thrones, you either play to win as she was, or you lose.

Although Cersei is able to stay informed of the various factions and plots in King’s Landing, she recognizes that knowledge is not enough to rule (although it is necessary). She knows that knowledge is nothing without the power to implement it. For instance, when Littlefinger hints to her that he knows she has an incestuous relationship with Jamie and that gives him power over her, Cersei quickly disabuses him of that notion by ordering her guards to kill him:

Cersei Lannister: I heard a song once, about a boy of modest means, found his way in the home of a very prominent family. He loved the eldest daughter. Sadly, she had eyes for another.

Petyr Baelish: When boys and girls live in the same home, awkward situations can arise. Sometimes, I’ve heard, even brothers and sisters develop certain affections. And when those affections become common knowledge, well that is an awkward situation indeed, especially in a prominent family. Prominent families often forget a simple truth I found.

Cersei Lannister: And which truth is that?

Petyr Baelish: Knowledge is power.

[Cersei pauses a moment]

Cersei Lannister: [to her guards] Cut his throat. [her guards move to do so]

Cersei Lannister: No, wait. [chuckles] I’ve changed my mind. Let him go. [her guards do so] Step back three paces. [they obey]. Turn around. [they obey] Close your eyes. [they obey].

Cersei Lannister: [steps up to Petyr] Power is power. (“The North Remembers”)

While Cersei understands the nature of power, she is actually a poor political actor. Rather than seeking to broaden the base of support for her son Joffrey’s tenuous hold on the Iron Throne, she lets petty jealousies get in the way (such as with her brother Tyrion), acts in a short-sighted manner and alienates potential allies (such as the Tyrells) with her immature behavior.

If the fate of the Iron Throne were left in Cersei’s hands, it would surely have succumbed to its enemies long ago. Yet the real power behind the unstable King Joffrey is not Cersei, the Queen Regent, but her father Tywin Lannister. Tywin is everything that his daughter is not: he is a prudent political actor who is able to see the big picture, form alliances without letting old feuds get in the way and knows that those alliances have to be constantly maintained for Joffrey to stay on the Iron Throne.

Tywin has proven his ability as a political actor over and over again. For one, he restored the position of House Lannister after his own father Tytos left them in ruins due to poor investments. The vassals of House Lannister rebelled and Tywin brutally put them down, showing he understands Machiavelli’s maxim:

Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails. [4]

And while Tywin is willing to offer the carrot whenever possible to win power, he will not hesitate to use deadly force. Thus inside the velvet Lannister glove there is a clenched fist.

During Robert’s Rebellion, Tywin remained non-committal until after it was clear that Robert was going to win. Then Tywin marched his own army to King’s Landing, but he tricked the Targaryens into believing that he had come to defend the capital. King Aerys II made a fatal mistake when he opened the gates and allowed Tywin’s forces to enter. Tywin wasted no time in sacking the city and killing the royal family. Once Robert Baratheon arrived, Tywin presented him with the Targaryen corpses as proof of his allegiance. Then he solidified the alliance with the Baratheons by marrying his daughter Cersei to Robert. Thus Tywin understands some of the key lessons of politics – knowing the right moment to strike, the use of deception and force, securing your position and making the right friends.

During the War of the Five Kings, Tywin’s political skills are on display once again as he is able to build the alliances that keep his grandson on the Throne. Despite the fact that House Tyrell had allied with Renly Baratheon, who were enemies of the throne, Tywin is not above mending fences with them by having Margarey Tyrell marry Joffrey – making her the future Queen. This alliance allows Tywin to bring the substantial military forces of House Tyrell to King’s Landing in order to defeat Stannis at the Battle of the Blackwater.

Although Tywin does not trust the Tyrells, he realizes that he needs them for more than just their military support. In order to wage the War of the Five Kings, the Lannisters had to incur an enormous debt from the Iron Bank of Braavos. And the Lannister gold mines have gone dry, so they are deeply in debt. Tywin understands that without the financial support of the Tyrells, then the Iron Bank (who demand repayment) may turn against the Iron Throne:

Tywin Lannister: You don’t need to make formal alliances with people you trust.

Cersei Lannister: And whom can we trust?

Tywin Lannister: Ourselves, alone. (stands up, pours wine) The Tyrells are our only true rivals in terms of resources- and we need them on our side. (passes Cersei a goblet)

Cersei Lannister: Robert wasn’t particularly rich.

Tywin Lannister: (scornfully) Robert had me funding him. (pours himself wine) Wars swallowed gold like a pit in the earth.

Cersei Lannister:… I suppose that explains why we did so well in the last one. (takes a drink)

Tywin Lannister: D’you know how much gold was mined in the Westerlands, this past year?

Cersei Lannister: (deadpan) Haven’t a clue.

Tywin Lannister: Go on- your best guess.

Cersei Lannister:… pounds, tons, ounces?

Tywin Lannister: (grimly) Doesn’t matter. The answer’s the same.

Cersei Lannister: (stares at him)… That can’t be.

Tywin Lannister: Our last working goldmine ran dry three years ago.

Cersei Lannister: (pause) Then how do we pay for anything?

Tywin Lannister: The Crown owes the Iron Bank of Braavos a tremendous amount of money. (walks back to his desk)

Cersei Lannister: How much?

Tywin Lannister:… A tremendous amount. (sits down)

Cersei Lannister: …There must be someone, at the Iron Bank, that you can speak to- come to some arrangement-

Tywin Lannister: (impatiently) The Iron Bank is the Iron Bank; there is no someone. (takes a drink)

Cersei Lannister: (also impatiently) Someone does work there, it is comprised of people-

Tywin Lannister: And a temple is comprised of stones; one stone crumbles, and another takes its’ place- and the temple holds its’ form, for a thousand years or more. And that’s what the Iron Bank is- a temple. We all live in it’s shadow, and almost none of us know it. You can’t run from them, you can’t cheat them, you can’t sway them with excuses. If you owe them money, and you don’t want to crumble yourself… you pay it back. (pause) Vesting the Tyrells in the Crown will help a great deal, in this respect. (“First of His Name”)

And Tywin also builds an alliance with House Frey (and the Boltons), whom Robb Stark had alienated, by giving them reassurances to kill the Starks. However, while the Freys kill the Starks during a wedding feast (a  dishonorable act), they take the credit for the massacre, but since Tywin operated in the shadows, he takes none of the blame. Thus Tywin not only lets pragmatism and grand strategy guide his strategy of building alliances and maintaining Lannister rule, he also “cheats” and lets others take the blame for dishonorable acts while he appears blameless. This grasp of politics and strategy allows Tywin to come out on top, while Robb Stark who never lost a battle was ultimately defeated:

Tyrion Lannister: No, I think armies give you power. (Tywin nods) Robb Stark had one, never lost a battle, and you defeated him all the same. [Tywin nods again] Oh, I know. Walder Frey gets all the credit- or the blame, I suppose, depending on your allegiance. (pause) Walder Frey is many things, but a brave man? No. He never would have risked such an action, unless he had certain assurances…

Tywin Lannister: Which he got from me. Do you disapprove?

Tyrion Lannister: I’m all for cheating, this is war. But to slaughter them at a wedding…

Tywin Lannister: Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner.

Tyrion Lannister: (sarcastically) So that’s why you did it- to save lives?

Tywin Lannister: (impatient) To end the war- to protect the family. Do you want to write a song for the dead Starks? Go ahead! Write one. (pause) I’m in this world a little while longer- to defend the Lannisters, to defend my blood.

Tyrion Lannister: …The Northerners will never forget.

Tywin Lannister: Good. Let them remember what happens when they march on the South. (pause, puts his papers away) All the Stark men are dead. Winterfell is a ruin. Roose Bolton will be named Warden of the North- until your son by Sansa comes of age. (stands up) I believe you still have some work to do on that score. (turns away, Tyrion stands up, furious, and follows him across the room)

Tyrion Lannister: (angrily) Do you think she’ll open her legs for me after I tell her how we murdered her mother and brother?!

Tywin Lannister: One way or another, you will get that girl pregnant-

Tyrion Lannister: I will not rape her! (pause)

Tywin Lannister: …Shall I explain to you in one easy lesson how the world works?

Tyrion Lannister: (sneering) Use small words- I’m not as bright as you! (Tywin glares at him)

Tywin Lannister: The house that puts family first will always defeat the house that puts the whims and wishes of its’ sons and daughters first. (Tyrion gives him an odd expression) A good man does everything in his power to better his family’s position- regardless of his own selfish desires. (Tyrion begins to smirk)… Does that amuse you?! (“Mhysa”)

While Tywin is not a perfect political actor (his hatred of Tyrion ultimately brings about his death), he understands better than almost any character in the series the importance of wisdom. He is a shrewd political operator who sees the big picture, knows it is not enough to win power but you have to keep it, uses deception, and maintains appearances as a fearsome (albeit honorable) man. And Tywin is smart enough to know that there are some things that he doesn’t know, so he has to be willing to listen to those more knowledgeable than him. It is a lesson that Tywin attempts to pass onto his grandson Tommen on what makes a good king (in contrast to Joffrey who was a bad king):

Tywin Lannister: Your brother is dead. Do you know what that means? [Tommen hesitates in answering] I’m not trying to trick you.

Tommen Baratheon: It means I’ll become king.

Tywin Lannister: Yes, you will become king. What kind of king do you think you will be?

Tommen Baratheon: A good king?

Tywin Lannister: I think so as well; you have the right temperament for it. But what makes a good king, hmm? What is a good king’s single most important quality?

Cersei Lannister: This is hardly the place or the time-!

Tommen Baratheon: Holiness?

Tywin Lannister: Baelor the Blessed was holy and pious. He built this sept. He also named a six year old boy High Septon because he thought the boy could work miracles. He ended up fasting himself into an early grave because food was of this world and this world was sinful.

Tommen Baratheon: Justice?

Tywin Lannister: A good king must be just. Orys the First was just; everyone applauded his reforms, nobles and commoners alike, but he wasn’t just for long. He was murdered in his sleep after less than a year by his own brother. Was that truly just of him, to abandon his subjects to an evil that he was too gullible to recognize?

Tommen Baratheon: No. What about strength?

Tywin Lannister: Yes, strength. King Robert was strong; he won the rebellion and crushed the Targaryen dynasty. And he attended three Small Council meetings in seventeen years of ruling, and he spent his time whoring, hunting and drinking until the last two killed him. So, we have a man who starves himself to death, a man who lets his own brother murder him and a man who thinks winning and ruling are the same thing. What do they all lack?

Tommen Baratheon: Wisdom?

Tywin Lannister: Yes!

Tommen Baratheon: Wisdom is what makes a good king.

Tywin Lannister: Yes. But what is wisdom? A house with great wealth and fertile lands asks you for your protection against another house with a strong navy that could one day oppose you. How do you know which choice is wise and which is not? Any experience of treasuries and granaries? Or shipyards and soldiers?

Tommen Baratheon: No.

Tywin Lannister: Of course not. A wise king knows what he knows and what he doesn’t. You’re young. A wise young king listens to his councilors and heeds their advice until he comes of age. And the wisest kings continue to listen to them long afterwards. Your brother was not a wise king. Your brother was not a good king. If he had been, he’d probably still be alive. (“Breaker of Chains”)

Tywin is not the only skilled political actor. Tywin began with certain advantages such as coming from a noble house and possessing connections. Yet Littlefinger shows how it is possible for someone of modest means can gain power and influence by taking advantage of chaos. While young, Littlefinger learned that he would never win by brute force or strength, but through guile and cunning:

Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish: You know what I learnt losing that duel? I learnt that I’ll never win. Not that way. That’s their game, their rules. I’m not going to fight them: I’m going to fuck them. That’s what I know, that’s what I am, and only by admitting what we are can we get what we want.

Ros: And what do you want?

Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish: Everything, my dear. Everything there is. (“You Win or You Die”)

Littlefinger’s sense of finances and ability to pick out the correct allies (and to ditch inconvenient ones) ensures that he is able to rise high. For instance, he befriends and betrays Ned Stark. Furthermore, Littlefinger also makes sure that he loyally serves anyone he is allied to at a particular moment (he successfully negotiates the Tyrell alliance to the Iron Throne). Littlefinger’s success in gaining the support of the Tyrell elevates him to become Lord of Harrenhal, which gives him a significant amount of land and title. He uses that title to arrange his marriage to Lysa Arryn and gain control of the Vale. Before leaving King’s Landing, Baelish has King Joffrey killed and frames Tyrion for the murder, creating even more chaos in the capital. And even if Littlefinger is discovered to be the culprit, he is now safely in the Vale which is a militarily impenetrable position. And after he marries Lysa and has her killed, Littlefinger is now in a position to marry Sansa Stark, who has a claim to the North. Thus, Baelish is now clearly positioned to gain a dominant position in the Seven Kingdoms.

Yet the true genius of Baelish is not that he took advantage of the civil war to gain power and title, it is that he orchestrated the war from the beginning. Littlefinger knew that there was bad blood between the Starks and Lannisters which just needed a fuse. He also knew that Lysa Arryn loved him, so he had her poison her husband Jon promising that they would be together if she did so. And Littlefinger had her blame the Lannisters for Jon Arryn’s death, thus lighting a match (and he was careful later to kill Lysa to silence any witnesses). Petyr’s strategy is to create chaos and then use the resulting confusion to play off his opponents and rise to power:

Littlefinger: Chaos… isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, who are given the chance to climb, they refuse. They cling to the realm. Or the gods. Or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is. (“The Climb”)

Lastly, there is the example of Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf son of Tywin, who is a capable political actor. Tyrion may have a sharp tongue, drink and sleep with prostitutes, but he is extremely intelligent and well-read. Realizing that he would never have his brother’s strength, he compensates for that with book-learning:

Jon Snow: Why do you read so much?

Tyrion Lannister: Look at me and tell me what you see.

Jon Snow: Is this a trick?

Tyrion Lannister: What you see is a dwarf. If I had been born a peasant, they might have left me out in the woods to die. Alas, I was born a Lannister of Casterly Rock. Things are expected of me. My father was the Hand of the King for twenty years.

Jon Snow: Until your brother killed that king.

Tyrion Lannister: …Yes. Until my brother killed him. Life is full of these little ironies. My sister married the new king, and my repulsive nephew will be king after him. I must do my part for the honor of my house; wouldn’t you agree? But how? Well, my brother has his sword, and I have my mind. And a mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow. (“The Kingsroad”)

Tyrion is able to use his mind and sharp wit to escape from death on a number of occasions. He is also able to see the big picture and swallow his pride. Tyrion builds alliances for his advantage, but in Tyrion’s case, it is often built on genuine friendship and the pursuit of mutually assured goals (such as Bronn). This doesn’t mean that Tyrion won’t practice subterfuge or play his opponents against each other (he does willingly), but he does so with the greater interests of House Lannister and his own comfort in mind.

Tyrion isn’t necessarily interested in glory, but in advancing his own agenda behind the shadows and acting as the situation requires. Unlike Cersei, Tyrion believes that real power is not necessarily from physical force, but where people believe it resides. And if he maneuvers himself correctly, he can gain a great deal of power, as the spy master Varys reminds him with a riddle:

Tyrion Lannister: The Council has a reputation for serving past Hands poorly. I don’t mean to follow Ned Stark to the grave.

Varys: Power is a curious thing, my lord. Are you fond of riddles?

Tyrion Lannister: Why, am I about to hear one?

Varys: Three great men sit in a room; a king, a priest and a rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives, who dies?

Tyrion Lannister: …Depends on the sellsword.

Varys: Does it? He has neither crown, nor gold, nor the favour of the gods.

Tyrion Lannister: He has a sword, the power of life and death.

Varys: But if it’s swordsmen who rule… why do we pretend kings hold all the power? When Ned Stark lost his head, who was truly responsible? Joffrey? The executioner? Or something else?

Tyrion Lannister: (frowns) I’ve decided I don’t like riddles.

Varys: Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick, a shadow on the wall, and… a very small man can cast a very large shadow. (they both smile and drink) (“What Is Dead May Never Die”)

In the last analysis, Game of Thrones eschews any idealized portrayal of feudal politics for the grim reality of realpolitik. While fantasy series typically present heroes who act honorably as the ones to come out on top, in the world of Westeros, following a code of honor is naïve and bound to get you killed. Rather, the winners in the game of thrones are those who use the facade of honor, while building alliances, manipulating others and taking advantage of a situation who ultimately win.

Conclusion

In the end, the Game of Thrones series may feel like perfect escapism into a fantasy universe, but the show is so much more than that. Game of Thrones breaks with the heroic world of knights, kings and magic to show the harsh and unforgiving realities of feudalism and power politics for the viewer. It is a world where class and power matters, women are at the mercy of men, and where honor will get you killed. For Marxists, Game of Thrones is essential viewing not only for its gripping storytelling and multidimensional characters and epic battles, but for showing us how exploitation and oppression functions.

Footnotes

1. The focus of this essay will be solely on the television series Game of Thrones and not George R. R. Martin’s books. All information was gathered either from the episodes of the show or the two wikis dedicated to the television series (http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/) or the novels (awoiaf.westeros.org/). Whenever dialogue from the series is quote, the episode name can be found italicized in parenthesis.
2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “German Ideology,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03abs.htm
3. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (New York: Verso Books, 1974),147.
4. Nicolo Machiavelli, “The Prince,” Marxists Internet Archive. http://marxists.org/reference/archive/machiavelli/works/prince/ch17.htm

Doug Enaa Greene is an independent historian living in the greater Boston area. He was active in Occupy Boston and is a volunteer at the Center for Marxist Education in Cambridge. He is the author of a forthcoming book Specters of Communism on the French communist Louis-Auguste Blanqui.

A life mesmerizingly truncated, James Dean left behind only three films, and the gaping absence of the career that might have been.

Even though he only made three films, James Dean introduced Hollywood to a new kind of man: Photo above: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

by India Ross

New Statesman

17 April, 2014 – In Rebel Without A Cause, from 1955, a 24-year old James Dean, red-jacketed and tight-jeaned, climbs behind the wheel of an old black Mercury. To his right, the opponent he will race to the edge of a cliff hangs out of his driver-side window for a last slug of bravado: “Hey Toreador!”, he jeers. “First man who jumps is a chicken.” Re-inserting a trademark cigarette, Dean flicks on his headlights and hits the gas, and the two cars accelerate towards the brink. Frames from the edge, Dean glances right, grabs for the door and rolls out onto the turf. His adversary, jacket sleeve caught on his door handle and jammed into his driver’s seat, slips wrenchingly over the edge with his car.

Less than a year later, the real life James Dean, whose legacy is the subject of an upcoming retrospective at the BFI, was to die in an echoing event, flipping a race-car on a bend on a California highway. A life mesmerisingly truncated, he left behind only three films, and the gaping absence of the career that might have been. It was a sequence of events morbidly inkeeping with the themes of doomed youth his characters embodied.

The word “iconic” is tossed around ad nauseum, but if ever it were to apply, in the sense of an individual and a star whose off-screen persona outshines the sum of their roles, who bends the fabric of the society in which they live, Dean would surely qualify. In life, and even more so in death, the bee-stung darling of early Technicolor has held the awe of the movie-going public.

But facial anatomy and excellent hair were not the traits for which Dean was influential. Hollywood does not suffer a shortage of cheekbones. He slotted into a blurry interlude following the second world war but before the flowering of the Beat movement, in which the role of a man in society was under sudden and unsuspected dispute. A generation primed for combat found itself at a loss of purpose, and gender roles that were without meaning overnight began to merge and reconfigure themselves.

Dean was a new kind of man. His characters cried and struggled and screamed in frustration at the blurry world they had to live in. They were awkward and uncertain, grappling with sexuality and the disappointment in older men around them. “What can you do when you have to be a man?”, screams Jim, the tortured hero of Rebel Without A Cause, at his impotent father.

The cut of the male star was formerly more robust: Charlton Heston, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable – these were men’s men, manoeuvring from the Alexandrian chariot to the Western Front with a raised eyebrow in place. But the type of machismo with which Hollywood used to cash cheques, which slipped so easily into the rhythm of day-saving and woman-placating, is now all but redundant. George Clooney is perhaps the only contemporary relic of that 1940s flavour of heterosexuality. With a Cary Grant jawline and non-threatening cool, Clooney lingers as a housewives’ favourite, occasionally modernising his brand with political activism and dips into independent pictures. He banks on a nostalgia for the screen heroes that preceded him.

But the successors to James Dean are in evidence everywhere. From the contemplative Ryan Gosling to the part-time poet James Franco, the Emotional Man is now a marketable asset. Matthew McConaughey, 2014’s case in point, has lived an entire spectrum of masculinity, latterly dropping frat-boy kilos to become a thoughtful shadow of himself – a feminised brand that has been remunerated well beyond his Oscar.

In Hollywood today, a “male icon” is a contradiction in terms. Where fame has become all but genderless, a new batch of androgynous stars has fumbled its way to the surface. From Michael Cera to Jesse Eisenberg, the cinema is synonymous with a group of loping, hobbit-haired boys so divorced from masculinity that their characters actively mock the idea of sexual power. A swelling interest in superheroes, as an object of ironic admiration by the tech generation, is not coincidental, as fanboys reflect on a lost type of man, so distant from themselves.

James Dean opened a door for the re-imagining of the male star. An awkward icon, he gave early shape to a model that would take decades to take hold. A man not just uncomfortable in himself but in the very idea of what a man represents, alongside Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash he broke a cycle of sexual dogma, laying the tracks for a half-century of flexible, sensitive masculinity. From the Beatles to The Graduate, The Smiths to Superbad, another type of man entirely was to dominate a soft, new horizon.

By Ramon Glazov

Jacobin Magazine

Oct 28, 2013 -  The easy narrative about Adbusters, accepted by its friends and enemies alike, is that it’s, at heart, an anarchist project. To those wishing it well, the magazine is one of the cornerstones of the Left, a wellspring of anti-authoritarian tools meant to revive progressive activism and shake things up for the greater good. For curmudgeonly detractors, “culture jamming” is little more than a powerless rehash of old Yippie protest tactics. Yet anarchism, nearly everyone assumes, is either the best or the worst part of Adbusters.

But those explanations miss a much weirder side of the magazine’s underlying politics.

This March, Adbusters jumped into what ought to seem like a marriage made in hell. It ran a glowing article [4] on Beppe Grillo – Italy’s scruffier answer to America’s Truther champion Alex Jones – calling him “nuanced, fresh, bold, and committed as a politician,” with “a performance artist edge” and “anti-austerity ideas… [C]ountries around the world, from Greece to the US, can look to [him] for inspiration.” Grillo, the piece gushed, was “planting the seed of a renewed – accountable, fresh, rational, responsible, energized – left, that we can hope germinates worldwide.”

Completely unmentioned was the real reason Grillo is so controversial in Italy: his blog is full of anti-vaccination and 9/11 conspiracy claims, pseudoscientific cancer cures and chemtrail [5]-like theories about Italian incinerator-smoke. And, as Giovanni Tiso noted [6] in July, Grillo’s “5-Star Movement” also has an incredibly creepy backer: Gianroberto Casaleggio, “an online marketing expert whose only known past political sympathies lay with the right-wing separatist Northern League.” Casaleggio has also written kooky manifestoes about re-organizing society through virtual reality technology, with mandatory Internet citizenship and an online world government.

Adbusters could have stopped flirting with Grillo at that point, but it didn’t. Another Grillo puff-piece appeared in its May/June issue. Then the magazine’s outgoing editor-in-chief, Micah White (acknowledged by theNation as “the creator of the #occupywallstreet meme”) recently went solo to form his own “boutique activism consultancy,” promising clients a “discrete service” in “Social Movement Creation.” Two weeks ago, in a YouTube video, White proposed that the next step “after the defeat of Occupy” should be to import Grillo’s 5-Star Movement to the US in time for the 2014 mid-term elections:

    After the defeat of Occupy, I don’t believe that there is any choice other than trying to grab power by means of an election victory … This is how I see the future: we could bring the 5-Star Movement to America and have the 5-Star Movement winning elections in Italy and in America, thereby forming an international party, not only with the 5-Star Movement, but with other parties as well.

The day after Adbusters ran its first pro-Grillo article, Der Spiegel compared [7]Grillo’s tone – and sweeping plans to restructure Italy’s parliamentary system – to Mussolini’s rhetoric. Ten days before that, a 5-Star Movement MP, Roberta Lombardi, faced a media scandal [8] after writing a blog post praising early fascism for its “very high regard for the state and protection of the family.”

Most progressives might reconsider their glowing assessment of a party as “the seed for a renewed left” when its leaders peddle absurd conspiracy theories and praise fascists. No such signs from Adbusters or White.

But Grillo may be more than a random ally for the gang at Culture Jammers HQ.

Just where did Adbusters get its defining philosophy? Why was it always so obsessed with ads and consumerism, while hardly focusing on class dynamics until the financial crisis?

In 1989, Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn claimed to have had an epiphany in a supermarket and started a movement to fight branding and advertisement. This wasn’t to be a repeat of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book! [9]-style anarchism, with roots in Proudhon’s famous “property is theft” dictum. Culture jammers weren’t acting to communalize most products, but to “uncool” them by taking on those products’ ads, with their own slickly-produced spoofs.

To them, the brand names bearing the coolness were more important than what the branded products did. It wasn’t drinking itself that their anti-Absolut vodka ads seemed to target, but glamorous logo-brands – as if smokers and alcoholics were hooked solely on label prestige.

The earliest Adbusters website on the Wayback Machine reads like a tamer, more Canadian, version of Alex Jones’ operation. Greeting you on the intro page is a Marshall McLuhan quote about “guerrilla information war.” Above its table of contents is the All Seeing Eye engraving from US currency.

“There’s a war on for your mind!” is the current InfoWars tagline. Not too far from the early Adbusters (the “Journal of the Mental Environment”) which promised to “take on the archetypal mind polluters – Marlboro, Budweiser, Benetton, Coke, McDonalds, Calvin Klein – and beat them at their own game.”

Oddly for a site now considered left-wing, Adbusters 1.0. was cheesily evasive about its political position, claiming to be “neither left nor right, but straight ahead.”

There’s good reason to be suspicious of anyone who pulls that “neither left nor right” line. Though Alex Jones’ InfoWars may not have been directly based on early-days Adbusters, the two were undeniably similar in sentiment. Both take a hostile view to mass media and widely-available consumer products, pushing readers towards an ascetic alternative lifestyle that insulates them from “The System” and its toxic worldliness.

And, as luck would have it, both are also the merchants of the (rarer, more expensive) alternative products needed to live this lifestyle. Alex Jones expounds the virtues of food-hoarding and drives Truthers to amass his survival packs, anti-fluoride filters, and nascent iodine drops; Adbusters flogs Blackspot shoes, Corporate America protest flags, and overpriced culture-jamming kits to “create new ambiences and psychic possibilities.”

With Lasn as its guru, culture jamming became popular among activists in the 1990s. Behind all those “subvertisements” lay one big assumption: regular sheeple were so brainwashed by consumerism that they couldn’t even snicker at rose-petally tampon ads without an enlightened jammer to spell everything out for them. Every adbuster got to feel like Morpheus, unplugging Sleepers from the Matrix with the Red Pill of Situationism.

This view of society wasn’t Marxist, left-liberal, or anarchist, so much as Don Draperist: “We are the cool-makers and the cool-breakers,” Kalle Lasn told an audience of advertising “creatives” in 2006. “More than any other profession, I think that we have the power to change the world.”

Lasn might claim not to believe in leaders, but he believes in elites: marketing professionals with a higher calling, responsible for shepherding public consciousness to save humanity from brands, from themselves.

And by exaggerating the mass media’s ability to zombify the public, jammers could imagine that they, too, had Svengali-like powers over ordinary proles. For all the “tools” Adbusters offered to sway public consciousness – stencilling, stickering, page defacement, supermarket trolley sabotage – there was never much emphasis on social skills, on persuading people with politics instead of bombarding them with theater or treating them like hackable machines.

More than anything, what sets culture jammers apart from social anarchism and weds them to the Grillo camp of quacks is a unifying emphasis on a theory called “mental environmentalism.” Mental environmentalism, Micah White explains, is “the core idea behind Adbusters, the essential critique that motivates our struggle against consumer society.”

    For Adbusters, concern over the flow of information goes beyond the desire to protect democratic transparency, freedom of speech or the public’s access to the airwaves. Although these are worthwhile causes, Adbusters instead situates the battle of the mind at the center of its political agenda. Fighting to counter pro-consumerist advertising is done not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself. This shift in emphasis is a crucial element of mental environmentalism.

    …

    Mental environmentalism is an emergent movement that in the coming years will be recognized as the fundamental social struggle of our era. It is both a unifying struggle – among mental environmentalists there are everything from conservative Mormons to far-left anarchists – and a struggle that finally, concretely explains the cause of the diversity of ills that threaten us.

    To escape the mental chains, and finally pull off the glorious emancipatory revolution the left has so long hoped for, we must become meme warriors who, through the use of culture jamming, spark a wave of epiphanies that shatter the consumerist worldview.

“The end in itself.” For culture jammers, posters and billboards don’t justrepresent exploitation, they are the tyranny (“the cause of the diversity of ills that threaten us”), and fighting them trumps all the progressive causes of their would-be allies.

That “neither left nor right” thing? It wasn’t just posturing. Not only is White equally willing to work with “far-left anarchists” and “conservative Mormons” but his mentor Lasn once hoped to guide Occupy into a merger with the Tea Party [10], producing a “hybrid party” that would transcend America’s “rigid left-right divide.”

White’s explanation of how mental pollution works sinks even deeper into conspiracy babble. Sounding a bit like a Scientologist, he tells us that humanity’s biggest problems are due to something called “infotoxins” which enter us through “commercial messaging”:

    If a key insight of environmentalism was that external reality, nature, could be polluted by industrial toxins, the key insight of mental environmentalism is that internal reality, our minds, can be polluted by infotoxins. Mental environmentalism draws a connection between the pollution of our minds by commercial messaging and the social, environmental, financial and ethical catastrophes that loom before humanity. Mental environmentalists argue that a whole range of phenomenon from the BP oil spill to the emergence of crony-democracy to the mass extinction of animals to the significant increase in mental illnesses are directly caused by the three thousand advertisements that assault our minds each day. And rather than treat the symptoms, by rushing to scrub the oil-soaked beaches or passing watered-down environmental protection legislation, mental environmentalists target the root cause: the advertising industry that fuels consumerism.

Instead of blaming mental illness rates on obvious culprits – workplace stress, problems at home, school bullying, bad genes, changes to DSM criteria – the “mental environmentalists” at Adbusters pin it all on subliminal infotoxins polluting our precious bodily fluids. How do they prove it? About as well as you can prove rock albums are demon-infested or that 70-million-year-old thetans cause influenza. White has decided that “external” environmentalism just doesn’t go deep enough – only “mental environmentalists,” with their meme wars, are fighting the “root cause.”

Lasn’s “mental environment” writings are just as L. Ron Hubbard-ish as White’s. (His epiphanies spawned the concept, after all.) In 2006, hesuggested to the Guardian [11] that advertising may be the cause of “mood disorders, anxiety attacks and depressions.” Four years later, he co-wrote an article with White repeating the same claims [12], along with new fears that TV was poisoning us with too many sensual images of “pouty lips, pert breasts [and] buns of steel”:

    Growing up in a violent, erotically-charged media environment alters our psyches at a bedrock level. … And the constant flow of commercially scripted, violence-laced, pseudo-sex makes us more voyeuristic, insatiable and aggressive. Then, somewhere along the line, nothing – not even rape, torture, genocide, or war porn – shocks us anymore.

    The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment. A factory dumps pollution into the water or air because that’s the most efficient way to produce plastic or wood pulp or steel. A TV station or website pollutes the cultural environment because that’s the most efficient way to produce audiences. It pays to pollute. The psychic fallout is just the cost of putting on the show.

If “mental environmentalism” had a true ally in American political thought, it would be Allan Bloom, with his Platonist neocon fretting about Sony Walkmans and MTV reducing life to cultural impoverishment, a “nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.” You can’t as easily picture Lasn agreeing with the “Anonymous” brand of anarchism or its “Information wants to be free!” maxims: whenever volume comes up in these mental environment articles, more infomation is apparently worse.

White made this explicit in a July blog post, “Toxic Culture: A Unified Theory of Mental Pollution,” writing:

    How do we fight back against the incessant flow of logos, brands, slogans and jingles that submerge our streets, invade our homes and flicker on our screens? We could wage a counteroffensive at the level of content: attacking individual advertisements when they cross the decency line and become deceptive, violent or overly sexual. But this approach is like using napkins to clean up an oil spill. It fails to confront the true danger of advertising … is not in its individual messages but in the damage done to our mental ecology by the sheer volume of its flood.

White has even theorized a much earlier spiritual forefather for Adbustersthan Kalle Lasn: Emile Zola [13], “who wrote what may be the first mental environmentalist short story, Death by Advertising, in 1866” and offered “a deeper look at advertising’s role in inducing a consumerist mindset” with his later novel, Au Bonheur Des Dames. Yes, Zola the social reformer who devoted his career to chronicling the fecund depravity and bestial desires of the underclasses. The guy who wrote a twenty-novel cycle promoting determinist psychology and Second Empire theories about hereditary animal passions of the colonized. Au Bonheur Des Dames is a cautionary tale about the nervous excitation big department stores can wreak on women’s fragile senses.

White hopes to take some morals from Zola’s shorter fiction:

    Like junk food can make us obese, junk thoughts and advertisements can make us moronic. …We are, in a literal way, poisoned each time we see an advertisement and that is the essential danger of a consumer society based upon advertising.

    …

    Zola glimpsed a hundred and forty years ago…that advertising has poisoned our minds and corrupted our culture. As we march toward collapse, the question remains whether we will go passively toward our death and remembered only as a foolish civilization killed by advertising, or whether there remains within us a spark of clarity from which a mental environment movement may catch flame.

Advertising, to culture jammers, is virtually the same kind of universal scapegoat psychiatry became for Scientologists: an insidious, corrupting Demiurge responsible for all evils. But you’ll rarely find paranoia without self-importance. The grander vision, for Lasn, White, and their associates, is a world where marketers have the power to save humanity or destroy it with their “carefully-crafted imagery.” Instead of “clearing” the planet with Hubbard’s E-meter auditing, they hope Zen subvertisments, Buy Nothing Days, and strange hybrid political parties will be the answer.

Given the focus of their psychosis, it can often seem like culture jammers have the same concerns as anarchists and socialists: saving the environment, fighting capitalist exploitation, building a popular movement. But if they hate some of the things leftists also hate, it’s for the wrong reasons – and worse, their solutions are quack ones.

So don’t be surprised by White’s new alliance with Grillo, or Lasn’s dashed hopes for a merger with the Tea Party: Adbusters was never on our side.

See more stories tagged with:
adbusters [14]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/media/behind-bizarre-ideology-fuels-adbusters-magazine

Links:

[1] http://jacobinmag.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ramon-glazov
[3] http://jacobinmag.com/2013/10/adbusted/
[4] https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/beppe-grillo.html
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory
[6] http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-211/feature-giovanni-tiso/
[7] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/beppe-grillo-of-italy-is-the-most-dangerous-man-in-europe-a-889104.html
[8] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/05/beppe-grillo-mp-fascism
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book
[10] http://www.canadianbusiness.com/business-strategy/interview-kalle-lasn-publisher-adbusters-magazine/
[11] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jan/09/advertising.g2
[12] https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/ecology-mind.html
[13] https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot-blog/death-advertising.html
[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/adbusters
[15] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

What does "cool" even mean in 2013?

By Carl Wilson

Slate Magazine

Last month the electro-psychedelic band MGMT released a video for its “Cool Song No. 2.” It features Michael K. Williams of The Wire as a killer-dealer-lover-healer figure stalking a landscape of vegetation, narcotics labs, rituals, and Caucasians. “What you find shocking, they find amusing,” the singer drones in Syd Barrett-via-Spiritualized mode. The video is loaded with signposts of cool, first among them Williams, who played maybe the coolest TV character of the past decade as the gay Baltimore-drug-world stickup man Omar Little. But would you consider “Cool Song No. 2” genuinely cool, or is it trying too hard? (Is that why it’s called “No. 2”?)

The very question is cruel, of course, and competitive. You can praise the Brooklyn band’s surreal imagination, or you can call it a dull, derivative outfit renting out another artist’s aura to camouflage that it has none of its own. It depends which answer you think makes you cooler.

If that sounds cynical, cynicism is difficult to avoid when the subject of cool arises now. Self-conscious indie rockers are easy targets, vulnerable to charges of recycling half-century-old postures that arguably were purloined from African-American culture in the first place. But what is cool in 2013, and why are we still using this term for what scholar Peter Stearns pegged as “a twentieth-century emotional style”? Often credited to sax player Lester Young in the 1940s, the coinage was in general circulation by the mid-1950s, with Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool and West Side Story’s finger-snapping gang credo “Cool.” You’d be unlikely to use other decades-old slang—groovy or rad or fly—to endorse any current cultural object, at least with a straight face, but somehow cool remains evergreen.

The standard bearers, however, have changed. Once the rebellious stuff of artists, bohemians, outlaws, and (some) movie stars, coolness is now as likely to be attributed to the latest smartphone or app or the lucre they produce: The iconic statement on the matter has to be Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker saying to Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” That is, provided you earn it before you’re 30—the tech age has also brought on an extreme-youth cult, epitomized by fashion blogger and Rookie magazine editor Tavi Gevinson, who is a tad less cool now at 17 than she was when she emerged at age 11. What would William S. Burroughs have had to say about that? (Maybe “Just Do It!”) 

Cool has come a long way, literally. In a 1973 essay called “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” art historian Robert Farris Thompson traced the concept to the West African Yoruba idea of itutu—a quality of character denoting composure in the face of danger, as well as playfulness, humor, generosity, and conciliation. It was carried to America with slavery and became a code through which to conceal rage and cope with brutality with dignity; it went on to inform the emotional textures of blues, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, and more, then percolated into the mainstream.

Stearns argues that cool’s imperatives of flexibility and fluidity helped Americans escape rigid Victorian morality into modernity and developed along with mass production and mass media as a new individualist ethos. But most analysts agree it only became widespread after World War II. As Dick Pountain and David Robins wrote in their 2000 book Cool Rules, it “took the collapse of faith in organized religion and the trauma of two world wars to turn it into a mass phenomenon,” one that thrummed with the paranoias of the atomic age and the Cold War as well as fantasies of cross-racial convergence. (See Norman Mailer’s mostly regrettable essay on the “White Negro.”)

Elvis and James Dean introduced cool to Middle America, but it was the Beat movement that revered it most, putting its queer shoulder to the wheel, even as black poet Gwendolyn Brooks was warning that “We Real Cool” was coming to mean “we die soon.” The Beats were succeeded by both the Warhol Factory and ’60s hippie culture, which converted cool to common currency in concert with Madison Avenue. And not just in its crucible, but around the world via pop and consumer culture. As Pountain and Robins claim, “American Cool proved in the end to be more exportable than Soviet Communism.”

That oversimplified history gives some sense of how cool moved from margins to center and became our elastic container for anyone and anything with relevance and spark. To be cool is to have cultural and social capital, and most urgently it is to be not uncool—a hang-up most of us pick up in adolescence that’s damnably hard to shake even if it mellows with age. Cool is an attitude that allows detached assessment, but one that prizes an air of knowingness over specific knowledge. I think that’s why it doesn’t become dated, unlike hotter-running expressions of enthusiasm like groovy or rad. As Stearns says, cool is “an emotional mantle, sheltering the whole personality from embarrassing excess. … Using the word is part of the process of conveying the right impression.”

This is part of what makes it so easy to appropriate, to market, and even to manufacture, in a process that’s grown ever more rapid—nothing wants to be cooler today than a corporation, and digital media erase the need to wait for lifestyle and aesthetic innovations to make their way from the outré to the mainstream. As critic John Leland has put it, “In a society run on information, hip is all there is.”

That’s the trouble with trying to point to cool’s center today. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is noise-music cassettes and K-pop, adult male My Little Pony fans and Maker Faires, alternative comedy podcasts and Holy Hip Hop, the feminist Twittersphere and even creepy pickup artistry, depending who you are, and most of all it is being coolly aware of all of the above. Mind you, most claims about a new balkanization of taste are nearsighted: Contrary to sentimental legend there never was a pop “monoculture.” So the issue now is not so much cool’s fracturing as its evanescence: Cool is what’s on BuzzFeed or Reddit in the morning, but it’s not cool by end of the day. The more ephemeral, the cooler; Snapchat is cooler than Instagram, which is cooler than Twitter, which is cooler than Facebook, which is cooler than the Web, which is infinitely cooler than print.

As a result, today’s celebrities, by definition overexposed, seldom can hold on to any 20th-century-like appearance of cool. Kanye West’s endurance as a superstar is owing to the fact that cool was never exactly what he brought to the table—he has more in common with the revenge-of-the-nerds, hip-to-be-square tide that’s elevated the tech geeks. Beyoncé is an old-fashioned showbiz gal under the surface, while her 1990s-holdover husband vacillates unattractively between flirting with avant-garde artists and flaunting ever-more-venal materialism. Anonymity and disappearing acts (cf., Daft Punk or Earl Sweatshirt) can be effective gambits to extend a bit of mystique past fruit-fly timelines.

Jennifer Lawrence arguably has attained “it girl” status partly through displays of uncoolness (the Oscar-steps stumble, the zany motormouth, the gormlessness when encountering her acting heroes) that only set her actual suaveness as an actress in a more flattering light. In another register, Lady Gaga and now Miley Cyrus push themselves beyond fashionable eccentricity into the deliberately grotesque. Lena Dunham shoots herself in awkward nudity on Girls in part to knock herself off any possible pedestal. This pattern prevails even among fictional characters—the anti-heroes in 21st-century serial “quality” drama aren’t chill Eastwood or Brando types but panic-attack-prone Tony Soprano, or Walter White, whose scheming intellect is undone by his pedantic-nebbish emotional insecurity. The likes of Omar are the exceptions that prove the (white) rule.

High-profile uncoolness comes as a relief to today’s audiences, I believe, because the stakes of cool for so many of us have become disastrously high. “Knowledge work,” the main alternative to subsistence-level service jobs, demands a performance of knowingness, and the transitory instability of employment requires everyone to operate as free agents marketing our own “personal brands.” In this situation—the deregulation of everything (except pot, so it remains universally hip) and the disorganization of the labor market—coolness becomes all but mandatory, even as we break into a sweat.

For a wired generation, cool’s markers aren’t tough to acquire, but maintaining them can become a frantic preoccupation. Young aspirants in cultural fields often come off to me as fairly confident that they are cool and profoundly unsettled about whether they’ll get to be anything more. The much-maligned hipsters (a cultural bogeyman I’ve avoided mentioning till now) expand that syndrome to a parodic, near-pornographic level—their apparent overidentification with the laws of cultural capital and embodying rootless mobility exposes, consciously or unconsciously, the unspoken edicts of post-industrial cool apathy, as if to say, “All the emperor has are clothes.”

Is coolness a trap, then, a nightmare from which we need to awake? Compared to the scale of the world’s real problems, it’s a frivolous, even malignant distraction, a cul-de-sac of endless and servile adolescence. Yet once it shielded African-American culture and pried open space for Jewish, gay, and other repressed perspectives. How then does it shift when the president of the United States, a conspicuously cool customer, is black and advocates gay marriage, and when black artists (rather than white imitators, though those still abound) tend to dominate the pop charts? The post-racial society is a myth, but perhaps it is a myth of cool—the one that spurs, for instance, MGMT to cast Williams as a shaman-assassin, or Vice magazine to dabble in hipster racism, or kids at electronic music festivals to dress up in faux Native American headdresses and face paint as clueless “tribal chic” even in front of a real live Native American music group that condemns it as “redface.”

So, just as the camp aesthetic inevitably has been diluted by queer mainstreaming, maybe cool is finished as a distinct category and is now just a generic hook on which to hang hierarchy. And yet … I owe cool too much (e.g., Krazy Kat, Gertrude Stein, Thelonious Monk, Frank O’Hara, Agnes Varda, The Slits, Outkast, David Foster Wallace [despite his protests], etc., etc.) to give up willingly on its legacy of canny, impassioned skepticism and its capacity to slip the strictures of propriety and social segregation. It’s not like we’ve run out of boundaries that want crossing: What about, say, the ones that drew the rules of cool with minimal input from women, non-city dwellers, or non-Westerners? Perhaps some elegant sidestep remains around the present sensation of being hornswoggled into a symbolic-status Hunger Games in which the scramble for cred is a top-down bloodbath of “creative destruction.”

Yeah, man, that’d be coolsville.

Carl Wilson is Slate‘s music critic.

On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist, our reporter searches the north African nation for signs of his legacy

• By Joshua Hammer
• Smithsonian magazine, October 2013,

The Hotel El-Djazair, formerly known as the Hotel Saint-George, is an oasis of calm in the tense city of Algiers. A labyrinth of paved pathways winds through beds of hibiscus, cactuses and roses, shaded by palm and banana trees. In the lobby, bellhops in white tunics and red fezzes escort guests past Persian carpets and walls inlaid with mosaics. Beneath the opulence, violence lurks. During the week I was there, diplomats descended on the El-Djazair to repatriate the bodies of dozens of hostages killed in a shootout at a Sahara natural-gas plant between Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Algerian Army.

Violence was in the air as well in January 1956, when the celebrated writer Albert Camus checked into the Hotel Saint-George. The struggle against French colonialism was escalating, with civilians becoming the primary victims. Camus was a pied-noir—a term meaning “black foot,” perhaps derived from the coal-stained feet of Mediterranean sailors, or the black boots of French soldiers, and used to refer to the one million colonists of European origin living in Algeria during French rule. He had returned after 14 years in France to try to stop his homeland from sliding deeper into war. It was a perilous mission. Right-wing French settlers plotted to assassinate him. Algerian revolutionaries watched over him without his knowledge.

The Casablanca-style intrigue—freedom fighters, spies and an exotic North African setting—seemed appropriate. Camus, after all, was often thought of as a literary Humphrey Bogart—dashing, irresistible to women, a coolly heroic figure in a dangerous world.

Camus is regarded as a giant of French literature, but it was his North African birthplace that most shaped his life and his art. In a 1936 essay, composed during a bout of homesickness in Prague, he wrote of pining for “my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean…the summer evenings that I love so much, so gentle in the green light and full of young and beautiful women.” Camus set his two most famous works, the novels The Stranger and The Plague, in Algeria, and his perception of existence, a joyful sensuality combined with a recognition of man’s loneliness in an indifferent universe, was formed here.

In 1957, Anders Österling, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, acknowledged the importance of Camus’ Algerian upbringing when he presented him with the Nobel Prize in Literature, a towering achievement, won when he was only 43. Österling attributed Camus’ view of the world in part to a “Mediterranean fatalism whose origin is the certainty that the sunny splendor of the world is only a fugitive moment bound to be blotted out by the shades.”

Camus is “the single reason people outside Algeria know about this country,” says Yazid Ait Mahieddine, a documentary filmmaker and Camus expert in Algiers, as we sit beneath a photograph of the writer in the El- Djazair bar, alongside images of other celebrities who have passed through here, from Dwight Eisenhower to Simone de Beauvoir. “He is our only ambassador.”

***

Yet despite Camus’ monumental achievements and deep attachment to his native land, Algeria has never reciprocated that love. Camus is not part of the school curriculum; his books can’t be found in libraries or bookshops. Few plaques or memorials commemorate him. “Algeria has erased him,” says Hamid Grine, an Algerian novelist whose 2011 Camus dans le Narguilé (Camus in the Hookah) imagines a young Algerian who discovers that he is Camus’ illegitimate son, and embarks on a quest to learn about his real father.

In 2010, the 50th anniversary of Camus’ death in a car accident in France, a committee of intellectuals organized an event they called a “Camus Caravan”—readings in seven Algerian cities. But “the authorities refused to allow it,” I was told by one of the organizers, Fatima Bakhai, a lawyer in Oran, Algeria’s second-largest city. When Camus turns 100 this year, not a single official commemoration is planned. The neglect reflects, in part, the scars of the civil war that tore apart Algeria in the 1990s, leaving 100,000—mainly civilians—dead in fighting between Islamic militants and the military regime. Most Algerians “were too busy trying to survive to worry about our literary heritage,” say Mahieddine.

But it is also a product of Camus’ complex political views. Despite his revulsion toward French colonial prejudices and his sympathy toward Arabs, Camus believed until the end of his life that Algeria must remain part of France. Five decades later, as I discovered during a weeklong trip through Algeria on the eve of Camus’ centennial, memorials to the independence struggle are ubiquitous, resentment toward France remains strong and the Algerian government, largely made up of former freedom fighters, has willed a national forgetting of its country’s greatest writer. “Camus is regarded as a colonialist, and that’s taught in the schools,” says Catherine Camus, the author’s daughter, who lives in France and last visited Algeria in 1960, six months after her father’s death when she was 14, and who now manages his literary estate. But she insists that although her father spent his last decades in France, “he was entirely Algerian.”

“It is true that Camus positioned himself with his own little family of colonists,” says Mahieddine, who fought the resistance of superiors to make a documentary for state television about Camus’ life in Algeria. “But that should not deny his talent, his greatness as a writer, his Nobel Prize and his contribution to presenting the image of Algeria to the world.”

***

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, now Dréan, a town near Algeria’s northeast coast, 30 miles from the Tunisian border. His father, Lucien Auguste Camus, the grandson of poor immigrants from the Bordeaux region, worked in a wine cellar at a vineyard. In the opening weeks of World War I, at the Battle of the Marne, he was struck in the head by shrapnel, and died in a field hospital a few weeks later. Albert and his older brother, Lucien, were raised by their mother, Catherine Hélène Sintès-Camus, a deaf illiterate of Spanish origin. “Although she was able to read lips, some people thought her mute, or mentally retarded,” writes Olivier Todd in his authoritative biography Albert Camus: A Life. According to Camus, her vocabulary consisted of only 400 words.

When Albert was a boy, the family moved to an apartment at 93 rue de Lyon, in Algiers’ Belcourt neighborhood, a working-class district. Here Arabs and pieds-noirs lived side by side, but seldom intermingled. Albert shared three rooms with Lucien, their uncle Étienne, their maternal grandmother, and Catherine Hélène, who toiled as a cleaning woman. Camus admired her gentle stoicism, and she shaped his empathy for the poor and oppressed. “Camus always wanted to speak for those who had no voice,” says Catherine Camus. In addition, says Todd, “He was extraordinarily devoted to her.”

Camus’ boyhood home still stands: a two-story building with a wedding-dress shop on the ground floor. Out front, I meet the owner, Hamid Hadj Amar, a wary octogenarian who eventually leads my translator and me up a drab spiral staircase. The Camus place, in the rear, seems impossibly small: a tiny kitchen and three cramped bedrooms off a dark corridor. The room shared by Lucien and Albert is a 10- by 10-foot chamber with French windows opening onto a filigreed balcony. I stand on the tiny terrace and take in Camus’ view: a busy street, shade trees obscuring a block of three- and four-story buildings with deteriorating white facades, orange-tile roofs and balconies draped in drying laundry.

My translator-guide, Said, and I walk to the other landmarks of Camus’ Belcourt years, passing cafés filled with elderly Arab men playing dominoes and sipping mint tea. The streets present a microcosm of Algeria’s mixed society: fashionably dressed, Westernized women carrying baguettes home from French bakeries; a couple from the Salafist Islamic movement, the man with a long beard and white robe, the woman’s face concealed behind a black niqab.

A few blocks north, I can just make out Les Sablettes, the popular beach where Camus spent many a summer day. “I lived in destitution but also in a kind of sensual delight,” Camus once wrote, conjuring up a childhood of swimming, sunshine and soccer.

Down the block from 93 rue de Lyon, I come across the École Communale, Camus’ primary school. I push open the heavy metal gate and approach the late 19th-century Beaux-Arts relic, with curving, filigreed outdoor staircases. The stucco facade is peeling away. It was here that Camus met a compassionate teacher, Louis Germain, who “saw a bright young boy,” says Todd, tutored him after-hours, helped him obtain a high-school scholarship and introduced him to a “world of words.”

Two days after my visit to Belcourt, I’m hiking along the coast 40 miles west of Algiers. An intermittent drizzle washes over acres of Roman ruins that extend to the edges of the cliffs.

Tipasa, originally a Phoenician settlement, was captured by the Romans and developed into an important port nearly 2,000 years ago. It was one of Camus’ most beloved destinations. In his teens and 20s he and his friends would travel here by bus from Algiers and picnic among first-century temples and villas, and a fourth-century Christian basilica. “For me there is not a single one of those sixty-nine kilometers that is not filled with memories and sensations,” he wrote of his regular trip to Tipasa from Algiers in “Return to Tipasa,” a 1952 essay. “Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus’s motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening’s slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old heart.”

Camus’ years of teenage exuberance were cut short when, at the age of 17, doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. Constantly short of breath, he was forced to abandon a promising soccer career, and would suffer relapses throughout his life. Despite the often-debilitating illness, he graduated in 1936 from the University of Algiers with a philosophy degree. After a stint of uninspiring office work, Camus was hired in 1938 as a reporter for a new daily newspaper, the Alger Républicain, covering everything from murder trials to a famine in the mountain region of Kabylia, 50 miles east of Algiers. That exposé of government neglect infuriated colonial authorities. They shut down the paper and blacklisted Camus, making him unemployable as a journalist.

Said and I follow a trail along the cliffs, past grazing goats and gnarled olive trees. We thread through a field of truncated columns and tread gingerly across the disintegrating mosaic floor of a ruined villa. In “Nuptials at Tipasa,” one of four rapturous essays about his homeland published in 1938, Camus celebrated a world of sunshine and sensual pleasure. “In springtime, gods dwell in Tipasa,” he wrote, “speaking through the sun and wormwood perfume, the sea in its silver armor, and great bubbles of light in piles of rocks.”

***

One summer afternoon in 1939, on Bouisseville Beach, just west of Oran, an acquaintance of Camus’, Raoul Bensoussan, had a run-in with two Arabs who, he believed, had insulted his girlfriend. “Raoul returned with his brother to argue with the Arabs, and after a brawl he was injured by one of them, who had a knife,” Todd writes in his biography. Raoul came back armed with a small-caliber pistol, but the Arabs were arrested before he could pull the trigger.

From this encounter, Camus fashioned the novel that has come to define him. In the opening pages of The Stranger, his anthem of existentialism and alienation, Meursault, Camus’ strangely detached antihero, joins his mother’s funeral procession in the Algerian countryside. “The glare from the sky was unbearable,” he writes. “I could feel the blood pounding in my temples.” The sun of Tipasa has morphed into a sinister force in Meursault’s world—a catalyst for violence and symbol of a universe bleached of significance. Later, on a beach much like Bouisseville, Meursault encounters an Arab with a knife and shoots him to death for no other apparent reason than the unnerving brightness and heat. “It was the same sun as on the day I buried Maman and, like then,” he writes, “my forehead especially was hurting me, all of the veins pulsating together beneath the skin.”

Today the once-pristine beach that inspired Camus’ absurdist drama is barely recognizable. The sun that drove Meursault to distraction, then murder, is today buried behind a heavy cloud cover, typical of the Mediterranean winter. Trash covers the curving sweep of sand, a faint odor of urine is in the air and the beachfront is lined with dilapidated French villas, many abandoned. “My father used to see Camus and his wife here all the time,” a grizzled man who rents out sun umbrellas tells us. He directs us down the beach toward a trickle of raw sewage flowing into the sea. Seventy years ago, this stream might have been “the little spring, running down through the sand” where Meursault encountered the doomed Arab and his friends.

The Stranger concludes with Meursault in his cell, preparing for his execution, following a trial in which his lack of emotion at his mother’s funeral is cited as proof of his depravity. Facing imminent death on the guillotine, Camus’ protagonist acknowledges that existence is meaningless, yet he now rejoices in the sheer sensation of being alive. “For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the benign indifference of the world,” he declares in the last lines of the book, a cry of defiance and a joyful assertion of his humanity.

The Stranger was published in 1942, to ecstatic reviews. It earned the respect of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Left Bank philosopher with whom Camus soon formed a tempestuous friendship. Thanks in part to Sartre’s attention, Camus found himself transformed almost overnight from an obscure pied-noir journalist into a literary lion. In 1944, fifteen-year-old Olivier Todd found a dog-eared copy in the cupboard of a Jewish woman who had lent Todd and his mother her apartment in occupied Paris after she had fled the Nazis. “I went to the Luxembourg Garden, and read the novel there, 200 yards away from German sentries,” remembers Camus’ future biographer. He was taken, he says, by the “double-faced” nature of Camus, who found darkness and horror in the Algerian sunshine. “He will be remembered as a formidable prose writer, who was capable of dreaming up extraordinary stories,” Todd says.

***

In March 1940, unemployed in Algeria, Camus had gone into exile in France, arriving on the eve of the Nazi invasion. He found a job as a reporter for a newspaper in Lyon, a city under control of the collaborationist Vichy government. In January 1941, he married Francine Faure, a beautiful pianist and math teacher from Oran. But the same month, facing wartime privation, censorship and the threat of losing his job, Camus returned with his wife to Oran.

Late on a January afternoon, after a six-hour drive from Algiers, I arrive in Oran, a city of one and a half million near the Moroccan border. The narrow street where Camus and Francine lived during his Algerian interlude is lined in faded-white buildings. Camus often whiled away the hours at the nearby Brasserie la Cintra on an avenue flanked by date palms. High above the city looms the Murjajo, a stone fortress constructed by Oran’s Spanish conquerors, who ruled here between 1509 and 1708, when the city fell to the Ottomans.

Despite the city’s history and vibrant multi-ethnicity, Camus disparaged Oran as “the capital of boredom” and disliked the seedy dockyards and industrial works that separated the city from the Mediterranean. Camus was unemployed, debilitated by tuberculosis and appalled by the surge of anti-Semitism under the Vichy regime. More than 110,000 Algerian Jews lost their French citizenship. A close friend of Camus’ was fired from his job as a high-school teacher, the words “French citizen” replaced by “native Jew” in his passport. “The return to Oran, considering the conditions of my life here, is not a step forward,” he wrote a friend in 1941. But, says Todd, Camus also found much to love about the city. “The Spanish character of Oran meant a lot to him,” he says. “The Spanish architecture, the way people ate, the way they lived, reminded him of the part of him that was Spanish.” “He loved and hated the city at the same time,” Todd says.

Camus lived with Francine in Oran for 18 months. In August 1942, they traveled back to France, where Camus recuperated in the mountains from a relapse of tuberculosis. Francine returned to Algeria and Camus planned to join her. But in November, the Allies invaded North Africa; Camus was stranded in France.

Outraged by the Nazi occupation, he became editor in chief of the resistance newspaper Combat. He and the other editors—including Sartre, André Malraux and Raymond Aron—produced articles denouncing the Nazis, and secretly printed 185,000 weekly copies on clandestine presses in Paris. It was dangerous work: Camus had one close call in 1943, when he was stopped by the Gestapo and managed to dispose of a layout copy of the paper before being searched.

During the war, Camus also began working on what many regard as his masterpiece, the allegorical novel The Plague, a meditation on exile, occupation and resistance. Set in Oran, the fable unfolds with an outbreak of bubonic plague that kills hundreds of people a day and forces authorities to seal the gates to prevent the pestilence from spreading. The contagion, like the Nazi occupation of France, brings out both venal and noble qualities in Oran’s populace. One character profiteers by selling contraband cigarettes and low-quality liquor. Camus’ heroes, the physician Bernard Rieux and the journalist Raymond Rambert, courageously tend the sick and dying. Both are cut off from the women they love, but place a sense of moral responsibility over happiness. “In its calm and exact objectivity, this convincingly realistic narrative reflects experiences of life during the Resistance,” declared his 1957 Nobel Prize testimonial, “and Camus extols the revolt which the conquering evil arouses in the heart of the intensely resigned and disillusioned man.”

Camus, too, was afflicted by, as his character Rieux describes it, “those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.” But he was serially unfaithful to his wife during their long period of separation. Francine reunited with her husband in Paris after the German defeat. The Plague was published, to great acclaim, in 1947, two years after the birth of the Camus twins, Jean and Catherine, in Paris. Camus’ relationship with Francine remained rocky, but he developed a close bond with his children. “He was full of life, he laughed a lot, he was down-to-earth, he was a real father,” says Catherine, who recalls with deep affection her trips back to Algeria in the 1950s with her father. Catherine says that her father “didn’t communicate any idea of his importance,” even after winning the Nobel Prize. It was only after his death that she began to understand his significance to the world.

***

After my return to Algiers, I make my way to a hilltop overlooking the bay, crossing a plaza to the Martyrs’ Monument: three concrete palm fronds that soar to 300 feet, encasing an eternal flame. The bronze statue of an Algerian freedom fighter stands at the base of each giant frond. This colossus commemorates the conflict that erupted here on November 1, 1954, when National Liberation Front (FLN) guerrillas carried out attacks on gendarmeries. Nearby I visit the Military Museum, which traces the conflict through blood-curdling dioramas of ambushes by mujahedin and torture chambers run by the French military.

Camus had often demonstrated his opposition to the abuses of the colonial system, from his exposé of the famine in Kabylia to his May 1945 investigative trip for Combat to Setif, site of an anti-French protest by Algerian veterans that had triggered a massacre by French forces. As the war escalated, he looked on with horror at attacks against civilians by French ultranationalists and the army. But while he was sympathetic to the idea of greater autonomy for Algeria, he was also disgusted by FLN bombings of cafés and buses and rejected demands for independence. In 1956 he arrived in Algiers with the hope of arranging a truce between the FLN and French forces. “Camus came as a figure of great moral authority, granted to him by his status as a writer, his role in the Resistance and his editorials in Combat. But the idea that he could alone effect change is exaggerated,” says Alice Kaplan, a Camus scholar at Yale University who edited a new anthology of Camus’ Algeria-related writing, Algerian Chronicles.

The visit was a humiliating failure. The two sides had passed the point of reconciliation, and even supposedly neutral Algerian leaders who escorted Camus to meetings were working secretly for the FLN. Besieged by shouts of “death to Camus” from right-wing French zealots in an Algiers meeting hall, Camus returned to France, shaken.

Camus continued to seek a middle path. He intervened with French authorities to save the lives of dozens of condemned mujahedin, but refused to support the armed struggle. “People are now planting bombs on the tramways of Algiers,” he famously told an FLN sympathizer following his acceptance of the 1957 Nobel. “My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” The FLN never forgave him for rejecting its cause. Eventually, Camus stopped commenting altogether on the war, a retreat that some equated with cowardice, but that Camus justified, saying that any comment he made would inflame one side or the other.

In Camus’ “Letter to an Algerian Militant,” published in Kaplan’s Algerian Chronicles, he equates the pain he felt about the Algerian War with the “hurt in his lungs.” By the time the war ended in March 1962, anywhere from a half-million to more than one million Arab civilians and freedom fighters were dead, along with nearly 40,000 French soldiers and pieds-noirs. A million pieds-noirs fled to France; others were massacred in Oran and other Algerian cities, while still others disappeared. (Camus’ mother died of natural causes in Algiers in September 1960.) Outside the former Barberousse prison, next to the Casbah, I studied a stone tablet that listed, in Arabic, the names of hundreds of fighters executed on the guillotine by the French occupiers.

Camus’ equivocating role during the Algerian War has never stopped igniting controversy. Columbia University historian Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, berated Camus for having an “incapacitated colonial sensibility.” Particularly damning for Camus’ critics is the absence of developed Arab characters in the author’s body of fiction, a telling indication, they say, that while Camus sympathized with Arabs in general, he cared little about them as individuals. Kaplan says that Camus was simply a product of his time, and the deeply segregated society from which he came. “He knew the settler population, their poverty and their issues,” she says. Even so, many Algerian Arab writers “are deeply engaged with Camus.”

For Olivier Todd, the quality that resonates for him is Camus’ “honesty,” his refusal to insist on absolute truth. “He is constantly doubting. He has doubts about the Communists, about the future of Algeria, even about himself,” Todd says. Yet it took Todd decades to warm up to him. Todd met Camus twice, once in a Paris café in 1948, when the writer sat down at the counter with a newspaper and ogled Todd’s young wife. “I was furious,” says Todd. “I said aloud, ‘Who is this asshole? Who does he think he is?’” A decade later he was introduced to Camus on the Boulevard St. Germain and “disliked him intensely. His clothes were much too loud, and he was aggressive with me. He defended the pieds-noirs too much.” But after five years immersed in his life and literature, after hundreds of interviews and repeated trips to Algeria, “My feelings about him have changed completely,” Todd says. “I ended up liking him immensely.”

For Kaplan and other admirers, Camus was, above all, a humanist, who believed in the sanctity of life, the folly of killing for an ideology and the urgency of peaceful coexistence. “There is a Camus for every stage of life,” says Kaplan, trying to explain Camus’ staying power and relevance today. “Adolescents can identify with the alienation of Meursault. The Plague is for when you’re in college, politically engaged and sympathetic with resistance.” The Fall, Camus’ 1956 novel about the crisis of conscience of a successful Parisian lawyer, “is for 50-year-olds. It is angry, acrimonious, confronting the worst things you know about yourself.” And The First Man, a beautifully rendered, unfinished autobiographical novel published posthumously in 1994, “is Camus’ Proustian moment, his looking back on his life. You can spend your whole life with Camus.”

In a field near the sea at Tipasa stands one of Algeria’s only monuments to the writer, a headstone erected by his friends after he died in January 1960, at the age of 46, in a car crash with his publisher, Michel Gallimard, near the French town of Sens. At the time he was living in Lourmarin, a village in the Vaucluse, where his daughter lives today. (According to Todd, Camus said that the hills near his home “always remind me of Algeria.”) Weathered by the wind, the French inscription is barely legible, and the name “Albert Camus” has been defaced with a knife by someone with a grudge. The inscription is a quote from the 1938 essay “Nuptials at Tipasa,” written before the horrors of war and the personal struggles that would shadow his rise to greatness. “Here I understand what they call glory,” it reads, in homage to the seaside ruins where he spent some of his most joyful moments. “The right to love without limits.”

By GEORGE YANCY
NYT Opinionator, Sept 1, 2012

I.

“Man, I almost blew you away!”

Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer — one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s — who caught sight of me carrying the new telescope my mother had just purchased for me.

“I thought you had a weapon,” he said.

The words made me tremble and pause; I felt the sort of bodily stress and deep existential anguish that no teenager should have to endure.

This officer had already inherited those poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices that make up what I call the “white gaze.” He had already come to “see” the black male body as different, deviant, ersatz. He failed to conceive, or perhaps could not conceive, that a black teenage boy living in the Richard Allen Project Homes for very low income families would own a telescope and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

A black boy carrying a telescope wasn’t conceivable — unless he had stolen it — given the white racist horizons within which my black body was policed as dangerous. To the officer, I was something (not someone) patently foolish, perhaps monstrous or even fictional. My telescope, for him, was a weapon.

In retrospect, I can see the headlines: “Black Boy Shot and Killed While Searching the Cosmos.”

That was more than 30 years ago. Only last week, our actual headlines were full of reflections on the 1963 March on Washington, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and President Obama’s own speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate it 50 years on. As the many accounts from that long ago day will tell you, much has changed for the better. But some things — those perhaps more deeply embedded in the American psyche — haven’t.  In fact, we should recall a speech given by Malcolm X in 1964 in which he said, “For the 20 million of us in America who are of African descent, it is not an American dream; it’s an American nightmare.”

II.

Despite the ringing tones of Obama’s Lincoln Memorial speech, I find myself still often thinking of a more informal and somber talk he gave. And despite the inspirational and ethical force of Dr. King and his work, I’m still thinking about someone who might be considered old news already: Trayvon Martin.

In his now much-quoted White House briefing several weeks ago, not long after the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, the president expressed his awareness of the ever-present danger of death for those who inhabit black bodies. “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” he said. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” I wait for the day when a white president will say, “There is no way that I could have experienced what Trayvon Martin did (and other black people do) because I’m white and through white privilege I am immune to systemic racial profiling.”

Obama also talked about how black men in this country know what it is like to be followed while shopping and how black men have had the experience of “walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.” I have had this experience on many occasions as whites catch sight of me walking past their cars: Click, click, click, click. Those clicks can be deafening. There are times when I want to become their boogeyman. I want to pull open the car door and shout: “Surprise! You’ve just been car-jacked by a fantasy of your own creation. Now get out of the car.”

The president’s words, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama’s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by critical race theorists to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic violence that blacks often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian social spaces.

III.

David Hume claimed that to be black was to be “like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.” And Immanuel Kant maintained that to be “black from head to foot” was “clear proof” that what any black person says is stupid. In his “Notes on Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson wrote: “In imagination they [Negroes] are dull, tasteless and anomalous,” and inferior. In the first American Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1798), the term “Negro” was defined as someone who is cruel, impudent, revengeful, treacherous, nasty, idle, dishonest, a liar and given to stealing.

My point here is to say that the white gaze is global and historically mobile. And its origins, while from Europe, are deeply seated in the making of America.

Black bodies in America continue to be reduced to their surfaces and to stereotypes that are constricting and false, that often force those black bodies to move through social spaces in ways that put white people at ease. We fear that our black bodies incite an accusation. We move in ways that help us to survive the procrustean gazes of white people. We dread that those who see us might feel the irrational fear to stand their ground rather than “finding common ground,” a reference that was made by Bernice King as she spoke about the legacy of her father at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

The white gaze is also hegemonic, historically grounded in material relations of white power: it was deemed disrespectful for a black person to violate the white gaze by looking directly into the eyes of someone white. The white gaze is also ethically solipsistic: within it only whites have the capacity of making valid moral judgments.

Even with the unprecedented White House briefing, our national discourse regarding Trayvon Martin and questions of race have failed to produce a critical and historically conscious discourse that sheds light on what it means to be black in an anti-black America. If historical precedent says anything, this failure will only continue. Trayvon Martin, like so many black boys and men, was under surveillance (etymologically, “to keep watch”). Little did he know that on Feb. 26, 2012, that he would enter a space of social control and bodily policing, a kind of Benthamian panoptic nightmare that would truncate his being as suspicious; a space where he was, paradoxically, both invisible and yet hypervisible.

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people [in this case white people] refuse to see me.” Trayvon was invisible to Zimmerman, he was not seen as the black child that he was, trying to make it back home with Skittles and an iced tea. He was not seen as having done nothing wrong, as one who dreams and hopes.

As black, Trayvon was already known and rendered invisible. His childhood and humanity were already criminalized as part of a white racist narrative about black male bodies. Trayvon needed no introduction: “Look, the black; the criminal!”

IV.

Many have argued that the site of violence occurred upon the confrontation between Trayvon and Zimmerman. Yet, the violence began with Zimmerman’s non-emergency dispatch call, a call that was racially assaultive in its discourse, one that used the tropes of anti-black racism. Note, Zimmerman said, “There’s a real suspicious guy.” He also said, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something.” When asked by the dispatcher, he said, within seconds, that, “He looks black.” Asked what he is wearing, Zimmerman says, “A dark hoodie, like a gray hoodie.” Later, Zimmerman said that “now he’s coming toward me. He’s got his hands in his waist band.” And then, “And he’s a black male.” But what does it mean to be “a real suspicious guy”? What does it mean to look like one is “up to no good”? Zimmerman does not give any details, nothing to buttress the validity of his narration. Keep in mind that Zimmerman is in his vehicle as he provides his narration to the dispatcher. As “the looker,” it is not Zimmerman who is in danger; rather, it is Trayvon Martin, “the looked at,” who is the target of suspicion and possible violence.

After all, it is Trayvon Martin who is wearing the hoodie, a piece of “racialized” attire that apparently signifies black criminality. Zimmerman later said: “Something’s wrong with him. Yep, he’s coming to check me out,” and, “He’s got something in his hands.” Zimmerman also said, “I don’t know what his deal is.” A black young male with “something” in his hands, wearing a hoodie, looking suspicious, and perhaps on drugs, and there being “something wrong with him,” is a racist narrative of fear and frenzy. The history of white supremacy underwrites this interpretation. Within this context of discursive violence, Zimmerman was guilty of an act of aggression against Trayvon Martin, even before the trigger was pulled. Before his physical death, Trayvon Martin was rendered “socially dead” under the weight of Zimmerman’s racist stereotypes. Zimmerman’s aggression was enacted through his gaze, through the act of profiling, through his discourse and through his warped reconstruction of an innocent black boy that instigates white fear.

V.

What does it say about America when to be black is the ontological crime, a crime of simply being?

Perhaps the religious studies scholar Bill Hart is correct: “To be a black man is to be marked for death.” Or as the political philosopher Joy James argues, “Blackness as evil [is] destined for eradication.” Perhaps this is why when writing about the death of his young black son, the social theorist W.E.B. Du Bois said, “All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart —  nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil — and my soul whispers ever to me saying, ‘Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.’ ”

Trayvon Martin was killed walking while black. As the protector of all things “gated,” of all things standing on the precipice of being endangered by black male bodies, Zimmerman created the conditions upon which he had no grounds to stand on. Indeed, through his racist stereotypes and his pursuit of Trayvon, he created the conditions that belied the applicability of the stand your ground law and created a situation where Trayvon was killed. This is the narrative that ought to have been told by the attorneys for the family of Trayvon Martin. It is part of the narrative that Obama brilliantly told, one of black bodies being racially policed and having suffered a unique history of racist vitriol in this country.

Yet it is one that is perhaps too late, one already rendered mute and inconsequential by the verdict of “not guilty.”

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He has authored, edited and co-edited 17 books, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes,” “Look, a White!” and (co-edited with Janine Jones) “Pursuing Trayvon Martin.”

Bob Simpson looks at how the ability for arts and culture to thrive relies upon working people’s fight for a space of their own.

“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” — David Harvey , The Right to the City

By Bob Simpson

Red Wedge

June 17, 2013 – The 1968 French student-worker uprising popularized the phrase “The Right to the City” from philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s book Le Droit à la ville. According to Lefebvre the right to transform the urban environment cannot be restricted to people who own substantial property, hold citizenship papers or are otherwise deemed to have a higher social status. It means all of us, regardless of race, gender, age, economic status or any narrowly defined category. The city is a place of possibilities and we have a basic human right to make those possibilities realities.

Lefebrve’s subsequent book, The Urban Revolution helped to expand on his Right to the City ideas. Written in 1970, the book speculates rather accurately how urban society would evolve. There is a now a World Charter for the Right to the City which came out of the Social Forum of the Americas held in Ecuador during July 2004. The Right to the City is a global movement as the urban dispossessed around the planet struggle to humanize their own cities.

I was reading Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution while riding the CTA Red Line on an April morning earlier this year. I was headed to Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. The economically and racially diverse Uptown community was fighting school closings and the forced exile of working class people to benefit wealthy real estate interests and corporate school privatizers.

View of Uptown from the Wilson CTA stop.

Led by a new organization called Uptown Uprising, Uptown’s embattled residents had called for a rally and march to show how the power of concentrated wealth was destroying a community. With blue skies overhead, I arrived at the Stewart Elementary School playground where Uptown Uprising was gathering. Stewart Elementary, along with Stockton Elementary in Uptown, was scheduled for closing. In Chicago, school closings are often closely linked with financial speculation and gentrification.
Reggie Spears, the Stewart music teacher, was leading his band students in a lively display of musical talent, while parents and students were making colorful signs on the playground’s artificial turf — for the city is a place of creation.

For the urban elite, creation consists of monumental glittering hi-rise buildings that can easily pierce through low lying Lakefront clouds. Like Shelly’s Ozamandias they scream,” Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!” For the working class residents of Uptown, creation is a more modest affair, done on a human scale. You can often chat personally with the artists, musicians and poets who live or perform there.

But the arts require spaces for their creation. Many Chicago grade schools do not have any music programs, much less have a band. The loss of Stewart meant another creative space gone in Uptown. It’s a stark message to the diverse working class youth of Uptown. Your dreams and creativity mean nothing compared to the allure of real estate speculation. Your diversity, which is a powerful engine of creativity, is of no consequence to those who know only financial spreadsheets and investment tips.
The same can be said of other Uptown cultural spaces like the American Indian Center, the Green Mill and the Peoples’ Church. It is unlikely any would survive the financial Katrina that the city’s wealthy elite would like to unleash on Uptown.

In the formulation and implementation of urban policies, the collective social and cultural interest should prevail above individual property rights and speculative interests. — World Charter of the Right to the City

Or, as the old song goes, the working class needs both bread and roses.

Getting ready for the Uptown Uprising rally

I watched as Uptown Uprising organizer Stavroula Harissis, armed with her clipboard and a broad smile, attended to last minute rally details, while Marty Ritter of the Chicago Teachers Union passed out window signs in Spanish and English that opposed school closings. Chuy Campuzano, who leads chants at many Chicago rallies, was walking among the children carrying his ever-present bullhorn.

Left: Community organizer Stavroula Harissis. Right: Stewart Elementary music teacher Reggie Spears.

Harissis is relatively new to Uptown, but that is well within the Uptown tradition. Over time the neighborhood has been a destination for a variety of new residents including Southern Appalachian white migrants, Native Americans from across the continent, as well refugees from wars around the world. In the highly segregated environment of Chicago, Uptown has stood for multiracial diversity. 
There cannot be a Right to the City without the free movement of peoples and the desire to live amongst each other in peace.

All persons have the Right to the City free of discrimination based on gender, age, health status, income, nationality, ethnicity, migratory condition, or political, religious or sexual orientation, and to preserve cultural memory and identity in conformity with the principles and norms established in this Charter.” — World Charter for the Right to the City

Earlier migrants to Uptown had sought jobs in the small and medium-size factories that once dotted the North Side of Chicago as well as in the huge sprawling steel mills and manufacturing plants located mostly on the South Side. I worked in a small North Side factory for a few months when I moved to Uptown in 1975 from Washington DC. Some of these factories were unionized, helping to push wages up for everyone, union and non-union alike.

Traditional Marxists look upon the industrial proletariat as the standard bearers of revolution. But Chicago’s industry largely disappeared into the Global South as capitalists sought non-union low wage labor. Today Chicago is global city of finance, with serious amounts of capital flowing into real estate instead of production:

It can even happen that real estate speculation becomes the principle source of capital, that is, the realization of surplus value. As the the percentage of overall surplus value formed and realized by industry begins to decline, the percentage created by real estate speculation and construction increases. The second circuit supplants the first, becomes essential. The role played by real estate in various countries (especially Spain and Greece) continues to be poorly understood, poorly situated in the capitalist economy. It is a source of problems. — Henri Lefebrve, The Urban Revolution

Marxist economists can disagree with Lefebrve’s use of the term surplus value as it applies to real estate speculation, but the role of the industrial proletariat in cities like Chicago has greatly diminished. An already racially divided US working class is becoming increasingly atomized into various forms of low wage contingent labor even as the public sector is being privatized.
Who then will form the nucleus of a revolutionary social movement for justice?

Taking back the street with signs and chants

Lefebvre talks about the street as public space. While recognizing the negative effects of what he calls the “invasion of the automobile,”  he celebrates the street as form of “spontaneous theater” where an individual may become “…spectacle and spectator, and actor.” Despite traffic rules, traffic signs and regulations about public gatherings, the street becomes a place of unpredictable movement where surprises blossom:

The urban space of the street is a place to talk, given over as much to the exchange of words and signs as it is the exchange of things. A place where speech can become “sauvage” [wild and free] and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribe itself on walls. — Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

Chants of “Lets keep Uptown for everyone," “Save our neighborhoods! Save our schools,” and “Don’t hate! Educate!” rang out as leaflets were distributed to passersby. The signs and chants encouraged motorists to blow horns in support, resulting in a cacophony from cars, trucks and buses. Pedestrian supporters smiled, gave thumbs up, raised their fists and sometimes stopped to chat briefly. This noisy spontaneous support for protest is fast becoming a tradition in Chicago’s working class neighborhoods.

Left: Young people of Uptown. Right: Picketing on Broadway Avenue as passersby honk their horns.

Yet few people park their vehicles or interrupt their sidewalk travel to spontaneously join these protests. They cheer for groups like Uptown Uprising as they would a favorite sports team, but do not normally join the events. Lefebrve attributes this passivity to a recognition that urban democracy is mostly a sham, a shadow play at best.

The politics of noisy neighborhood protest can lead to local victories that encourage people to fight for subsequent local victories, but this seems to have little effect on the overall power structure of the city. Lefebvre also believes that it is very difficult for people to see the city in its complex totality, especially those who are migrants from rural areas or smaller towns. People’s vision is limited by past experience, by consumer consumption and by incessant media propaganda.

But beneath this seeming passivity are a mass of unsolvable contradictions that on occasion burst forth in unexpected displays of massive urban resistance. The Occupy Movement, Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Wisconsin Uprising and Taksim Square in Istanbul are recent examples.
That April day in Uptown was not one of those days. But I’m sure some of the organizers hoped that sunny day was at least a dress rehearsal.

School closings, affordable housing, and Uptown’s Alderman Cappleman

Rally speakers discussed the relationship between school closings, low wage jobs, affordable housing and social services in the ward. The name of Uptown’s Alderman James Cappleman came up often. He has been waging a protracted war against poor people since he was first elected. This included trying to shut down one of the last “men-only cubicle hotels” (called SRO’s in Chicago). These serve the poorest male population. Cappleman also tried to prevent the Salvation Army from distributing sustenance to the hungry from their regularly scheduled food trucks. Cappleman’s arrogance and general inaccessibility is a major reason why Uptown Uprising exists at all.

The Right to the City includes the right of all residents to participation in decision making and to appropriation of public space. Did Alderman Cappleman ask the residents of the SRO and the hungry people who gather around food trucks to participate in an open democratic process? Did he respect the right of the Salvation Army to appropriate public space to feed people at their own expense?
Cappleman and his affluent supporters believe they are a new urban aristocracy who should have unlimited power to remake Uptown in their own image. Uptown Uprising does not agree.

Across the street from the rally site is a large Target store, one of many new stores that now exist in Uptown. I mentioned the new Target to a rally-goer standing next to me. She liked the Target and expressed no particular animosity toward the wealthier residents of Uptown. The new stores made it easier for her to shop. As for the wealthier residents, she and the other Uptown Uprising supporters I spoke with expressed a desire for an Uptown diversity that included the affluent as well.

But is a truly mixed income neighborhood even possible?

Uptown has demonstrated its ability to maintain a racially and ethnically diverse population, but can it sustain a population that reflects social class diversity as well? So far, the answer has been a surprising yes. Gentrification was already well underway in 1975 when I lived there. But in 2013, Uptown still boasts a substantial working class. This has only been possible because of almost constant struggle.

Some faces of the Uptown Uprising.

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, groups like Jobs or Income Now (JOIN), the Young Patriots and the Heart of Uptown Coalition championed the right of working class people to decent jobs, housing, healthcare and police protection rather than police brutality. The Young Patriots, a revolutionary group made up mostly of impoverished white southern migrants, made common cause with the revolutionary Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Organization (a Puerto Rican group).

This Rainbow Coalition, as it came to be called, demanded revolutionary change in our socio-economic system, while also providing social services like healthcare and nutrition programs for children, needs which the Chicago political elite had somehow “overlooked.” When their organizations disbanded because of government repression and internal disagreements, their work was continued by the Heart of Uptown Coalition into the 1970s and 1980s.

These efforts eventually led to the election of Helen Schiller as Uptown’s representative  to the City Council, herself a product of the Rainbow Coalition. Schiller served from 1987–2011. Today, Uptown Uprising is among the many groups in Chicago who continue the tradition of multi-racial radical working class organizing.

Uptown Uprising rally speaker Virginia Hester, a 50 year resident of Chicago’s North Side and also member of the multiracial North Side Action for Justice (NA4J), called for affordable housing and equal education from the wealthy Gold Coast to mixed income Rogers Park, the boundaries of North Side Chicago. The NA4J describes itself as “a grassroots, member-controlled organization that builds power for low and moderate income people in order to advance the cause of economic and social justice on the north side of Chicago and across the globe.”

Left: Peggy Terry of JOIN. Right: Virginia Hester.

For those familiar with Chicago’s seeming relentless drive for gentrification and the closing of neighborhood schools in low income areas, Hester’s call to action may seem hopelessly utopian and naive. It would require a social revolution far more profound than even the labor revolts of the 1930s or the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

But the 1968 urban rebellion of Paris, the one that gave rise to the Right to the City movement, voiced a key slogan: “Be realistic! Demand the impossible!”

What may impossible now, may become everyday reality in an unwritten future.

The march through Uptown

The march began from Stewart Elementary and wound it’s way though Uptown with minimal police presence. Perhaps the number of strollers with babies and parents with toddlers in hand or on their shoulders convinced them that the 200-300 marchers were not a public menace. The procession was more than a march. It was also a public education project, another growing Chicago neighborhood tradition. There were stops with short presentations about the socio-economics of life in Uptown.

One important stop was at Truman College, the large community college that serves much of the North Side. It provides important educational resources for Uptown residents, but that came at a cost, the destruction of low income housing and another forced exodus of working class people. In 1968 Uptown community activists presented a plan for low income housing that would rehab the old buildings on what is now the Truman site. The plan included social services, playgrounds for kids, and a community center for the projected 8000 residents.

Left: More marchers of the Uptown Uprising. Right: Telling stories of the neighborhood as Chuy holds the bullhorn.

It was to be named Hank Williams Village to honor the mostly white southern migrants who lived there. A series of back-room deals with landlords doomed Hank Williams Village and Truman College went up instead. City planners fronting for powerful financial interests always “know better” what working class people want without ever planning a democratic process to find out what that really is.

Planners, programmers and users want solutions. For what? To make people happy. To order them to be happy. It’s a strange way of interpreting happiness. — Henri Lefebrve, The Urban Revolution

After marching on the sidewalk of busy Wilson Ave, we turned on to North Beacon Street, a quiet residential thoroughfare. Almost immediately voices among the crowd began saying, “Take the street!” An elderly woman next to me sounded the call with particular enthusiasm.

So strollers, toddlers and all, we poured into the street and took up the familiar chant,” Whose streets? Our streets!” With the police nowhere in sight, parade marshals took up the rear to watch for oncoming cars as a new exhilaration swept through us.

The street is a place to play and learn. The street is disorder. All the elements of urban life, which are fixed and redundant elsewhere, are free to fill the streets and through the streets flow to the centers, where they meet and interact, torn from their fixed abode… Revolutionary events generally take place in the street. Doesn’t this show that the disorder of the street engenders another kind of order? — Henri Lefebrve, The Urban Revolution

We stopped at the now shuttered Uptown Hull House, a descendent of the famous Hull House on Chicago’s then ethnically diverse working class West Side. Started by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Hull House had the city’s first public playground, bathhouse, and public gymnasium. It was a meeting place for the city’s low wage workers, labor activists, feminists, socialists, anarchists, progressive reformers and others.

The Hull House neighborhood art programs were especially popular and included painting, sculpture, clay modeling and basket weaving. It’s “Little Theater Movement” helped birth the Chicago experimental and small theater movement. Jazz great Benny Goodman took music lessons there as a child.

Many of our present (and very much threatened) public welfare programs can be traced to the activities of Hull House in the early 20th century. The original Hull House expanded into the Jane Addams Hull House Association and settlement houses sprang up elsewhere in the city.

Besides its social programs, Uptown Hull House also had regular art shows and was at various times home to the Organic Theater, the Pegasus Players and the Black Ensemble Theater. Playwright and screenwriter David Mamet got his start at the Organic when it was located in Uptown Hull House. It was not only a cultural space for Uptown, but for the entire city of Chicago.

In January of 2012 the Jane Addams Hull House Association, plagued by a reduction in public funding and a sharp increase in demand for its services, went out of business. Uptown Hull House abruptly closed. City authorities failed to step in and help the 122 year old organization which has done so much for Uptown’s working class. Yet, when projects that benefit Chicago’s wealthy elite are proposed, the money tap always seems to magically open.
The Uptown Hull House building was bought by David Gassman who plans to turn it into expensive apartments. He told critics of his plan: "If you want to buy the building, then you should buy it and you can do what you want.That’s what I would tell anyone who doesn’t like it. Don’t live in America. That’s how it works.”

Urbanization is a channel through which surplus capital flows to build new cities for the upper class. It is a powerful process that newly defines what cities are about, as well as who can live there and who can’t. And it determines the quality of life in cities according to the stipulations of capital rather than those of people. — Interview with David Harvey

Despite the fact that Uptown Hull House improved the quality of life for many of its working class neighbors, surplus capital as described by David Harvey won the battle.
After paying our respects to the Uptown Hull House we marched down the street to Stockton School, which like Stewart, was slated for closing. Many of Stockton’s students are homeless or have special needs. Despite support from the Uptown community, both schools were among the 49 schools that were shut down by CPS in May of 2013.

Left: Taking North Beacon Street. Right: Stockton School.

As more schools are closed and public education is privatized through charters and turnarounds, the flow of surplus capital into education is becoming a deluge. Hedge fund operators and bond traders are touting investment in education as The Next Big Thing for generating mega profits.

In Uptown and other working class communities across Chicago, these school closings are seen as a way to push low income people out of the city by destabilizing neighborhoods and disrupting the education of their children. It is an attack on their children’s lives whose effects will extend far into their future.

Pauline Lipman has written extensively about education and the Right to the City:

Education is integral to a movement to reclaim the city. It‘s a demand for all those locked out of equitable access to public education and dispossessed of their schools, a demand for public schools that are not exclusionary (racist, homophobic or discriminatory) and for all those who simply desperate to find a “good school” for their children. It is also a cry for education that develops our human potential, that prepares us to be subjects of history—to read and write the world. In the words of the indispensable radical educational journal Rethinking Schools, an education that is critical, multicultural, antiracist, projustice, hopeful, joyful, kind and visionary. – from "The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race and the Right to the City"

The Right to the City and the Urban Revolution
After leaving Stockton School the march headed back to the Stewart playground for refreshments and informal discussion as people began heading home. As I helped Stavroula Harissis carry some of the PA equipment back to her small apartment, I thought about my own brief participation in Uptown radical organizing almost 40 years before. And today here I was with a young visionary fighting similar battles, battles which predated both of us.

After the 1848 Revolution in France, Napoleon III assigned the architect Haussman the task of removing the rebellious working class from the center of Paris. He leveled the slums of the inner city and in the words of David Harvey,”…using powers of expropriation for supposedly public benefit and did so in the name of civic improvement and renovation.”

The idea was to use surplus capital to move the working class a safe distance away from the growing bourgeoisie. Harvey believes that the Paris Commune of 1870 and the 1968 French worker-student revolt were in part, an attempt by the working class to reclaim the city that been taken from them.
In the late 19th century Frederick Engels pointed out the obvious, that impoverished working class people are simply moved elsewhere like pawns on a chess board, taking their poverty and class exploitation with them:

…whether this is done from considerations of public health or for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or, owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets (which sometimes seem to have the aim of making barricade fighting more difficult)… No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise by the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else. — Frederick Engels, "The Housing Question"

In its own 21st century circumstances, the Uptown Uprising is fighting a similar battle against what Engels described. Chicago’s financial elite, through their messenger boy Rahm Emanuel, wants to drive out much of the city’s working class population, especially those who are people of color. It is ethnic cleansing by financial manipulation.

One of the criticisms against the Right to the City movement is how vague it is on what it will take to actually gain the rights detailed in its charters, manifestos, proclamations, books and scholarly articles. 

Here in Chicago, I often hear people say that we must move beyond protest. That we have spoken out in public meetings; that we have worked on insurgent electoral campaigns; that we have petitioned; that we have picketed; that we have sat-in; that we have been arrested and beaten, and all of that is true. But somehow it is not enough. We must move beyond that. But to what?

Some more faces of Uptown’s future (hopefully).

Chicago has not had an urban insurrection on the scale of Istanbul, though that is a possibility. It might help, but we are one city among many and the crisis is global. There is a democratic spirit sweeping across the planet and where it will take us is very unclear. Up against the clock of an increasingly dysfunctional global capitalism and the terrifying prospects of major climate change, we take action because we must, leaving many questions unanswered.

What does social revolution mean in the 21st century is one of those unanswered questions. Civilization and perhaps the survival of the species itself may be at stake. I like to think that some answers might emerge from diverse and rebellious communities like Uptown. They are centers of a raw creativity in culture and the arts, those expressions of the human spirit so necessary to any revolution. There are communities like Uptown around the planet in this age of mass working class migration. They are in part, the global working class in miniature, learning how to build solidarity instead of division.

No wonder they always seem to be under threat from the bulldozer and the eviction notice.

The democratization of the right to the city and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative, if the dispossessed are to take back control of the city from which they have for so long been excluded and if new modes of controlling capital surpluses as they work through urbanization processes are to be instituted. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all. — David Harvey, The Right to the City

Bob Simpson is a long-time Chicago activist and writer.