Building the Commune: Venezuela's Radical Democracy

Decolonizing Dialectics

'So Much the Worse for the Whites': Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution

by George Ciccariello-Maher

This article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the dialectical importance of identitarian struggles in forging the universal. Finally, I offer Frantz Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—overlooked in Buck-Morss’ account—as a corrective that allows us to truly rethink progress toward the universal in decolonized dialectical terms.

Invisible No More

George Ciccariello-Maher, The Jacobin

Geographically, Caracas, Venezuela consists of a relatively short, narrow valley just over twenty miles in length, sheltered from the Caribbean Sea by a mountain range to the north, with population seams radiating southward in a series of smaller valleys.

The old city center lies to the west of the valley, with growth historically moving ever eastward: first in verdant suburbs, then elite urbanizations, and finally — the valley’s easternmost limitations reached — the massive informal barrio settlements that precariously ring the hilltops of nearly the entire city.

Ferguson: breaking out of post-racial hypnosis

This interview with George Ciccariello-Maher (GCM) by Anna Curcio and Lenora Hanson was originally published on CommonWare (CW). ROAR Magazine

CW: Our first question has to do with the way that Ferguson exploded after Michael Brown’s murder and the police response. What are the social dynamics that led to and preceded these intense riots? What led to the uprising of the black community and how can you explain the violence of the police response there?

Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years On: A Memorial Roundtable

Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years On: A Memorial Roundtable by TigersEye99

We Created Chávez: by George Ciccariello-Maher

We Created Chávez by George Ciccariello-Maher by Duke University Press

American Blowback

by GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER and MIKE KING, CounterPunch

Yesterday was not simply a day like any other, and yet an entire system is grinding into motion to ensure that the peculiarities of the day be promptly forgotten: another crazy person lost it and committed unthinkable acts. The act of killing stands in and speaks for the person: look what he has done, of course he must be crazy. Case closed.

What they want you to see is just another Adam Lanza, just another inexplicable act, and when the act speaks for the assailant, words are secondary and there is no need to listen. But this is not, and has never been, a good way to understand reality.

The Coming War on the Occupy Movement

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch 

As I begin to write this, Occupy Oakland circulates in a by-now familiar pattern: forced from the camp at the break of day, the occupiers reconvened as they have done before on the steps of the Public Library. Later, they will attempt to close a repeating circuit that stretches a short six blocks along 14^th Street between City Hall and the Library.

Flashmob Hysteria

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch

The character of our present moment is undeniable, and the tangled web of causes and consequences is the same from London to Cairo to Santiago: budget cuts in the name of “austerity,” rising unemployment, increasing popular resistance, and an upsurge in racist violence and policing measures like “stop-and-frisk.” The failure of an economic system in the short and long term has generated an entire class of undesirables, living proof of that failure who must be contained, controlled, and silenced.

Planet of Slums, Age of Riots

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch

Tottenham, Chile, Tunis…

There are too many to count

Oakland, Brixton, Taybat al-Imam…

Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine: Symbolic Violence from Fanon to Chávez

by George Ciccariello-Maher, Theory & Event, Vol. 13, No.1. 2010

Abstract

 This paper finds the unifying thread of Frantz Fanon's revolutionary decolonial philosophy in what I call "symbolic decolonial violence," the violent self-assertion and public appearance of colonized and racialized non-beings which creates the necessary groundwork for their entry into being. By applying this concept to contemporary political discourse and identity dynamics in Venezuela, while maintaining an insistently "parallax view," we are able to enrich our understanding of both Fanon's work and the specificities of the Venezuelan situation. Such an approach allows us to see that it is the social-scientific literature that is most critical of the "violence" and "conflict" of the contemporary Venezuelan revolutionary process that testifies most powerfully to the very Fanonian truth of that process: the forced entry of formerly non-beings into being.

Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution

by George Ciccariello-Maher, Monthly Review

Too often, the Bolivarian Revolution currently underway in Venezuela is dismissed by its critics—on the right and left—as a fundamentally statist enterprise. We are told it is, at best, a continuation of the corrupt, bureaucratic status quo or, at worst, a personalistic consolidation of state power in the hands of a single individual at the expense of those “checks and balances” traditionally associated with western liberal democracies. These perspectives are erroneous, since they cannot account for what have emerged as the central planks of the revolutionary process. I will focus on the most significant of these planks: the explosion of communal power.