Three important notes about this file

AT Cede the Political

The current order derives its ontological consistency in opposition to blackness, trying to work within this system is definitionally impossible. Instead, striving for impossible reparations is the only way to create a politics beyond current comprehension.

Wilderson and Howard 10 [Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies, Percy, Psychotherapist, “Frank Wilderson, Wallowing in the Contradictions, Part 1” http://percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/frank-b-wilderson-%E2%80%9Cwallowing-in-the-contradictions%E2%80%9D-part-1/ //liam]
FW Reparations suggests a conceptually coherent loss. The loss of land, the loss of labor power, etc. In other words, there has to be some form of articulation between the party that has lost and the party that has gained for reparations to make sense. No such articulation exists between Blacks and the world. This is, ironically, precisely why I support the Reparations Movement; but my emphasis, my energies, my points of attention are on the word “Movement” and not on the word “Reparation.” I support the movement because I know it is a movement toward the end of the world; a movement toward a catastrophe in epistemological coherence and institutional integrity—I support the movement aspect of it because I know that repair is impossible; and any struggle that can act as a stick up artist to the world, demanding all that it cannot give( which is everything ), is a movement toward something so blindingly new that it cannot be imagined. This is the only thing that will save us. PH As a Psychotherapist, I was very interested to see your contrasting Frantz Fanon and Lacan concerning their conceptualizations of potential paths to “emancipation in the libidinal economy”, as you put it. I am ashamed to admit that I have never read Fanon, but have read Lacan. Please illuminate  your idea that the stark difference in their conceptualizations of conflict/antagonism differ are based on the fact that Lacan would  still see Blacks as fundamentally situated in personhood, but that Fannon (and yourself) see Blacks as “situated a priori in absolute dereliction”. FW This is a big question, too big for a concise answer—I think I take about thirty to forty pages to try and get my head around this in the book. But the key to the answer lies in the concept of “contemporaries.” Fanon rather painfully and meticulously shows us how the human race is a community of “contemporaries.” In addition, this community vouchsafes its coherence (it knows its borders) through the presence of Blacks. If Blacks became part of the human community then the concept of “contemporaries” would have no outside; and if it had no outside it could have no inside. Lacan assumes the category and thus he imagines the analysand’s problem in terms of how to live without neurosis among ones contemporaries. Fanon interrogates the category itself. For Lacan the analysands suffer psychically due to problems  extant within the paradigm of contemporaries. For Fanon, the analysand   suffers due to the existence of the contemporaries themselves and the fact that s/he is a stimulus for anxiety for those who have contemporaries. Now, a contemporary’s struggles are conflictual—that is to say, they can be resolved because they are problems that are of- and in the world. But a Blacks problems are the stuff of antagonisms: struggles that cannot be resolved between parties but can only be resolved through the obliteration of one or both of the parties. We are faced—when dealing with the Black—with a set of psychic problems that cannot be resolved through any form of symbolic intervention such as psychoanalysis—though addressing them psychoanalytically we can begin to explain the antagonism (as I have done in my book, and as Fanon does), but it won’t lead us to a cure.

Progressive movements are too timid and fail- inevitably adopt they underlying tenets of racism

Martinot and Sexton 03- *prof at San Francisco State University**PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, Director, African American Studies at UC Irvine (Steve and Jared, “The Avant-garde of white supremacy,” http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/avantguard.htm//MGD)

There are oppositional political movements of course; some are progressive, fewer are radical. But each encounters a certain internal limitation. For instance, there are movements seeking to make the police more accountable to legal and communal standards of conduct; but their role then becomes one of making the state work better and more efficiently. They work, perhaps unwittingly, at reconstructing and not dismantling the white state. What they fail to understand or accept is that the police are already accountable, but to something out of reach of the principles of justice or democracy. There is a (largely symbolic) multiracial or mixed race movement that understands itself to be the very transcendence of race but, in mixing and matching races supposed to really exist, it subsumes the products of racism in ways that recall many dimensions of white supremacist thinking. The ethic of retribution that legitimates the expanding prison-industrial complex in the US and beyond is one of these products. Even political opposition to that ethic outside the prison wall falls prey to certain acceptance of criminal law; in other words, it assumes that the prison is essential to social order. This acceptance is unacceptable from the point of view of the violence and violation engendered by the prison regime. Political (or politicized) prisoners demand an epistemology of a different order, one that challenges the internal limits of opposition in a radical way—the dream of prison abolition. How can one critically discuss policing and imprisonment without interrogating the very notions of freedom, citizenship, and democracy? How is one to think seriously about (the ends of) race without rethinking gender, sexuality, and the body? How can any economic questions be raised in this country—where movements for reparations and against sweatshops and prisons are becoming paramount on the left—without confronting the specter of slavery? How can we think political economy without also disturbing even radical critique and its historicist narratives of development, progress, and the primacy of production?
Notions of leftist solidarity with radicals merely maintain distance that inhibits political change

El Kilombo Intergalactico 07 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos “BEYOND RESISTANCE: EVERYTHING,”libcom.org/files/beyondresistance.pdf//MGD)

In our efforts to forge a new path, we found that an old friend—the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN)—was already taking enormous strides to move toward a politics adequate to our time, and that it was thus necessary to attempt an evaluation of Zapatismo that would in turn be adequate to the real ‘event’ of their appearance. That is, despite the fresh air that the Zapatista uprising had blown into the US political scene since 1994, we began to feel that even the inspiration of Zapatismo had been quickly contained through its insertion into a well-worn and untenable narrative: Zapatismo was another of many faceless and indifferent “third world” movements that demanded and deserved solidarity from leftists in the “global north.” From our position as an organization composed in large part by people of color in the United States, we viewed this focus on “solidarity” as the foreign policy equivalent of “white guilt,” quite distinct from any authentic impulse toward, or recognition of, the necessity for radical social change. The notion of “solidarity” that still pervades much of the Left in the U.S. has continually served an intensely conservative political agenda that dresses itself in the radical rhetoric of the latest rebellion in the “darker nations” while carefully maintaining political action at a distance from our own daily lives, thus producing a political subject (the solidarity provider) that more closely resembles a spectator or voyeur (to the suffering of others) than a participant or active agent, while simultaneously working to reduce the solidarity recipient to a mere object (of our pity and mismatched socks). At both ends of this relationship, the process of solidarity ensures that subjects and political action never meet; in this way it serves to make change an a priori impossibility. In other words, this practice of solidarity urges us to participate in its perverse logic by accepting the narrative that power tells us about itself: that those who could make change don’t need it and that those who need change can’t make it. To the extent that human solidarity has a future, this logic and practice do not! For us, Zapatismo was (and continues to be) unique exactly because it has provided us with the elements to shatter this tired schema. It has inspired in us the ability, and impressed upon us the necessity, of always viewing ourselves as dignified political subjects with desires, needs, and projects worthy of struggle. With the publication of The 2 Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle in June of 2005, the Zapatistas have made it even clearer that we must move beyond appeals to this stunted form of solidarity, and they present us with a far more difficult challenge: that wherever in the world we may be located, we must become “companer@s” (neither followers nor leaders) in a truly global struggle to change the world. As a direct response to this call, this analysis is our attempt to read Zapatismo as providing us with the rough draft of a manual for contemporary political action that eventually must be written by us all.

Reform within the political system is futile- engagement with the state props up inequality

El Kilombo Intergalactico 07 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos “BEYOND RESISTANCE: EVERYTHING,”libcom.org/files/beyondresistance.pdf//MGD)

Second, we must reassess the grounds for potential political change. If we are to take the Zapatistas seriously and conclude that the politics of the politicians is a sphere that functions through the simulation of public opinion—through polls and the circulation of sound bites and images—to administer the interests of transnational capital, it would be near suicide to continue to do politics as a competition for influence within that sphere. No matter how well-intentioned or “progressive” a given party or platform may be, the proximity of politicians to the vertical structure and logic of the State today assures only their complete functionality to the larger system of inequalities. In addition, we must remind ourselves that these politicians are not there to simulate for just any power; they are there to simulate social peace for a global power that is today greater than the collective power of any particular state. Thus, any opposition that limits itself to the level of a single state, no matter how powerful, may be futile. Yet, at the same time that these futilities surface, other strategies and tactics simultaneously emerge within this new situation, strategies that rise to the challenge of the contemporary impasse faced by our previous social visions. Consider for example the tremendous inspiration provided by the following lines written by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos; what appears at first as poetic license should be read more carefully as the outline of a brilliant strategy for our times: “The social ship is adrift, and the problem is not that we lack a captain. It so happens that the rudder itself has been stolen, and it is not going to turn up anywhere. There are those who are devoted to imagining that the rudder still exists and they fight for its possession. There are those who are seeking the rudder, certain that it must have been left somewhere. And there are those who make of an island, not a refuge for self-satisfaction but a ship for finding another island and another and another…”11

The left’s efforts are nothing more than crisis management- they forego opportunities at abolition of total war in the US by embracing flawed state knowledge production

Rodriguez 09- PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, prof at UC Riverside (Dylan, “The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition,” Critical Sociology, vol. 36 no. 1 p. 151-173//MGD)

Thus, behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering, guided by the logic of normalized and mundane black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the USA) really does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. The non-profit and NGO left, in particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the violent ‘abandonments’ of the state, which forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities (which were already insufficient at best) while transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities – which Gilmore (2007b: 44–5) says are guided by a ‘frightening willingness to engage in human sacrifice’. Yet, at the same time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left remains relatively unwilling and therefore institutionally unable to address the questions of social survival, grass roots mobilization, radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very domestic war(s) that the state has so openly and repeatedly declared as the premises of its own coherence. Given that domestic warfare composes both the common narrative language and concrete material production of the state, the question remains as to why the establishment left has not understood this statecraft as the state of emergency that the condition so openly, institutionally encompasses (war!). Perhaps it is because critical intellectuals, scholar activists, and progressive organizers are underestimating the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical (teaching) apparatus, that they have generally undertheorized how the state so skillfully generates (and often politically accommodates) sanctioned spaces of political contradiction that engulf ‘dissent’ and counter-state, antiracist, and antiviolence organizing.
Grass roots protest movements solve

Rodriguez 09- PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, prof at UC Riverside (Dylan, “The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition,” Critical Sociology, vol. 36 no. 1 p. 151-173//MGD)

Our historical moment suggests the need for a principled political rupturing of existing techniques and strategies that fetishize and fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and management of the worst outcomes of domestic warfare. One political move long overdue is toward grass roots pedagogies of radical dis-identification with the state, in the trajectory of an anti-nationalism or anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive identification with the creative possibilities of insurgency (this is to consider ‘insurgency’ as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive maneuvering of ‘resistance’). While there are rare groups in existence that offer this kind of nourishing political space (fromthe L.A.-based Youth Justice Coalition to the national organization INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence), they are often forced to expend far too much energy challenging both the parochialisms of the hegemonic non-profit apparatus and the sometimes narrow politics of the progressive US left.