Interview by Nathan Schneider

Literary critic Terry Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.” He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room.

NS: Rather than focusing on “believers” or “atheists,” which are typically the categories that we hear about in the new atheist debates, you write about “a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists.” Who are these people? Why do you choose to address them?

TE: I wanted to move the arguments beyond the usual, rather narrow circuits in order to bring out the political implications of these arguments about God, which hasn’t been done enough. We need to put these arguments in a much wider context. To that extent, in my view, radicals and humanists certainly should be in on the arguments, regardless of what they think about God. The arguments aren’t just about God or just about religion.

NS: Are you urging people to go to church, or to read the Bible, or simply to acknowledge the historical connections between, say, Marxism and Christianity?

TE: I’m certainly not urging them to go to church. I’m urging them, I suppose, to read the Bible because it’s very relevant to radical political concerns. In many ways, I agree with someone like Christopher Hitchens that most religion is fairly hideous and purely ideological. But I think that Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are gravely one-sided about the issue. There are other potentials in the gospel and in the Christian tradition which are, or should be, of great interest to radicals, and radicals haven’t sufficiently recognized that. I’m not trying to convert anybody, but I am trying to show them that there is something here which is in a certain interpretation far more radical than most of the mainstream political discourses that we hear at the moment.

NS: You’re a literary scholar, and you’re talking about religion. Is religion literature? Are you proposing that religion become a resource for politics to draw from in the same way as any other literary canon might be?

TE: No, not at all. I think the whole movement to see religion as literature is a way of diffusing its radical content. It’s actually a way of evading certain rather unpleasant realities that it insists on confronting us with. One of the things that happened in the 19th century was that culture—literary and other kinds of culture—tried to stand in for religion, and there was a lot of talk about religion as poetry and religion as myth. That was an attempt to shy away from some of the more uncomfortable challenges of religion when taken rather more seriously.

NS: And those are the political challenges?

TE: Largely. Or, if you like, the ethical-political. They were forgotten, or sidelined, and Christianity in particular became a piece of poetry or a piece of mythology. There’s a lot of poetry and mythology in the Bible, to be sure, but it interacts with other kinds of elements, and that’s what I was stressing.

NS: Do you think that these traditions need to be radically reinterpreted for the modern, secular world? Thomas Aquinas is mentioned in your book, but so are—perhaps even more—Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Is the religion you’re defending closer to that of the medieval scholastics or to these more recent figures?

TE: I think that the Christian gospel always stands in need of contemporary reinterpretation. Theologians have to determine what kind of discourse, what contemporary way of talking, can best articulate its particular concerns. There should be controversy and debate. While Marx and Freud and others are relevant to the contemporary interpretation of Christianity, that doesn’t mean one rejects tradition and simply concentrates on the present. The present is made out of tradition and out of history. What I’m offering in my book is what I take to be—although it’s couched very often in terms of Marx or Freud or radicalism in general—a fairly traditional interpretation of scripture.

NS: Though of course the Christianity you present doesn’t sound like a lot of the Christianity one hears in the public sphere, especially in the United States.

TE: I think partly that’s because a lot the authentic meanings of the New Testament have become ideologized or mythologized away. Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture. The scandal of the New Testament—the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois—all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version. I’m presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries. Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way. He slips out of your grasp if you try to do so. His concern is with universal humanity, not with one particular section of it. Such ideologies make it very hard to get a traditional version of Christianity across.

NS: There are so many competing claims for supernatural revelation; some people say they adjudicate truth by the Bible, or by papal authority. How do you know one reliable supernatural tradition from another?

TE: Well, you have to argue about it on the basis of reason, and evidence, and analysis, and historical research. In that sense, theology is like any other intellectual discipline. You don’t know intuitively, and you certainly can’t claim to know dogmatically. You can’t simply, in a sectarian way, assert one tradition over another. I don’t think there’s any one template, any one set of guidelines, which will magically identity the correct view. Theology, like any other intellectual discipline, is a potentially endless process of argument. But that’s not to say that anything goes.

NS: One thing that stood out to me was your reassertion of liberation theology, which, for instance, the current pope repudiated when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was concerned that hope for a worldly liberation through revolution would become a substitute for spiritual liberation through Christ.

TE: It would certainly be a big mistake to identify any particular human society with the kingdom of God. If any liberation theology were doing that, then it would be properly rebuked. I don’t think that’s why the pope is averse to it; he’s averse to it anyway because of its politics. It would be a grave mistake to think that we’re talking about the difference between a material revolution and a spiritual one. That would be the kind of gnosticism, or dualism, which Judaism and Christianity challenge. A socialist revolution is quite as spiritual as the fight for the kingdom of God is material.

NS: Do you consider yourself a Christian per se, or a person who happens to like and be inspired by Christianity?

TE: I don’t think the pope will consider me a Christian. I was brought up, of course, a Catholic. I suppose it was fortunate that around the time of the Vatican Council I encountered, just when I might have rejected a lot of it, a very challenging version of Christianity. I felt there was no need to reject it on political and intellectual grounds, because it was highly relevant and sophisticated and engaging. In a sense one doesn’t have much choice about these things. What I find is that heritage very deeply influences my work, and probably has more so over the last few years. Quite what my relation to it now is is hard to say. But that’s just a historical dilemma, a matter of how to understand oneself historically.

NS: When you talk about it being beyond choice—I’ve been interested to see how Richard Dawkins calls himself a “post-Christian atheist” and talks about celebrating Christmas.

TE: I think, actually, he’s a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place! That would be rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist. You’d have to read him first to be post-him. As I’ve said before, I think that Dawkins in particular makes such crass mistakes about the kind of claims that Christianity is making. A lot of the time, he’s either banging at an open door or he’s shooting at a straw target.

NS: You say he emphasizes a “propositional” account of religious faith above a “performative” one. But how far can one go believing in God performatively, through political acts, before it becomes a proposition?

TE: All performatives imply propositions. There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on. The performative and the propositional work into each other. But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance. Somebody who didn’t grasp that would be making a root-and-branch mistake about the kind of thing being confronted. These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.

NS: Are there political reasons behind this mistake?

TE: Dawkins and I were recently asked to write articles for the front page of the Wall Street Journal, if you can believe it. I don’t know what the rationale behind this is, or even if it will come off. I said that I would do so, provided that my last sentence would be, “Jesus Christ would never have been given a column in the Wall Street Journal.” It is indicative of the strangeness and intensity of this debate that it crops up in the most peculiar places. It crops up at the very temples of Mammon. But, you see, I think that’s because these people really do think it’s just about a set of ideas, of propositions. That’s a pretty comfortable debate. But the point I try to make when I enter on these forums is that it’s not just that. It has a strong political subtext.

NS: Back to issues of faith and reason—your position reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould’s model of “non-overlapping magesteria.” Gould himself was not a believer, though he wrote about religion and science, and sometimes he has been accused of having a position that is only possible if you’re not really taking belief seriously.

TE: I think that Gould was right in that particular position. What is interesting is why it makes people like Dawkins so nervous. They misinterpret that position to mean that theology doesn’t have to conform to the rules and demands of reason. Then theologians can say anything they like. They don’t have to produce evidence, and they don’t have to engage in reasonable argument. They’re now released from the tenets of science. Traditionally, this is the Christian heresy known as fideism. But all kinds of rationalities, theology included, have been non-scientific for a very long time and yet still have to conform to the procedures of reason. The new atheists think this because they falsely identify the rules of reason with the rules of scientific reason. Therefore if something is outside the purview of science, it follows for them that it is outside the purview of reason itself. But that’s a false way of arguing. Dawkins won’t entertain either the idea that faith must engage reason or that the very idea of what rationality is is to be debated.

NS: The atheists have promoted themselves by wearing big red “A”s on their t-shirts and calling themselves “brights.” Is there a counter-movement you’d like to begin? What would you put on the t-shirt?

TE: Rather than simply man the barricades on either side, I’d like to step back and see what’s happening here. That sort of gesture has to be understood in terms of an American society in which a relatively small coterie of self-consciously enlightened atheists or agnostics are indeed confronted with a massively ideologized religion, which in many respects is very ugly indeed. What I think is wrong, and what I think is rationalistic, is to cast the argument in terms of intelligence. It may be that a lot of people who believe that they’re going to be rapt up into heaven are fairly dim creatures. On the other hand, Europe is full of dim agnostics. It is a rationalist error to think that your opponents are simply stupid. That betrays what’s wrong with this particular kind of new atheism: it casts the arguments largely in intellectual and propositional terms and doesn’t see that a great deal else is involved here.

NS: Do you think that it’s an accident that the most successful of the new atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, come with English accents?

TE: No. England is a very agnostic society. It looks with amazement on the behavior of many Americans as far as religion goes. America, of course, is in all kinds of ways out of line. It’s still an enormously metaphysical and religious society, while the typical advanced capitalist culture is pretty skeptical. Advanced capitalist societies do not normally call upon their citizens to believe very much, as long as they roll out of bed and do their work. They are pretty post-metaphysical. In a sense, Britain is a post-metaphysical society. A very small minority of people go to church. Religion is not part of a public and political discourse in anything like the way it is in the States. The States is peculiar because it is, on the one hand, the most rampantly capitalist society in history and, on the other, deeply, deeply metaphysical. Really, those two things are inherently at odds. Markets are relativizing, pragmatizing, and secularizing. But to prop them up, to defend them, and to legitimate them, you may need some much more absolute values. That may be why there are a lot of psycho-spiritual stockbrokers around.

Read original post at The Immanent Frame

MST releases photo and public note to society:

The Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) comes to public to manifest his grief again for the loss of companheiro Elton Brum loss, to manifest  solidarity to the family and for:

1. To denounce one more harsh and violent action of the Military Police of Rio Grande do Sul, what resulted in Elton Brum murder, 44 years, two children’s father, natural of Canguçu, during the forced eviction of Southall Farm occupation in São Gabriel. The information on the eviction shows that Brum was murdered when the situation was already controlled and there was no resistance. There are indications that he has been murdered by the backs.

2. To denounce that besides the landless worker death, the action still resulted in dozens of injured, including women and children, with wounds of splinters, swords and bitten of dogs.

3. We denounced Governor Yeda Crusius, hierarchal commander of the Military Police, responsible for a politics of criminalization of the social movements and of violence against the urban and rural workers. The use of firearms to deal with social movements reveals that the violence is part of the politics of this State. The criminalization is not an exception, but it is the rule and an unpopular government’s need, to service of obscure interests and to remain in the power by force.

4. We denounced Colonel Lauro Binsfield, Commander of the Military Police, whose report includes other disarray actions, cruelty and violence against the workers, as in the March 8, 2008, when he repeated the same methods against the women of Via Campesina.

5. We denounced the Judiciary Power that impeded the expropriation and the emission of ownership of Fazenda Antoniasi, where Elton Brum would be seated. His life would have been saved if the Judiciary Power was to service of Federal Constitution and not of interests of local oligarchies.

6. We denounced State Public Prosecution service in São Gabriel (MPE – Ministério Público Estadual) that was omitted when the seated families demanded the liberation of resources already available for the construction of the school for 350 families, of which kids now will lose the school year, and for health, what already costed three children’s life. The same MPE was omitted in the moment of the action, in front of the violence they witnessed in the field. And now they come to public to eulogize Military Police action as professional.

7. To recall the Brazilian society that rural social movements have been denouncing for more than one year that there is a criminalization politics from Yeda Crusius Government to the Commission of Human Rights of the Senate, to the Special Department for Human Rights, to Agrarian Audit and to OAS – Organization of American States. The omission of the authorities and the disrespect of the Governor to any institution and to democracy resulted today in a fatal victim.

8. To reaffirm that we will follow demanding the settlement of all families camped in Rio Grande do Sul and the infrastructure conditions to implement the settlements foreseen to São Gabriel.

We demanded Justice and Punishment to the Criminals!

For our dead, not even a minute of silence. A whole life of struggle!

Land reform, for social justice and popular sovereignty!

Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra)

(English version by me)

Written by Marie Trigona
Friday, 14 August 2009

The workers at Argentina’s occupied ceramics factory, FASINPAT (Factory Without a Boss), won a major victory this week: the factory now definitively belongs to the people in legal terms. The provincial legislature voted in favor of expropriating the ceramics factory and handing it over to the workers cooperative to manage legally and indefinitely. Since 2001, the workers at Zanon have fought for legal recognition of worker control at Latin America’s largest ceramics factory which has created jobs, spearheaded community projects, supported social movements world-wide and shown the world that workers don’t need bosses.

“This is incredible, we are happy. The expropriation is an act of justice,” said Alejandro Lopez the General Secretary of the Ceramists Union, overwhelmed by the emotion of the victory. “We don’t forget the people who supported us in our hardest moments, or the 100,000 people who signed the petition supporting our bill.”

Hundreds of workers from the FASINPAT factory waited anxiously until the late hours of the night for the legislature’s decision. The expropriation law passed 26 votes in favor and 9 votes against the bill. Thousands of supporters from other workers’ organizations, human rights groups and social movements, along with entire families and students, joined the workers as they waited outside the provincial legislature in the capital city of Neuquén. Enduring the Patagonian winter weather, activists played drums and shouted: “here they are the workers of Zanon, workers without a boss.”

FASINPAT has operated under worker control since 2001 when Zanon’s owners decided to close its doors and fire the workers without paying months of back pay or severance pay. Leading up to the massive layoffs and plant’s closure, workers went on strike in 2000. The owner, Luis Zanon, with over 75 million dollars in debt to public and private creditors (including the World Bank for over 20 million dollars), fired en masse most of the workers and closed the factory in 2001-a bosses’ lockout. In October 2001, workers declared the plant under worker control. The workers subsequently camped outside the factory for four months, pamphleteering and partially blocking a highway leading to the capital city of Neuquén. While the workers were camping outside the factory, a court ruled that the employees could sell off remaining stock. After the stock ran out, on March 2, 2002, the workers’ assembly voted to start up production without a boss. Since the occupation, the workers renamed the factory FASINPAT (Factory without a Boss).

The workers set up a stage with a giant screen for the thousands of supporters to view the legislative vote. As the decision was read, workers embraced one another in tears in disbelief that after 8 years of struggle they finally won legal control of the factory. “This decision reflects an organized struggle that won the support all of society,” said Veronica Hullipan from the Confederation of Mapuche. She said that the network of Mapuche indigenous communities in the Patagonia have supported the Zanon workers’ struggle and said legal decision is a “political triumph of workers’ organization.”

Zanon workers reminded their supporters that the struggle of Zanon, was also the struggle of Carlos Fuentealba, a public school teacher from the province of Neuquén killed by a police officer during a peaceful protest in defense of public education.  The Zanon workers have not only created jobs, but they have supported workers struggles locally, nationally and internationally. Workers from FASINPAT were present at the protest where Fuentealba was shot point blank in the head with a tear gas canister, in police repression ordered by the conservative ruling coalition of Neuquén MPN, which has ruled the Patagonian province since the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

“This is an important chapter in the struggle of the Zanon workers, who have been fighting in the streets for more than 9 years. First they tried to evict us in order to auction off the factory, the workers’ struggle and the community pressured the government to expropriate the factory,” Raul Godoy, Zanon worker told the national news daily Página/12.  Today, the plant exports ceramics to 25 countries.

Many legislative representatives wanted to demand that the workers at the self-managed factory “guarantee a pact for social peace.” But for the workers, the pact for social peace is broken when businessmen fraudulently go bankrupt and throw hundreds of workers out into the street. “The capitalists are constantly declaring war with tariff increases, by privatizing public companies and with firings. Before this situation, the workers must defend themselves; and the workers at Zanon commit to defending ourselves, in the street, however we have to.”

According to the legislation passed, the FASINPAT cooperative which employs 470 workers and exports ceramics to more than 25 countries, will remain under the control of the cooperative. The state would pay off 22 million pesos (around $7 million) to the creditors. One of the main creditors is the World Bank – which gave a loan of 20 million dollars to Luis Zanon for the construction of the plant, which he never paid back. The other major creditor is the Italian company SACMY that produces state of the art ceramics manufacturing machinery and is owed over $5 million. However, the workers have resisted the state pay-off, saying that courts have proven that the creditors participated in the fraudulent bankruptcy of the plant in 2001, because the credits went directly to the owner Luis Zanon and not investments into the factory. “If someone should pay, Luis Zanon should pay, who is being charged with tax evasion,” said Omar Villablanca from FASINPAT.

Victory, then an eviction

While the victory of FASINPAT brings hope to many of the 200 occupied factories currently operated under worker self-management in Argentina, many are still facing legal attacks. Early yesterday morning, just hours after the Zanon victory, a police operative evicted the factory Textil Quilmes, a thread factory occupied in the new wave of factory occupations in 2009. The four workers on night guard were evicted violently. The Buenos Aires provincial government is currently debating an expropriation bill for Textil Quilmes and several other new occupations in the Buenos Aires province. The textile workers are resisting the eviction at the factory’s doors, rallying support to re-enter the factory despite police presence.  They also had temporary legal protection, following an expropriation bill that was approved unanimously by the lower house in the provincial legislature.

The workers occupied the plant on February 11, 2009. “We camped outside the plant to avoid the bosses’ liquidation of the machinery. And the workers decided to take a direct action, occupy and form a cooperative,” said Eduardo Santillán, a Quilmes textile worker. With the remaining cotton left in the plant, the workers immediately began to produce cotton thread. At the time of the firing, more than 80 worked at the plant. In a common practice for business owners who file bankruptcy despite an increased demand for their product, the owner Ruben Ballani of Febatex owed the workers months of unpaid salaries, unpaid vacation time and social security. The workers also reported that the owner would force his employees to work 12 hour shifts, a practice outlawed nearly 100 years ago.

Six months after the workers were fired and the union (Sindicato Textil – AOT) failed to intervene, the workers at Textil Quilmes started up production. They claim that the union, who turned their backs on the workers once they were fired, is now negotiating on behalf of the bosses.

The occupations in Argentina continue to rise as the global economic crisis hits the South American nation. The Arrufat chocolate factory, Disco de Oro empanada pastry manufacturer, Indugraf printing press, Febatex thread producer and Lidercar meat packing plant joined the ranks of the worker occupied factory movement from 2008 to 2009. Textil Quilmes has fought along with workers from other factories occupied since the onset of the global economic crisis to demand expropriation laws; none have a definitive legal future.

Many independent analysts expect the global recession to hit Argentina’s real economy. Unemployment rates have gone up and industry growth has halted, while the financial sector remains unaffected because it already took a major blow in 2001. Those who benefited from Argentina’s economic recovery of course are now those who are using this crisis as an excuse to downsize and lay-off workers with the promise of public bailout packages and government credits.

The phenomenon of worker occupations continues to grow as the world falls deeper into the current recession. Nearly 20 new factories in Argentina were occupied since 2008. This may be a sign that workers are confronting the current global financial crisis with lessons and tools from previous worker occupied factories post-2001 economic collapse and popular rebellion. Today, some 250 worker occupied enterprises are up and running, employing more than 13,000. Many of these sites have been producing under worker self-management since 2002, providing nearly a decade of lessons, experiments, strategies and mistakes to learn from.

Zanon and others from the occupied factory movement have proven that they are capable of doing what bosses aren’t interested in doing: creating jobs and work with dignity.  This may be why government representatives, industry leaders and factory owners have remained silent and often times reacted with hostility on this issue; they are afraid of these sites multiplying and the example they have set.

At Zanon, workers constantly use the slogan: “Zanon es del pueblo” or Zanon belongs to the people. The workers have adopted the objective of producing not only to provide jobs and salaries for more than 470 people, but also to create new jobs, make donations in the community and to support other social movements. For many at the recuperated enterprises, the occupation of their workplace meant much more than safe-guarding their jobs, it also became part of a struggle for a world without exploitation. While the Zanon victory is a step in the right direction, many of the occupations are facing eviction orders. FASINPAT can now operate legally and focus their attention to producing ceramics in a faltering economy. The Zanon collective has expressed their continued commitment to defending workers’ rights and self-management, which means defending all worker occupations with slogan: “si nos tocan a uno, nos tocan a todos”: “if they mess with one of us, they mess with all of us.”

Original source: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/2052/32/

By Javier Auyero, Pablo Lapegna and Fernanda Page Poma

“Since the early 1990s, much of Latin America has witnessed the simultaneous growth of both protest and clientelism (Svampa and Pereyra 2003; Giarracca 2001; Giraudy 2007; Levitsky 2003; Stokes 2005; Auyero 2007; Almeida and Johnston 2006; Shefner et al. 2006; López-Maya and Lander 2006), a twin process that most sociological and political science research deems unlikely. Patronage (its vertical networks, opportunities, resources, and ideological frames) tends to counteract the emergence of collective action (its horizontal networks, opportunities, resources, and ideological frames). The joint increase in clientelism and contentious politics is paradoxical only if we fail to pay attention to the zone of mutual influence between both political phenomena. Attention to the area of intersection and interaction uncovers a variety of ways that contentious politics articulate with patronage politics.”

Read full article at LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Vol. 51 Issue 3 – Fall 2009

By Pierre Beaudet (Alternatives)
Published at Rabble

Burqin is an old village. The story is that one day, Jesus stopped here on his way to Jerusalem. He met lepers and told to these wretched of the world that they would be healed and indeed they were, so says Luke in the New Testament . We visit a very antique church in the middle of the village where our Palestinian guide tells us this is precisely where the miracle occurred.

Today, Burqin is part of a densely-populated circle of villages living off what remains of their land. Most people identify themselves first and foremost as farmers even if, in real terms, their income now mostly comes from outside through, now declining, remittances from brothers and fathers that have migrated everywhere in the world.

Indeed, Burqin is in the middle of the storm. It’s been like that for quite some time. So is the whole Jenin district, a green and hilly region inhabited by over 250 000 Palestinians. The villagers revolted against British rule in the 1930s under the leadership of the famous Ezzedeen Al-Qassam. Later, they fought hard in subsequent wars against Israel. Finally in 1967, Jenin and the West Bank were occupied. In 1987 with the first Intifada, the whole district became a burning field of revolt. And despite the ‘interim agreement’ of 1993, it remains so even today. Technically speaking, Jenin is now ‘co-managed’, so to speak, by Israel and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), as part of the ‘deal’ agreed under the Oslo agreement.

This evening, things are pretty quiet. Gathered to enjoy the usual narghile, people chat and share jokes. The weather is cool and pleasant. It seems so far away from any sort of conflict and tension. The ‘mukhtar’ (traditional village head) is happy because he has finished completing his house (after 25 years) where a large part of his extended family resides. When the night falls, we move to a marriage where hundreds of people have come to celebrate. In the center place of the village men gather to cheer the groom. In the surrounding houses, women are looking by as much as they can, but they also are enjoying their own ceremony. Marriage is really a way to assure redistribution. Before the end of the evening, the new family will have gathered enough money to start building their house, most probably over the top or beside the rest of the extended family (‘hamula’) which is at the heart of the Palestinian society.

Later, the loudspeakers call men to dabke, the Palestinian dance. They hold themselves by the shoulder and go around in ardent foot-trumping runs. There is no doubt about the substance of the matter, as songs, symbols and gestures are all about resistance, patriotism and ‘sumud’ (steadfastness). Toddlers run around with elders, with a majority of teens and very young men. It is taken seriously, you can see that in their faces. But it’s neither dramatic nor romantic. It has no other sense than expressing this combative identity which characterizes Palestinians. The party continues until late at night.

Most of the village has now gone to sleep. Arafat, Karim, Jihad, Refaat and many others are moving in and out to engage in the other favorite Palestinian art, politics. All of them, and indeed most of their age group have participated in resistance activities. ‘We are all graduates of the 1987 Intifada’ says Refaat. Most have gone to jail, many were tortured or maimed at one point or the other. This ‘generation’ came hard against the occupation. But it was also a challenge, although implicitly, to the original leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). After a while however, the PLO under Yasser Arafat was able to prevail. Nonetheless even today, the memory of the Intifada is very strong. ‘Israel was on the defensive when we pushed back their tanks with our bare hands’.

After the agreement between the PLO and Israel in 1993, there was hope that some sort of a deal would come true, even if not perfect. But rapidly, the house of cards came down. Successive Israeli administrations accelerated the locking-up of the occupied territories through the expansion of settlements and so-called «by-pass roads’, destroying the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state. Things got sour and very tough, especially when resistance pushed up again. When the second Intifada erupted in 2000, Jenin, as usual, became the epicenter. The whole Northern region became the nightmare for Israel because of the suicide bombers that came from it to blow themselves up in Tel-Aviv and other Israeli cities. In fact, many of these ‘shahid’ were from Burqin. ‘We were really surprised that so many of our neighbors became Martyrs. We understood later how many young men were so angry and determined to use their own body for what they saw as an act of resistance’ says Arafat. Later in 2002, Jenin became famous again when fierce Palestinian resistance caused scores of Israeli soldiers’ casualties. The army came in full force and literally bulldozed the refugee camp, killing 56 Palestinian civilians and fighters in a few hours.

Today apparently at least, Burqin and Jenin are ‘pacified’. The Palestinian authorities are working hand in hand with Israeli security under the guidance of US general Keith Dayton. It’s part of the latest deal which was approved by President Mahmood Abbas and implemented by his Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The fighters linked with Hamas or Fatah’s dissidents have been arrested or forced into hiding. Over 1000 Palestinians are detained by the PNA, without trial or accusation, just like over 10 000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel. According to the human rights organizations, torture and maltreatment is abundant in the Palestinian jails.

However in terms of securing Israel, this not enough. Indeed, encirclement of Palestinian cities and lands remains tight. Even if some control points have been closed, there are literally hundreds of Israeli-controlled check-points in the West Bank. Otherwise, the ‘border’ remains closed except for a few dozen Palestinian workers who can work in Israel. Palestinians from inside the green line, who used to come shopping into the district, are not often seen, as they are discouraged by the roadblocks, therefore adding on the economic decline of the Palestinian areas. The destruction of Gaza is used as a terrorist threat: ‘do not dare to resist because we will do with you (in the West Bank) as we have done with them in Gaza’.

Around the table however, people are not here to lament about the occupation which they consider the ‘normality’. They have no illusion about the ‘peace process’ or on the economic benefits that were announced by the PNA and Israel in the last period. ‘The battle early in 2009 in Gaza destroyed any illusion that was left around’ says Refaat, a teacher currently managing a Palestinian NGO in Ramallah. ‘The idea that somehow, a political settlement is about to come is buried’. In the meantime, the economic and social situation remains dreadful, with unemployment rates of 50-80% and a very serious deterioration of living conditions. Before his illness, Ariel Sharon, the then Israeli PM had said it clearly, ‘we are going to put Palestinians on a diet’, meaning the kind of siege that has been imposed on the Palestinian society in the last seven years. Everything is done to weaken, humiliate, destroy the Palestinians except an all-out massacre which would remind the world of the situation. ‘Killing us slowly is more efficient from the official point of view in Israel’ says Refaat.

Ok, this is ‘normal’ from the point of view of people living under the occupation. But what next then? What can happen?

Everyone agrees that the Al-Aqsa Intifada triggered by Yasser Arafat in 2000 failed and in fact was used by the occupiers to strengthen their position. In the meantime, Fatah, the movement that led Palestinian resistance for the last 40 years, is agonizing as a credible and legitimate political force. Military resistance by Hamas also failed and even worst, the Islamist movement has fallen into the same pitfalls that were manifested by Fatah standing in as the ‘PNA’. This became evident with the events in 2007. After a brief fight, Hamas organized a ‘counter-coup’ to the move planned by the Israelis and the US through their Palestinian surrogate, Fatah’s boss in Gaza, Mohamed Dahlan. The problem however is that after this, Hamas became itself very authoritarian, using the ‘good old’ tactics of nepotism and control. ‘The ‘take over’ of the strip by Hamas in 2007, says Refaat, badly damaged the reputation of a movement that was initially seen by many as an alternative to the declining and corrupted post-Arafat Fatah’.

In the meantime under Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli regime seems to be determined to erase once and for all the possibility of ending the occupation. Is that the end of the story I asked my Burqin friends?

Our capacities are presently limited’ says Arafat, the local leader of the Democratic Front, one of the three left Palestinian parties [1]. He explains that the DF that used to have thousands of activists back in the late 1980s has now ‘only’ 100 members in Burqin. He is surprised when I say that very few villages in the world, even in countries with a strong activist tradition, can claim ‘only’ 100 local members (out of a population of 5000). Nonetheless for Arafat, the issue is rather qualitative. As for most of the people around the table, the fact is that currently, the Palestinians have ‘no leadership’. As DF activists, they do not really respect their own leadership although everyone agrees that Abd al-Karîm, otherwise known as Abu Laila (the current DF leader in the occupied territories), is brilliant and honest. ‘Our leaders have been transformed into the ‘loyal opposition’ and are not really opposing the capitulationism of the PNA’. Moreover, the leadership has accepted to play a minor role in the management of an unacceptable regime. ‘They criticized Fatah all the time, but the salaries of the officials is paid by Abu Mazen’ (nom de guerre of Mahmood Abbas).

In fact, even Abu Laila admits himself that his ‘hands are tied’: ‘We have now two police states, one in Gaza and one in the West Bank’. He believes that Abbas is cooking a deal with Hamas to perpetuate the impossible status quo, for ‘each one to have relative control over ‘his’ territory, leaving the occupation in command’. He is hoping to raise the issues of the social and economic dimensions of the present crisis so as to attract angry youth, but that is problematic. Traditionally, the DF as well as groups like the PFLP were perceived by the population as more ‘radical’ nationalists, all geared towards national liberation, rather than left-leaning socialist groups struggling for the social empowerment of the poor.

At another level, leftists factions like the DF are not well positioned to criticize the authoritarianism of the PNA and of Fatah, having themselves shaped by heavily-centralized decision-making. This democratic deficit is coming back to haunt the left. It is now discussed, and there are moves to implant another culture. But there is still a long way to go.

Mustapha Barghouti, now the head of the Palestinian National Initiative (al-Mubadara), was one of the few that saw this problem before others. He defected from the Communist party to promote another political culture, more open and inclusive, focusing on civil non-armed resistance against the occupation as an apartheid society contradicting all provisions of the international human rights convention. But now Mustapha is also pessimistic. Although a fervent supporter of the peace process, he cannot be but very somber: ‘ The Israelis have no incentive to compromise. They are not pressed in any fashion by the Palestinian authorities. They are comforted in their intransigence by the continuous support from the US, despite and beyond Obama’. Despite initial hopes and frequent encounters with the new administration in Washington, Mustapha sees no result to affect the sinister alliance condoning Israeli practices in the occupied territories as well as their aggressive behavior towards the Arab and Muslim countries.

So the spirit is a bit low tonight in Burqin. Nonetheless, I am informed that the activist core of ‘only’ 100 members remains active through social projects of different kinds. The ‘social safety net’ provided by a politicized civil society (closely linked with the left) is crucial for the people, apart from family support. My friends also animate a workers’ coalition against the local (municipal) authorities and UN agencies who, despite the fact that they employ many Palestinians, are not very respected because of inefficient and corrupted practices. The flame is kept alive and like nowhere in the struggling global south, activists remain connected with their people.

Is the solution through civil resistance initiatives like the well-publicized movement in Bil’in (near Ramallah)? It has been much promoted as the way to confront Israeli apartheid practices through peaceful demonstrations and well-planned media events. Around the room, there is a consensus that the tactics used in Bil’in are effective. Moreover, it was the most spectacular aspect of the first Intifada.‘We were able then to paralyze the occupation by confronting, without arms, the Israeli occupation. The non-military component of the struggle became the centerpiece of resistance.

However, it is ‘premature, says Arafat, to abandon altogether the military part of our struggle. This is not India here, and the Israeli occupiers are not like the British, who had no will to fight’. He concedes at the end that traditionally, the Palestinian struggle was ‘overmilitarized’ and did not, except during the first Intifada, build enough strength through mass mobilization. Political discussions carry on over the night. As people slowly retire, I am left with a contradictory impression. I am still struck with the statement about the ‘only’ 100 activists remaining. I keep thinking, ‘wow, if we could have this in my country!’

But the permanence of resistance goes beyond that. I understand that most of the people in Burqin are well aware of what is happening not only locally, but at a larger, even international level. On this of course the impact of Al-Jazeera, in addition to the wide use of the internet and mobile phones, cannot be neglected. ‘People now see and hear directly the voices of the opposition in Palestine and the Arab world’ says Refaat. ‘We have lost our naivety towards our self-proclaimed leaders. We are free thinkers now’.

In this village of 5000, there is no capitulation. ‘We are ready to rise up again, as we have no choice really’. Israeli occupation forces, even supplemented by PNA military and police, do not control the area. ‘This is not Egypt or Jordan, we do not bow down to the Sultan’ say my friends. Even if General Dayton is working hard to develop local repressive capacities, the occupation cannot rule by force only.

From the Palestinian side, resistance is not based on a ‘grand strategy’, therefore the inherent tendency within the movements to reproduce some of the same mistakes and impasses. But because it is a people’s struggle and not a movement of a minority, resistance remains basically uncompromising, so it is quasi impossible to crush it. Is this enough? Certainly not. But one day probably not far ahead, the facades of the occupation will crack again, resulting from the complex fractures that undermine the Israeli society and State (not talking about the declining evolution of the US Empire). Occupation will also crack from the imagination of Palestinians fighting endlessly, generation after generation. For sure, the people of Burqin will continue to be part of this invisible accumulation.

Notes:

[1] The DFLP originally came out of the Popular Front (PFLP), which remains numerically speaking the largest leftist force. There is also the People’s Party (former Communist Party).

“The issue of class is important here, not because the workers are angels with whom we may not ever differ, but because their organised power is necessary to make even these democratic demands effective. Even if the protesters were all middle class, I would want them to win. Truth be told, I would want them to win even more than they bargained for – to win so comprehensively that they gave a shot in the arm to the working class and facilitated their rapid self-organisation outside of the Islamic Labour Council approved unions. Never mind a general strike: what is urgently needed is the reappearance of the shoras. And we have seen the riots spread chaotically to working class areas of Isfahan (see also), where the protesters drove out the police, and the southern city of Yazd. The protests have spread to workers districts in southern Tehran. Reports of working class turnout are appearing, albeit infrequently, in some of the English-language press.”

Read it full at Lenin’s Tomb

By Comité Invisible

La Fabrique Editions, 2007

“Whatever angle you look at it from, there’s no escape from the present. That’s not the least of its virtues. For those who want absolutely to have hope, it knocks down every support. Those who claim to have solutions are proven wrong almost immediately. It’s understood that now everything can only go from bad to worse. “There’s no future for the future” is the wisdom behind an era that for all its appearances of extreme normalcy has come to have about the consciousness level of the first punks. The sphere of political representation is closed. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness acting by turns either as the big shots or the virgins, the same sales shelf heads, changing up their discourse according to the latest dispatches from the information service. Those who still vote give one the impression that their only intention is to knock out the polling booths by voting as a pure act of protest. And we’ve started to understand that in fact it’s only against the vote itself that people go on voting. Nothing we’ve seen can come up to the heights of the present situation; not by far. By its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more ‘grown up’ than all those squabbling amongst themselves to govern it do. Any Belleville chibani is wiser in his chats than in all of those puppets’ grand declarations put together. The lid of the social kettle is triple-tight, and the pressure inside won’t stop building. The ghost of Argentina’s Que Se Vayan Todos is seriously starting to haunt the ruling heads.”

Read full book here (English Version) – Tarnac 9 support commitee.
For French Version, click here

By Plan B Bureau

“The biopolitical metropolis is administrated exclusively using governance. Social movements, autonomous forces and all those who truly have the desire to subvert the status quo understand that when a struggle begins one should never commit the fatal error of going straight to negotiate with governace, sit at it’s “tables”, accept its forms of corruption and thus become its hostage. On the contrary, it is necessary right from the beginning to impose the battleground, the deadlines and even the modality of struggle on governance. Only when the balance of power is overturned in favor of the metropolitan autonomy will it be possible to negotiate governance’s surrender while standing up, on solid legs.”

Read full content at http://www.occupiedlondon.org/

JOÃO PEDRO STÉDILE
INTERVIEWED BY ATILIO BORON

See it here, at Socialist Register: http://socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/SR_08_Stedile_0.pdf