of elections & beyond: thinking through the crisis in western hegemony

Africa World Now Project

Image: Fannie Lou Hamer & Ella Baker, Aug. 6, 1964 [https://snccdigital.org/events/mfdp-holds-state-convention/]

Knowledge is the intentional organization of information to meet an expressed objective and/or objectives. If this is, indeed, a viable conceptualization of knowledge, then the ability to correctly analysis the conditions within which a people find themselves must operate as praxis, consistently and constantly.

As stated before, European modernity rooted in the intellectual and material construction of a global order as founded in the creation of whiteness, supported by the culture of racial capitalism is rupturing. In reaction, this whiteness, as an organizing construct is attempting to hold its position of authority.

While the U.S. is currently in the middle of what to some is a peculiar national election cycle, to others, that critical thinking and radical vibrating other, this period is only peculiar in that we are once again in a cyclical discourse around voting in a settler nation that was organized on genocide; forced labor; systemic and institutionalized race/ism; and continuous imperial engagement with the world.

In order to maintain one’s sanity living in such contradiction, one can only think with those who provide sharp and penetrating clarity when analyzing the discourses of the moment.

“It isn't revolutionary or materialist to disconnect things. To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolutionizing activity, to build consciousness with political agitation and educational issue-making alone is idealistic rather than materialist....” (George Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 1972: 26-27).

Thinking through the binary, the either/or category of thought that limits our capacities for strategic praxis in Western capitalist democracies, we see how the dialectical processes operate throughout the Africana world to create contradictions [and opportunity].

For example, Senegalese political economist Ndongo Samba Sylla (2013), echoing the scholarship of Samir Amin (2004) in The Liberal Virus, demystifies the celebratory language of ‘free and transparent’ elections for ‘liberal democracies’ in Africa as fictitious systems that benefit the economic elite in-so-much as they create an impression (rather than a reality) of an emancipated collective.” (A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics, and Legacies of Thomas Sankara, 2018: 130-131; Sylla, 2013).

Said all this to say, we are at a juncture. An unavoidable fracture that is weaved into the sociopolitical and cultural fabric of the nation-state. The conflicts inherent in political discourse, that is the competing narratives between the political activity of the collective and the political act of the individual are a manufactured reality in a capitalist democracy.

Cedric Robinson provides more clarity for us on this arguing: “capitalist democracy” is one of the most powerful and enduring metanarratives of modern Western historiography. As an ideological formation it has inscribed discursive domains as distinctive as politics and science…As icon, its aura hovers over our institutions of knowledge and power, permeating inquiry and decision making with the counterfeit certainties of predestination” (Cedric Robinson, Oliver Cromwell Cox and the Historiography of the West: 7).

So, what is to be done? How do we make sense of all this?

Today…: of elections and beyond, thinking through the Crisis in Western Hegemony.

I recently sat down with Corey Walker, Professor of the Humanities at Wake Forest University.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!