1. October 23, 2015.
Class Session: War, Terrorism and Balance of Power
Capitalism, Hegemony and White Supremacy
Basic Understandings
o Faith, Logic, Empiricism
o Opinions must be based on facts (in context)
Holocaust Example
o Do not assert “truth”, unless it is based upon facts in context
Understanding the Nature of Social Problems: A Model
o The Integration and explanation of Social Problems
o Local, National and World Problems
The evolution and nature of capitalism (Wallerstein)
o Emergence of Capitalism World System in 16th
Century
o Slave Trade and New World Slavery
o The Emergence of Nation States
o Capitalism, Empire and White Supremacy
o The Emergence of Nation-States
o Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism
Capitalism and Imperialism (Chomsky)
o The Shock Doctrine (Klein)
White Supremacy, Maroon Societies and Black Liberation (Shaewki)
Definition of War and Terrorism (U.S. Government)
Lawrence Wilkerson video (Chief of Staff to Secretary Colin Powell)
The Shock Doctrine (Klein)
Re-integration: Capital and Climate, War, Disease, Inequality, Poverty, etc.
Proposed Solutions based upon this analysis
Pedagogy
Community College – 2:30-5:15 PM
Low income, drug (heroine) & alcohol
Class Size = 24, talkative
Distribution – 22 women, 2 men / 3 black /4 30-40 yrs. Old
2. PANELS
Mills’ 3 Questions
US Congress Report on Intrusions
Forms of Imperialism
Shock Doctrine List
A Graphic History of White Supremacy
DEFINITIONS
War
Terrorism
Colonialism
Neo-Colonialism
Imperialism (Lenin)
Occupation
Empire
Hegemony
THE PRESENT SITUATION
Endless War
France, Beirut, Africa
US Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
Occupation of Palestine (South Africa, American Indians)
US led coups in the Middle East
al Qaeda, ISIS
3. SOME OF MY UNDERSTANDINGS
NUMBER 1
Know how you “know.”
Three Forms of Knowing
Faith (Religion)
Logic (Philosophy)
Empiricism (Science)
NUMBER 2
Everyone is entitled to an opinion.
However, opinions must be grounded in reality.
Facts, only in socio-historical context, provide truth.
Make sure you are grounded in this relationship, before you speak.
(Harvey Holtz, 2015)
NUMBER 3
It is not the strongest of the species that survive,
nor the most intelligent,
but the ones most responsive to change.
(Charles Darwin, 1859)
NUMBER 4
Who controls the present, controls the past.
Who controls the past, controls the future.
(George Orwell, 1948)
NUMBER 5
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,
i.e., the class which is the ruling material force,
is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
(Karl Marx, 1846)
NUMBER 6
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.
(Karl Marx, 1844)
4. MODES OF PRODUCTION
(SOCIAL FORMATIONS)
Hunting and Gathering
Egalitarian with Real Scarcity)
Sedentary Agriculture
The Neolithic Revolution
Ancient Society
(Slaves and Masters)
Feudalism
Nobility, Clergy, Peasants
Plantation Slavery
(Slaves, Slaaavemasters
Capitalism
(Social Classes)
Socialisms
(Classless Society)
State Socialism
(state ownership and control)
Social Democracy
{Not Socialism, Really Capitalism}
(Bernie Sanders)
Democratic Socialism
(worker ownership and control)
Communism
(To have or to be?)
From each according to his/her ailitu
6. THE THEORY OF MANY THINGS
Evolution: Inorganic & Organic
The “Big Bang” (18 billion years ago)
The Earth (4 ½ billion years ago)
Life on Earth (3 ½ billion years ago)
Dinosaurs (230million years ago)
The Fifth Extinction (65 million years ago)
Human Beings
Homo Sapiens Neanderthals (300,000 years ago)
Homo Sapiens Sapiens (200,000 years ago)
Out of Africa (90-60,000 years ago)
Neanderthal Extinction (40,000 years ago)
Civilization
Egypt (12,000 years ago)
“Creation” (6,000 years ago)
Greece 5,000 years go)
Rome (2,750 years ago)
Western Religions
Old Testament (2,300 years ago)
New Testament (2,085 to 2,155 years ago)
Koran (609-632 BC)
Relevant European Events
The Inquisition (begins in 12th
century)
The Magna Carta (1215)
Columbus Discovers Hispaniola (1492)
The Native-American Genocide (1492-2015)
Slave Trade (15th
through 19th
century)
Plantation (New World) Slavery – As Economic System (Jamestown 1619)
As Ideology: White Supremacy and Racism (15th
century – 2015)
Protestant Reformation (begins early 16th
century)
Rise of the Capitalist world System (17th
century)
Enlightenment (late 17th
to late 18th
century)
Invention of the Cotton Gin (1793)
Revolutions and Their “Solutions”
The French Revolution (1789) vs. The Magna Carta (1215)
World Anti-Systemic Revolution of 1848 (& Seneca Falls)
Industrial Revolution (mid-18th
to early 19th
century)
America: A World Economic Power (early 19th
century)
The American Civil War (1861-65)
The 13th
, 14th
& 15th
Amendments (1865-1870)
Reconstruction and the Birth of the KKK
The Russian Revolution (1905-1917)
The Chinese Revolution (1949)
The Cuban Revolution (1960)
7. The Birth of Nation States
American Led Coups
Palestine and Israel
Iran, Chile
The Age of Imperialism (Economic and Military Components)
Colonialism, and Neo-colonialism
World War I (1914-1918)
Palestine and Zionism
The Gilded Age (“the roaring twenties”)
The Great Depression (1929)
World War II {WWI, part 2 (1939-1945)
D—Day (1944) - 2 years to late for 20 million Russians)
Yalta Conference (1945)
The American Century: American Hegemony (circa 1945-1973)
Israel (1948)
World Anti-Systemic Revolution II (1965)
Vietnam and the Decline of America (1970’s)
Viet Nam “War” – US entry (1960’s)
Anti-Systemic Revolution of 1965
Anti-Systemic (Colonial) Revolutions (mid 20th
century)
The Civil Rights Movement (1960’s)
Black Liberation Movements (Black Power, The Black Panthers, Democratic Politics)
The Black Panthers
The Grey Panthers
Civil Rights Laws Passed (1964-65)
Women, GLBT, Handicapped Rights Movements (1970’s)
Action and Response of Capital and Nation-States
Globalization (1970’s)
Neoliberal Economics (1970’s)
Reagan and Thatcher (1980’s)
Neoconservative Foreign Policy (1980’s)
The Birth of al Qaeda in Afghanistan (1980’s)
Reactionary Movements (1980’s)
The IMF and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1989)
The (First) Gulf War (1989)
Project for a New American Century (1998)
Financial Capital, American Under Attack and Their Aftermath
Nine-Eleven (2001)
Congress passed the Patriot Act (2001)
Invasion, Occupation and Destruction of Iraq (2003-????)
The Great Recession (2008 to the present)
G-20 (2009)
American “Coup” in the Ukraine (2014)
8. Mass Incarceration
Police Killings
Black Urban Occupation
Instability: Economic, Political and Social
Katrina (2004), Sandy and More
The Occupy Movement (20??)
Black Lives Matter (2014)
The “Boycott, Divest, Sanction Movement”
The Attack on Paris (2015) - The Mass Media Xenophobia
Blockadia
Social Problems in Context
Social Problems are Not Discreet Occurrences
As the earth must be understood in the context of the solar system (model)
Gravity is the major force connecting elements of the solar system
National and World Social Problems are Connected to the Historical and Social Context
Capitalism is the major force connecting stability and instability (social problems)
How Do You Create Change
The Future
The Anthropocene {or Holocene} (2016)
Climate Catastrophe
War and Terrorism
The Sixth Extinction
Socialism or Barberism
Reservations, South Africa, Israel
9. The Sociological Imagination
C. Wright Mills’ Three Questions
1. What is the structure of this particular society as a whole?
A. What are its essential components, and how are they related to one another?
B. How does it differ from other varieties of social order?
C. Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?
2. Where does this society stand in human history?
A. What are the mechanics by which it is changing?
B. What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole?
C. How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical
period in which it moves?
D. And this period...what are its essential features?
E. How does it differ from other periods?
F. What are its characteristic ways of history-making?
3. What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period?
A. And what varieties are coming to prevail?
B. In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted?
C. What kinds of "human nature" are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society
in this period?
D. And what is the meaning for "human nature" of each and every feature of the society we are
examining?
Individual Problem vs. Social Problem
If 50,000 marriages take place and only 1 ends in divorce, YOU have a problem.
If 50,000 marriages take place and 25,000 end in divorce, WE have a problem.
10. Selected Materials
Books
Noam Chomsky. The Umbrella of US Power. NY: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. NY:Simon and Shuster, 2015.
Elizabeth Kolbert. The Sixth Extinction: by Elizabeth Kolbert | Key Takeaways, Analysis &
Review: An Unnatural History. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.
Ahmed Shawki. Black Liberation and Socialism. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006.
Emmanuel Wallerstein. World Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham and London: Duke
University Press 2004.
Website
Lawrence Wilkerson: The Travails of Empire @ Lone Star College Kingwood
Main Section: 6:09-30:00 – Connecting Other Issues and Questions (30:01-1:25:11.
Chief of Staff to Secretary Colin Powell (during invasion of Iraq).
Film
Avi Lewis (Director) Naomi’s Klein’s, This Changes Everything.