January 2017 - P2P-Foundation - lists.ourproject.org

Call for Open Access Book Proposals: Critical Digital and Social Media Studies (Univ of Westminster Press)
by Christian Fuchs 26 Jan '17

26 Jan '17

DEADLINE APPROACHING SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Monday 30 January 2017 23:00 BST by e-mail to Andrew Lockett (University of Westminster Press Manager), A.Lockett(a)westminster.ac.uk. For full details and proposal guidelines see; http://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/news Critical Digital and Social Media Studies is a new book series edited by Professor Christian Fuchs on behalf of the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies and published by the University of Westminster Press (UWP). We invite submissions of book proposals that fall into the scope of the series. CALL DETAILS After the publication of the first title in the series we invite submission of book proposals (adhering to the guidelines set out below) accompanied by one full chapter for books in the range of 35,000-80,000 words. The books in the series are published online in an open access format available online without payment using a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY-NC-ND) and simultaneously as affordable paperbacks. We are able to publish a number of books in the call without any book processing charges thanks to generous support by the University of Westminster Library that covers these fees. Potential authors are welcome to contact the series editor outside of the initial time frame of this call for book proposals but should note that priority for funding support for suitable projects will be given to those proposals meeting the deadline. We welcome submissions of a book outline proposal with (exactly one) sample chapter but only accept suggestions for books written in English. Example topics that the book series is interested in include: the political economy of digital and social media; Brexit and digital media; authoritarianism and digital media; the EU and digital media; digital and informational capitalism; digital labour; ideology critique in the age of digital/social media; new developments of critical theory in the age of digital and social media; critical studies of advertising and consumer culture online; critical social media research methods; critical digital and social media ethics; working class struggles in the age of social media; the relationship of class, gender and race in the context of digital and social media; the critical analysis of the implications of big data, cloud computing, digital positivism, the Internet of things, predictive online analytics, the sharing economy, location- based data and mobile media, etc.; the role of classical critical theories for studying digital and social media; alternative social media and Internet platforms; the public sphere in the age of digital media; the critical study of the Internet economy; critical perspectives on digital democracy; critical case studies of online prosumption; public service digital and social media; commons-based digital and social media; subjectivity, consciousness, affects, worldviews and moral values in the age of digital and social media; digital art and culture in the context of critical theory; environmental and ecological aspects of digital capitalism and digital consumer culture.

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Fwd: Your library and WEA Paperbacks
by Michel Bauwens 26 Jan '17

26 Jan '17

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Fwd: [CommonGood] Degrowth im movement(s) - 21 texts in English online, 3 texts incl. Unconditional Basic Income
by Michel Bauwens 24 Jan '17

24 Jan '17

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kipping Katja Mitarbeiter 02 <katja.kipping.ma02(a)bundestag.de> Date: Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 9:35 PM Subject: [CommonGood] Degrowth im movement(s) - 21 texts in English online, 3 texts incl. Unconditional Basic Income To: Common Good Newsgroup <commongood(a)listi.jpberlin.de> *Degrowth im movement(s) - 21 texts in English online, 3 texts incl. **UBI:* *- See especially text number 18 : Unconditional Basic Income <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/unconditional-basic-in…> by Ronald Blaschke - "**Sustainable Ecological Transition is Impossible Without Unconditional Social Security for All People"* *also text number 5 "Care Revolution" and text number 8 "Degrowth".* Best regards, Ronald Blaschke ------------------------------------------ *** please spread*** *Degrowth in movement(s) - 21 texts now available in English!* <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/> [image: DIM Logo] <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/> Degrowth is not only a label for an ongoing discussion on alternatives, and not just an academic debate, but also an emerging social movement. Regardless of many similarities, there is quite some lack of knowledge as well as scepticism, prejudice and misunderstanding about the different perspectives, assumptions, traditions, strategies and protagonists both within degrowth circles as well as within other social movements. Here, space for learning emerges – also to avoid the danger of repeating mistakes and pitfalls of other social movements. At the same time, degrowth is a perspective or a proposal which is or can become an integral part of other perspectives and social movements. The integration of alternatives, which are discussed under the discursive roof of degrowth, into other perspectives often fails because of the above mentioned scepticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings. *The multi-media project "Degrowth in movement(s)" shows which initiatives and movements develop and practice social, ecological and democratic alternatives*. Representatives from 32 different fields describe their work and history, their similarities & differences to others and possible alliances. From the Solidarity Economy to the Refugee-Movement, from Unconditional Basic Income to the Anti-Coal-Movement, from Care Revolution to the Trade Unions - they discuss their relationship to degrowth in texts, videos, photos and podcasts. The project was run by the "Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie" (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) in Germany, so most of the authors are from there. However, there are a couple of clearly international perspectives and most of the movements work far beyond the national level. You can find the English texts <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/> here. For now, we have translated 21 texts: 1. Introduction <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/introduction/> by Corinna Burkhart, Dennis Eversberg, Matthias Schmelzer and Nina Treu 2. 15 M <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/15m/> by Eduard Nus 3. Artivism <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/artivism/> by John Jordan 4. Buen Vivir <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/buen-vivir/> by Alberto Acosta (with VIDEO) 5. *Care Revolution <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/care-revolution/> by Matthias Neumann and Gabriele Winker* 6. Climate Justice <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/climate-justice/> by Tadzio Müller 7. Commons <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/commons/> by Johannes Euler and Leslie Gauditz 8. *Degrowth <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/degrowth/> by Corinna Burkhart, Dennis Eversberg, Matthias Schmelzer and Nina Treu * 9. Demonetize <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/demonetize/> by Andrea*s Exner, Justin Morgan, Franz Nahrada, Anitra Nelson, Christian Siefkes 10. Environmental Movement (NGO) <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/environmental-movement…> by Franziska Sperfeld, Kai Niebert, Theresa Klostermeyer and Hauke Ebert 11. Food Sovereignty <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/food-sovereignty/> by Irmi Salzer and Julianna Fehlinger 12. Free Software <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/free-software-movement/> by Gualter Barbas Baptista 13. Peoples Global Action <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/peoples-global-action/> by Friederike Habermann (VIDEO coming soon) 14. Radical Ecological Democracy <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/radical-ecological-demo…> by Ashish Kothari 15. Refugee Movement <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/refugee-movement/> by Olaf Bernau (with VIDEO) 16. Solidarity Economy <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/solidarity-economy/> by Dagmar Embshoff, Clarita Müller-Plantenberg and Giuliana Giorgi 17. Transition Initiatives <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/transition-initiatives/>by Gesa Maschkowski, Stephanie Ristig-Bresser, Silvia Hable, Norbert Rost and Michael Schem 18. *Unconditional Basic Income <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/unconditional-basic-in…> by Ronald Blaschke* 19. Unions <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/unions/> by Jana Flemming and Norbert Reuter 20. Youth Environmental Movement <http://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/youth-environmental-mov…> by Janna Aljets and Katharina Ebinger 21. Closing chapter <https://www.degrowth.de/en/dim/degrowth-in-movements/closing-chapter/> by Corinna Burkhart, Matthias Schmelzer and Nina Treu Enjoy reading! *** please spread *** _______________________________________________ CommonGood Mailingliste JPBerlin - Politischer Provider CommonGood(a)listi.jpberlin.de https://listi.jpberlin.de/mailman/listinfo/commongood -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: an image
by Michel Bauwens 23 Jan '17

23 Jan '17

dear Stacco and Ann-Marie, thanks for sharing the wonderful poster below on our blog, Michel ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Caroline Woolard <carolinewoolard(a)gmail.com> Date: Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 7:30 PM Subject: an image To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> Michel, I hope this email finds you in community. I'm writing because I made an illustration that I think you'll appreciate, which can be used to educate people about the solidarity economy. Here are free PDFs to print at 11 x 17 with text in Mandarin, Spanish, and English. Free PDF in Mandarin: http://carolinewoolard.com/static/uploads/texts/ Solidarity_Economy_poster_Mandarin.pdf Free PDF in Spanish: http://carolinewoolard.com/static/uploads/texts/ Solidarity-Economy-poster-Espanol_1.pdf Free PDF in English: http://carolinewoolard.com/static/uploads/texts/ Solidarity-Economy-poster-English_1.pdf Jeff Warren and I made this image / coloring book to visualize the Solidarity Economy in a neighborhood. There will be free prints at the Queens Museum and at Cooper Union in NYC today, too. Feel free to print a TON. If you want to order a print to benefit NAACP or SPLC please go to: http://unterbahn.com/solidarity/ Together, Caroline -- *(cell) 929-522-9064 * *(web) http://carolinewoolard.com <http://carolinewoolard.com>* -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: FW: FraudStop: Turn the tables on the Turnbull Government
by Michel Bauwens 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Patricia Morgan <p.morgan(a)unsw.edu.au> Date: Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 1:21 PM Subject: FW: FraudStop: Turn the tables on the Turnbull Government To: Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> Hi Michel, Greetings from a sunny day here in Sydney. I thought you might like to read about this initiative – this group Getup have devised this free software to help people who are under attack from the government here in Australia. All the best, Patricia *From:* Mark – GetUp! [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Saturday, January 21, 2017 2:56 PM *To:* Patricia Morgan *Subject:* FraudStop: Turn the tables on the Turnbull Government Patricia, Each week, 20,000 more people are getting crushed by the Turnbull Government's automated debt system.1 And it's about to expand rapidly to pensioners and people with disabilities.2 *So we're creating FraudStop – a free automated tool to fight back against the Turnbull Government's automated attack on everyday people.* Every aspect of the new Centrelink review process is designed to frustrate people until they give up and pay debts they don't owe. It's a demoralising attack by a callous government. But they didn't count on *FraudStop*, which lets people lodge an appeal in * just five minutes*, instead of waiting hours on the phone with no result. We're urgently working to launch *FraudStop* nationwide next week -- but we need the funding to prepare for thousands of users, pay the processing costs on their behalf, and advertise it to the hundreds of thousands of people who need it. *Can you chip in $10, or whatever you can, to help the turn the tables on the Turnbull Government's debt-threat fraud?* <https://getup.org.au/debt-letter-fightback?t=3qkYgWf07A&utm_content=16565&u…> FraudStop thwarts the corrupted Centrelink review process by launching a multi-pronged response through a single five-minute form. - *Appeal By Post.* People are running out of call minutes trying to get through to understaffed Centrelink offices.3 You can't formally appeal in person or online, so FraudStop submits an appeal by post, free of charge. - *FOI Request.* Shockingly, Centrelink staff are directed not to consider evidence already on file, like pay slips and doctor's certificates. 4 So FraudStop submits an FOI request for a person's file, to get the evidence Centrelink already has, instead of desperately searching for paperwork from five years ago. - *Help from local MP.* FraudStop submits a request for help to a person's local MP, which is often the best way to get things resolved quickly. Even in the testing phase, we're already hearing about local MPs responding to help. *We need your help to run FraudStop as a free community service.* The technology requires continued maintenance – and there are processing costs for every appeal. Most critically, we need a large ad campaign to get it in front of the people who need it. *Can you chip in $10 to launch FraudStop nationwide next week, before the Turnbull Government attacks tens of thousands of pensioners and people with disabilities?* <https://getup.org.au/debt-letter-fightback?t=3qkYgWf07A&utm_content=16565&u…> Already more than 250 people have used FraudStop to challenge their debt threats – just in its initial testing phase. And we've learned it's providing desperate people with some hope. *Angela, a GetUp member posting on Facebook, shared this story:* ***Trigger warning: Includes mention of suicide*** *"My friend who was suicidal over a debt threat was beyond pleased when I showed her the GetUp page. She felt relieved that now she had options and could do something about it. I honestly think you saved her life … and I say that without exaggeration."* There are thousands more people in the same situation. *Let's make sure they have a way to fight back, and let them know they're not alone.* *Chip in $10, or whatever you can, to fund FraudStop and give hope to people suffering under the Turnbull Government's fraudulent debt threats.* <https://getup.org.au/debt-letter-fightback?t=3qkYgWf07A&utm_content=16565&u…> Thanks for helping people who truly need it, Mark, Ruby, Daney and Django, for the GetUp team PS – *FraudStop is just one part of our fight back against the Turnbull Government's automated debt threats.* Right now we're seeking initial advice on legal challenges to stop the whole system, as well as a class action to recover the false debts. And we're going to pile on the political pressure by taking on Social Services Minister Christian Porter in his electorate of Pearce, where polling (funded by GetUp members!) shows he's already down 5 points thanks to the Centrelink fraud fiasco.5 *Chip in $10 now to make sure we end the Turnbull Government's fraudulent debt system once and for all.* <https://getup.org.au/debt-letter-fightback?t=3qkYgWf07A&utm_content=16565&u…> PPS – If you've received a debt letter and want to submit an appeal, you can use our beta version of *FraudStop* at fraudstop.com.au <https://fraudstop.com.au?t=3qkYgWf07A&utm_content=16565&utm_campaign=FraudS…> right now. If you or someone you know needs help, or to talk to someone, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. *References: [1] Fears Centrelink online glitch may send welfare recipients to debt collectors, The Guardian, 19 December 2016 [2] Centrelink's controversial data matching program to target pensioners and disabled, Labor calls for suspension, ABC News, 17 January 2017 [3] Talking Point: When the truth is a too-bitter pill, The Mercury, 21 January 2017 [4] Centrelink staff told not to fix mistakes in debt notices – whistleblower, The Guardian, 19 January 2017 [5] Robo-debt poll blow to Porter, The West Australian, 19 January 2017 * ------------------------------ GetUp is an independent, not-for-profit community campaigning group. We use new technology to empower Australians to have their say on important national issues. We receive no political party or government funding, and every campaign we run is entirely supported by voluntary donations. If you'd like to contribute to help fund GetUp's work, please donate now! <https://www.getup.org.au/donate/make-a-donation?t=3qkYgWf07A&utm_content=16…> To unsubscribe from GetUp, please click here <http://www.getup.org.au/unsubscribe?t=3qkYgWf07A&utm_content=16565&utm_camp…>. *Our team acknowledges that we meet and work on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We wish to pay respect to their Elders - past, present and future - and acknowledge the important role all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to play within Australia and the GetUp community. * Authorised by Paul Oosting, Level 14, 338 Pitt Street, Sydney NSW 2000. -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Frankfurt School Critical Theory - Donald Trump, authoritarian capitalism/populism & Twitter
by Christian Fuchs 20 Jan '17

20 Jan '17

Read how Donald Trump is prototypical for a new form of authoritarian capitalism. What is authoritarian capitalism? How does Trump practice authoritarian capitalism? These questions are discussed in C. Fuchs' new study "Donald Trump: A Critical Theory-Perspective on Authoritarian Capitalism" that uses critical theory for the analysis of Trump: http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/835 What does Trump's Twitter use tell us about how politics works in authoritarian capitalism? The following piece analyses how Twitter's me-centredness is the ideal tool for Trump's narcissistic and authoritarian politics: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/christian-fuchs1/how-the-frankfurt-school-_… Critical theory is urgently needed today... The journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique will throughout 2017 operate the special section "Critical Theory Interventions on Authoritarianism and Right-Wing Extremist Ideology in Contemporary Capitalism" and invites submission of interventionist contributions to this section - Submission details: http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions Please make sure to use the template and to apply the guidelines http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/abou/submissions#authorGuidelines

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Fwd: Normalizing Trump's Authoritarianism is Not an Option
by Michel Bauwens 20 Jan '17

20 Jan '17

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tikkun <magazine(a)tikkun.org> Date: Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 7:02 PM Subject: Normalizing Trump's Authoritarianism is Not an Option To: Michelsub2004(a)gmail.com <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=R3%2BDpZrjd8GCAvHcBdeHfUVDjXRf…> January 19, 2017 Normalizing Trump’s Authoritarianism is Not an Option by Henry A. Giroux The dark times that haunt the current age no longer appear as merely an impending threat. They have materialized with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump and his administration of extremists epitomize the dire dangers posed by those who longed to rule American society without resistance, dominate its major political parties, and secure uncontested control of its commanding political, cultural, and economic institutions. The consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of the financial elite along with the savagery and misery that signifies their politics is no longer the stuff of Hollywood films such as *Wall Street* and *American Psycho*. If George W. Bush’s reign of fearmongering, greed, and war on terror embodied the values of a kind of militarized Gordon Gekko, Trump represents the metamorphosis of Gekko into the deranged and ethically neutered, Patrick Bateman. Yet, Trump’s ascent to the highest office in America is already being normalized by numerous pundits and politicians, including Barack Obama, who are asking the American public to give Trump a chance or are suggesting that the power and demands of the presidency will place some restraints on his unrestrained impetuousness and often unpredictable behavior. As might be expected, a range of supine politicians, media pundits, and mainstream journalists are already tying themselves in what Tom Engelhardt calls “apologetic knots” while they “desperately look for signs that Donald Trump will be a pragmatic, recognizable American president once he takes the mantle of power.”[1] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn1> As comedian John Oliver pointed out on his show, *Last Week Tonight*, Trump is not ordinary and his politics forebode the storm clouds of an American version of authoritarianism. Oliver brought his point home by shouting repeatedly “This is not normal,” and, of course, he is right! It is even more surprising that Lesley Stahl’s *60 Minut*e interview with Trump portrayed him less as a demagogue than as a transformed politician who was “subdued and serious.”[2] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn2> In addition, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell “reported approvingly upon the transition as if proposed White House counselor Steve Bannon and proposed attorney general Jeff Sessions, two men with racism in their pasts, were ordinary appointments.” [3] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn3> High profile celebrity, Oprah Winfrey, stated without irony, in an interview with *Entertainment Tonight *that “I just saw President-elect Trump with President Obama in the White House, and it gave me hope.”[4] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn4> This is quite a stretch given Trump’s history of racist practices, his racist remarks about Blacks, Muslims, and Mexican immigrants during the primary and the presidential campaigns, and his appointment of a number of cabinet members who embrace a white nationalist ideology. *The* *New York Times’ *opinion writer, Nicholas Kristof, sabotaged his self-proclaimed liberal belief system by noting, in what appears to be acute lapse of judgment, that Americans should “Grit [their] teeth and give Trump a chance.”[5] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn5> Bill Gates made clear his own and often hidden reactionary world view when speaking on CNBC’s *Squawk Box*. The Microsoft co-founder slipped into fog of self-delusion by stating that Trump had the potential to emulate JFK by establishing an upbeat and desirable mode of “leadership through innovation.”[6] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn6> <#m_8655823248749904935__edn6> Such actions by the mainstream media and such highly visible pundits point to not just a retreat from responsible reporting, discourse, and a flight from any vestige of social responsibility, but also the further collapse of serious journalism and thoughtful reasoning into the corrupt world of a corporate controlled media empire and an infantilizing celebrity culture. Normalizing the Trump regime does more than sabotage the truth, moral responsibility, and justice; it also cancels out the democratic institutions necessary for a future of well-being and economic and political justice. *New York Times* columnist, Charles Blow, observes insightfully that under a Trump administration: The nation is soon to be under the aegis of an unstable, unqualified, undignified demagogue [who surrounds] himself with a rogue’s gallery of white supremacy sympathizers, anti-Muslim extremists, devout conspiracy theorists, anti-science doctrinaires and climate change deniers….This is not normal [and] I happen to believe that history will judge kindly those who continued to shout, from the rooftops, through own weariness and against the corrosive drift of conformity.[7] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn7> Blow is right. Any talk of working with a president who has surrounded himself with militarists, racists, neo-fascists, anti-intellectuals, and neoliberal fundamentalists should be resisted at all cost. It is well worth remembering that Trump chose to put Steve Bannon, a notorious anti-Semite and white supremacist, at the center of power in the White House. As Reuters reported, “White supremacists and neo-Nazis have rarely, if ever, in recent history been so enthusiastic about a presidential appointment as Donald Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon to be his chief White House strategist.”[8] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn8> Trump has also surrounded himself with militarists and corporate ideologues who fantasize about destroying all vestiges of the welfare state and the institutions that produce the public values that support the social contract. Neal Gabler argues that the normalizing of Trump by the mainstream media is about more than the dereliction of duty my members of the mainstream media. He writes: Far more serious is their normalization not of Trump but of his voters. The former is typical cowardice under threat of reactionary populism. The latter is an endorsement of reactionary populism that may have far-reaching consequences for whether the country can ever be reunited after having been torn asunder.[9] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn9> Normalization is code for a retreat from any sense of moral and political responsibility, and it should be viewed as an act of political complicity with authoritarianism and condemned outright. What is being propagated by Trump’s apologists is not only a reactionary popularism and some fundamental tenets of an American style authoritarianism, but also a shameless whitewashing of the racism and authoritarianism at the center of Trump’s politics. In addition, little has been said about how Trump and his coterie of semi-delusional, if not heartless, advisors embrace a demented appropriation of Ayn Rand’s view that selfishness, war against all competition, and unchecked self-interest are the highest human ideals. In addition, arguments in defense of such normalization appear to overlook with facile indifference how the rhetoric of authoritarianism has become normalized in many parts of the world and that the Trump administration has clearly demonstrated an affinity with such hateful rhetoric. How else to explain the support that Trump has received from a number of ruthless dictators who head reactionary governments such as the Philippines, Turkey, and Egypt, among others. Such a danger is all the more ominous given the current collapse of civic literacy and the general public’s increasing inability to deal with complex issues, on one hand, and the attempt, on the other hand, by those who maintain power to ruthlessly promote a depoliticizing discourse of lies, simplicity, and manufactured distortions. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=h%2B294j8BiLP%2Bjo%2BAetVYdkVD…> The United States has entered a new historical conjuncture, which echoes elements of a totalitarian past. Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, and Robert Paxton, the great theorists of totalitarianism believed that the fluctuating elements of fascism are still with us and that they would crystalize in different forms.[10] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn10> Far from being fixed in a frozen moment of historical terror, these theorists believed that totalitarianism not only “heralds as a possible model for the future”[11] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn11> but that its “protean origins are still with us.”[12] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn12> Arendt, in particular, was keenly aware that a culture of fear, the dismantling of civil and political rights, the ongoing militarization of society, the attack on labor, an obsession with national security, human rights abuses, the emergence of a police state, a deeply rooted racism, and the attempts by demagogues to undermine education as a foundation for producing critical citizenry were all at work in American society. Historical conjunctures produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for democracy, dissent, and human rights.[13] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn13> More recently, Robert Paxton in his seminal work, *The Anatomy of Fascism*, provides a working definition of fascism that points to both its anti-democratic moments and those elements that link it to both the past and the present. Paxton’s point is not to provide a precise definition of fascism but to understand the conditions that enabled fascism to work and make possible its development in the future. Accordingly, fascism is: A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.[14] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn14> It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly categorizes a country as either authoritarian *or* democratic and leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems. American politics today suggests a more updated if not different form of authoritarianism or what might be called the curse of totalitarianism. In Trump’s America, there are strong echoes of the fascism that developed in Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s. For instance, there are resemblances to a fascist script in Trump’s scapegoating of other; his claim that the United States is in a period of decline; his call to make America great again; his blatant appeal to ultra-nationalism; his portrayal of himself as a strongman who alone can save the country; his appeal to aggression and violence aimed at those who disagree with him; his contempt for dissent; his deep rooted anti-intellectualism or what Arendt called “thoughtlessness” (i.e., denial that climate change is produced by humans) coupled with his elevation of instinct and emotion over reason; his appeal to xenophobia, national greatness, and support for a politics of disposability; his courting of anti-Semites, white supremacists, and flirtation with the discourse of racial purity; his support for a white Christian public sphere; his use of a kind of verbal waterboarding to denigrate Muslims, Blacks, illegal immigrants, and women’s reproductive rights; his contempt for weakness and his support for the dark side of hyper-masculinity. I argue in this essay that the dark period Americans are about to enter under a Trump regime cannot be understood without an acknowledgement of the echoes of a totalitarian past. With Trump’s election, the crisis of politics is accompanied by a crisis of historical conscience, memory, ethics, and agency exacerbated by an appeal to a notion of common sense in which facts are regarded with disdain, words reduced to slogans, and science confused with pseudo-science. Under such circumstances, language is emptied of any meaning and constitutes a flight from ethics, justice, and social responsibility. As language becomes devoid of any meaning, the American public is inundated with empty slogans such as “post-truth” and “fake news”—euphemisms for a landscape of manufactured derangements and distortions that constitute what might be called a culture of post-ethics. This culture is part of what Todd Gitlin calls “an interlocking ecology of falsification that has driven the country around the bend.”[15] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn15> Against the background of an infantilizing culture of immediacy, spectacle, and sensationalism, Trump will govern as if he is running a reality TV show, endlessly performing for an increasingly depoliticized public. But there are more dangers ahead than the toxic seduction of politics as theater and the transformation of the mainstream media as adjunct of the entertainment industry or for that matter a growing distrust of democracy itself. Under casino capital, the alleged celebration of the principle of a free press hides more than it promises. Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers, and Robert McChesney, among others, have observed, mainstream media now work in conjunction with the financial elite and the military-industrial-academic complex as an echo chamber while further indulging in the rituals of shock, celebrity culture, and spectacularized violence in order to increase their ratings. Earlier this year, Les Moonves, CBS CEO stated that his network’s inordinate and disastrous coverage of Trump “may not be good for America but it’s damn good for CBS.”[16] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn16> Moonves openly gloated not only because the network was pumping up its ratings but was also getting rich by inordinately covering Trump’s presidential campaign. As he put it, [T]he money’s rolling in … [T]his is going to be a very good year for us….It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going."[17] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn17> Moonves made it clear that the power of mainstream media in general has little to do with either pursuing the truth or holding power accountable. On the contrary, its real purpose was to normalize corruption, lies, misrepresentation, accumulate capital, and allow the transformation of the press to become an adjunct of authoritarian ideologies, policies, interests and commodified values—if that is what it takes to increase their profit margins. Normalization is about more than dominating media outlets being complicit with corrupt power or willfully retreating from any sense of social responsibility; it is also about aiding and abetting power in order to increase the bottom line and accumulate other cowardly forms of power and recognition. This is evident in the fact that some powerful elements of the mainstream press not only refused to take Trump seriously, they also concocted embarrassing rationales for not holding him up to any viable sense of accountability. For instance, Gerard Baker, the editor-in-chief of *The Wall Street Journal*, publicly announced that in the future he would not allow his reporters to use the word lie in their coverage. This is more than a retreat from journalism’s goal of holding people, institutions, and power to some measure of justice; it also legitimizes the kind of political and moral cowardice that undermines the truth, informed resistance, and the first amendment. While such actions may not rise to the level of book burning that was characteristic of various fascist and authoritarian regimes in the past, it does mark a distinctive retreat from historical memory and civic courage that serves to normalize such actions by making dissent appear, at best, unreasonable and, at worse, an act of treason. Such actions become apparent in efforts by the mainstream press to rage against the rise of fake news, suggesting that since they are not part of such attempts their integrity cannot be questioned. Of course, fake news is a euphemism for deliberately lying and collapsing the line between facts and fiction, the truth and falsehoods. By that definition, lying is about more than fake news, it is central to the need to manufacture consent in the interest of implementing polices, constructing identities, and shoring up values that serve a wide range of unsavory political and ideological interests. The slippery nature of the term fake news is on full display particularly when used by Trump and his merry band of liars to dismiss anyone or any organization that holds him accountable for his fabrications. Hence, there were no surprises when Trump at his first president-elect press conference refused not only to take questions from a CNN reporter because his network had published material critical of Trump, but he justified his refusal by labeling CNN as fake news—reducing the term to a slogan used to silence the press. Clearly, we will see more of this type of bullying repression and censorship but it will not be aimed just at mainstream outlets such as CNN but will also eventually be used to smear all manner of alternative social media such as *Truthout, Tikkun, Counterpunch, TomDispatch.com, Democracy Now*, and others. Traditional democratic public spheres such as higher education will also feel the brunt of such an attack. Normalization has many registers and one of the most important is the control by the financial elite over commanding cultural apparatuses that produce, legitimize, and distribute highly selective media narratives that shore up the most reactionary ideologies and financial interests. The mainstream press says little about how such actions serve as an apology for the egregiously reactionary nature of Trump’s ideology and policies. Moreover, they fail to note how distortions of the truth, the endless production of lies by governments, politicians, and corporations, along with the media’s flight from civic literacy, serve to bolster authoritarian societies willing to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent. Under such circumstances, it should not be surprising that Trump’s authoritarian and hateful discourse, threats of violence, loathing of dissent, and his racist attitudes towards Muslims, Blacks and Mexican immigrants are downplayed in the mainstream media. These structured silences have become more and more apparent given the benign manner in which the supine press and its legion of enervated anti-public intellectuals and pundits treat Trump’s endless nighttime Twitter outpourings and his incessant choreographed public fabrications. For instance, *The Wall Street Journal’s* refusal to address critically Trump’s endless lies and insults is matched by the high brow *New Yorker’s* publishing of a piece on Trump, which largely celebrates uncritically how he is viewed by conservative intellectuals such as Hillsdale College president, Larry Arnn. Arnn supports Trump because he shares Arnn’s view that “the government has become dangerous.”[18] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn18> If he were referring to the rise of the surveillance and permanent war state, it would be hard to disagree with Arnn. Instead, he was referring to the government’s enforcement of “runaway regulations.”[19] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn19> What Arnn and *The New Yorker* ignore is the fact that the real danger the government poses is the result of it being in the hands of demagogues such as Trump who are truly dangerous and threaten the planet, American society, and the rest of the world. While *New Yorker* staff writer Kelefa Sanneh mentions Trump’s connection to the “alt-right,” he underplays the group’s fascist ideology and refuses to use the term white supremacy in talking about such groups, reverting instead to the innocuous term, “white identity politics.”[20] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn20> Trump’s misogyny, racism, anti-intellectualism, Islamophobia, and hatred of democracy are barely mentioned. Sanneh even goes so far as to suggest that since Trump has disavowed the “alt-right,” his connection to neo-fascist groups is tenuous. This is more than an apology dressed up in the discourse of ambiguity; such reporting is a shameful retreat from journalistic integrity, an assault on the truth, and constitutes an egregious act of normalization. This is only one example of what is surely to come in the future under Trump’s rule. Under Trump’s regime of economic, religious, education, and political fundamentalism, compassion and respect for the other will be viewed with contempt while society will increasingly become more militarized and financial capital will be deregulated in order to be free to engage in behaviors that put the American public and planet in danger. A form of social and historical amnesia will descend over American society like a poisonous virus. A culture of dumbness and civic illiteracy will be produced and legitimated along with a culture of fear that will enable a harsh law and order regime. Policies will be enacted in which public goods such as schools will be privatized, and a culture of greed and selfishness will be elevated to new heights of celebration. There will be a further retreat from civic literacy, civic courage, and social responsibility, one matched by a growing abandonment by the state of any allegiance to the common good. Fear and the threat of state violence will shape how problems are addressed, and a growing culture of dissent will be ruthlessly suppressed in all of the public spheres in which it has functioned in the past. The free-market mentality that gained prominence under the presidency of Ronald Reagan will accelerate under the Trump administration and it will continue to drive politics, destroy many social protections, celebrate a hyper-competitiveness, and deregulate economic activity. Under Donald Trump’s reign, all human activities, practices, and institutions will be subject to market principles and militarized. The only relations that matter will be defined in commercial terms just as civil society will be organized for the production of violence. It is most likely that the most dangerous powers of the state will be unleashed under Trump, possibly on the environment, public and higher education, protesters, poor Blacks, Muslims, and illegal immigrants. Surely, all the signs are in place given the coterie of billionaires, generals, warmongers, Islamophobes, neoliberal cheerleaders, and anti-public demagogues Trump has appointed to high-ranking government positions. Americans may be on the verge of witnessing how democracy ends and this is precisely why Trump’s election as the president of the United States cannot be normalized. Trump’s repressive and poisonous attitudes and irresponsible view of others and the broader society will not change his role as president. If fact, he will consolidate his power and will be more reckless than he was during the primaries and presidential campaigns. Trump’s narcissism, indifference to the truth, and addiction to the spectacle will further increase his view of himself and his policies as unaccountable, especially as he institutes a mode of governance that suppresses the opposition and deals with his audience directly through the social media. Fortunately, a number of diverse groups, extending from union members and women’s groups to more left oriented groups such as Refuse Fascism.org, along with teachers, actors, and artists are organizing to protest Trump’s neo-fascist ideology and policies. As George Yancy pointed out to me in a personal correspondence, such actions are unique in that they make the political more pedagogical by elevating protests, modes of resistance, and criticism to the level of the cultural rather than allowing such criticism to reside in the voice and presence of isolated, prophetic intellectuals. Moreover, a number of opposition magazines and social sites such as *In These Times*, *The Nation*, *Truthout, and Counterpunch* along with various public intellectuals such as Anthony DiMaggio, Robin Kelley, and members of the Black Lives Matter Movement are producing instructive articles on both the nature of resistance and what forms it might take.[21] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn21> At issue here is the urgent necessity to produce a collective effort that enables a level of critical thinking, civic literacy, and political courage that will inspire and energize a massive broad-based struggle intent on producing ongoing forms of non-violent resistance at all levels of society. Rabbi Michael Lerner is right in insisting that progressives need a new language of critique and possibility, one that embraces a movement for a world of love, courage, and justice while being committed to a mode of nonviolence in which the means are as ethical as the ends sought by such struggles.[22] <#m_8655823248749904935__edn22> Such a call is as historically mindful as it is insightful and it draws upon legacies of non-violent resistance as diverse as those called for by renowned activists such as Saul Alinsky, Paulo Freire, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet, in spite of their diverse projects and methods, these modes of non-violent resistance all shared a commitment to a collective and fearsome struggle in which non-violence strategies rejected passivity and compromise for powerful expressions of resistance. Such struggles to be successful will have to be coordinated, fearless, and relentless. Single-issue movements will have to join with others in supporting both a comprehensive politics and a mass collective movement. *We live at a time in which totalitarian forms are with us again. * American society is no longer at the tipping point of authoritarianism, we are in the midst of what Hannah Arendt called “dark times” and individual and collective resistance is the only hope we have to move beyond this ominous moment in our history. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=aBel7awaHA%2F0gXu5SQGiNEVDjXRf…> Henry A. Giroux currently is a Contributing Editor for Tikkun Magazine and the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015), and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2016). His website is www.henryagiroux.com <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=CRZuRnLdH5857zNLEAVW0kVDjXRfvL…> . ------------------------------ [1] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref1> Tom Engelhardt, “Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, No ‘New Normal,” TomDispatch (November 20, 2016). Online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176212/ <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=%2Bmfi2Wt6j6kjb02OciWF10VDjXRf…> [2] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref2> Neil Gabler, “And So It Begins: Normalizing the Election,” *Moyers&Company* (November 24, 2016). Online: http://billmoyers.com/story/media-normalizing-election/ <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=dDdgMAOZeloxcSFUvjaNkUVDjXRfvL…> [3] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref3> Ibid. Gabler, “And So It Begins: Normalizing the Election.” [4] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref4> The interview is available at http://buzz.blog.ajc.com/2016/11/12/oprah-trump/ [5] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref5> Nicholas Kristof, “Gritting Our Teeth and Giving President Trump a Chance,” New York Times (November 9, 2017). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/opinion/gritting-our- teeth-and-giving-president-trump-a-chance.html?_r=0 <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=6si6ziEe3xXllDFZ3PbO2UVDjXRfvL…> [6] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref6> *Irish Central* Staff, “Bill gates Says Trump Could lead America like JFK,” *IrishCentral.com* (January 6, 2017). Online: http://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/bill-gates-says- trump-could-lead-america-like-jfk [7] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref7> Charles Blow, “Donald Trump, This is not Normal,” *New York Times* (December 19, 2016). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/donald-trump- this-is-not-normal.html?_r=0 [8] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref8> Bill Trott, “Donald Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon as chief strategist sets off critical firestorm,” *Global News *(November 15, 2017). Online: http://globalnews.ca/news/ 3068972/donald-trumps-choice-of-steve-bannon-as-chief- strategist-sets-of-critical-firestorm/ [9] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref9> Ibid., Gabler, “And So It Begins: Normalizing the Election.” [10] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref10> Hannah Arendt, *The Origins of Totalitarianism*, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York: 2001). Sheldon S. Wolin, *Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism*, (Princeton University Press, 2008). [11] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref11> Marie Luise Knott, *Unlearning With Hannah Arendt*, trans. by David Dollenmayer, (Other Press: New York, NY. 2011, 2013), p 17. [12] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref12> Bill Dixon, “Totalitarianism and the Sand Storm,” Hannah Arendt Center (February 3, 2014). Online: http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=12466 <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=aRimh79uSBO%2FNj%2FXFkvfQkVDjX…> [13] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref13> The following three paragraphs draw from previous work in Henry A. Giroux, “Barack Obama and the Resurgent Specter of Authoritarianism,” *3:4 JAC* (2011), pp. 415-440. [14] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref14> Robert O. Paxton, *The Anatomy of Fascism*. (USA, N.Y.: Vintage Books, 2005), p. 208. [15] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref15> Todd Gitlin, “Welcome to the Vortex,” *Open Democracy*, [7 January 2017] Online: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/01/07/welcome-vortex [16] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref16> Amy Goodman, “"It Might Not Be Good for America, But It's Good for Us": How the Media Got Rich on Trump's Rise,” *Democracy Now *(Novemmber 9, 2016). Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/9/it_might_not_be_good_for <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=qGxSaAOPugB848q%2ByBvF90VDjXRf…> [17] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref17> Ibid. [18] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref18> Kelefa Sanneh, “Secret Admirers: The Conservative Intellectuals Smitten with Trump,” The New Yorker (January 9, 2017). Online: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/ intellectuals-for-trump <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref19> [19] Ibid. [20] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref20> Ibid. [21] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref21> See for instance, “A Handbook For Resistance” in the January 2017 issue of *In These Times*; the December 5th issue of *The Nation* on “How to Fight Back;” Anthony DiMaggio, “The Anti-Trump Uprising: Forging a Path Forward in Uncertain Times,” Counterpunch (December 15, 2016). Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/ 2016/12/15/the-anti-trump-uprising-forging-a-path- forward-in-uncertain-times/ <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ZJBE2F%2Bkgko2uQY8rrPY3EVDjXRf…>; Robin D. G. Kelley, “After Trump,” *Boston Review *(November 15, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/after-trump/robin-d-g-kelley- trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=YmcJm9mDsp%2BwE555p0%2B8VUVDjX…>; a resistance manual launched by the Movement for Black Lives, See https://www.resistancemanual.org/Resistance_Manual_Home [22] <#m_8655823248749904935__ednref22> Rabbi Michael Lerner, “Yearning for a World of Love and Justice: An introduction to the Ideas of *Tikkun* and the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP),” *Tikkun *(April 30, 2015). Online: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/yearning-for-a-world- of-love-and-justice-the-worldview-of-tikkun-and-our-network-of-spiritual- progressives ------------------------------ Click here to unsubscribe <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=aJ0m914I6MT90nXbhSl7LEVDjXRfvL…> if you are having trouble unsubscribing Click here <kay(a)tikkun.org> Copyright 2015 Tikkun Magazine. Tikkun is a registered trademark. 2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200 Berkeley, CA 94704 510-644-1200 Fax 510-644-1255 [image: empowered by Salsa] <http://www.salsalabs.com/?email> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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how should we think about markets ?
by Michel Bauwens 19 Jan '17

19 Jan '17

Answered this in an email to someone who believes markets themselves are the key issue, and therefore need to be abolished completely: "First of all, we distinguish markets from capitalism, and we see markets as having both disadvantages and advantages, as have the 3 other main modes of allocation, for example as described in the Structure of World History by Kojin Karatani, and Alan Page Fiske's 'Structure of Social Life'. We see that different historical periods have different configurations and 'dominations' of one mode above the others .... Capitalism, because of its extractivism and externalities is now hugely problematic, but it is hard to see how to eliminate markets completely without totalitarian coercion. Thus it makes more sense in our view to focus on 2 interlocking strategies 1) the first is to re-embed markets in reciprocity mechanisms and as supporting the commons, and in fact we see this emerging and discuss this in our manuscript; we believe change does not descend ex nihilo from people who look at the system from outside and describe how they believe the world should work, but from actual praxis, and it is this praxis we examine. And what we see is commons-based productive communities aiming to re-discpline markets to their needs 2) second, we believe the role of the market will likely drastically diminish, on the condition we can export the current coordination mechanisms for immaterial work, which can already largely operate outside the market (free software , open design), to actual physical production, which will require both the development of open and contributory accounting, of other stigmergic mechanisms, but also shared and open supply chains; this will give the material basis of gradually increasing the mutual coordination of production outside of market mechanisms. While the first is well underway, the second has hardly started, and so, in this transition period, the focus will be in our opinion on expanding the commons, and re-embedding markets under reciprocity mechanims, ie. de-capitalizing the markets if you like, but while this proceeds, the conditions for the second strategy gradually improves." -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: EDA - Official Website Launch
by Michel Bauwens 19 Jan '17

19 Jan '17

dear david, do you know this commons org from the USA ? Michel Economic Democracy Advocates Launch Announcement View this email in your browser <http://us14.campaign-archive1.com/?u=acd1450c92d1d0d7b47bbaed5&id=53dc59781…> Dear James, We’re excited to announce the launch of our new website: www.EconomicDemocracyAdvocates.org <http://economicdemocracyadvocates.us14.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=acd14…> . EDA will be partnering with like-minded non-profit organizations and individuals like YOU to raise public awareness and bring about legislative change for the protection of natural resources and systems that comprise our common heritage. *Imagine a world where the right to clean water, healthy food, and sustainable energy rests in YOUR hands. THIS is Economic Democracy.* We need people like you who are willing to educate yourselves on the issues and get involved with decision-makers to change laws and norms to make this our reality. Visit our website to join us and learn about our plans for ensuring a more equitable world now and for generations to come. We need you! We will be in touch to find out how we can work together in the New Year and beyond. Happy New Year! Your Economic Democracy team: George Catlin, Jacelyn Eckman, Patti Ellis, Tracy Edmonds, Sylvia Reischke, Jack Rued, Eva Simonsen, Alison Weeks, Wayne Wilson P.S. We’ll be back in touch with you soon with details on EDA’s first annual conference the last weekend in May, 2017 in Asheville, NC. Mark your calendar. [image: image] <http://economicdemocracyadvocates.us14.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=acd14…> [image: image] <http://economicdemocracyadvocates.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=acd145…> [image: image] <http://economicdemocracyadvocates.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=acd145…> *Copyright © 2017 Economic Democracy Advocates, All rights reserved.* Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences <http://economicdemocracyadvocates.us14.list-manage.com/profile?u=acd1450c92…> or unsubscribe from this list <http://economicdemocracyadvocates.us14.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=acd145…> This email was sent to jbquilligan3(a)charter.net *why did I get this?* <http://economicdemocracyadvocates.us14.list-manage.com/about?u=acd1450c92d1…> unsubscribe from this list <http://economicdemocracyadvocates.us14.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=acd145…> update subscription preferences <http://economicdemocracyadvocates.us14.list-manage.com/profile?u=acd1450c92…> Economic Democracy Advocates · 18615 Castle Lake Drive · Morgan Hill, Ca 95037 · USA [image: Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp] <http://www.mailchimp.com/monkey-rewards/?utm_source=freemium_newsletter&utm…> [image: image] -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: Henry Giroux: Militant Hope in the Age of Trump
by Michel Bauwens 19 Jan '17

19 Jan '17

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tikkun <magazine(a)tikkun.org> Date: Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 3:34 AM Subject: Henry Giroux: Militant Hope in the Age of Trump To: Michelsub2004(a)gmail.com <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=bSWrM81O36v4e06Df4dFz03AqzUh8s…> You can read this online at http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/henry-giroux-on- militant-hope-in-the-age-of-trump <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=CrrDk7Hea15uvQaUm3n1WrDtqs4fEj…> SHARE ON FACEBOOK <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=hh84BHSv546pDRSdmarnm7Dtqs4fEj…> SHARE ON TWITTER <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=XfgJhK9I2985y21GX3WG2bDtqs4fEj…> Editor's note: We are proud to announce that Professor Henry Giroux has just joined Tikkun's editorial board as a Contributing Editor. You can read his amazing article on education at http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/defending-educators- in-an-age-of-neoliberal-tyranny-2 <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=1T%2Bb%2BXQUPp%2FXecDszVmQlLDt…> (it appears in the Fall, 2016 issue of Tikkun magazine). We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are building the kind of broad based movement that Giroux calls for in this article, though we call it a movement for a world of love and justice (read about it at www.tikkun.org/covenant <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=fQnAvTUdfmlBAqxirkXepbDtqs4fEj…>) and put great emphasis on our commitment to nonviolence because the means must be as ethical as the ends we seek. But nonviolence does not mean passivity, as MLKjr demonstrated so powerfully in the 1960s. --Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun(a)gmail.com Militant Hope in the Age of Trump Henry A. Giroux The United States stands at the endpoint of a long series of attacks on democracy, and the choices faced by the American public today point to the divide between those who are committed to democracy and those who are not. Debates over whether Donald Trump was a fascist or Hillary Clinton was a right-wing warmonger and tool of Wall Street were a tactical diversion. The real questions that should have been debated include: What measures could have been taken to prevent the United States from sliding further into a distinctive form of authoritarianism? And what could have been done to imagine a mode of civic courage and militant hope needed to enable the promise of a radical democracy? Such questions take on a significant urgency in light of the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Under such circumstances, not only is the public in peril, it is on the brink of collapse as the economic, political, and cultural institutions necessary for democracy to survive are being aggressively undermined. As Robert Kuttner observes: [image: Anti-Trump protest in Chicago] “It is hard to contemplate the new administration without experiencing alarm bordering on despair: Alarm about the risks of war, the fate of constitutional democracy, the devastation of a century of social progress. Trump's populism was a total fraud. Every single Trump appointment has come from the pool of far-right conservatives, crackpots, and billionaire kleptocrats. More alarming still is the man himself – his vanity, impulsivity, and willful ignorance, combined with an intuitive genius as a demagogue. A petulant fifth-grader with nuclear weapons will now control the awesome power of the U.S. government. One has to nourish the hope that Trump can yet be contained. Above all, that will take passionate and strategic engagement, not just to resist but to win, to discredit him and get him out of office while this is still a democracy. We can feel sick at heart – we would be fools not to – but despair is not an option.”[1] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=n3ZKvez7oemrVG3IAxKDL7Dtqs4fEj…> A Call for Resistance Kuttner rightly mediates such despair with a call for resistance. Yet, such deep-seated anxiety is not unwarranted given the willingness of contemporary politicians and pundits during the 2016 presidential battle to use themes that echoed alarmingly fascist and totalitarian elements of the past. According to Drucilla Cornell and Stephen D. Seely, Trump's campaign mobilized a movement that was “unambiguously fascist.”[2] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=V1TFN5hNCaIT1BfKRyww3rDtqs4fEj…> They write: “We are not using the word ‘fascist’ glibly here. Nor are we referencing only the so-called ‘alt-right’ contingent of his supporters. No, Trump's entire movement is rooted in an ethnic, racial, and linguistic nationalism that sanctions and glorifies violence against designated enemies and outsiders, is animated by a myth of decline and nostalgic renewal and centered on a masculine cult of personality.”[3] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=L4utT5nb9%2FwqRcQ%2F0z9c2E3Aqz…> Large segments of the American public, especially minorities of class and color, have been written out of politics over what they view as a failed state and the inability of the basic machinery of government to serve their interests. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish – from public schools to healthcare centers – there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good. This grim reality has been called a “failed sociality” – a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy.[4] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=2rXpHomp7Qaq5vRjuN3C5E3AqzUh8s…> As the consolidation of power by the corporate and financial elite empties politics of any substance, the political realm merges elements of Monty Python, Kafka, and Aldus Huxley. With the election of Donald Trump, the savagery of neoliberalism has been intensified with the emergence at the highest levels of power of a toxic mix of anti-intellectualism, religious fundamentalism, nativism, and a renewed notion of American exceptionalism. Mainstream politics is now dominated by hard-right extremists who have brought to the center of politics a shameful white supremacist ideology, poisonous xenophobic ideas, and the blunt, malicious tenets and practices of Islamophobia. The older political establishment's calls for regime change and war are now supplemented by the discourse of state sanctioned torture, armed ignorance, and a deep hatred of democracy. Neoliberalism, with its full-fledged assault on the welfare state and public goods, the destruction of the manufacturing sector, and a dramatic shift in wealth to the upper 1 per cent, has destroyed the faith of millions in democracy, which lost its power to contain the rich and the rule of financial capital. With the erosion of the social contract and the increasing power of the rich to control both the commanding institutions of society and politics itself, democracy has lost any legitimacy as a counter weight to protect the ever widening sphere of people considered vulnerable and disposable. The result has been that the *dangerous roadmap* to neo-fascist appeals have gained more and more credence. The end result is that large portions of the American public have turned to Trump's brand of authoritarianism. The future looks bleak, especially, for youth in neoliberal societies as they are burdened with debt, dead-end jobs, unemployment, and, if you are black and poor, the increasing possibility of being either incarcerated or shot by the police.[5] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Rany1JqFtzLqlRvGBcUp%2BLDtqs4f…> The United States has become a war culture and immediate massive forms of resistance and civil disobedience are essential if the planet and human life is going to survive. There can be little doubt that America is at war with its own ideals and that war is being waged against minorities of color and class, immigrants, Muslims, and Syrian refugees. Such brutality amounts to acts of domestic terrorism and demands not only massive collective opposition but also a new understanding of the conditions that are causing such sanctioned violence and the need for a fresh notion of politics to resist it. This suggests putting democratic socialism on the agenda for change. Struggle for Democratic Socialism The struggle for democratic socialism is an important goal, especially in light of the reign of terror of the existing neoliberal mode of governance. It is crucial to remember that as a firm defender of the harsh politics and values of neoliberalism, Trump preyed on the atomization and loneliness many people felt in a neoliberal social order that derides dependency, solidarity, community, and any viable notion of the commons. He both encouraged the fantasy of a rugged individualism and toxic discourse of a hyper-masculine notion of nativism, while at the same time offering his followers the swindle of a community rooted in an embrace of white supremacy, a white public sphere, and a hatred of those deemed irrevocably other. The ideology and public pedagogy of neoliberalism at the root of Trump's embrace of a new authoritarianism must be challenged and dismantled ideologically and politically. Yet, the task of challenging the new authoritarianism will only succeed if progressives embrace an expansive and relational understanding of politics. This means, among other things, refusing to view elections as the ultimate litmus test of democratic participation and rejecting the assumption that capitalism and democracy are synonymous. The demise of democracy must be challenged at all levels of public participation and must serve as a rallying cry to call into question the power and control of all institutions that bear down on everyday life. Moreover, any progressive struggle must move beyond the fragmentation that has undermined the left for decades. This suggests moving beyond single issue movements in order to develop and emphasize the connections between diverse social formations. At stake here is the struggle for building a broad alliance that brings together different political movements and, as Cornell and Seely observe, a political formation willing to promote an ethical revolution whose goal “is not only socialism as an economic form of organization but a new way of being together with others that could begin to provide a collectively shared horizon of meaning.”[6] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=p2zy203dj2VJFXatLsbgxLDtqs4fEj…> Central to a viable notion of ideological and structural transformation is a refusal of the mainstream politics of disconnect. In its place is a plea for broader social movements and a more comprehensive understanding of politics in order to connect the dots between, for instance, police brutality and mass incarceration, on the one hand, and the diverse crises producing massive poverty, the destruction of the welfare state, and the assaults on the environment, workers, young people and women. One approach to such a task would be to develop an expansive understanding of politics that necessarily links the calls for a living wage and environmental justice to demands for accessible quality healthcare and the elimination of conditions that enable the state to wage assaults against Black people, immigrants, workers and women. Such relational analyses also suggest the merging of labour unions and social movements. In addition, progressives must address the crucial challenge of producing cultural apparatuses such as alternative media, think tanks and social services in order to provide models of education that enhance the ability of individuals to make informed judgments, discriminate between evidence based arguments and opinions, and to provide theoretical and political frameworks for rethinking the relationship between the self and others based on notions of compassion, justice, and solidarity. Crucial to rethinking the space and meaning of the political imaginary is the need to reach across specific identities and to move beyond single-issue movements and their specific agendas. This is not a matter of dismissing such movements, but creating new alliances that allow them to become stronger in the fight to not only succeed in advancing their specific concerns but also enlarging the possibility of developing a radical democracy that benefits not just specific but general interests. As the Fifteenth Street Manifesto group expressed in its 2008 piece, “Left Turn: An Open Letter to U.S. Radicals,” many groups on the left would grow stronger if they were to “perceive and refocus their struggles as part of a larger movement for social transformation.”[7] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=9FXNMT4ISJOtO3bOYWnh57Dtqs4fEj…> Any feasible political agenda must merge the pedagogical and the political by employing a language and mode of analysis that resonates with people's needs while making social change a crucial element of the political and public imagination. At the same time, any politics that is going to take real change seriously must be highly critical of any reformist politics that does not include both a change of consciousness and structural change. If progressives are to join in the fight against authoritarianism in the United States, they will need to create powerful political alliances and produce long-term organizations that can provide a view of the future that does not simply mimic the present. This requires aligning private issues to broader structural and systemic problems both at home and abroad. This is where matters of translation become crucial in developing broader ideological struggles and in fashioning a more comprehensive notion of politics. Movements require time to mature and come into fruition and depend on an educated public that is able to address both the structural conditions of oppression and how they are legitimated through their ideological impact on individual and collective attitudes and modes of experiencing the world. In this way radical ideas can be connected to action once workers and others recognize the need to take control of the conditions of their labour, communities, resources, and lives. Struggles that take place in particular contexts must also be associated to similar efforts at home and abroad. For instance, the ongoing privatization of public goods such as schools can be analyzed within increasing attempts on the part of billionaires to eliminate the social state and gain control over commanding economic and cultural institutions in the USA. At the same time, the modeling of schools after prisons can be connected to the ongoing criminalization of a wide range of everyday behaviors and the rise of the punishing state. Moreover, oppressive economic, political, and cultural practices in the U.S. can be connected to other authoritarian societies that are following a comparable script of widespread repression. For instance, it is crucial to think about what racialized police violence in the United States has in common with violence waged by authoritarian states such as Egypt against Muslim protesters. This allows us to understand various social problems globally so as to make it easier to develop political formations that link such diverse social justice struggles across national borders. It also helps us to understand, name and make visible the diverse authoritarian policies and pedagogical practices that point to the parameters of a totalitarian society. This is especially true in addressing the ongoing criminalization of Blacks and the rise of new forms of domestic and state terrorism. As Nicholas Powers points out, “The old racial line between ‘Black’ and ‘White’ has been redrawn as the line between criminal and citizen. Up and down the class hierarchy form poor to wealthy, Black people have to dodge violence, from macroaggressions to economic sabotage and from public shaming to physical attacks... every day another person of color is shot by police, and the hole left inside families are where love ones used to breathe. The cops not only steal the lives of our children; they steal the lives of everyone who loved them. A part of us freezes, goes numb.”[8] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Um8GoZ2%2FJivv%2FhQK3uyLM7Dtqs…> Critical Thinking, Critical Culture In this instance, making the political more pedagogical becomes central to any viable notion of politics. That is, if the ideals and practices of democratic governance are not to be lost, there is a need for progressives to address and accelerate the production of critical formative cultures that promote dialogue, debate and, what James Baldwin once called, a “certain daring, a certain independence of mind” capable of teaching “some people to think and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything.”[9] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=QsQbgzCqhp0pTAOe4f00y7Dtqs4fEj…> Thinking is dangerous, especially under the cloud of an impending neo-fascism, because it is a crucial requirement for constructing new political institutions that can both fight against the impending authoritarianism and imagine a society in which democracy is viewed no longer as a remnant of the past but rather as an ideal that is worthy of continuous struggle. This merging of education, critical thinking, and politics is necessary for creating informed agents willing to fight the systemic violence and domestic forms of repression that mark the authoritarian policies and repressive practices of the Trump administration. Under the Trump presidency, the worse dimensions of a neoliberal order will be accelerated and will include: deregulating restrictions on corporate power, cutting taxes for the rich, expanding the military, privatizing public education, supressing civil liberties, waging a war against dissent, treating Black communities as war zones, and dismantling all public goods. Such actions make it all the more imperative for progressives to challenge a market-driven society that erodes the symbolic and affective bonds and loyalties that give meaning to social existence. Appealing to the economic interests of the public is important, but it is not enough. Hope has to be fed by the lessons of history, the recognition for collective action, and the willingness to “feel one's way imaginatively into the situation of others.”[10] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=YM0cVTuhF4aAKPzKfNh7CrDtqs4fEj…> Hope is not only about expanding the limits of the radical imagination, it is also about recognizing that resistance is a necessity that has to be rooted in a realistic assessment of the roadblocks ahead. [image: Black Lives Matter - Toronto] Refusing a politics of disconnection means taking on the crucial challenge of producing a critical formative culture along with corresponding institutions that promote a form of permanent criticism against all elements of oppression and unaccountable power. One important task of emancipation *is to encourage* educators, artists, workers, young people and others to use their skills in the service of a politics in which public values, trust and compassion can be used to chip away at neoliberalism's celebration of self-interest, the ruthless accumulation of capital, the survival-of-the-fittest ethos and the financialization and market-driven corruption of the political system. Political responsibility is more than a challenge – it is the projection of a possibility in which new identification, affectations, and loyalties can be produced to enable and sustain new forms of civic action, political organizations, and transnational anti-capitalist movements. A radical democracy based on the best principles of a democratic socialism must be written back into the script of everyday life, and doing so demands overcoming the current crisis of memory, agency and politics by collectively struggling for a society in which matters of justice, equity and inclusion define what is possible. Neo-fascism thrives on the disparagement of others, nativism, ultra-nationalism, an appeal to violence, an unchecked individualism, and the legitimation of an alleged preferred people to dominate others. These are the elements of a formative culture rooted in nihilism, cynicism, economic insecurity, unrestrained anger, a paralyzing fear, and the collapse of public values and the ethical grammar that gives a democracy meaning. At work here is the undeniable fact of how education is at the center of politics, and can be used for either oppressive or emancipatory ends. This suggests strategies aimed at the development of alternative, progressive educational apparatuses, grounded in the pedagogical necessity to make knowledge and ideas meaningful in order to make them critical and transformative. This means appropriating and using the symbolic and intellectual tools of persuasion, identification, and belief as crucial political strategies. I am not talking about a facile appeal to a notion of consciousness raising. Rather, I am emphasizing the necessity for progressives to work in conjunction with labour unions, educational unions, and other social movements to develop the institutions necessary for a critical formative culture that can change the consciousness, desires, identities, investments, values, while providing a sense of agency of those who lack the tools of civic literacy and critical frames of reference necessary for understanding the conditions that produce misery, exploitation, exclusion, and mass resentment, all the while paving the way for right-wing populist movements. Under the reign of casino capitalism, democratic public spheres along with the public they support are disappearing. One consequence is a warfare state built not only on the militarization of the economy but also on what my colleague Brad Evans calls “armed ignorance.” Such ignorance represents more than a paucity of ethical and social responsibility, it is also symptomatic of an educational and spiritual crisis in the United States. A culture of fear, hate and bigotry has transformed American politics into a pathology. Fear cripples reason and makes it easier for authoritarian figures to engage in what might be called terror management. Trump's speeches mobilized millions with the drug inducing appeal of uncertainty, fear, and hatred. David Dillard-Wright insightful commentary on Trump's use of fear makes clear how he used it as both a political and pedagogical tool. He writes: “The Trump rally speeches go through a litany of perceived threats to the American worker: the immigrants taking ‘our’ jobs, the terrorists who want to kill ‘us’, the media who want to silence ‘us’. Trump is no social psychologist, but he has an instinctive sense for crowds: the purpose of this rhetoric is to tear down the listener to a point of malleability, at which point, he ‘alone” supplies the answer (as in his ‘I alone can fix it’ speech at the Republican National Convention in the summer). He drowns the listener in fear and then reaches out a helping hand from the threat that he, himself, has conjured. This verbal waterboarding breaks down the Trump fan into a panicked rage and then channels that fear and anger into the pretend solution of a giant wall or jailing Hillary Clinton, which not incidentally, also places Trump at the center of power and control over his fans’ lives. Fear actually short-circuits rational thought and gets the rally-goer to accept the strongman as the only way to avoid the perceived threat.”[11] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=yQboW8grKY4LQDx9vTtKBLDtqs4fEj…> The appeal to mass produced fear legitimates a politics that tramples the rights of minorities, young people, and dissidents. Moreover, it reinforces a violent and corrupt lawlessness that extends from the highest reaches of government and big corporations to the para-militarization of our schools and police forces. Domestic terrorism becomes normalized as unarmed Blacks are killed by the police almost weekly, while more and more members of the population are considered excess, disposable, redundant, and subject to the bigotry of escalating right-wing groups, corrupt politicians, and policies that benefit the financial elite. And with the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency, a fog of authoritarianism will all but diminish any vestige of democracy and civic literacy. Such a prophecy is not simply the stuff of science fiction. As David Remnick predicts the Trump administration will usher in both a withering of public values and a democratic sensibility leading to a dystopian social order immersed in misery, violence, and cruelty: “There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event – and it's a stretch – is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.”[12] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=dM9XOrpFOOnL%2FkydKasC%2FrDtqs…> The world is on the brink of nuclear war, ecological extinction, an accelerating refugee crisis, and a growing culture saturated in violence; yet, the public is persuaded that the burning issues of the day focus on the breakup of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Kim Kardashian's loss of $11-million in jewelry to thieves, or the endless focus on the banality of Reality TV and celebrity culture. In addition, violence is now treated as a theatrical performance paving the way each day for the next news cycle operating primarily as spectacle and entertainment. Moral and political hysteria is in fashion and has undermined the public spheres that promote self-reflection, dialogue, and informed judgment. Informed exchanges and arguments that rely on evidence have been displaced by a culture of shouting, emotion, lying, and thuggery. War comes in many forms and is as powerful as a form of ideology and identification as it is in the service of multiple forms of violence. Once we recognize the metrics of war as both crisis of politics and education, we can mobilize against both its ideological and material relations of power. But time is running out. New Discourse, New Politics The American public needs a new discourse to resuscitate historical memories and develop new methods of opposition in order to address the connections between the escalating destabilization of the Earth's biosphere, impoverishment, inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, corporate crime, and the poisoning of low-income communities. Once again, not only are social movements from below needed, there is also a need to merge diverse single-issue movements that range from calls for racial justice to calls for economic fairness. Of course, there are significant examples of this in the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing strikes by workers for a living wage.[13] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=vUbqeOFEcdZuY4UUb9W69bDtqs4fEj…> But these are only the beginning of what is needed to contest state violence, institutionalized racism, and the savage machinery of neoliberal capitalism. There has never been a more pressing time to rethink the meaning of politics, justice, struggle, collective action, and the development of new political parties and social movements. The ongoing violence against Black youth, the impending ecological crisis, the use of prisons to warehouse people who represent social problems, the poisoning of children due to neoliberal fiscal policies, and the ongoing war on women's reproductive rights, among other crises, demand a new language for developing modes of creative long-term struggle, a wider understanding of politics, and a new urgency to create modes of collective struggles rooted in more enduring and unified political formations. Such struggles demand an increasingly broad-based commitment to a new kind of activism. We don't need tepid calls for repairing the system; instead, we need to invent a new system from the ashes of one that is terminally broken. We don't need calls for moral uplift or personal responsibility. We need calls for economic, political, gender, and racial justice. Such a politics must be rooted in particular demands, be open to direct action, and take seriously strategies designed to both educate a wider public and mobilize them to seize power. Trump's willingness to rely upon openly fascist elements prefigures the emergence of an American style mode of authoritarianism that threatens to further foreclose venues for social justice and civil rights. The need for resistance has become urgent. The struggle is not simply over specific institutions such as higher education or so-called democratic procedures such as the validity of elections but over what it means to get to the root of the problems facing the United States. At the heart of such a movement is the need to draw more people into subversive actions modeled after the militancy of the labour strikes of the 1930s, the civil rights movements of the 1950s and the struggle for participatory democracy by the New Left in the 1960s while building upon the strategies and successes of the more recent movements for economic, social and environmental justice such as Black Lives Matter and Our Revolution. At the same time, there is a need to reclaim the radical imagination and to infuse it with a spirited battle for an independent politics that regards a radical democracy as part of a never-ending struggle. “ We need a language that reframes our activist politics as a creative act that responds to the promises and possibilities of a radical democracy.” None of this can happen unless progressives understand education as a political and moral practice crucial to creating new forms of agency, mobilizing a desire for change and providing a language that underwrites the capacity to think, speak and act so as to challenge the sexist, racist, economic and political grammars of suffering produced by the new authoritarianism. The left needs a language of critique that enables people to ask questions that appear unspeakable within the existing vocabularies of oppression. We also need a language of hope that is firmly aware of the ideological and structural obstacles that are undermining democracy. We need a language that reframes our activist politics as a creative act that responds to the promises and possibilities of a radical democracy. Broad-based social movements cannot materialize overnight. They require educated agents who are able to connect structural conditions of oppression to the oppressive cultural apparatuses that legitimate, persuade, and shape individual and collective attitudes in the service of oppressive ideas and values. No wide-ranging social movement can develop without educating a public about the diverse economic, political, cultural, and pedagogical conditions that provide a discourse of critique and inquiry on the one hand and a vocabulary of action and hope on the other. Under such conditions, radical ideas can be connected to action once diverse groups recognize the need to take control of the political, economic, and cultural conditions which shape their world views, exploit their labour, control their communities, appropriate their resources, and undermine their dignity and lives. Yet, raising consciousness alone will not change authoritarian societies. Though, it does provide the foundation for making oppression visible and for developing from below what Etienne Balibar calls “practices of resistance and solidarity.”[14] <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=%2B4pqxgcfpNzp0yXfQA9GCLDtqs4f…> We need more than radical critique of capitalism, racism, and other forms of oppression. Any viable struggle for justice and a radical democracy also need to nourish a critical formative culture and cultural politics that inspires, energizes, and provides a radical education project in the service of a broad-based movement for democratic socialism. • SHARE ON FACEBOOK <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=0%2BWouaBaEOQbPPe8F6bQErDtqs4f…> SHARE ON TWITTER <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=0kjPcYZXocKRVq6U2kL3U7Dtqs4fEj…> Henry A. Giroux currently is a Contributing Editor for Tikkun Magazine and the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015), and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2016). His website is www.henryagiroux.com <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=9WIyOIW57YLHVpLdH2MhwrDtqs4fEj…> . Endnotes: 1. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Vi4sWn5OyHMuDOgvJy%2FtFrDtqs4f…> Robert Kuttner, “The Audacity of Hope <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=NfML2UyszFAKopXrVedZTLDtqs4fEj…> ,” The American Prospect (December 16, 2016). 2. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=DtZodcZH%2FtoJi8qGT0iJ67Dtqs4f…> Drucilla Cornell & Stephen D. Seely, “Seven Theses on Trump <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Kbj6JEhaPhF3TaVdOi%2FxOrDtqs4f…> ,” Critical Legal Thinking (November 28, 2016). 3. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=SKq8%2B3NLLnxSF18JIIUSFLDtqs4f…> Ibid., Drucilla Cornell & Stephen D. Seely. 4. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=oDENG5mmeSO%2BqF1LsTA1uLDtqs4f…> Alex Honneth, Pathologies of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 188. 5. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=rsifoc2y%2F9VU1JwEszQL9LDtqs4f…> See, for instance, a number of insightful articles on police violence against people of color in Maya Schenwar, Joe Macare and Alana Yu-lan Price, eds. Who do You Serve Who Do You Protect (Chicago: Haymarket books, 2016). 6. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=j3vYlJfHf0UtqYy%2F8Rp4iLDtqs4f…> Ibid., Drucilla Cornell & Stephen D. Seely. 7. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=JNYvNFjPgtJlrg%2B8bUcVvbDtqs4f…> Situations Manifesto, Left Turn: An Open Letter to U.S. Radicals <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=hasgvwpp8L1146DLrb9QOLDtqs4fEj…>, (N.Y.: The Fifteenth Street Manifesto Group, March 2008), p. 1. 8. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=h0oeE2Sq6fHufdJdhr%2FgmLDtqs4f…> Nicholas Powers, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life.” In Maya Schenwar, Joe Macare and Alana Yu-lan Price, Eds. Who do You Serve Who Do You Protect (Chicago: Haymarket books, 2016), p. 14. 9. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=%2FzcNNU%2BEsfOVqOtweW9Gd7Dtqs…> James Baldwin. James Baldwin: The last Interview and Other Conversations <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=LzzGuFiXvgMcpmVEhJYeBLDtqs4fEj…>, (Polity Press, 2016: Cambridge, UK), p. 22. 10. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=GoMin2QDox8%2Fed2sJ4CRW7Dtqs4f…> Terry Eagleton, “Reappraisals: What is the worth of social democracy?” Harper's Magazine, (October 2010), p. 790. 11. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=QawL9Z9EtAztaA%2F2W0jwGrDtqs4f…> David Dillard-Wright, “Explaining the Cult of Trump <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=O%2FSrRUJ1gvUZ5XhejJ0KbLDtqs4f…> ,” AlterNet (December 16, 2016). 12. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=57YNbNzp1VrL2wmLspY2bE3AqzUh8s…> David Remnick, “American Tragedy <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=mTX00BO4BIadcfA3IjnhIrDtqs4fEj…> ,” The New Yorker (November 9, 2016). 13. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ULIXtLWm7TB63h9LngTLPLDtqs4fEj…> Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ETEfjVl3qSbN%2FxEuMQkYQk3AqzUh…> ,” The Feminist Wire (October 7, 2014). Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “The rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=T1w1ctqc4OZtNVF1kpzVb7Dtqs4fEj…> ,” Socialist Worker.org (January 13, 2015). Elizabeth Day, “#BlackLivesMatter: the birth of a new civil rights movement <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=%2FiUJ3ZPTz1uKezIlxuGit7Dtqs4f…> ,” The Guardian (July 19, 2015). 14. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=g0Qrz%2FxZFVzmrnv7jXgzCk3AqzUh…> Clement Petitjean, “Étienne Balibar: War, racism and nationalism <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=YLr7%2FEtk5hRWvfhUr%2F1tEk3Aqz…> ,” Verso Book Blog (November 17, 2015). ------------------------------ Click here to unsubscribe <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=lQEw7LQbaj6q0JSawPwps7Dtqs4fEj…> if you are having trouble unsubscribing Click here <kay(a)tikkun.org> Copyright 2015 Tikkun Magazine. 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