Mere seconds ago, Greg Ehrig inquired,
>Forgive my ignorance, but what are we defining as "anti-systemic
>movements"?
In a 1992ish book entitled Anti-Systemic Movements..., Four Evangelists
of WS theory, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre
Gunder-Frank explored the destiny and global scale of anti-systemic movements
in what, I feel quite certain, should, nay, must be taken as the definitive
pronunciation on the profound importance and consequentiality of anti-systemic
movements. Nowhere, in this Breviary-Update of cutting-edge WS theory, is
the usage "anti-systemic movements" defined, and so it should remain.
Yes, I could elaborate as to why, wherein the wisdom of this procedure,
ie, UNDEFINED-relegation, evinces its essential wisdom. But that'd merely
get me into worse Trouble. Oh, whythehecknot.
women's movements, racial-ethnic minority movements, lesbian-gay-bisexual
movements, environmentalist movements, local-community-autonomist movements
(exclusive of Amitai Etzioni-an Communitarianism, by current consensus ugly-
reactionary and repressive in character, whereto I concur and on better
grounds than most, to wit, thirty seconds of sheer terror trapped in a
dysfuntional hotel elevator with Amitai Etzioni, revelatory of Character
as a plane crash, except one survives) notably NGO movements in Peru and
elsewhere. Islamicist terrorism promoted by Islamic Jihad in Egypt, Islamic
Salvationist Front in Algeria, Hizbullah in the circum-Palestine region,
and analogous entities, whilst they engage in community-building volunteer
work, including self-help infrastructural development, localized welfare-
benefit payment schemes, and entire educational systems which fill the
yawning void in this area consequent to or indicative of the collapse of
the official state bureaucracies, are excluded. The reader should be able
to readily discern the reason.
One Positive development attributable to the despised and excluded armed
Islamicists, however, is suggested in the following anecdote: Two Jewish
friends of mine, nearly killed by a Cairo bomb, sent a postcard ecstatically
gratified that they were blown up as tourists, not as *Jewish* tourists.
Thus we pronounce Klinghofferism dead as Klinghoffer himself.
If you are confused by the foregoing, it is not without reason. Others
will disagree.
New Religions, a fortiori, such as the mock-Hindu sects of the earlier
1970s, the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhists and more importantly, the South Korean
crusade to save the US from Communist aggression, ie, The Unification Church
led by Rev Sun Myung Moon (which built upon the pioneering efforts of ISKCON,
Divine Light Mission, and Christian youth-targeted fundamentalist and gnostic
analogues of the South Asian competition, not to mention the suicidal Poeples
Church, 1979, and Branch Davidians, 1992, are without exception dismissed as
conservative or worse. The fruit of all the aforementioned toiling in the
vineyard, Moral Majority, Christian Crusade, and whatever's next, are far
worse than that. As I said yesterday, anyone recall a "pattern variable"
called "secularization"?)
Without exception, in the capitalist core countries, there has been no
anti- reported as having been perpetrated against the "system" by any movemnt
mentioned above. It is also the case that, by my own definition of social
movements, which will be omitted here due to the execrable regard the book
is held by the perverse few who have heard of it and *then* didn't read it,
these movements no longer exist qua social movements at this time; they are,
have been throughout the period of recuperation and social quiescence since
the Nixonian repression, stable subcultures within a stagnant hegemonic
culture, where routine politics is practiced on both/multiple sides via the
anticipable devices of mass-membership organizations, lobbying, the odd
ritualized protest march ("episodic dissidence" in my obliviated book),
and special-interest or niche media.
Now, the serious problem. In what sense of "system" were the anti-systemic
movements ever anti-sustemic?
There are two possibilities.
The first is the Talcott Parsons structural-functionalist "Social System,"
after the book, The Social System, 1956ish. This is a synchronic, static
model. Talcott Parsons has said to this writer, as well as to this writer's
co-author of that time, who was driving the car, in a Personal Communication,
"I don't know much about history." Nor, it is safe to say, did he know the
immensely popular song whereof that was the first line, verbatim. Unlike the
marxian *mode of production* or *social formation*, riven as it is by class
struggle rooted in appropriation of material surplus product by the
exploiting-ruling class from its direct producers, the Parsonian social
system is a Seamless Robe of Capitalist Rationality at every point; hence
it cannot be attacked at its weakest point, the class contradiction. It
is destructible if and only if it is attacked everywhere at once. The latter
inference was Unthought by Parsons himself; it was however advocated by
Herbert Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man, 1964, and in later works somewhat
less abstruse. On the latter account he became a hero to aficionados of rock,
dying in California, where he belonged. That the Marcusian dystopia was merely
the Parsonian utopia turned inside out went unrecognized, except in my first
book, justifiably excluded from the professional literature.
The unity of theory and praxis in anti-ing a system, which is a strategy
of total disruption at every point at once, is associated with the name
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, since *evenements* of the magnitude of May 1968 in France
must be associated with somebody's name. (Today, Daniel Cohn-Bendit has a good
job in the environmentalist business, lives in obscurity, and both supports
and raises his family, a quite conservative "life-style" these days. Nobody,
of course, cares. The Marcusian *all-azimuth* disruptionism strategy (the
asterisked term derives from French thermonuclear missle-aiming policy,
such that at one time, a missle pointed at Moskva was counterbalanced by
one drawing a bead on the District of Columbia).
The possibility that the "system" the anti-systemic movements are anti-
corresponds to system as employed in the usage Political Economy of the World
System is nil. Like all social movements, they were at their inception state-
specific; and in their current, ossified, even quasi- or fully bureaucratized
form, they are even more so. Their cultural features accept the cultural and
stylistic hegemony of the Upper Middle Class of the US, the only portion of
the occupation-income-structure whose real incomes are appreciating. In terms
of the international aspect of their cultural impact, this is derivative
immediately from US cultural hegemony.
That's simplicity itself. Those who object to some of my sentence-lengths
are reminded that, by birth, I am not of your People. I was born a sociologist,
and was raised in the Sociological Tradition of my People, whose Sacred
Language I am entitled to use, in requiting, by you, the Sufferings of our
People, as we deserve. In 1961, the great Johns Hopkins University demographer,
James C. Beshers, said to me, Personal Communication, "Sociologists are the
[African-Americans] of the academic profession." Our subsequent sufferings,
wanderings, famines, houndings from pillar to post, all validated the race-
relations model. Take one look at my scarred visage; the face of a Visible
Minority indeed. Karl Marx perished of suicidal depression before he could
kill himself. Max Weber not merely spent half his life in the Bin, but was
Meaningfully Committed to celibacy excepting just once with his Marianne
Weber's best friend. Emile Durkheim, aside from Jewish self-hatred, was
totally screwed up beyond belief. These three, yet I say unto ye, the greatest
of these, longest sentences ever written, too, was Marx.
WE DEMAND that, in such cases where the ethnicity of all job applicants for
anything is UNKNOWN or UNDEFINED, the System Default should be set to Sociolo-
gist, the latter, if any present, should be hired.
HIRE THE SOCIOLOGIST. He or she can't do anything, either.
Daniel A. Foss
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