Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You": Lessons for the Left

By Bryant William Sculos

Originally published in 2019 in Class, Race and Corporate Power.

1.   Films thus far have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it….

This would be more appropriate as thesis eleven, but it is a crucial starting point for what follows. No matter how radical, no matter how popular, a critical film is, a film by itself, not even one as prescient and valuable as Sorry to Bother You is, is enough to change the world. Not that anyone would suggest that it could be, but radical films can serve important purposes in the struggle against capitalism and various forms of oppression. A good radical film can inspire and even simply entertain those engaged in struggle—or those thinking about becoming more active. Sorry to Bother You will not change the world, but it can be an important basis for motivation, critical conversation, and necessary enjoyment for those in struggling to do just that.

2.   Tactics should always be informed by an organized strategy.

Sorry to Bother You highlights the difference between pure subversive tactics and an organized strategy for resistance. In the film there is a group of anarchist-types, of what size or of what degree of organization the audience never sees, whose primary role in the film is to highlight the impotence of pure tactics (in this film, this amounts to clever vandalism) disconnected from a coherent strategy for organized opposition. Juxtaposed to these tactics we see the hard work of organizing a workplace and an eventual strike. While the strike may not have heralded the end of capitalism, the audience bears witness to the clear difference in results (including both the response of the capitalist class and their police force as well as the ability of the strike to bring new layers of people into struggle).

3.   As important as the superiority of tactics informed by an organized strategy is, it is perhaps as important how those on the left address their internal disagreements about strategies and tactics.

There is a subtle scene between Squeeze (the labor activist attempting to organize the workers at the telemarketing firm, played by Steven Yeun) and Detroit (perhaps the best radical feminist of color ever seen in a popular US film, played superbly by Tessa Thompson). Squeeze becomes aware that Detroit is part of the anarchist group doing the anticapitalist vandalism and instead of criticizing Detroit’s tactics, Squeeze takes the opportunity to appreciate that they are both on the same side of the struggle. This solidaristic interaction serves as the basis to build deeper, more active solidarity in the future (some of which we see later in the film). It is often difficult for those on the left to ignore or at least put aside disagreements over tactics and strategy, and sometimes it is important that the Left not leave disagreements unaddressed, but Sorry to Bother You provides some insight into how the Left can deal with internal, and interpersonal, disagreements in ways that do not further alienate us from one another. After all, the Left needs all the comrades it can get. What makes someone a comrade is a contentious issue to be sure, but it is an important one that the Left should continue to reflect on.

4.   Solidarity across identities is crucial.

Perhaps one of the most obvious—though no less important—lessons from Sorry to Bother You, with its awesome diverse cast and characters, is that class has colors and genders and a variety of other identities that come with their own unique oppressions that condition the experience of class in diverse ways. Not only does the film illuminate the intersections of racism and capitalism (the “white voices” are the stuff of film legend here), but we also see cross-racial, cross-gender, and even cross- (fictional) species solidarity. If Sorry to Bother You does one thing well (and it does way more than just one thing well), it is expressing the importance of building this kind of intersectional solidarity, as well as how the variable experiences of class can be navigated without chauvinism or exclusion. While the treatment of non-fictional racial and gender solidarity is powerful in its own right, Boots Riley’s use of the (for now…) fictional equisapiens drives the point home. Ending the exploitation of some group at the expense of others can never be an acceptable Left position.

5.   Art can be radical, but not all subversive art is radical, at least not on its own.

Detroit, in addition to her day job as a sign twirler and then as a telemarketer, is an artist. Beyond the politics of Sorry to Bother You, the film also delves into the difficulty of being a subversive artist within the confines of capitalism, which demands that all art be commodifiable in order to be of any value. Despite Detroit’s best efforts to resist this pressure, we see her engage in a powerful and uncomfortable piece of performance art where her audience is asked to throw things at her, including broken electronics and blood-filled balloons. The scene is a bit of a parody of ostensibly “radical” art that is consumed by a primarily bourgeois audience. Subversive art that challenges the commodity-form can itself become commodified, but it can still be useful as a foundation to challenge artistic norms and social conventions, break down the barrier between performer and audience. However, even at its best there is no guarantee that anything will fundamentally change because of these dissensual elements. Sorry to Bother You is a better example of what radical, subversive art can be than the artistic performances it portrays—though neither one is the basis for revolutionary activity. While the critical theorists and postmodernists of the late twentieth century are right to emphasize the importance of aesthetics in radical politics and resist the temptation, embodied most noticeably in socialist realism, to use art strictly instrumentally, art disconnected from organized struggle is bound to be as ineffective as any tactic disconnected from organized struggle. Sorry to Bother You does not provide a clear alternative, but it does provide a powerful basis to think through the question of how art can relate to radical politics, and radical politics to art, effectively.

6.   Material conditions are shaped by ideological conditions, which in turn affect our psychologies.

As the protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green (portrayed by Lakeith Stanfield with incredible complexity and skill to make the audience cringe in every instance they are supposed to) moves up the ladder at the telemarketing company, after living in poverty for years, his perspective on poverty and the plight of workers shifts in perverse but predictable directions. Consciousness is never one-to-one with class position, something that is perhaps still too obvious for the Left to effectively grapple with, but the radical beauty of Sorry to Bother You is how well Boots Riley is able to show how consciousness changes as wealth (though not always identical to class position) increases. Capitalism as a whole dehumanizes even those who benefit from it, though workers and the poor and oppressed should have little patience or sympathy for those who benefit unequally from the exploitation they reproduce. As difficult as it is, it is important to remember this, that even as capitalists and the defenders of capitalism come to personify the evils of capitalism, they too are driven by the heinous psycho-social incentives of the system. While this is, in itself, important to be cognizant of, it is more important to be aware of the process through which this happens to middle class people, and even workers fortunate enough to escape the dregs of poverty wages.

7.   Contacting your elected officials is not nearly enough and can actually be demoralizing and demobilizing.

One of the best scenes in the film, enhanced by the speed with which is begins and ends, is when Cash decides to make public the genetic alteration plans of Steve Lift (CEO of the Amazon-like WorryFree, played by Armie Hammer). Cash goes on an absurd reality TV show and various news programs to tell the world about the equisapien experiments and implores people to contact their elected officials. The montage ends with WorryFree’s stock rising and the general public excited about the new technological developments. Nothing changes. The lesson here is that Cash was relying on the representatives of the system that encourages the kinds of perversity that Steve Lift represents to solve the problem. Cash encouraged people to place their hope in decrepit politicians. The audience experiences the results too quickly. The montage is powerful as it stands, but it is worth questioning whether the full range of critical points here might be lost on even a well-focused self-reflective audience (though I noticed so perhaps I’m the one being too cynical). Cash placed his hope in the automatic negative reactions of people—people who have been conditioned by capitalism to view all technological developments as progressive and liberating—to resist those changes. Back in the real world, while there are some instances where outrage may seem (or even actually be) more or less automatic, there is often unseen or unacknowledged organizing and propagandistic work being done to produce an effective public reaction. The best recent example of this is from the 2017 airport protests/occupations in reaction to President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. While some of the people showed up at the airports spontaneously, there were also a number of left-wing groups, of diverse politics, working to make these actions effective. It is likely we would not have witnessed the positive results we saw from these actions had it not been for the quick, organized work of activists on the ground. And yet, it all appeared rather spontaneous.

8.  The truth is not enough, and it will not set us free. Truth is not irrelevant, but it is not enough for the Left simply to be “right.”

Related to thesis 7, Cash relies on his exposing the truth to the world to be the catalyst for widespread resistance to the practices of WorryFree. Mind you, this is all taking place in a world where all of the other dehumanizing practices of WorryFree, such as: lifetime contracts for workers, with all room and board provided but without pay, are deemed acceptable. Why would artificially producing human-horse hybrid workers be any different? While there is a vital educational role for the Left to play in providing the factual basis for the need for organized resistance and building an alternative to racist, patriarchal, imperialist capitalism, these facts are not enough. Facts can be interpreted in various ways and perverted by the mouthpieces of capitalism, often most egregiously by the ostensibly liberal vanguard of “progressive” capitalism. The Left needs to not only be “right” but it also needs to provide deeper context and present viable options to pursue. Put differently, in addition to having the truth on its side, the Left needs to be persuasive.

9.   Automation is complicated and likely will not take the forms or have the effects the public are often led to believe it will have.

The world has been browbeaten into thinking that the worst consequences of increased automation in the twenty-first century will be mass unemployment. Sorry to Bother You, believe it or not, provides a glimpse at one more realistic alternative—as well as a basis for a more honest look at the effects of automation. First, as we have seen throughout the history of capitalism, workers themselves, both physically and psychologically, are made into automatons. Second, the worst consequences of automation is not joblessness but deskilling. Part of the automation of human beings is the decreased cognitive and creative labor that more and more jobs will require or allow. Companies, whether it is WorryFree or Amazon, would much prefer the less expensive route of encouraging society, primarily through culture and schooling, to produce less thoughtful, more compliant workers, rather than spend huge sums of money on automation technologies that could become obsolete within a few years. Automation technology under capitalism is expensive. On the flipside, people under capitalism have been made to be quite inexpensive. Maybe we all will not be turned into human-horse hybrids, but given the trajectory of undemocratic automatic in the early years of the twenty-first century, we will not likely be looking at a Jetsons-esque lifestyle for everyone. People will likely continue to be subjected to intense pressures to physically, psychologically, and chemically alter themselves in order to acquire even slightly higher wages.

10.  People, especially workers within capitalism, are willing to accept very little money or benefits in exchange for their labor and even their lives.

Capitalist exploitation and oppressions degrade people. Capitalist ideology convinces people that they are merely worth whatever some boss is willing to pay them—and they are fortunate to have what little they have. After all, there are plenty of people with less. This reality puts impoverished workers in a terrible situation when bosses try to buy them off to undermine labor organizing or threaten a worker with firing for talking about politics at work. This reality is also part of the root cause of conservative labor union practices, which often sacrifice anything beyond moderate gains in wages and benefits for worker compliance. The promise of a more lavish lifestyle, new clothes and a new car (or really just a car that is reliable) is what motivates Cash to sell-out. Scabs may indeed be the scum of the Earth from a labor organizing perspective (and there’s no reason to think otherwise), but they are motivated by the very same things that motivate workers to sell their labor for a wage in the first place. So really, besides the immediacy of the betrayal, what is the difference between a scab and worker who refuses to join their union or a worker who does not vote to support a strike? The results and the motivations are fundamentally identical. This is not a defense of scabbing (as if such a defense were actually possible), but it is a lesson that needs to be learned. Capitalist ideology is extremely powerful, and it compels us all in various ways to become subjects of our exploitation and the exploitation of others. Scabs and other types of non-class-conscious workers are as much a product of capitalism as the credit card is.

11.  Sorry to bother—and even betray—you, but apologies and forgiveness matter.

Even after Cash betrays his fellow-workers and friends by crossing their picket lines multiple times, once he realizes his grave error and is determined to join them in struggle, his friends forgive him. They accept his apology. The apology does not change what Cash did, but it reflects his commitment to doing the right things moving forward. This might be one of the hardest lessons for the Left to learn from this movie. How does one forgive someone who has betrayed them, especially when it was not just a friendship that was betrayed but an entire movement? However, put differently, how can the Left ever be successful moving forward without the capacity to forgive and work alongside those who have actively worked against the Left in their past? Where is the place for former liberals (or even former conservatives or reactionaries)? Where is the place for former scabs? Sorry to Bother You argues that despite the awfulness of one’s past positions and actions, the answer to these two preceding questions is: among the Left. Very few people are born into radical politics, and almost no one holds the right views from the start, and so people need time to learn and grow. Sometimes it is a very longtime filled with egregious beliefs and behaviors—but if the Left is to ever be effective, it will be populated mainly by these kinds of people.[1]

12.  The first win (or loss) is only a beginning…

Sorry to Bother You ends with a victory of sorts. A small one. Without spoiling too much, the lesson here is that strikes, whether successful or not, can only ever be the start of a revolutionary movement. Same for protests. Protests in and of themselves are not going to bring down a government or a political-economic system. Strikes will not either. There is plenty of debate on the Left about whether a mass general strike could do that, but even with something as powerful as a general strike (which is really only practically imaginable with preliminary strikes and protests preceding it) it would be unlikely on its own to replace capitalism with socialism (or whatever your preferred label for a democratic, egalitarian form of postcapitalism is). Revolutionary transformation is not something that can be won or lost overnight, with one victory—nor can it be lost with one loss, by one strike that fails or never happens, by one protest that has low turnout or fails to motivate further actions. Hope is crucial, but it must be tempered by a realistic pessimism regarding the struggle ahead. There will be many loses and hopefully many more wins—but the struggle continues. Even if capitalism were successfully dismantled, what replaces it will also be an object of struggle, one that will require that we learn as much as we can from all the struggles that precedes it.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. He was formerly a Mellon-Sawyer postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2019 Summer Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. Bryant is the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power and contributing editor for the Hampton Institute. Beyond his work for the aforementioned outlets, his work has also appeared in New Politics, Dissident Voice, Truthout, Constellations, Capitalism, Communication, & Critique (tripleC), New Political Science, and Public Seminar. He is also the co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; paperback forthcoming July 2020 with Haymarket Books).

Notes

[1] Although she was writing about how socialists should deal with liberals at Women’s Marches, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s writings served as crucial inspiration for this point. See: “Don’t Shame the First Steps of a Resistance” in Socialist Worker, Jan. 24, 2017. Available online at: https://socialistworker.org/2017/01/24/dont-shame-the-first-steps-of-a-resistance.

Language, Truth, and Political Viability: Derek R. Ford and Paolo Virno in Conversation

By Richard Allen

Pundits and philosophers alike would have us believe that we now live in a "post-truth" era. As the political Right enjoys a period of relative control over "the discourse," dominating their respective electorate's concept of truth as a coy, destructive agenda intended to erase "traditional values", what must the Left do in order to not merely resist, but produce a viable political movement?

Derek R. Ford, an educator and activist, in a new piece for The Hampton Institute, suggests that in an age which (seemingly) finds itself resistant to "truth," the task is not to defend a preexisting truth, but the creation and actualization of new truth. It is a matter of subverting the discourse through invention. Language is the productive faculty of a new truth or set of truths which create a new world. "Political struggle isn't really about an existing truth but rather concerns the formulation of new truths and, more importantly, the materialization of those truths." The illusion is not the possibility of truth itself, but truth as preexisting, something static and ignorant of new contexts. Ford continues probing this illusion with a question: If this is a post-truth era, at what point in time was truth existent and viable for all? As an example, if our President and his ilk suggest that critical journalism is "fake news," thereby signifying the reality of a post-truth era, at what point in our collective history was commonplace, liberal politics not an exercise in propogating fiction as some form of truth? In other words, it is liberal bourgeois fancy to believe an era of "truth" existed prior to this new era of "post-truth," as the very concept of an age beholden to a preexistent, static and unquestionable truth could never be determined.

Ford, rightfully so, does not deny the possibility of truth nor the benefit of appealing to truth in political discourse. Rather, his claim is that political viability-whereby truth is fashioned, declared, and materialized through struggle-is a subjective response toward fiction as a commodity-of-truth, something preexistent to be offered within the "marketplace of ideas" that derives itself from the illusory idea of static truth. As Ford writes, "The truth is always framed and contextualized, and so we need to ask what certain truths are doing in certain moments, what their material effects will be." Truth is material, intimately connected with the world and the actions of actually-existing human beings. It behooves those of us concerned about the political strategy of the Right to counter their claims with new truth, truth that finds its being in substantive action. This is the central claim of Ford's piece: truth and political struggle depend upon invention, the creation of new truth as a subversion of existing discourse, not the defense of an illusory, static and preexistent truth.

The question now becomes whether it is possible to create or invent new truth, and if so, what significance does the act of invention have for political action? We must now turn to the Italian Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno for the answer.

In his book Déjà Vu and the End of History (Verso, 2015), Virno suggests the distance between potential and act is the foundation of history, of historicity as such, and yet within the capitalist era, the distance between the two is subsumed and distorted, creating a false and burdensome perception that potential has no inherent ability to invent, only to reproduce something that has already occurred. The experience and phenomenon of déjà vu is the historical being attempting to reconcile the possibility inherent to potential and the "remembered now" which seemingly dictates potentiality. "The excess of memory, which without doubt characterizes the contemporary situation, has a name: the memory of the present…What is excessive is not per se the split in every instant between a perceived 'now' and a remembered 'now', but rather the fact that this split has become fully visible." In the experience of déjà vu, one mischaracterizes the actual "now" for a remembered "now" which limits one's understanding of potential as always-already present to create the future in the act.

Virno suggests that our contemporary situation finds itself struggling to reconcile the (apparent) disconnection between potential and act, seeing as the past (within capitalism) dictates potential. "The hypertrophy of memory, from which the consumption and blockage of history derive, is made up of deja vu. People for whom the present seems wholly dependent upon the past, like an echo of the original sound, are no longer historical (they are now incapable, that is, of carrying out genuinely historical actions)." In other words, if potential is entirely dependent upon the past, then the act has, in some sense, already occurred. Nothing is original, therefore within the capitalist framework, the distinction between potential and act within time has become illusory. In relation to Ford's contention that the Left must create new truths, Virno's explication of the problem is helpful for the purposes of crafting a materially viable politics. If potential "exists" before the act, but is not exhausted by the act itself or any combination of actions, and if potential is not dependent upon the past for its own presence and viability, then the possibility of creating something new now becomes a radical reality. Virno goes on to forcefully clarify his thesis: "But no authentic past is of such considerable authority as to impose such a dependency. No sequence of events that has really happened deserves to be emblazoned with the title of an untouchable, binding archetype." The past as history does not dictate the present as potentiality. In the present moment, the "here-and-now", potential and act are joined yet never exhausted by the other, creating the future, not reproducing the past.

Much of Virno's academic work centers on the philosophy of language, whereby language is understood as comprising of both potential (the ability to speak) and the act (utterance as such, systems of signs, etc.), yet language is not wholly contained by one or the other. For our purposes here, language is the key element of producing a subversive new truth, one which finds its materialization in attainable actions. In the act of speaking, I utilize the potential of the capacity-to-speak, yet my speech does not exhaust the potential, but instead demonstrates its limitation once performed. The faculty as such remains impenetrably infinite, even while the act demonstrates its own limitation when using the productive capacity-to-speak. Virno writes, "The crucial point here is not to daydream about a potential without acts - far from it. Rather, it is to accept that acts do not fulfill potential, and do not offer a faithful or even only approximate version of it: they are not, in sum, realized potential." Upon speaking, the productive capacity-to-speak remains present, yet infinitely unconsumed. The act of speech actualizes the potential as such and simultaneously pushes the capacity into the recesses of infinite potentiality.

If the Left captures both Ford's and Virno's suggestion - namely, that political viability depends not on preexistent truth or past events, but the productive capacity-to-speak new truth into existence - a pathway now opens to achieving political victory over and against the Right. Only by realizing the inherent potential of language as productive without exhausting potential as such will the Left find a solution to its reliance upon past events to dictate present action. Capitalism and liberal bourgeois discourse would have us believe that politics is eternally dependent upon the past, the past as truth, in order for justice to materialize. However, not only is the past not truth, but truth depends upon the productive capacity of language to be made present here-and-now.

It is time we reclaimed our capacity-to-speak as the "capacity-to-invent" that which is necessary for liberation.

This was originally published at the author's blog.

Don't Bring the Truth to a Knife Fight: A New Year's Proposal for the Left

By Derek R. Ford

The following is an excerpt from the author's new book, Politics and pedagogy in the "post-truth" era.

Many are in shock that today that the truth doesn't seem to matter in politics. Every time U.S. president Donald Trump tweets out that a news article unfavorable to him is "FAKE NEWS!" they are aghast and disoriented. Every time he says something blatantly false, it adds a new bullet point to a list of lies and sets off a new circuit of outrage. The response is clear: we need to call out the lies and tell the truth! Educators have a crucial role to play here, for we are the ones who teach the truth to others, or who facilitate the collective realization of the truth. This analysis and proposal completely miss the mark: politics has never been about a correspondence with an existing truth. Indeed, when I hear people denounce our political scene as "post-truth," I have to wonder when exactly they think it was that politics was determined by the truth? The same goes for those who decry today's "fake news." Hasn't the media always been an arena of struggle? To claim that with Trump's election we've entered a post-truth era of fake news is to claim that the U.S. was built on truthful politics and media. Political struggle isn't really about an existing truth but rather concerns the formulation of new truths and, more importantly, the materialization of those truths. Our contemporary moment thus offers up an important opportunity for the Left to embrace political struggle, to stake out positions, and to fight to make those positions reality.

On the one hand, it seems reasonable to propose that we reject the "post-truth" designation altogether. After all, doesn't the repetition of that language serve to further entrench the liberal narrative of a democracy corrupted? I would answer this question affirmatively. But, on the other hand, we can't exhaustively determine the uses to which this language will be put and the effects that such usage will have, and maybe there's an opening here. Thus, I'd like to hang on to the "post-truth" for now, but I'd like to propose a particular conceptualization of it, one that I believe holds political and pedagogical promise as a frame for engaging in transformative praxis. To be post-truth, so I wish to suggest, is not to be "anti-truth" or even "without truth." Instead, I proffer that we understand the relationship between the "post-truth" and "the truth" in the same way that Jean-François Lyotard formulated the relationship between the modern and the postmodern.

For Lyotard, the postmodern is not a negation, annihilation, or supersession of the modern. There is no dialectic of or between either. The postmodern doesn't come after the modern, for such a progression would itself be decidedly modern. No, the postmodern "is undoubtedly part of the modern," Lyotard tells us. [1] Even Christianity has its own postmodern inflection (for who can really prove that Christ isn't a phony?)[2] The postmodern inhabits the modern, interrupting it: "The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations- not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable ."[3] The modern is that which offers up a narrative of understanding, cohesion, and unity, and the postmodern is that which interrupts it.

The post-truth designation, on this reading, might be an occasion to refuse the liberal nostalgia for the democratic and civil public sphere based on truthful exchange at the marketplace of ideas. Like the postmodern shows how the modern covers over difference and the rules and methods by which difference is accommodated or obliterated, the post-truth can agitate the political nature of truth and, more importantly, the pedagogy of truth. The post-truth, in other words, opens up a political project as well as a pedagogical one. The political project involves the power relations that compose truths, and the pedagogical project involves how we engage ourselves, each other, and the world in transformative processes.

Force in the market-place of ideas

The right wing knows all of this. They don't make appeals to the truth. They make appeals to beliefs and convictions. If those beliefs and desires contradict some set of evidence, then that evidence is fake. That is what Donald Trump means when he tweets "FAKE NEWS!" It isn't an assertion of what the truth really is (as if the news had some innate relationship to truth and constituted "the real"). It isn't an objection based on an understanding of language as neutral and objective containers of ideas, nor is it based on an understanding of language as a weapon of persuasion. Rather, the "FAKE NEWS" tweet is intended as an anticipatory interpellation. It's an assertion of belief of what should be, a performative utterance meant to organize and intensify one side-his side-of the political. To reply that the news isn't fake, that the fake news designation only applies to news that he doesn't like, news that makes his side look bad, misses the point completely. Sure, the right wing preaches about the importance of "freedom of speech," but they clearly only mean their speech. They'll attack a left-wing academic for their tweets and try to get them fired while they protest against a campus banning a neo-Nazi speaker. Recently, Trump got backlash for sharing anti-Islamic propaganda videos from a neo-Nazi group in Britain. Their veracity was first called into question and then disproven. When confronted with this, Trump's press secretary totally disregarded the attack: "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," she said. [4]

This is why the right wing is winning: they know they have enemies and they have allies, and together they want to defeat those enemies. To defeat those enemies, they mobilize, organize, intervene, and act collectively. They imagine the future they want. They talk to each other, they create their own ideological bubbles from which to act, resist, take swings. They capture the state and wield it toward their ends. They don't care about what the other side thinks. They aren't trying to win us over. They believe in themselves and their movement. They don't think their people need to be enlightened by public intellectuals.

This isn't an embrace of relativism. I'm not saying that what is true for some is false for others or that we should never make appeals to the truth. But we can't position politics outside of the truth or pretend that our politics is derived from the truth. The truth is always framed and contextualized, and so we need to ask what certain truths are doing in certain moments, what their material effects will be. Think about what's happening in Iran right now. There are anti-government protests. There are pro-government protests. It is "people" who are at each of the protests. I can share pictures of either sets of protests, and say "support the people!" Politics is much more helpful than the truth.

None of this is to say that appeals to the truth aren't important, for they surely are. It is important to call out the lies propagated by the right wing to promote oppression and exploitation. My point is that this is a failed political strategy because it rests on the idea that there is a truth that can bridge all divisions and erase all antagonisms, something we can all agree on that transcends our structural positions in society.

I'm also not arguing that "might makes right." If I was, then I would be affirming that what is should be. My position rather is that might makes; that it is ultimately force which makes our world, not abstract ideals or transcendent truths. In his study of public space and social justice, Don Mitchell shows how "the public" is never decided a priori but is always the result of concerted action on behalf of the excluded. Certain groups, that is, only become part of the public to the extent to which they force a new configuration of the public. One of the ways Mitchell demonstrates this is by looking at the history of speech regulations in the U.S. One common thread throughout Supreme Court rulings on protests and "free speech" is the idea that "a democratic polity requires dissenting ideas; these ideas, however, have to stand or fall on their own merits as they enter into competition with other ideas; the better ideas win, but only by being tested against less worthy ideas." [5]

This is where we get to the "marketplace of ideas," which only works if we accept the market for what it actually is. Bourgeois ideologues (on the Supreme Court and everywhere) want us to think of the marketplace of ideas like they want us to think about any marketplace: a space in which different groups hang commodities with price tags and descriptions for buyers to peruse at their leisure until they decide on the one or ones they'd like to purchase. Setting aside the characterization of ideas as commodities, this is liberal ideology at its purest in that it completely ignores power, ownership, subjectivity, and history. First there is the question of who has admittance to the marketplace to buy and sell, as marketplaces are always exclusionary. Even in so-called free societies there are a host of racialized, gendered, and classed rules (e.g., dress codes, age limits) and the construction of some as "window shoppers" and others as "loiterers." Second, even if everyone was allowed to participate in the marketplace, some clearly have more capital than others and therefore can purchase preferential locations with bigger lots, recruit and fund designers, advertisers, hawks, and so on, to sell their products. They can buy out their competitors, create legislative barriers to entry, establish monopolies.

There is an even more fundamental problem with the marketplace of ideas, which is the question of determining what constitutes the competitive order in the first place, and the rules of engagement in the second place. The excluded are by definition irrational, disorderly, and without access to the marketplace. And so, as a result of struggle, Mitchell says, "the seeming irrationality of violence… becomes a rational means for redressing the irrationality of injustice, for withdrawing consent from an order that does not deserve to be legitimated." [6] The marketplace is not a site of idyllic exchange but of coercion, power, and struggle, and the capitalist marketplace was founded on slavery, genocide, and the expropriation of many by law and individual acts of terror. If this order is to be transformed then there must be a forceful disorder. The direction of that disorder will determine the character of the political thrust, but regardless of its character, without force there is no transformation. As Marx put it, "force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with the new."[7]

Derek R. Ford is an academic, organizer, and member of the Hampton Institute. His most recent book is Education and the production of space: Political pedagogy, geography, and urban revolution (Routledge, 2017).

Notes

[1] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. D. Barry, B. Maher, J. Pefanis, V. Spate, and M. Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988/1992), 12.

[2] Ibid., chapter 2. Here Lyotard clarifies his infamous report on knowledge and postmodernity, writing that he both oversimplified and overemphasized the category of the narrative.

[3] Ibid., 15, emphasis added.

[4] Christina Wilkie, (2017). "White House: It Doesn't Matter if Anti-Muslim Videos Are Real Because 'the Threat is Real." CNBC, 29 November. Available online: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/white-house-it-doesnt-matter-if-anti-muslim-videos-are-real-the-threat-is-real.html (accessed 30 November 2017).

[5] Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003), 47.

[6] Don Mitchell, The Right to the City, 53.

[7] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (vol. 1), trans. S. Moore (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 703.

Lessons from The Brothers Karamazov: Doubt, Freedom, and the Organic Nature of Religious Truth

By Ali Ahmed

If you have read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, you will agree that it is one of a select few treasure-houses of literature. A classic novel of ideas, it is singular in that unlike many classics, Dostoevsky's magnum opus has only one group of readers: admirers. (There might admittedly be some dissidents here and there but, to me, they have not really read the novel) It is certainly one of the most powerful works I have ever read. While it is not as long as Tolstoy's War and Peace, it is still however good and lengthy. And if you haven't read it, yet, then in this two-part series, by exploring a little of the profound depths of the novel and drawing out some of its lessons, I intend to persuade you that you are worth it.

In abbreviations of the book, the novel is often boiled down to the infamous section of the Grand Inquisitor, which says a lot about the novel as that particular section does not really, at least in my estimation, move the plot. Nevertheless, readers might agree that it forms perhaps the most gripping part of the novel. By focusing on this particular chapter, we'll get a sense of Dostoevsky's understanding of the place and purpose of religion, and how he envisions the real liberation of man vis-à-vis religion.

Without getting into too much detail about the plot, allow me to briefly preface our discussion by saying that the novel is about the return of the three Karamazov brothers to their birthplace, their father's home in the town of Skotoprigonevsk. In the days that follow, their father is murdered and one of the brothers is accused with the crime. Essentially, as far as plot is concerned, the novel is a whodunit, but as we've mentioned, The Brothers Karamazov being a novel of ideas, Dostoevsky is infinitely more intrigued by the intricate subtleties of thought and emotion, the hundred indecisions and the hundred visions and revisions, than he is with solving the crime. Now, each of the three brothers-Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha, in that order-are quite different from one another and that's part of the dynamic of the story. In the chapter of the Grand Inquisitor, which takes place before the murder scene, the two younger Karamazov brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, meet at a local tavern and catch up. It's been years since they've had a chance to speak to each other. Ivan, the elder, has since been through several years of schooling, including University, and has thus become somewhat of a recognized intellectual. Alyosha, the youngest brother, chooses the path of spiritual training and has joined the monastery to become a monk. After many years of separation, the two younger brothers meet-earlier in the novel-and in this chapter, Ivan presents his thesis, his "what I believe" to Alyosha.

Ivan relates to his brother a philosophical "poem" he has written, set during the severest days of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century. A large crowd has gathered outside of a cathedral in Seville, just a day after a hundred heretics were burned at the stake by the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor in an auto-da-fe. The people are a scattered, miserable sight, and it is in the midst of this misery that Jesus reappears, not in the form of the spiritual lion that vanquishes falsehood at the end of times - as is prophesied - but in the same human image in which he walked on the earth fifteen centuries ago. He says nothing but the people know it is him; there is a healing power even in the touch of his garments. He cures an old man of his blindness and witnesses a funeral procession leading out of the cathedral. The mother of the dead child wails and begs him for his help. With the same words with which he had brought back the dead all those years ago, he brings the little girl back to life. She sits up in the coffin, still holding the flowers in her hand, and looks around in amazement. By this point, the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, who had been eyeing the situation from a distance, has had enough. He is enraged at what he has seen and orders his guards to take away the meddling intruder. The people not only don't intervene, but they have been made so utterly submissive to the aged Inquisitor that they, as one body, bow down to him as Jesus is taken away to prison. In his sermon on the Dostoevsky Brothers, Robert M. Price makes a noteworthy point when he says, about Jesus, "after all, wasn't he, and doesn't he remain, the greatest of heretics?" That is indeed a common oversight, the fact that all prophets are, by virtue of their task, rebels against the status quo. But more on that another time.

"Why, then, have you come to interfere with us?" asks the Grand Inquisitor of Jesus in the cell. "Anything you proclaim anew will encroach upon the freedom of men's faith, for it will come as a miracle, and the freedom of their faith was the dearest of all things to you, even then, one and a half thousand years ago. Was it not you who so often said then: 'I want to make you free'? But now you have seen these 'free' men…this work has cost us dearly…but we have finally finished this work in your name. For fifteen hundred years we have been at pains over this freedom, but now it is finished, and well finished…these people are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet." What exactly is the aged Inquisitor babbling about? Well, Jesus had made it his priority to inspire faith freely. The faith that he demanded was born of constant thought and personal reflection in the face of doubt and disarray. "Such an experience of faith," writes Simon Critchley in his piece in the New York Times, "is not certainty, but is only gained by going into the proverbial desert and undergoing diabolical temptation and radical doubt…doubt is not the enemy of faith. On the contrary, it is certainty." The truth that sets you free is a difficult truth because it is predicated upon the constant dialectical process between certainty and doubt. Contrary to popular opinion, which is of course based on an easy and widely accepted interpretation of faith, religion does not demand a surrender of contemplation, but rather exactly the opposite. Religion is not a manual for life, as some might like to declare, with an extensive index that conveniently leads you to the solution for every situation. Those that think that religion is just that, a manual, compromise the organicism that is at the heart of faith and reduce the grand design of the human subject to the machinations of an operating system. It is only in understanding and accepting faith as a living, organic process that addresses each individual subject's search for truth in a world of "diabolical temptation" that one exercises the freedom Jesus required from the faithful.

Returning to the Grand Inquisitor, we note again, to emphasize his point, what he tells Jesus: "Was it not you who so often said then: 'I want to make you free?'…For fifteen hundred years we have been at pains over this freedom, but now it is finished." The freedom of faith that we've been discussing; the organic, dialectical process - born of contemplation - navigating between the waters of doubt and certainty, all that is finished. It is finished because this freedom has been a burden on humanity, says the Grand Inquisitor, who accuses Jesus of mistakenly believing it to be strong enough and thus demanding more than it can handle. The Grand Inquisitor says that the Church has replaced this dialectical process with the fixity of certainty (and the Inquisition-the burning of "heretics"-itself both actuates and demonstrates this shift), for that is more conducive to the happiness of mankind than the burden of free thought and free choice. So how has the Church accomplished this? "You were warned," says the Inquisitor to Jesus in the prison cell. "You had no lack of warnings and indications, but you did not heed the warnings, you rejected the only way of arranging for human happiness…" That course of "arranging for human happiness" was offered to Jesus by the devil in the account of the three temptations which, exhorts the Inquisitor, was the real miracle. But Jesus rejects each of these temptations precisely because they sacrifice human freedom. "Decide yourself who was right: you or the one who questioned you then?" asks the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor. The Church has effectively re-written the narration and thus defeated the entire trajectory of faith that Jesus had envisioned.

After a 40-day fast in the desert, Jesus is met by the devil, whose temptations come in the form of three questions. Each of these temptations the Grand Inquisitor identifies with a single word. In the first, the devil tells Jesus to convert stones into bread, not so much for his own sake, but for the benefit of the people who will, struck by the miracle, immediately follow him thereafter. Man cannot live on bread alone, replies Jesus, but rather on the word of God. This Palestinian Prophet has in mind something other than the contentment offered by a material appetite; he envisages a spiritual satiation. In the next question, the devil tempts Jesus to throw himself off from the top of the temple. If he is really the son of God as he claims, says the devil, he will be propped up by angels who will keep him from falling onto the ground. Not only will this prove his devotion to God, but it will force the people into faith. They will have no option but to believe, incapable as they will be of processing the mystery. In the final temptation, the devil takes Jesus to the top of a mountain, offering him a vista of humanity and heaven, and promises him a combined package of eternal and temporal power under one singular authority. All kingdoms of all peoples would answer to one single sovereign. This would ensure the happiness of humankind through unity. Dissent is a result of difference. In this new scheme, humanity would be homogenized; it would be composed of a factory-line of people. Each individual would thus be exactly like the other, hence not an individual at all. A familiar scene out of so many science fiction movies we all know. Jesus is well aware of this and thus simply rejects the final offer.

"In this you acted proudly and magnificently, like God," says the Inquisitor to his prisoner, "but mankind, that weak, rebellious tribe-are they gods? ...could you possibly have assumed…that mankind, too, would be strong enough for such a temptation? Is that how human nature was created-to reject the miracle, and in those terrible moments of life, the moments of the most terrible, essential, and tormenting questions of the soul, to remain only with the free decisions of the heart?" He accuses Jesus of setting unachievable goals for humankind, that "weak, rebellious tribe." The freedom that he wanted for them is of no consolation in the face of existential despair; hence they themselves give up their freedom for happiness. "We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from their hearts." Finally, the Inquisitor reveals that the Church, though working in the name of Christ, is actually in cahoots with the devil. "Exactly eight centuries ago, we took from him what you so indignantly rejected, that last gift he offered you when he showed you all the kingdoms of the earth." It is in working with the devil that they have "corrected" the work of Jesus and thus rewritten the entire flight plan of the human spirit that he had envisioned. "Why did you reject that last gift? Had you accepted that third counsel of the might spirit, you would have furnished all that man seeks on earth, that is: someone to bow down to, someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common, concordant, and incontestable anthill". This is the Grand Inquisitor's ultimate assessment of humanity: a pathetic, rebellious band of weaklings who cannot bear the burden of a conscience and thus collectively seek a higher being to fall down in front of. A higher being that can dictate their lives and free them of any accountability. They find comfort in this collective unconsciousness and hate being told that things could be arranged differently. It is out of pity for what it believes to be the human condition that the Church sets out to rewrite religion, of which it has a rather bleak view.

In rejecting miracle, mystery, and authority, Jesus had desired faith freely given, faith that was, as we've mentioned before, born of a process. The two opposing poles of doubt and certainty charge and propel man towards truth, living life in the middle-path that is faith. "If faith becomes certainty," writes Critchley, "then we have become seduced by the temptations of miracle, mystery, and authority. We have become diabolical. There are no guarantees in faith. It is defined by an essential insecurity, tempered by doubt and defined by a radical experience in freedom." This radical freedom does not make easy the most terrible moments of life, nor is it any fun to live a life tempered by doubt. The insecurity that is at the heart of faith is terribly demanding and it takes its toll on even the most mentally adept; hence the daily, new converts to the Church of certainty, the religion of the Inquisitor. And it is only the ones who are certain of themselves and their faith that can pass judgement on others - who are either coerced into conviction or annihilated if found wanting. This is why certainty demands homogeneity, for it cannot tolerate difference. Those who follow this creed have not really dealt with their internal insecurity; they have merely covered it with the blanket of blind faith. And in the darkness, their insecurity silently spreads like a plague. A toxin of the mind and soul. While Jesus founded his teachings on spiritual precepts (Man shall not live on bread alone…), the Church has effectively recalibrated it on materialistic principles, hence the emphasis on the physicality of the three temptations. It is materialistic precisely because the Church has sought power by subverting the transcendent principle of religion. As Gabriel Marcel notes in Man and Mass Society, "even the authentic religions may become similarly degraded in their very principle of being. They too can degenerate into idolatries; especially where the will to power is waiting to corrupt them; and this, alas, is almost invariably the case when the Church becomes endowed with temporal authority". The will to power, the ego, chokes the organicism of religion and thus do we see multiple, temporal authorities reigning and disputing over fragments of a shattered spirit. More and more splinter groups that invoke heaven with more zealousness than those before them.

"You hoped that, following you, man, too, would remain with God, having no need of miracles" says the Inquisitor. "But you did not know that as soon as man rejects miracles, he will at once reject God as well, for man seeks not so much God as miracles. And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself, his own miracles this time…" The miracles man makes himself are the miracles of technology; the manipulation of matter. And since man had invested in faith for the sake of miracles to begin with, mastery over matter leads him to believe that he no longer needs God. As Dostoevsky himself says in the novel, commending Alyosha, for the realist, faith does not spring from miracles, but miracles from faith. Modern man belongs to the Church of White Coats, investing his faith in the idea that Physics alone reveals all; nothing stands outside of the frontiers of Physics. And Metaphysics, if it still exists, is an increasingly diminishing field as Science grows to encompass more of that which it did not know before. That is thus another reason why I believe that the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor is the prophet of materialism because a materialistic universe is essentially deterministic; the future is merely the result of all the physical data-the atoms-present in the universe. Human free will is an illusion. "It is very important for us to recognize," says Marcel, "that a materialistic conception of the universe is radically incompatible with the idea of a free man: more precisely, that, in a society ruled by materialistic principles, freedom is transmuted into its opposite, or becomes merely the most treacherous and deceptive of empty slogans." Marcel goes on to say that freedom in a society run on materialistic principles would be evanescent, it would consist of "rendering oneself sufficiently insignificant to escape the attention of the men in power…from the point of view of the individual in such a society, there is no conceivable way out at all: private life, as such, does not exist any more".

While real religion is predicated upon a self-willed process between certainty and doubt, and this process is an expression of human liberty as one chooses to face their personal insecurities and the despair of the human condition, the religion of materialism quietly rids you of your autonomy to afford you happiness. And it does this under the banner of making you free, convincing you that you've been a captive under religion. It sells you "freedom" in bulk; and what is more comforting than the freedom of certainty-freedom from self-doubt. The Church of Materialism has become so pervasive in so short a time that its principles have corrupted religions with principles of transcendence, religions that, under the increasing pressure of a secular, materialistic conception of the universe, have - unfortunately - lost ground in their "radical experience of freedom."