Planning Chaos in the Middle East: Destruction of Societies for Foreign Money Control

Scott Scottdale interviews Prof. John McMurtry for Canadian Challenger

John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and his work is published and translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author and editor of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his latest book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism/from Crisis to Cure.

SS/CC: You have said that “the trick of the endless US-led wars in the Middle East is to control both sides so as to ensure against sovereign states able to defend the common interests of their peoples”. Please explain.

JM: Whenever any nation has an independent government with fossil fuel, financial, agricultural or strategic resources not yet subjugated to transnational corporate control, there is a US-led campaign to destroy it. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Syria have all experienced this over many decades dating from the overthrow of the social-democratic president Mossadegh of Iran in 1953 to Syria’s still mildly independent social state being destroyed to the roots today. Lebanon was a civilized center of the Middle East before warred upon by Israel in 1982 and has been civil-war divided ever since. Iraq’s region-leading social state with universal health-care, free higher education, public water and electricity, local agricultural and food subsidies has been subjected to genocidal destruction and civil war imposition from 1990 to now, with Syria being destroyed by foreign-supported civil war from 2011. Once CIA-agent and coup leader Saddam Hussein could not destroy Iraq’s oil-worker-led society from within after his US-supplied war against Iran was over, Iraq was attacked on contrived pretexts – the constant excuse for non-stop war crimes in the Middle-East – and the state was irreversibly destroyed “because it was floating on a sea of oil” (Wolfowitz’s phrase).

Iraq is a model example of controlling both sides of the ever-shifting Middle-East wars to seize the assets of all, and so too the NATO bombing and jihadi overthrow of Gadhafi in Libya whose socialized oil state was even more developed than Iraq’s with public programs and infrastructures, including quasi-free homes for young couples. Libya’s long-time leader was first welcomed into the
Western fold after 2000 and his opponents deported and reditioned by British M-15, then jihadis were joined by massive NATO ‘humanitarian bombing’ in 2011 to overthrow his social state, and Libya too is now in civil war chaos. Induced civil wars are the divide-and-rule policy across borders, and especially successful social states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya where their people are clearly better off than neighbouring peoples under US diktat. A better example of society is always prohibited even by war criminal attacks – as in Yugoslavia and Nicaragua in the 1980’s, and Ukraine today. All are orchestrated into sectarian insanity and internecine wars. At the same time vast new profits, resources, lands, price climbs, markets, agribusiness and – most of all – looting of public resources and finances by private foreign financiers and corporations proceeds more freely with stable social fabrics destroyed, not only in the victim societies but at home.

SS/CC: How does ISIL connect to all this?

JM: The historical background is that US-financed Islamic fundamentalism coupled with royal absolutism has come to rule inside and outside governments – Saudi Arabia being the prime example. When I travelled overland through the Middle East including North Africa decades ago, secular ‘Arab socialism’ was the rule led by Nasser and Egypt, and Islam was the background mass religion.

Then a great US-led policy turn occurred in which fanatic jihadists were financed and armed across the region to ensure against “communism”, the Great Satan of the US. The massive funding and arming of jihadis as a war machine began with the US-orchestrated civil war in the then quasi-socialist secular state of Afghanistan to bleed the Soviet Union dry. Since the 9-11 construction, the US with local allies has increasingly sponsored jihadists of every kind to take down any remaining social state while also justifying their oil-for-weapons empires producing no life good but only death and destitution. Observe the connections today. Private armaments and military servicing corporations drain the public treasuries of the US and allied royal states trading oil for arms in the trillions, while financed jihadis provide justification for all the death machines and attack target states at the same time.

The civil war model of long-term society destruction to feely loot its resources has continued to the present day in a strategic arc of devastating civil wars from Pakistan to Iraq to Muslim Africa – not to mention now in Europe itself in Ukraine after the Chechnya civil war in Russia was ended. ISIL is a supremely atavistic instrument of the civil-war strategy. The US-Israel sponsored split of the originally secular-socialist PLO (Palestine Liberation Army) into warring factions, where the demonized Hamas was itself sponsored by Israel to divide it, is another example of the society-wrecking pattern at the sub-state level. ISIL today continues it at a more diabolical extreme – originally funded and armed by the very US-led forces now dropping bombs on it in Syria. Israel even gives ISIL terrorists hospital service on the Syrian border after Mossad and the CIA trained them as a largely ex-Saddam jihad army. All of this seems quite insanely contradictory. But all promotes civil wars and they render peoples helpless against foreign money control.

If one wonders how a desert-crawling line of Japanese open-back trucks gifted by the US filled with countless irregular fighters in plain view could ever have ever made it overnight to the point where
Western military and political leaders are saying “the war against ISIL may be interminable”, one begins to see through the game. ISIL is a construction financed and trained by covert US and oil-king allies that ruins every place it enters, like Syria once the regime began to win the civil war. Al-Nusra/Al Qaeda was not enough. ISIL is a step up in the US-led control of the Middle East by terror, chaos and social devastation. “The Salvador option” was the first name for the post-war death squads in Iraq, but “Islamic State” stirs much more apocalyptic passions pro and con. Best of all, the ruling foreign war machines of the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and NATO are now far better justified to “fight the barbaric terrorists”. Saudi Arabia with US support is now even projecting the “terrorist” and sectarian “Shiite” labels on the popular uprising of the poor in Yemen against a corrupt US-Saudi puppet government. One object alone is achieved. Peoples and resources of the region can be predated without sovereign social defences or unity of collective life purpose, the ultimate target of every US-led aggression. As long as all evils can be blamed on an ever-shifting Enemy, there is no overcoming recognition.

SS/CC: If someone were to say, this is “another conspiracy theory,” how would you reply?

JM: It is the very opposite of a conspiracy theory. Civil war chaos has been instituted across agents, places and times. The underlying pattern of destroying evolved societies and their collective control of life resources is far deeper. The only diagnostic model that fits all the hallmark characteristics is a runaway cancer system at the macro level with no social immune recognition. It is unflagged even as it keeps hollowing out more societies towards social collapse. Look for disconfirming evidence of the objective pattern – for example, a society made better rather than worse anywhere in the Middle East since 1991. The divide and rule reign of civil destruction is now deep into the US and Israel themselves, with civil war or its repression now pervasive in the Arab world. This was not originally gamed as the outcome. US geostrategic planners are social morons by the nature of their game model, as I have explained in my The Moral Decoding of 9-11: Beyond the US Criminal State. But the invariable result of the civil wars they foment and manipulate still forces other societies’ resources open to private corporate control and exploitation without limit until they move onto the next. You do not even need corporate trade agreements to do it. Even if the US people themselves keep being bled dry with their common life bases and interests stripped out by military and financial claws in the trillions every year, not to mention agro-industry, the same private transnational corporations producing no life goods but destroying them keep money-profiting more. Plundering public purses and resources across continents is the unseen means.

As transnational private money sequences alone multiply, everything connects in social and environmental life depredation out of control. There are myriad masks of the disorder, but always the evolved collective life capital bases of societies and their ecological life hosts are devoured and torn apart. Now Kenya and Nigeria too join the jihadi-split nations to open a state of permanent war, looting and profit with no social organization to stop it. In Venezuela and Ukraine peoples fight back, but the same civil war method unfolds across continents with few connecting the dots. Twenty-five years after the dismantling of Yugoslavia into atavistic nationalisms steeped in the Nazi past, the same happens again in Ukraine. One outcome has become predictable across borders. Socially organized development is reversed for a private transnational feeding frenzy on collective financial, agricultural, natural and strategic resources of the victim societies. Only the rule of life-protective law with the force of law works across peoples. But Palestine even seeking protection of international law is openly threatened and its taxes seized by Israel with US support. When Palestine joins UNESCO by invitation, the US defunds UNESCO. This is not a conspiracy. It is a lawless rule of normalized terror, life destruction and tyrannical oppression.

SS/CC: How does Harper Canada fit into all this?


Canada is very privileged with vast natural resources. It is not historically soaked in blood, and has evolved a civil culture without fanatic ‘isms’. Yet after Alberta Reform swallowed the Progressive Conservative Party with money from Big Oil and the retailer Eaton’s, PM Harper incarnates the divide-and-rule war method. His CEO rule strips Canada of its social life infrastructures and public tax funds in the name of the nation, while serving only private market powers to multiply and pillage across borders. This is his program, and there is no exception to it. Now Canada is aerial bombing in Arab lands from Libya to Syria – also funded by public money –even though the target ISIL beheaders now have been trained and financed by the allied states bombing them. Up North his regime now trains and supplies a violent-coup US-installed regime whose one-way aerial bombing of East-Ukraine civilians and infrastructures has driven two million people from their homes.

Whatever one’s own preferences, the morality in charge means only what serves the transnational corporate system. This is the market God which now dwarfs all world religions in power to dictate and destroy and capture imagination. Its cornerstone of defence for war crimes is to blame another enemy– as with the Nazis “terrorists” are those who block or resist its rule. The differences between
Canada and Palestine or Syria are obvious at the level of conventionalized horror and life deprivation. But the underlying value system is the same in principle. The master driver is the solely ruling compulsion to turn private money demand into maximally more private money demand without limit, border or higher purpose at all. This is called “freedom”. No life coordinates ever enter the sequences and equations in this system in its deregulated mutations. Not even eco-genocide can be seen through its prism. Yet few dare recognize the blind war against life itself which spreads the more its fatal disorder is denied and rationalized away.

SS/CC: How does Islam fit into this destruction of societies by corporate globalization?

JM: The Prophet’s abomination of idolatry above all fits very well to the disorder. Turning money into more money for money controllers is the greatest idol worship of history, and no stationary idol of the past remotely approaches its direct ruin of one society after another – a consequence Mohammed chorally emphasizes in the Koran. No idol can make or breathe life, and here the idolatry goes far beyond anything ever before. It seeks to reduce all that exists into private money value, and devours ever more life and life means to multiply its global demand. Its world-consuming, flesh-eating code is even more deeply at work behind the Middle East holocaust of nations than the US which has become its creature.

Civilizing Islam long ago worked – as, for example, in architecture-rich Moorish Spain from the eighth century to 1492 when a rising European imperialism launched its genocidal seizures and destructions of other people’s life bases across continents. Degenerate versions of ‘Islam’ from absolutist oil-kings to jihadist death squads have followed, and whatever their pretences, they serve only the underlying agenda of corporate money-sequence globalization. They keep peoples superstitiously suggestible, and force obedience by violence and threats without understanding. Collective life-serving programs for all – as found in Iraq and Libya before the saturation bombings – have disappeared into the Arab past almost altogether. The corporate state now rules as pseudo-Muslim and suffocating. Even ‘austerity programs’ have been instituted across the Middle East, with life-serving social organization – public health and free higher education, social security of the person, ecological regulation – not funded or stripped out.

Islam confined to ritual repetitions and prohibitions without social life standards does not confront the corporate money-sequence idolatry. It allows submission to life-blind rules of oppression as ‘submission to God’s will’. Thus the transnational lootings of the people’s common wealth by oil dealing, weapons, finance, GMO agribusiness, and money-trough military services and reconstruction multiply to more corrupt and private oligarchical control and demand. Mass submission, resignation, obedience, faith without organization beyond faction parallels the dispossessed mass anomie of the West. The ‘Arab Spring’ itself – which never pronounced one public policy – seems to have been a construction without common life-ground dividing the people into even more helpless impotence of collective self-determination. People think “well at least they got rid of Mubarak.” Down the memory hole goes the fact that Mubarak was a marked man after he refused to commit Egypt to the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq which he prophetically declared “would open the gates of Hell”.

SS/CC: You emphasize the ‘ad adversarium fallacy’ as the dominant “track-switch of people’s thought” which always diverts their attention away from humanity’s underlying real problems.

JM: A simple example would be accusing me of being “a communist” or “an unbeliever” or “a conspiracy theorist” for what I say above. The topic is diverted to a familiar hate-object of the audience. Corporate mass media and politicians do this as their stock in trade. It gets attention and usually sells. This blame-the-enemy diversion dominates across cultures, but is almost never named. It runs so deep into the group psyche that not even logicians, psychologists and cognitive scientists define it.

Once diverted to the hate-object of the group – say “Saddam” or “Putin” or “state socialist” or “terrorist” – most people block out disproving facts so as to remain acceptable to the surrounding group. Challenge by evidence or reason is derailed onto blaming a known enemy of the audience. This is the underlying track-switch of thought upon which all mass-murderous wars and system oppressions depend, as well as most propaganda of daily life. It is the cornerstone of American ideology which has no common ground but animosity to the latest designated enemy. Yet not even academics will stand up to the accusation of “Putin-lover”, “9-11 conspiracy theorist”, “communist”, or whoever the shifting enemy may be. US Republicans and branch-plant Harperism now rely on this enemy-hate for every attack ad and proclamation.

This is why evidence, public statistics, knowledge of anything outside the game, is not now safe in corporate states. Public knowledge itself is the ultimate enemy of the whole game. That which sees, documents, shares, certifies, distributes, or organizes to prove and act for the public good is forbidden in a thousand ways even in Canada – the secret behind the Harper agenda of information control – from defunding and de-listing progressive NGO’s, to gags on government ministries and scientists, to allowing only his photographer’s pictures into the mass media.

In the Middle East, silencing is by drones, secret police, bombing, special forces, mind-stopping lies, and unending murder, mayhem and terror in imposed civil wars. Always the ultimate operation is to blame the enemy for all that goes wrong – - even if the enemy is the endless victim, as in Palestine. In the case of Israel, the imperialist nation with its boot in the face of the people is for the first time in history proclaimed as the victim, as bravely observed by Gideon Levy. “Who is denying whose right to exist?” is not a question asked. “Who is throwing stones at Goliath in Israel today?” is an unspeakable thought. Total reversal, blaming the oppressed for what you doing, endless diversions to the designated enemy is the ultimate lie of today’s human condition. But it today rules the Middle East by a more complex process of shifting wars and hates than ever before. /30 JM

http://www.globalresearch.ca/planning-chaos-in-the-middle-east-destruction-of-societies-for-foreign-money-control/5445509

The Myth of ‘Value-Free’ Social Science Or The Value of Political Commitments to Social Science

For many decades, mainstream social scientists, mostly conservative, have argued that political commitments and scientific research are incompatible.  Against this current of opinion, others, mostly politically engaged social scientists, have argued that scientific research and political commitment are not contradictory.

 

In this essay I will argue in favor of the latter position by demonstrating that scientific work is embedded in a socio-political universe, which its practioners can deny but cannot avoid.  I will further suggest that the social scientist who is not aware of the social determinants of their work, are likely to fall prey to the least rigorous procedures in their work – the unquestioning of their assumptions, which direct the objectives and consequences of their research.

We will proceed by addressing the relationship between social scientific work and political commitment and examining the political-institutional universe in which social scientific research occurs.  We will recall the historical experience of social science research centers and, in particular, the relationship between social science and its financial sponsors as well as the beneficiaries of its work.

 

We will further pursue the positive advantages, which political commitments provide, especially in questioning previously ignored subject matter and established assumptions.

We will start by raising several basic questions about scientific work in a class society:  in particular, how the rules of logical analysis and historical and empirical method are applied to the research objectives established by the ruling elites.

 

Social Scientific Research and Socio-political Context

Scientific work has its rules of investigation regarding the collection of data, its analytic procedures, the formulation of hypotheses and logic for reaching conclusions.  However, the research objective, the subject matter studied, the questions of ‘knowledge for what?’ and ‘for whom?’ are not inherent in the scientific method. Scientists do not automatically shed their class identity once they begin scientific endeavor.  Their class or social identity and ambitions, their   professional aspirations and their economic interests all deeply influence what they study and who benefits from their knowledge.

Social scientific methods are the tools used to produce knowledge for particular social and political actors, whether they are incumbent political and economic elites or opposition classes and other non-elite groups.

The Historical Origins of Elite Influenced Social Science
After World War II, wealthy business elites and capitalist governments in the United States and Western Europe established and funded numerous research foundations carefully selecting the functionaries to lead them.  They chose intellectuals who shared their perspectives and could be counted on to promote studies and academics compatible with their imperial and class interests.  As a result of the interlocking of business and state interests, these foundations and academic research centers published books , articles and journals and held conferences and seminars, which justified US overseas military and economic expansion while ignoring the destructive consequences of these policies on targeted countries and people.  Thousands of publications, funded by millions of dollars in research grants, argued that ‘the West was a bastion of pluralistic democracy’, while failing to acknowledge, let alone document, the growth of a world-wide hierarchical imperialist order.

 

An army of scholars and researchers invented euphemistic language to disguise imperialism.  For example, leading social scientists spoke and wrote of  ‘world leadership’, a concept implying consensual acceptance based on persuasion, instead of describing the reality of ‘imperial dominance’, which more accurately defines the universal use of force, violence and exploitation of national wealth.  The term, ‘free markets’, served to mask the historical tendency toward the concentration and monopolization of financial power.  The ‘free world” obfuscated the aggressive and oppressive authoritarian regimes allied with Euro-US powers.  Numerous other euphemistic concepts, designed to justify imperial expansion, were elevated to scientific status and considered ‘value free’.

The transformation of social science into an ideological weapon of the ruling class reflected the institutional basis and political commitments of the researchers.  The ‘benign behavior’ of post-World War 2  US empire-building, became the operating assumption guiding scientific research.  Moreover, leading academics became gatekeepers and watchdogs enforcing the new political orthodoxy by claiming that critical research, which spoke for non-elite constituencies, was non-scientific, ideological and politicized.  However, academics, who consulted with the Pentagon or were involved in revolving-door relationships with multi-national corporations, were exempted from any similar scholarly opprobrium:  they were simply viewed as ‘consultants’ whose ‘normal’ extracurricular activities were divorced from their scientific academic work.

In contrast, scholars whose research was directed at documenting the structure of power and to guiding political action by social movements were condemned as ‘biased’, ‘political’ and unsuitable for any academic career.

In other words, academic authorities replicated the social repression of the ruling class in society, within the walls of academia.  Their principle ideological weapon was to counterpose ‘objectivity’ to ‘values’.  More specifically, they would argue that ‘true social science’ is ‘value free’ even as their published research was largely directed at furthering the power, profits and privileges of the incumbent power holders.

‘Objective Academics’:  the Manufacture of Euphemism and the Rise of Neo-Liberalism
During the last two decades, as the class and national liberation struggles intensified and popular consciousness rose in opposition to neoliberalism, one of the key functions of the academic servants of the dominant classes has been to elaborate concepts and language that cloak the harsh class-anchored realities, which provoke popular resistance.
A number of euphemisms, which were originally elaborated by leading social scientists, have become common currency in the world beyond the ivory tower and have been embraced by the heads of international financial institutions, editorialists, political pundits and beyond.

Twenty-five years ago, the concept ‘reform’ referred to progressive changes: less inequality, greater social welfare, increased popular participation and more limitations on capitalist exploitation of labor.  Since then, contemporary social scientists (especially economists) use the term, ‘reform’, to describe regressive changes, such as deregulation of capital, especially the privatization of public enterprises, health and educational institutions.  In other words, mainstream academics transformed the concept of ‘reform’ into a private profitmaking business.  ‘Reform’ has come to mean the reversal of all the working-class advances won over the previous century of popular struggle.  ‘Reform’ is promoted by neo-liberal ideologues, preaching the virtues of unregulated capitalism.  Their claim that ‘efficiency’ requires lowering ‘costs’, in fact means the elimination of  any regulation over consumer quality, work safety and labor rights.

Their notion of ‘efficiency’ fails to recognize that economies, which minimize workplace safety, or lower the quality of consumer goods (especially food) and depress wages, are inefficient from the point of view of maximizing the general welfare of the country.  ‘Efficiency’ is confined by orthodox economists to the narrow class needs and profit interests of a thin layer of the population.  They ignore the historical fact that the original assumption of classical economics was to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number.

The concept of ‘structural adjustment’ is another regressive euphemism, which has circulated widely among mainstream neoliberal social scientists.
For many decades prior to the neo-liberal ascendancy, the concept of ‘structural changes’ meant the transformation of property relations in which the strategic heights of the economy were nationalized, income was re-distributed and agrarian reforms were implemented.  This ‘classical conception of structural change’ was converted by mainstream neoliberals into its polar opposite:  the new target of ‘structural change’ was public property, the object was to privatize by selling lucrative public enterprises to private conglomerates for the lowest price.  Under the new rule of neo-liberal policymakers, ‘structural adjustment’ led to cuts in taxing profits  of the rich and increases in regressive wage and consumer taxes on workers and the middle class.  Under neoliberalism,  ‘structural adjustments’ involve the re-concentration of wealth and property.

The scope and depth of changes, envisioned by neoliberal economists, far exceed a simple ‘adjustment’ of the existing welfare state; they involve the large scale, long-term transformation of living standards and working conditions.  ‘Adjustment’ is another euphemism designed by academics to camouflage the further concentration of plutocratic wealth, property and power.

The concept ‘labor flexibility’ has gained acceptance by orthodox social scientists despite its class-anchored bias.  The concept’s operational meaning is to maximize the power of the capitalist class to set work hours and freely fire workers for any reason, minimizing or eliminating notice and severance.  The term ‘flexibility’ is another euphemism for unrestrained capitalist control over workers.  The corollary is that labor has lost job security and protection from arbitrary dismissal.  The negative connotations are obscured by the social scientist’s manipulation of language on behalf of the capitalist class:  the operational meaning of ‘labor flexibility’ is ‘capitalist rigidity’.

Our fourth example of the class bias of mainstream neoliberal social science is the concept of ‘market economy’.  The diffuse meaning of ‘market’ fails to specify several essential characteristics:  These include the mode of production where market transactions take place; the size and scope of the principle actors (buyers and sellers); and the relationships between the producers and consumers, bankers (creditors) and manufacturers (debtors).

‘Markets’ have always existed under slave, feudal, mercantile and capitalist economies.  Moreover, in contemporary states, small scale local farmers’ markets, co-operative producers and consumer markets ‘co-exist’ and are subsumed within national and international markets.  The ‘actors’ vary from small-scale fruit and vegetable growers, fisher folk and artisan markets to markets dominated by multi-billion dollar conglomerates.  The relations within markets vary between ‘relatively’ free, competitive local markets and massive international markets dominated by the ten largest ‘monopoly’ conglomerates.  Today in the United States, international banks and other financial institutions exert vast influence over all large-scale market activity.

By amalgamating all the different and disparate ‘markets’ under the generic term ‘market economies’, social scientists perform a vital ideological function of obscuring the concentration of power and wealth of oligarchical capitalist institutions and the role that financial institutions play in determining the role of the state in promoting and protecting power.

The Question of Political Commitment and Objectivity Reconsidered
By critically examining a few of the major concepts that guide orthodox social science researchers, we have exposed how their political commitments to the capitalist system and its leading classes inform their objectives and analysis, direct their research and guide their policy recommendations.

 

Once their political commitments define the research ‘problem’ to be studied and establish the conceptual framework, they apply ‘empirical’, historical and mathematical methods to collect and organize the data. They then apply logical procedures to ‘reach their conclusions’.   On this flawed basis they present their work as ‘value-free’ social science.  The only ‘accepted criticism’ is confined to those who operate within the conceptual parameters and assumptions of the mainstream academics.

Who Benefits from Social Science Research?
In the 150 years since its ‘establishment’ in the universities and research centers, the funders and gatekeepers of the profession, including the editors of professional and academic journals, have heavily influenced mainstream social scientists.  This has been especially true during ‘normal’ periods of economic growth, political stability and successful imperialist wars.  However, deep economic crisis, prolonged losing wars and social upheavals inevitably make their impact on the world of social science.  Fissures and dissent among scientists grow in direct proportion to the ‘breakdown’ of the established order:  The dominant academic paradigm is shown to be out of touch with the everyday life of the academics and as well as the public.  Crisis and the accompanying national, class, racial and gender mass movements present challenges to the dominant academic paradigms.  In the beginning, a minority,  mostly students and younger scholars form a vanguard of iconoclasts via their critiques, exposing the hidden political biases embedded in the work of leading social scientists.

For example, the critics point out that the pursuit of ‘stability’, ‘prosperity’, ‘social cohesion’ and ‘managed change’ are ideological goals, dictated by and for the preservation of the dominant classes faced with societal breakdown, widespread immiseration and deepening social changes.

What would begin as a minority movement critiquing the ‘value free’ claims of the mainstream, becomes a majority movement, openly embracing a value informed social science oriented toward furthering the struggle of popular movements.  This happens through committed social scientists, whose work criticizes the structures of power, and propose alternative economic institutions and class, national, racial and gender relations.

Economic crisis, imperial defeats and rising social struggles are reflected in a polarization within the academic world:  between students and younger academics linked to the mass struggles and the established foundation/state-linked senior faculty.

Having lost ideological hegemony, the elite gatekeepers resort to repression: Denying tenure to critics and suspending or expelling students on the basis of spurious charges that political activism and research directed toward mass struggle are incompatible with scientific work.  The emerging academic rebels counter by exposing the elites’ hypocrisy – their political activities, commitments and consultancies with corporate and state institutions.

 

Movements outside academia and critical academics and students within the institutions point to the enormous gap between the elites declared ‘defense of “universal values’ and the narrow elite class, imperial and race interests that they serve and depend upon.

 

For example, elite academic claims of defending democracy through US intervention, coups and wars are belied by the majoritarian resistance movements in opposition to, as well as the oligarchies and military juntas in support of, the intervention.  The elite academics, faced with these empirical and historical facts, resort to several ideological subterfuges to remain ‘loyal’ to their principles:  They can admit the facts but claim they are ‘exceptions to the rule’ – amounting to temporary and local aberrations. Some academic elites, faced with the contradiction between their embrace of the ‘democratic hypothesis’ and the authoritarian- imperialist reality, denounce the ‘tyranny of the majority’ and exalt the minority, as the true carriers of ‘democratic values’.  In this case ‘values’ are superimposed over the quest for economic enrichment and military expansion; ‘values’ are converted into disembodied entities, which have no operative meaning, nor can they explain profoundly authoritarian practices.

Finally and most frequently, elite academics, faced with overwhelming facts contrary to their assumptions, refuse to acknowledge the critiques of their critics.  They simply avoid public debate by claiming they are not ‘political people’ . . . but reserve their right to castigate and punish their adversaries, behind closed doors, via administrative measures.  If they can’t defeat their critics intellectually or scientifically, they use their enormous administrative powers to fire or censure them, cut their salaries and research budgets and thus…. ‘end the debate’.

With these elite options in mind and given that their power resides in their administrative prerogatives, critical academics, oriented to popular movements, need to engage in coalition building inside and outside of academia.  First they must build broad alliances with local and national academic solidarity movements defending freedom of expression and opposing repression; secondly they must engage in research supporting popular movements.  Any successful coalition must be inclusive among critical academics, students, university workers and the parents of students capable of paralyzing the university and negotiating with the academic – administrative power elite.  Finally, they have to strengthen and build political coalitions with social movements outside of academia, especially with groups with which academic researchers have established working relations.These include neighborhood groups, tenant unions, trade unions, farmers’ and ecology movements and community organizations fighting urban evictions, which will ally with academic struggles on the basis of prior working relations and mutual solidarity. When academics only show up to ask for popular support in their time of distress effective social mobilization is unlikely to evolve.
The ‘inside and outside’ strategy will succeed if it strikes quickly with large-scale support.  These alliances can go forward through immediate victories even if they are small scale:  small victories build big movements.

Conclusion
Academic freedom to conduct scientific research for and with popular, national, democratic and socialist movements is not merely an academic issue.  To deny this research and to expel these academics creates larger political consequences.  Rigorous studies can play a major role in aiding movements in arguing, fighting and negotiating in favor of their rights and interests.  Likewise, critical academics, whose studies are disconnected from popular practice, end -up publishing inconsequential treatises and narratives.  Such social scientists adopt an exotic and obtuse vocabulary, which is accessible only those initiated into an academic cult.  The elite tolerates this exotic type of critical academic because they do not pose any threat to the dominant elite’s paradigm or administrative power.

For the serious critical academic, in answering the question of ‘knowledge for whom?’: they would do well to follow Karl Marx’s wise adage, ‘The object of philosophy is not only to study the world but to change it.’

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-myth-of-value-free-social-science-or-the-value-of-political-commitments-to-social-science/5444597

"Out of the rolling ocean the crowd"

By Walt Whitman 1819–1892.      

 

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,

Whispering, I love you, before long I die,

I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,

For I could not die till I once look’d on you,

For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.

 

Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe,

Return in peace to the ocean my love,

I too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated,

Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!

But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,

As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;

Be not impatient – a little space – know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land,

Every day at sundown for your dear sake, my love.

Wat de wereld schrijft.

Ik kijk naar de wolken

en dit is wat zij schrijft,

Ook al veranderd de vorm,

het is de essentie die gelijk blijft,

De doorns maken de roos,

De mensen maken de steden,

De wereld bouwt op...

en sleept niet met zijn verleden,

Ook al veranderd de vorm ,

het is de essentie die gelijk blijft,

Ik kijk naar de wolken

en dit is wat zij mij schrijft.

Het strand van mijn zijn.

En daar zit ik dan, oh zo klein.
Aan het eindeloze strand van mijn zijn.
De golven van het leven komen en gaan.
Ik geeft haar mijn zand & af en toe spoelt er een parel aan.