Middle Class Laziness

Franz Fanon’s strikingly prescient words which so aptly describe today’s political and intellectual fallout from the “Arab Spring”:
“History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps…….This traditional weakness, which is almost congenital to the national consciousness of under-developed countries, is not solely the result of the mutilation of the colonized people by the colonial regime. It is also the result of the intellectual laziness of the national middle class, of its spiritual penury, and of the profoundly cosmopolitan mould that its mind is set in.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

Asia in my life: NGUGI WA THIONG'O

It is time to make the invisible visible in order to create a more interesting – and ultimately more meaningful – free flow of ideas in the world.

BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

WRITER NGUGI wa Thiong'o, whose name is pronounced "Googy" and means "work", writes novels, plays, essays and children's literature. Among his most acclaimed works is the 2006 novel "Wizard of the Crow", a sweeping satire on globalisation that he originally wrote in his native Gikuyu language.

THE links between Asia and Africa and South America have always been present, but in our times they have been made invisible by the fact that Europe is still the central mediator of Afro-Asian-Latino discourse. We live under what Satya Mohanty in his interview in Frontline (April 6, 2012) aptly calls the long intellectual shadow of the Age of European Empire.

In my case, I had always assumed that my intellectual and social formation was tied to England and Europe, with no meaningful connection to Asia and South America. There was a reason. I wrote in English. My literary heroes were English. Kenya being a British colony, I had learnt the geography and history of England as the central reference in my widening view of the world. Even our anti-colonial resistance assumed Europe as the point of contest; it was we, Africa, against them, Europe. I graduated from Makerere College in Uganda in 1964, with a degree in English, then went to the University of Leeds, England, for further studies, in English. Leeds was a meeting point of students from the Commonwealth: India, Pakistan, Australia, and the Caribbean. We saw each other through our experience of England. Our relationship to England, in admiration, resentment or both, was what established a shared space.

After I wrote my memoir of childhood, Dreams in a Time of War, published in 2006, I looked back and saw how much India had been an equally important thread in my life. I had not planned to bring out the Indian theme in my life, but there it was, staring at me right from the pages of my narrative. The thread starts from home, through school, college and after.

I did not grow up in a Christian home, but we celebrated Christmas, everybody did; it was a time of carnival, with children, in their very best, trooping from house to house to indulge their fancy in terms of food. We were vegetarians throughout the year, though not out of choice, and to many Christmas day was the first time they would taste meat. For me Christmas meant the occasion for eating gitoero, a curried broth of potatoes, peas, beans, and occasionally a piece of lamb or chicken, but the centrepiece of the dishes was cabaci, sometimes called mborota. Even today, Christmas and feasts in Kenya mean plentiful of cabaci, thambutha and mandath i, our version of the Indian chapati, paratha, samosa. The spices, curry, hot pepper and all, so very Indian, had become so central a part of Kenyan African cuisine that I could have sworn that these dishes were truly indigenous.

It was not just Christmas: daily hospitality in every Kenyan home means being treated to a mug of tea, literally a brew of tea leaves, tangawizi, and milk and sugar, made together, really a masala tea. Not to offer a passing guest or neighbour a cup of tea is the height of stinginess or poverty, and for the guest to decline the offer, the ultimate insult. So African it all seemed to me that when I saw Indians drinking tea or making curry, I thought it the result of African influence. Where the Indian impact on African food culture was all pervasive, there was hardly any equivalence from the English presence; baked white bread is the only contribution that readily comes to mind. This is not surprising. Imported Indian skilled labour built the railway line from the Coast to the Great Lake, opening the interior for English settlement. Every railroad station, from Mombasa to Kisumu, initially depots for the building material, mushroomed into a town mainly because of the Indian traders who provided much needed services to the workers initially, and, in time, to the community around. If European settlers opened the land for large-scale farming for export, the Indian opened the towns and cities for retail and wholesale commerce.

Limuru, where I come from, had a thriving Indian shopping centre built on land carved from that of my maternal grandfather's clan. The funeral pyres to burn the bodies of the Indian dead were held in a small forest that was also under my maternal grandfather's care. Cremation is central to Hindu culture: it asks Agni, the fire god, to release the spirit from the earthily body to be re-embodied in heaven into a different form of being. The departed soul travelled from pretaloka to pitraloka unless there were impurities holding it back. My mother did not practise Hinduism, but to her dying day, she believed and swore that on some nights, she would see disembodied Indian spirits, like lit candles in the dark, wandering in the forest around the cremation place. She talked about it as a matter of regular material fact, and she would become visibly upset when we doubted her.

It was not all harmony all the time. The Indian community kept to itself, there was hardly any social interaction between us, except across the counters at the shopping centre. Fights between African and Indian kids broke out, initiated by either side. The Indian dukanwalla, an employer of Africans for domestic work and around the shops, was, more often than not, likely to hurl racially charged insults at his workers. Some of the insults entered African languages. One of the most insulting words in Gikuyu was njangiri. A njangiri of a man meant one who was useless, rootless, like a stray dog. Njangiri came to Gikuyu from Junglee, the Sanskrit/Hindi word for wild: it would have been what the Indian employer was likely to call his domestic help. In colonial times, in my area at least, I do not recall the tensions ever exploding into inter-communal violence.

The postcolonial scene presents a different picture. Time and again Indians and Indian-owned stores have been targets of violence, especially in times of crisis, mostly victims of looting. I am not sure if it is the fact of their Indianness, or the fact of their being a most visible part of the affluent middle class. In such a case the line between the racial and class resentment is thin. Different in that sense is the case of Idi Amin's Uganda, where hundreds of Asians were expelled from a country that had been their home for almost a century. In both the colonial and postcolonial era, social segregation, forced in the case of the colonial era, or a consequence of habit and history, has exacerbated tensions.

The colonial school system segregated Asian, European and African from each other and it was not until Makerere College that I had social interaction with Indians. Makerere was an affiliate of the University of London in Kampala, Uganda, where, until the advent of Idi Amin, racial relations were benign. Before its college status, Makerere used to be a place of post-secondary schooling for African students from British East Africa, but as Independence approached, the college opened its doors to a sizeable Indian student presence. That is when we started learning about each other's different ways of life at a more personal basis. We shared dorms, classes, and the struggles for student leadership in college politics and sports. Leadership emerged from any of the multi-ethnic and multiracial mix. Doing things together is the best teacher of race relations: one can see and appreciate the real human person behind the racial and ethnic stereotypes.

The lead role of an African woman in my drama, The Black Hermit, the first major play ever in English by an East African black native, was an Indian. No make-up, just a headscarf and a kanga shawl on her long dress, but Suzie Wooman played the African mother to perfection, her act generating a standing ovation lasting into minutes. I dedicated my first novel, Weep Not Child, to my Indian classmate Jasbir Kalsi, probably as homage to our friendly but fierce intellectual rivalry in our English studies. Ghulsa Nensi led a multi-ethnic team that made the costumes for the play, while Bahadur Tejani led the team that raised money for the production.

It was not simply at the personal realm. Commerce, arts, crafts, medical and legal professions in Kenya have the marks of the Indian genius all over them. Politics too, and it should never be forgotten that Mahatma Gandhi started and honed his political and organising skills in South Africa, where he spent 21 years of his life from 1893, leaving for India in 1914. The South African scholar Masilela Ntongela places Gandhi squarely as one of the founding intellectuals of what Masilela calls the New African Movement. The honorific Mahatma, the great soul, was first applied to him in South Africa for by the time he left for India, he had already developed his Satyagraha and Ahimsa ready for use in his anti-colonial struggles that eventually led to Indian Independence in 1947, an event that had a big impact on anti-colonial struggles in Africa. What India achieved could be realised in Africa! Gandhi kept in touch with politics in Africa, Kenya in particular, and wrote a letter of protest when the British imprisoned one of the early Kenyan nationalists, Harry Thuku, in the 1920s. Gandhi created the tradition of South African Asians at the front line of struggle in South Africa. Ahmed Kathrada was one of the 10 defendants in the famous Rivonia trial that would lead him to Robben Island where he spent 18 years alongside Nelson Mandela and others. What Gandhi started Mandela completed. When I met Mandela in Johannesburg soon after his release and becoming president of the African National Congress (ANC) party, I came out from the hour-long one-on-one conversation struck by the charisma of his simplicity, reminiscent of what people say about Gandhi.

MAKHAN SINGH ADDRESSING workers in Nairobi in 1961, following his release after more than 11 years, during which he had been held without trial in remote and isolated parts of Kenya. Makhan Singh, along with Gamal Pinto, started the trade union movement in Kenya.

The birth of the Trade Union Movement in Kenya was largely the work of Gamal Pinto and Makhan Singh. Imprisoned by the Kenya colonial authorities repeatedly, Makhan Singh would never give up the task of bringing Indian and African workers together. He was the first prominent political leader to stand in a court of law and tell the British colonial state that Africans were ready to govern themselves, a heresy that earned him imprisonment and internal exile. Kapenguria is usually associated with the trial and imprisonment of Jomo Kenyatta, but Makhan Singh preceded him. There have been some Indian political martyrs, the first being the Indian workers executed for treason by the authorities in the very early days of colonial occupation. Gamal Pinto, a hero of the anti-colonial resistance, would be a prominent victim of the postcolonial negative turn in Kenyan politics. Though under a fictional name, Gamal Pinto has been immortalised in Peter Nazareth's novel In a Brown Mantle, one of the best literary articulations of the political drama of the transformation of African politics from the colonial to the neocolonial.

The recent explosion of Chinese interest in Africa might obscure the fact that there has always been a small but significant migrant Chinese presence, in South Africa mostly, but also in Zimbabwe. Fay Chung, whose grandparents migrated to Rhodesia in the 1920s, became an active participant in the anti-colonial struggle, at one time running for her life into exile in Tanzania, and was a big player in the founding of Zimbabwe. She founded Zimfep, which invited Kamirithu theatre to Zimbabwe. (A visit was scuttled by the Daniel arap Moi regime by simply banning the theatre group and forcing one of its leaders, the late Ngugi wa Mirii, to flee to Zimbabwe.) Under Zimfep, she launched the Zimbabwe Community Theatre Movement, ensuring the continuity and expansion of the Kamirithu spirit.

Mao Zedong never visited Africa, but his thought has been part of the intellectual debate in the postcolonial era. His class analysis of Chinese society was seen as providing a more relevant model for analysing African postcolonial social realities than the European Marxist model, and Kwame Nkrumah's book Class Struggle in Africa has Mao's marks all over it. The notion of the Comprador bourgeoisie dependent on and serving foreign capital and hence contrastable from the national bourgeoisie with its primary reliance on national capital has become an analytic model in political theory and development studies.

The intellectual history of the continent would be the poorer without the journal Transition, now based in Harvard, but founded by Rajat Neogy way back in 1962. Neogy, a brilliant and creative editor, was Uganda born and educated: he believed in the multicultural and multifaceted character of ideas, and he wanted to provide a space where different ideas could meet, clash, and mutually illuminate. Transition became the intellectual forum of the New East Africa, and indeed Africa, the first publisher of some of the leading intellectuals in the continent, including Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui and Peter Nazareth. Transition published my short story The Return, a turning point in my literary life. The story, which captured what would later become so central a part of my aesthetic explorations in my novels, principally A Grain of Wheat et al, was the sole basis of my inclusion in the 1962 conference of African writers of English expression.

Peter Nazareth and Bahadur Tejani, early contributors to Transition, would later set the tradition of Afro-Indian writing with their novels, a tradition taken to new heights by Moyez G. Vassanji. More than even black African writers, these three have been among those who have explored extensively and intensively the often problematic African-Indian relations. My own work, Wizard of the Crow, published in 2006, in which I tried to bring in Eastern philosophies into imaginative discourse with African realities was following in the footprints already made by these writers on the sands of the cultural scene in Africa.

It may be argued that in the specific cases of East and South Africa, where there has always been a sizeable Asian immigrant presence, Afro-Asian dialogue was inevitable. But, in general, Africa and Asia have met through political entities such as the Bandung Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation; and at intellectual practice, the long years of the Afro-Asian writers' movement which staged conferences in various capitals of Asia and Africa.

I have always felt the need for Africa, Asia and South America to learn from each other. This south-to-south intellectual and literary exchange was at the centre of the Nairobi Literature debate in the early 1960s, and is the centrepiece of my recent theoretical explorations, in Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. The debate brought about a literature syllabus that centred the study of Indian/Asian, Caribbean, African-American and South American writers alongside those of the European tradition. The result was not to the liking of the neocolonial regime in Kenya, who accused me and my colleagues of replacing Shakespeare with Marxist revolutionaries from Asia, the Caribbean, Afro-America and Latin America, among them Lu Xun, Kim Chi Ha, V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, C.L.R. James, Alejo Carpentier, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Shakespeare was of course safe, but we had committed the crime of placing him among other writers and changing the name of the department from English to Literature, which we thought was the more appropriate designation of the study of literature without borders.

As the editor of the Gikuyu language journal Mutiiri, I have published the Gikuyu translations of some of the poetry of Ariel Dorfman and Otto Rene Castillo. Professor Gitahi, who did the translations directly from Spanish into Gikuyu, did his doctoral work on Latin American literature. Gitahi was a product of the literature syllabus of the reorganised literature department of Nairobi University. His translation has facilitated direct Spanish-Gikuyu language conversation.

I would like to publish numerous translations from the languages of Asia and South America and you can call this a challenge to African, South American and Asian translators. More important, I would like to see similar efforts at enabling conversations between African, Asian and South American languages. This also calls for a new category of literary scholars who have studied a combination of languages from Asia, Africa and South America.

It is time to make the invisible visible in order to create a more interesting – and ultimately more creative and meaningful – free flow of ideas in the world. Satya Mohanty is quite right when he says: “One of the many advantages of the present moment is that the long intellectual shadow of the Age of European Empire seems to be receding a bit, and we have remarkable opportunities to work across cultures to learn from one another.”

Mohanty's call for the cultural interaction and interchange across borders – beyond the Eurocentric campus and our current notions of Comparative Literature – echoes in a forceful way and fresh manner the vision assumed and contained in the call for the abolition of the English Department made in Nairobi in 1969, the first steps in what would later become postcolonial theories and studies. Mohanty's call for cross-regional comparative literary studies is a necessary and timely intervention on the path towards a genuine world literature.

Plight of the poor in kenya

Tragedies among the poor are so frequent that hardly merit a headline. Our Media outlets have neither a conscience nor care for social justice as they are preoccupied with politics, celebrities and fashion. When they discuss they discuss the plight of the marginalized it is always judgmental, pitiful and patronizing. Fr. Gabriel Dolan

Ethnicity and class relations in kenya

When you look at the ethnic nationality of a politician and disregard his class we start making mistakes. Ethnic nationality of a politician has not made any difference to how they treat the working class kenyan. A kikuyu politician will unite any day any time with a kalenjin, luo,luhya politician if their class demands even if they have previously sponsored the massacre of the working class  and peasantry of each others ethnic nationality.

Marx at 193

John Lanchester

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we’re doing most of the time it marks a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production.

I, on the other hand, am an empiricist. That’s not so much because I think Marx was wrong about the distorting effect of underlying ideological pressures; it’s because I don’t think it’s possible to have a vantage point free of those pressures, so you have a duty to do the best with what you can see, and especially not to shirk from looking at data which are uncomfortable and/or contradictory. But this is a profound difference between Marx and my way of talking about Marx, which he would have regarded as being philosophically and politically entirely invalid.

Consider these passages from The Communist Manifesto, which Marx wrote with Engels in 1848, after being kicked out of both France and Germany for his political writings:

Capitalism has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities. Capitalism has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.

Capitalism has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.

Capitalism has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. Capitalism has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

Capitalism cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the capitalist epoch from all earlier ones. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.

Commercial crises put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire capitalist society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.

It’s hard not to conclude from these selected sentences that Marx was extraordinarily prescient. He really did have the most astonishing insight into the nature and trajectory and direction of capitalism. Three aspects which particularly stand out here are the tribute he pays to the productive capacity of capitalism, which far exceeds that of any other political-economic system we’ve ever seen; the remaking of social order which accompanies that; and capitalism’s inherent tendency for crisis, for cycles of boom and bust.

I should, however, admit that I haven’t quoted these sentences exactly as Marx wrote them: where I wrote ‘capitalism’, Marx had ‘the bourgeoisie’. He was talking about a class and the system which served its interest, and I made it sound as if he was talking only about a system. Marx doesn’t use the word ‘capitalism’. The term never occurs in the finished first part of Das Kapital. (I checked this by doing a word search and found it three times, every time an apparent mistranslation or loose use of the German plural Kapitals – in German he never talks of Kapitalismus.) Since he is widely, and accurately, seen as capitalism’s greatest critic, this is quite an omission. The terms he preferred were ‘political economy’ and ‘bourgeois political economy’, which he saw as encompassing everything from property rights to our contemporary idea of human rights to the very conception of the independent autonomous individual. I think he didn’t use the word ‘capitalism’ because that would have implied that capitalism was one of a number of competing possible systems – and Marx didn’t believe that. He didn’t think it was possible to move past capitalism without a fundamental overturning of the existing social, political and philosophical order.

He was right: no alternative has developed. Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject. If there were ever going to be a serious and sustained theoretical challenge to the hegemony of capitalism inside economics – a serious and sustained challenge subsequent to the one provided by what used to be called ‘actually existing socialisms’ – you’d have thought one would have come along since the near terminal meltdown of the global economic system in 2008. But all we’ve seen are suggestions for ameliorative tweaking of the existing system to make it a little less risky. We have at the moment this monstrous hybrid, state capitalism – a term which used to be a favourite of the Socialist Workers Party in describing the Soviet Union, and which only a few weeks ago was on the cover of the Economist to describe the current economic condition of most of the world. This is a parody of economic order, in which the general public bears all the risks and the financial sector takes all the rewards – an extraordinarily pure form of what used to be called ‘socialism for the rich’. But ‘socialism for the rich’ was supposed to be a joke. The truth is that it is now genuinely the way the global economy is working.

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism, but if the cashpoints stopped giving out money, it would be an event on a scale that would put the currently constituted democratic states at risk of collapse. And yet governments act as if there is very little they can do about it. They have the legal power to conscript us and send us to war, but they can’t address any fundamentals of the economic order. So it looks very much as if Marx’s omission of the word ‘capitalism’, because he foresaw no alternative within the existing social order, was an instance of his crystal ball functioning with particularly high resolution.

Marx puts great pressure on the question of where value comes from, how commodities are exchanged and what money is. It’s a very simple question but not one that had been asked with such clarity before; it’s also the kind of question no longer asked at a professional or institutional level because the current order of things is taken so much for granted. But it is a very basic and important question, or two questions: what is money and where does its value come from?

There are many hundreds of pages on this subject in Marx, and many tens of thousands in commentaries and analyses of his work, so my summary of his views is of necessity cartoonishly compressed and simple. Marx’s model works like this: competition pressures will always force down the cost of labour, so that workers are employed for the minimum price, always paid just enough to keep themselves going, and no more. The employer then sells the commodity not for what it cost to make, but for the best price he can get: a price which in turn is subject to competition pressures, and therefore will always tend over time to go down. In the meantime, however, there is a gap between what the labourer sells his labour for, and the price the employer gets for the commodity, and that difference is the money which accumulates to the employer and which Marx called surplus value. In Marx’s judgment surplus value is the entire basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour. That’s what makes up the cost of the thing; as Marx put it, ‘price is the money-name of the labour objectified in a commodity.’ And in examining that question he creates a model which allows us to see deeply into the structure of the world, and see the labour hidden in the things all around us. He makes labour legible in objects and relationships.

The theory of surplus value also explains, for Marx, why capitalism has an inherent tendency towards crisis. The employer, just like the employee, has competition pressures, and the price of the things he’s selling will always tend to be forced down by new entrants to the market. His way of getting round this will usually be to employ machines to make the workers more productive. He’ll try to get more out of them by employing fewer of them to make more stuff. But in trying to increase the efficiency of production, he might well destroy value, often by making too many goods at not enough profit, which leads to a surplus of competing goods which leads to a crash in the market which leads to massive destruction of capital which leads to the start of another cycle. It’s an elegant aspect of Marx’s thinking that the surplus theory of value leads directly and explicitly to the prediction that capitalism will always have cycles of crisis, of boom and bust.

There are obvious difficulties with Marx’s arguments. One of them is that so many of the contemporary world’s goods and commodities are now virtual (in the digital-oriented sense) that it’s not easy to see where the accumulated labour in them is. David Harvey’s lectures on Capital, for instance, the best beginning for anyone studying Marx’s most important book, are of immense value but they’re also available for free on the internet, so if you buy them as a book – you can take in information much more quickly by reading than by listening – the surplus value you’re adding to is mainly your own.

This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world. Take Facebook. Part of its success comes from the fact that people feel that they and their children are safe spending time there, that it is a place you go to interact with other people but is not fundamentally risky or sleazy in the way new technologies are often perceived to be – that VHS, for instance, was when it was launched on the market. But the perception that Facebook is, maybe the best word would be ‘hygienic’, is sustained by tens of thousands of hours of badly paid labour on the part of the people in the developing world who work for companies hired to scan for offensive images and who are, according to the one Moroccan man who went on the record to complain about it, paid a dollar an hour for doing so. That’s a perfect example of surplus value: huge amounts of poorly paid menial work creating the hygienic image of a company which, when it launches on the stock market later this year, hopes to be worth $100 billion.

When you start looking for this mechanism at work in the contemporary world you see it everywhere, often in the form of surplus value being created by you, the customer or client of a company. Online check-in and bag drop at airports, for example. Online check-in is a process which should genuinely increase the efficiency of the airport experience, thereby costing you less time: time you can spend doing other things, some of them economically useful to you. But what the airlines do is employ so few people to supervise the bag drop-off that there’s no time-saving at all for the customer. When you look, you see that because airlines have to employ more people to supervise the non-online-checked-in customers – otherwise the planes wouldn’t leave on time – the non-checked-in queues move far more quickly. They’re transferring their inefficiency to the customer, but what they’re also doing is transferring the labour to you and accumulating the surplus value themselves. It happens over and over again. Every time you deal with a phone menu or interactive voicemail service, you’re donating your surplus value to the people you’re dealing with. Marx’s model is constantly asking us to see the labour encoded in the things and transactions all around us.

Last year the National Geographic ran a feature on ‘the world’s most typical human being’ to commemorate the birth of the world’s seven billionth person. The single uncontentious point about this person is the fact of right-handedness. (Actually, though handedness isn’t contentious, it is quite interesting, since the average rate of left-handedness runs at about 10 per cent, but seems to be higher in societies that have a higher level of violence. Nobody knows why, but that isn’t surprising since the reason some people are born left-handed isn’t understood.) That he is a he is a relatively recent development. More male children are born than female ones, in the ratio of 103-106 to 100, because male children have a higher rate of infant mortality and to balance the gender ratio of the species you need more male babies. But modern medicine has in most parts of the world sharply decreased infant mortality and now the difference in birth rates is feeding through into other demographic distributions, which have historically had more women than men because women live longer, again for reasons which aren’t understood. In addition, and much much more darkly, rising prosperity and technological abilities have led to huge disparities in birth rates, which can only be to do with the selective abortion of female children. The sex ratio in many parts of Asia in particular has risen way past biologically possible levels. In China and India, census data indicate that the level is nationally around 120 to 100. By 2020, China will have between thirty and forty million more men than women under the age of 19. To put that figure in perspective, forty million is the total number of American men in that demographic bracket. So, within eight years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America permanently single. One of the dark things about this is that ‘son preference’, as it’s dryly called in the literature, rises with income and with modernisation – which means it’s been rising sharply. That amounts to many tens of millions of missing girls.

So he’s a he. He earns less than £8000 a year. He has a mobile phone but not a bank account. That fits Marx’s model of how capitalism would play out: he doesn’t have a bank account because the typical worker is a proletarian who’s got nothing to deposit in a bank; he doesn’t have any capital; he has to sell his labour for the best price he can get. He is 28 – that’s the median age of the world population, the guy in the middle. And if you say the world’s most typical person belongs to the world’s most numerous ethnic group, it follows that he is a Han Chinese. So this representative human in 2012 is a 28-year-old Han Chinese man, no bank account but a mobile, earning on average less than £8000 a year. Guess how many people fit those exact criteria today? Nine million. We can even guess his name: Lee, or Li, the most common surname in the world. There are as many people called Lee as there are people in the UK and in France added together.

I don’t think Marx would have seen anything in that picture to disprove his model, to use a word he would have disliked. He foresaw the development of a proletariat who did most of the world’s work and a bourgeoisie who in effect owned the fruits of their labour. The fact of the proletariat being in the developing world, in effect shoved out of sight of the Western bourgeoisie, does nothing to disprove that picture – an ‘external proletariat’, it’s sometimes called. Take as a case study of this process the world’s most valuable company, which at the moment is Apple. Apple’s last quarter was the most profitable of any company in history: it made $13 billion in profits on $46 billion in sales. Its bestselling products are made at factories owned by the Chinese company Foxconn. (Foxconn makes the Amazon Kindle, the Microsoft Xbox, the Sony PS3, and hundreds of other products with other companies’ names on the front – it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that it makes every electronic device in the world.) The company’s starting pay is $2 an hour, the workers live in dormitories of six or eight beds for which they are charged rent of $16 a month, their factory in Chengdu, where the iPad is made, runs 24 hours a day, employs 120,000 people – think about that, a factory the size of Exeter – and isn’t even Foxconn’s biggest plant: that’s in Shenzhen and employs 230,000 people, who work 12 hours a day, six days a week. The company’s answer to a recent scandal about suicide rates was to point out that the suicide rate among Foxconn employees is actually lower than the Chinese average, and that it turns away thousands of applicants for jobs every day, and both of those facts are true. That’s what’s really shocking. These conditions are equal to or better than most of the equivalent manufacturing jobs in China, where most of the world’s goods are made, and that life is widely seen among Chinese workers as preferable to the remaining alternatives of rural life. And all this, in an irony so large there is almost no word to encompass it, in the world’s biggest and most powerful notionally Communist state. I don’t think you can describe these as 19th-century labour conditions, but they come very close to fulfilling Marx’s model of an alienated proletariat whose labour is sucked away from it and turned into other people’s profits. Our 28-year-old Mr Lee can easily be imagined as working at one of those plants.

The challenges to Marx’s account of where we would be now come when you look in closer detail. If you look at a large picture of the world, much of what he predicted has come true. We have an affluent bourgeoisie which is international but which in the Western world forms the majority of the population, and a proletarian workforce largely in Asia. Add to that the regularity of economic crises, the growing concentration of wealth among the already wealthy and the increased pressures that are everywhere apparent on the international bourgeoisie – the squeezedness we read so much about. There’s a general sense that there are no longer any safe havens, that there’s no escaping economic change, that capitalism moves at a pace faster than humans themselves can move. If you are a welder but your daughter has to be trained as a software engineer in order to get work, that’s probably something you and your society can adapt to; if you are a welder and you have to retrain as a software engineer halfway through your productive career, that just isn’t so easy. And yet changes of this scale are what is implied by developments in modern labour markets. This is exactly what Marx meant when he foresaw a world in which ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ It is therefore not too hard to convince yourself that Marx’s predictions were right at a certain level of broad-brush impressionism.

The most obvious mistake in his version of the world is to do with class. There is something like a classic Marxian proletariat dispersed through the world. But Marx foresaw that this proletariat would be an increasingly centralised and organised force: indeed, this was one of the reasons it would prove so dangerous to capitalism. By creating the conditions in which labour would be sure to organise and assemble collectively capitalism was arranging its own downfall. But there is no organised global conflict between the classes; there is no organised global proletariat. There’s nothing even close. The proletariat is queuing to get into Foxconn, not to organise strikes there, and the great danger facing China, which is in a sense where the world’s proletariat now is, is the inequality caused by fractures within the new urban proletariat and the rural poverty they’re leaving behind. China also has tensions between the coast and the centre, and increasing problems with corruption and maladministration that erupt regularly in what are known as Mass Group Incidents, MGI – basically anti-authority riots which occur regularly all over China and seem never to be reported in the Western mainstream media. But none of these phenomena is to do with class, and given the emphasis put on organised class struggle in Marx’s work you have to file this under predictions which haven’t proved true.

Why not? I think for two main reasons. The first is that Marx did not foresee, as no one else did and I don’t think anyone could, the variety of different forms of capitalism which would evolve. We talk of capitalism as one thing, but it comes in many different flavours, involving different models. The contemporary welfare state – housing and educating and feeding and providing healthcare for its citizens, from birth to death – is a development which challenges the basis of Marx’s analysis of what capitalism is: I think he would have looked hard at the welfare state and wondered whether it fundamentally undermined his analysis, just because it is so different from the capitalism Marx saw operating in his day, and from which he extrapolated. Perhaps he would argue that what has happened is that British society in its entirety has become part of a global bourgeoisie, and the proletariat is now in other countries; that’s a possible argument, but not one that’s easy to sustain in the face of the inequalities which exist and are growing in our society. But Scandinavian welfare capitalism is very different from the state-controlled capitalism of China, which is in turn almost wholly different from the free-market, sauve-qui-peut capitalism of the United States, which is again different from the nationalistic and heavily socialised capitalism of France, which again is not at all like the curious hybrid we have in the UK, in which our governments are wholly devoted to the free market and yet we have areas of welfare and provision they haven’t dared address. Singapore is one of the most avowedly free-market countries in the world, regularly coming top or near top of surveys for liberalisation of markets, and yet the government owns most of the land in the country and the overwhelming majority of the population lives in socialised housing. It’s the world capital of free markets and also of council flats. There are lots of different capitalisms and it’s not clear that a single analysis which embraces all of them as if they were a single phenomenon can be valid.

One of the ways this plays out is in the variety and complexity of our interests in this system. In February all the workers in Foxconn had their basic pay increased by 25 per cent overnight. That wasn’t because of a feat of organisation and protest on the part of the workforce: it was because of an article about working conditions there in the New York Times. Ethical pressures from the West are one of the most potent forces for improving factory conditions in Shenzhen. Another example, well known in the medical world but not much outside it, concerns Mectizan, a drug developed to treat river blindness by the American company Merck. (The initial samples that contained the chemical used to make the drug came from a golf course in Japan.) The drug was developed at considerable cost in 1987, and then given away, free, in perpetuity, with the effect of saving many hundreds of thousands of people from blindness, and also saving many more from starvation because it allowed 25 million hectares of previously uncultivatable land to be turned over to agriculture. You can just about squeeze that into a Marxist model by describing it as a publicity stunt, but I don’t think that analysis works, not least because hardly anybody in the Western world has ever heard of it.

That’s something Marx didn’t predict and it touches on something else that couldn’t have been foreseen. That’s the diversity of our interests and roles in contemporary capitalism. Marx talked about people, indeed classes, as being divided into workers and owners of the means of production, and he made some allowance for the fact that we are ‘bearers’ of these roles, different aspects of which might be in play at different times, with the result that a proletarian may find himself competing against other proletarians even though their class interests are aligned. The fact is that in the modern world our selves are far more fragmented and contradictory than that. Many workers have pensions invested in companies whose route to profit lies in cutting to a minimum the number of workers they employ; one of the things that led to the credit crunch was pension funds’ search for higher stable returns to pay the pension liabilities of future generations of retiring workers, so that in very many cases we had a situation in which people lost their jobs because of losses incurred in the attempt to provide future security for the same workers. Most of us are wage slaves, beneficiaries of the welfare state, funders of that state, at the same time as being current or future pensioners who, in that capacity if in no other, are textbook bourgeois owners of the means of production. It’s complicated; and the intense ethical pressures which can intermittently be brought to bear on companies are a symptom of that complexity and multiplicity of interests. It’s very striking how seldom companies defend themselves using the simplest – and under classic capitalism most truthful – answer to criticism of their behaviour: our ethical role is to make a profit for our shareholders, provide employment and pay our taxes. That’s it. The other stuff is for government. But they never say that, perhaps sensing that we all intuit the fact that our interweaving and internally conflicting interests make the world more complicated than that.

Complicated though Marx’s model of the world is, the modern world is more complicated still. This exerts great pressure in one more area, one Marx would have recognised through a favourite saying that comes from Hegel: quantity changes quality. What this means is that you can have an explanatory system which accounts for certain phenomena – in this case, the way capitalism produces things which run against its own main current of accumulation and exploitation – while the broad direction of travel remains the same. But a point comes when the phenomena mount up, and stop seeming like isolated contradictory examples and look instead like a basic challenge to the central ideas. Something like this has happened with the countercurrents that run inside capitalism.

Take the most basic statistical measures of life, infant mortality and life expectancy. Life expectancy in Britain in 1850, the year The Communist Manifesto was first published in English, was 43 years; that’s lower than today’s life expectancy in Afghanistan, which is in turn lower than in any country that hasn’t been hit by the Aids epidemic. UK life expectancy is now over eighty and rising so sharply that buried in the statistics is a truly strange fact: a woman who is eighty today has a 9.2 per cent chance of living to be a hundred, whereas a woman of twenty has a 26.6 per cent chance. It may seem weird that the person sixty years younger has a three times better chance of making it to a century, but what it shows is just how fast progress is being made. Infant mortality, which is often taken as a proxy for a whole set of things (level of medical and technological development, strength of social ties, degree of access to care for the poor, a society’s acknowledgment of the needs of strangers), is something in which Marx would have taken a keen interest. In Victorian Britain it was at the rate of 150 deaths per thousand births. Today, UK infant mortality is 4.7 per thousand. That’s an improvement of 3191 per cent. (Many countries have done better than us and have lower rates; we’re only 31st in the world – the lowest of all being in the place where everyone lives in council flats, at 1.92 per thousand.) The global infant mortality rate is 42.09 per thousand, a third of the British rate in Marx’s day. Aids has a terrible effect on these figures: Botswana, for instance, has a life expectancy of 31.6 years, but according to UN data, if you remove the impact of Aids that goes up to 70.7 years.

At what point do data of this sort represent a challenge to Marx’s ideas? These data mask significant inequalities – the notorious example in London is that if you take the Jubilee Line from Westminster towards the east, male life expectancy goes down a year every stop for the next eight stops – but leaving that aside, the very broad picture is that pretty much everyone lives longer and enjoys better health. If that is true, can it be true that capitalism consistently and reliably immiserates? Can it be true that the system is destructive, if people who live under it quite simply live longer? Take the Millennium Development goals, announced at the turn of the new century, and setting targets to reduce infant mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015 from a starting point of 1990 (the books slightly cooked by setting the starting point ten years in the past), halving the number of people who live in absolute poverty, doubling the percentage of children getting at least a primary education. Can an achievement on that scale be ignored? If a system does that, can you say that it produces nothing but immiseration? Marx himself said that there were moments when the capitalist mode of production could transcend itself, as in the invention of the joint stock company. Further evidence of this possibility for self-transcendence would have exerted great pressure on his intellectual models.

A final challenge to Marx’s model, and also to his picture of the future, comes from something he did see very clearly and prophetically, the extraordinary productive power of capitalism. He saw how capitalism would transform the surface of the planet and impact on the life of every single person alive. There is, however, a crack or flaw close to the heart of his analysis. Marx saw the two fundamental poles of economic, and social and political, life as labour and nature. He didn’t see these two things as static; he used the metaphor of a metabolism to describe the way our labour shapes the world and we in turn are shaped by the world we have made. So the two poles of labour and nature don’t stay fixed. But what Marx doesn’t allow for is the fact that nature’s resources are finite. He knows that there is no such thing as nature unshaped by our assumptions, but he doesn’t share our contemporary awareness that nature can run out. This is the kind of thing which is sometimes called ironic, but is closer to tragedy, and at its heart is the fact that the productive, expansionist, resource-consuming power of capitalism is so great that it is not sustainable at a planetary level. The whole world wants to have a First World bourgeois lifestyle, and the whole world can see what that looks like by glancing at a television set, but the world can’t have it, because we will burn through its resources before we get there. Capitalism’s greatest crisis is upon us, and it is predicated on the unavoidable fact that nature is finite.

This is a point that Marxists for the most part have been reluctant to address, and for a very good reason: the problem of resources in the world today, whether food or water or power, power in all senses, are to do with inequitable distribution and not with the total supply. There is more than enough of all those things for all of us. Writers and activists in the Marxist tradition have tended to stress that point, and they’re right to do so, but we need also to face the fact that the world is heading towards ever greater consumption of and demand for resources on the part of everybody. Everybody simultaneously. That fact is capitalism’s most deadly opponent. To give just one example in relation to one resource only, the American average consumption of water is one hundred gallons per person per day. There isn’t enough fresh water on the planet for everyone to live like that.

So the question is whether capitalism can evolve new forms, in the way it has so far managed to do, and come up with property and market-based mechanisms which deflect the seemingly inevitable crisis that will ensue, or whether we need some entirely different social and economic order. The irony is that this order might in many respects be like the one Marx imagined, even if he saw a different route to getting there. When Marx said that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction he wasn’t talking about climate change or resource wars. If we feel a natural gloom and despondency at the prospect of the difficulties ahead, we should also take comfort in the fact of our imaginative adaptability and the ingenuity which has brought us so far so fast – so far, so fast, that we now need to slow down, and don’t quite know how. As Marx wrote, towards the end of the first volume of Capital, ‘man is distinguished from all other animals by the limitless and flexible nature of his needs.’ Limitless needs we see all around us and they’ve brought us to where we are, but we’re going to have to work on the flexible part.

Does The West Have A Future?

Friday, May 11, 2012

By Paul Craig Roberts for the Information Clearing House

Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence. Consider:

We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.

This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an “invisible bomb” that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A “senior law enforcement source” told the New York Times that “the scary part” is that “if they buil[t] one, they probably built more.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people.” Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder women and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as “a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that the fake plot proves the need for warrantless surveillance in order to detect--what, fake plots? In Congress Republican Pete King and Democrat Charles Ruppersberger denounced media for revealing that the plot was a CIA operation, claiming that the truth threatened the war effort and soldiers’ lives.

Even alternative news media initially fell for this fake plot. Apparently, no one stops to wonder how al-Qaeda, which has become so disorganized and helpless that it is on the run and left its revered leader, Osama bin Laden, in a Pakistan village alone and unguarded to be murdered by US Navy Seals, could catch the CIA off guard with an “undetectable” bomb, to use the description provided by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein, who was briefed on the device by US intelligence personnel.

Notice that the Secretary of State has committed the bankrupt US and its unravelling social safety net to the protection of “India and others” from terrorists. But the real significance of this latest hoax is to introduce into the fearful American public the idea of an undetectable underwear bomb.

What does this bring to mind? Anyone of my generation or any science fiction aficionado immediately thinks of Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters.

Written in 1951 but set in our time, Earth is invaded by small creatures that attach to the human body and take over the person. The humans become the puppets of their masters. Large areas of America succumb to the invaders before the morons in Washington understand that the invasion is real and not a conspiracy theory.

On clothed humans, the creatures cannot be detected, and the edict goes out that anyone clothed is a suspect. Everyone must go about naked. Women are not even allowed to carry purses in their hand, because the creature can be in the purse attached to the woman’s hand.

Obviously, if the CIA, the news sources, and Dianne Feinstein’s briefers are correct that defeated al-Qaeda has come up with an “undetectable” bomb, we will have to pass through airport security naked.

If so, how will this be possible? If each airline passenger must go through a personal screening by disrobing in a room, how long will it take to clear “airport security”? I doubt there is any place in North or South America that the traveller couldn’t drive there faster. Or perhaps this is an answer to depression level US unemployment. Millions of unemployed Americans will be hired to view naked people before they board airliners.

As the Transportation Safety Administration division of Homeland Security has taken its intrusions, unchallenged, into train, bus, and highway travel, are we faced with the total collapse of the clothing industry? Stay tuned.

A couple of years ago a noted philosopher wrote an article in which he suggested that Americans live in an artificial or virtual reality. Another noted philosopher said that he thought there was a 25% chance that the philosopher was right. I am convinced that he is right. Americans live in the Matrix. Nothing that they know or think that they know is correct.

For example, our non-truth-telling “leaders” continually declare that “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” This myth is one of the many reasons rolled out to justify American taxpayers’ declining incomes being taxed to provide the Israeli government with the means to murder Palestinians and steal their country.

Israeli democracy a myth you say? Yes, a myth. According to news reports compiled and reported by Antiwar.com (May 8), the September 4 Israeli elections have been cancelled, because the “opposition leader Shaul Mofaz is joining the government.”

Mofaz sold out his party for personal power, a typical politician’s behavior.

Mofaz’s treachery produced protests from his followers, but, according to news reports, “Israeli police were quick to crack down on the protest, terming it ‘illegal’ and arresting a number of journalists.”

Ah, “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”

In truth Israel is a fascist state, one that has been in violation of international law and Christian morality during the entirety of its existence. Yet, in America Israel is a hallowed icon. Like Bush, Cheney, and Obama, millions of American “christians” worship Israel and believe it is “God’s calling” for Americans to die for Israel.

If you believe in murdering your opponents, not debating with them, dispossessing the powerless, creating a fictional world based on lies and paying the corporate media to uphold the lies and fictional world, you are part of what the rest of the world perceives as “The West.”

Let me back off from being too hard on The West. The French and Greek peoples have shown in the recent elections that they are unplugging from the Matrix and understand that they, the 99%, are being put by their elites in a position to be the sacrificial lambs for the mistakes of the 1% mega-rich, who compete with one another in terms of how many billions of dollars or euros, how many yachts, collections of exotic cars, and exotic Playboy and Penthouse centerfolds they have as personal possessions.

The central banks of the West--the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the UK bank--are totally committed to the prosperity of the mega-rich. No one else counts. Marx and Lenin never had a target as exists today. Yet, the left-wing is today so feeble and brainwashed that it does not exist as even a minor countervailing power. The American left-wing has even accepted the absurd official account of 9/11 and of Osama bin Laden’s murder in Pakistan by Navy Seals. A movement so devoid of mental and emotional strength is useless. It might as well not exist.

People without valid information are helpless, and that is where Western peoples are. The new tyranny is arising in the West, not in Russia and China. The danger to humanity is in the nuclear button briefcase in the Oval Office and in the brainwashed and militant Amerikan population, the most totally disinformed and ignorant people on earth.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. www.paulcraigroberts.org

Another "war on terror" injustice

Speech: Tarek Mehanna

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Another "war on terror" injustice

April 18, 2012

After two years in solitary confinement, an eight-week trial, a guilty verdict on seven different counts, Egyptian American pharmacist Tarek Mehanna was sentenced on April 12, 2012 to 17.5 years in prison, with an additional seven years of supervised release to follow.

A tireless movement had campaigned to defend Tarek from baseless charges by the government that he provided "material support" for terrorists--by allegedly translating al-Qaeda material into English. The victim of an Islamophobic political climate, Tarek delivered the following statement to the judge at his sentencing hearing.

Tarek Mehanna

IN THE name of God the most gracious the most merciful.

Exactly four years ago this month, I was finishing my work shift at a local hospital. As I was walking to my car, I was approached by two federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way.

The "easy" way, as they explained, was that I would become an informant for the government, and if I did so, I would never see the inside of a courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it.

Here I am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down for 23 hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very hard--and the government spent millions of tax dollars--to put me in that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a cell.

In the weeks leading up to this moment, many people have offered suggestions as to what I should say to you. Some said I should plead for mercy in hopes of a light sentence, while others suggested I would be hit hard either way. But what I want to do is just talk about myself for a few minutes.

When I refused to become an informant, the government responded by charging me with the "crime" of supporting the mujahideen fighting the occupation of Muslim countries around the world. Or as they like to call them, "terrorists."

I wasn't born in a Muslim country, though. I was born and raised right here in America, and this angers many people: how is it that I can be an American and believe the things I believe, take the positions I take? Everything a man is exposed to in his environment becomes an ingredient that shapes his outlook, and I'm no different. So in more ways than one, it's because of America that I am who I am.

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WHEN I was six, I began putting together a massive collection of comic books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed.

This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of my childhood, I gravitated towards any book that reflected that paradigm--Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I even saw an ethical dimension to The Catcher in the Rye.

By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was learning just how real that paradigm is in the world. I learned about the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European settlers. I learned about how the descendants of those European settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III. I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed insurgency against British forces--an insurgency we now celebrate as the American revolutionary war.

As a kid, I even went on school field trips just blocks away from where we sit now. I learned about Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown and the fight against slavery in this country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs and the struggles of the labor unions, working class and the poor.

I learned about Anne Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

Everything I learned in those years confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was six: that throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned about, I found myself consistently siding with the oppressed, and consistently respecting those who stepped up to defend them--regardless of nationality, regardless of religion. And I never threw my class notes away. As I stand here speaking, they are in a neat pile in my bedroom closet at home.

From all the historical figures I learned about, one stood out above the rest. I was impressed by many things about Malcolm X, but above all, I was fascinated by the idea of transformation, his transformation. I don't know if you've seen the movie Malcolm X by Spike Lee. It's over three-and-a-half hours long, and the Malcolm at the beginning is different from the Malcolm at the end. He starts off as an illiterate criminal, but ends up a husband, a father, a protective and eloquent leader for his people, a disciplined Muslim performing the Hajj in Mecca, and finally, a martyr.

Malcolm's life taught me that Islam is not something inherited; it's not a culture or ethnicity. It's a way of life, a state of mind anyone can choose, no matter where they come from or how they were raised. This led me to look deeper into Islam, and I was hooked.

I was just a teenager, but Islam answered the question that the greatest scientific minds were clueless about, the question that drives the rich and famous to depression and suicide from being unable to answer: What is the purpose of life? Why do we exist in this universe?

But it also answered the question of how we're supposed to exist. And since there's no hierarchy or priesthood, I could directly and immediately begin digging into the texts of the Koran and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, to begin the journey of understanding what this was all about, the implications of Islam for me as a human being, as an individual, for the people around me, for the world; and the more I learned, the more I valued Islam like a piece of gold.

This was when I was a teen, but even today, despite the pressures of the last few years, I stand here before you, and everyone else in this courtroom, as a very proud Muslim.

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WITH THAT, my attention turned to what was happening to other Muslims in different parts of the world. And everywhere I looked, I saw the powers that be trying to destroy what I loved.

I learned what the Soviets had done to the Muslims of Afghanistan. I learned what the Serbs had done to the Muslims of Bosnia. I learned what the Russians were doing to the Muslims of Chechnya. I learned what Israel had done in Lebanon--and what it continues to do in Palestine--with the full backing of the United States.

And I learned what America itself was doing to Muslims. I learned about the Gulf War, and the depleted uranium bombs that killed thousands and caused cancer rates to skyrocket across Iraq. I learned about the American-led sanctions that prevented food, medicine and medical equipment from entering Iraq, and how--according to the United Nations--over half a million children perished as a result. I remember a clip from a 60 Minutes interview of Madeline Albright where she expressed her view that these dead children were "worth it."

I watched on September 11 as a group of people felt driven to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings from their outrage at the deaths of these children. I watched as America then attacked and invaded Iraq directly. I saw the effects of "shock and awe" in the opening day of the invasion--the children in hospital wards with shrapnel from American missiles sticking out of their foreheads (of course, none of this was shown on CNN).

I learned about the town of Haditha, where 24 Muslims--including a 76-year old man in a wheelchair, women and even toddlers--were shot up and blown up in their bedclothes as the slept by U.S. Marines. I learned about Abeer al-Janabi, a 14-year old Iraqi girl gang-raped by five American soldiers, who then shot her and her family in the head, then set fire to their corpses.

I just want to point out, as you can see, Muslim women don't even show their hair to unrelated men. So try to imagine this young girl from a conservative village with her dress torn off, being sexually assaulted by not one, not two, not three, not four, but five soldiers.

Even today, as I sit in my jail cell, I read about the drone strikes which continue to kill Muslims daily in places like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Just last month, we all heard about the 17 Afghan Muslims--mostly mothers and their kids--shot to death by an American soldier, who also set fire to their corpses.

These are just the stories that make it to the headlines, but one of the first concepts I learned in Islam is that of loyalty, of brotherhood--that each Muslim woman is my sister, each man is my brother, and together, we are one large body who must protect each other. In other words, I couldn't see these things beings done to my brothers and sisters--including by America--and remain neutral. My sympathy for the oppressed continued, but was now more personal, as was my respect for those defending them.

I mentioned Paul Revere--when he went on his midnight ride, it was for the purpose of warning the people that the British were marching to Lexington to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock, then on to Concord to confiscate the weapons stored there by the Minutemen. By the time they got to Concord, they found the Minutemen waiting for them, weapons in hand. They fired at the British, fought them, and beat them. From that battle came the American Revolution.

There's an Arabic word to describe what those Minutemen did that day. That word is "jihad," and this is what my trial was about.

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ALL THOSE videos and translations and childish bickering over, "Oh, he translated this paragraph" and "Oh, he edited that sentence," and all those exhibits revolved around a single issue: Muslims who were defending themselves against American soldiers doing to them exactly what the British did to America.

It was made crystal clear at trial that I never, ever plotted to "kill Americans" at shopping malls or whatever the story was. The government's own witnesses contradicted this claim, and we put expert after expert up on that stand, who spent hours dissecting my every written word, who explained my beliefs. Further, when I was free, the government sent an undercover agent to prod me into one of their little "terror plots," but I refused to participate. Mysteriously, however, the jury never heard this.

So this trial was not about my position on Muslims killing American civilians. It was about my position on Americans killing Muslim civilians, which is that Muslims should defend their lands from foreign invaders--Soviets, Americans or Martians. This is what I believe. It's what I've always believed, and what I will always believe.

This is not terrorism, and it's not extremism. It's the simple logic of self-defense. It's what the arrows on that seal above your head represent: defense of the homeland.

So I disagree with my lawyers when they say that you don't have to agree with my beliefs. No. Anyone with common sense and humanity has no choice but to agree with me.

If someone breaks into your home to rob you and harm your family, logic dictates that you do whatever it takes to expel that invader from your home. But when that home is a Muslim land, and that invader is the U.S. military, for some reason, the standards suddenly change. Common sense is renamed "terrorism" and the people defending themselves against those who come to kill them from across the ocean become "the terrorists" who are "killing Americans."

The mentality that America was victimized with when British soldiers walked these streets two-and-a-half centuries ago is the same mentality Muslims are victimized by as American soldiers walk their streets today. It's the mentality of colonialism.

When Sgt. Bales shot those Afghans to death last month, all of the focus in the media was on him--his life, his stress, his PTSD, the mortgage on his home--as if he was the victim. Very little sympathy was expressed for the people he actually killed, as if they're not real, they're not humans.

Unfortunately, this mentality trickles down to everyone in society, whether or not they realize it. Even with my lawyers, it took nearly two years of discussing, explaining and clarifying before they were finally able to think outside the box and at least ostensibly accept the logic in what I was saying. Two years!

If it took that long for people so intelligent, whose job it is to defend me, to deprogram themselves, then to throw me in front of a randomly selected jury under the premise that they're my "impartial peers"--I mean, come on. I wasn't tried before a jury of my peers because with the mentality gripping America today, I have no peers. Counting on this fact, the government prosecuted me--not because they needed to, but simply because they could.

I learned one more thing in history class: America has historically supported the most unjust policies against its minorities--practices that were even protected by the law--only to look back later and ask: "What were we thinking?" Slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of the Japanese during the Second World War--each was widely accepted by American society, each was defended by the Supreme Court. But as time passed and America changed, both people and courts looked back and asked "What were we thinking?"

Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by the South African government, and given a life sentence. But time passed, the world changed, they realized how oppressive their policies were, that it was not he who was the terrorist, and they released him from prison. He even became president.

So everything is subjective--even this whole business of "terrorism" and who is a "terrorist." It all depends on the time and place and who the superpower happens to be at the moment.

In your eyes, I'm a terrorist, I'm the only one standing here in an orange jumpsuit and it's perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit. But one day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the U.S. military in foreign countries, yet somehow I'm the one going to prison for "conspiring to kill and maim" in those countries--because I support the mujahideen defending those people.

They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a "terrorist," yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the "terrorists" are, she sure wouldn't be pointing at me.

The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with "killing Americans." But as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a no lie more ironic.

PIO GAMA PINTO.mp4