The problem with information these days is not only its content, but equally its form. The velocity of information is striking, making it near impossible for a concerned person to discern both what is significant and what is true. Providing an excess of information that comes without proper, democratic analysis and is almost entirely controlled by a small oligarchy is its own form of censorship, exhausting the reader and viewer into submission. What is censored is not only information itself, although that does occur more than we admit, but also knowledge and wisdom. The news remains at the level of it happened, without explaining most of what happened at all: it does not explain why it happened, what caused it to happen, or its possible consequences. This form of reporting lies by omission, as events are neither static nor singular but part of a complex process.
How to do a conjunctural analysis by Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, October 18, 2024
Events must be understood in an active way, which means asking how a political force will act to shape the future, rather than passively watching the future unfold. Vijay Prashad
That is why conjunctural analyses, derived from a history of Marxist analysis and from the work of the political and social movements that conduct them, are rooted in four principles:
- History. Since events do not take place in isolation but are part of a long-term process, there must be a distinction between incidental or occasional events and organic or structural events.
- Totality. Events are interconnected. They are part of a complex structure that encompasses various possibilities.
- Structure. Events take place within a lattice that includes economic, political, social, and cultural aspects and within which people are organised into classes and power blocs that interact through institutions and ideas.
- Politics. Events must be understood in an active way, which means asking how a political force will act to shape the future, rather than passively watching the future unfold. Answering this question requires a close analysis of the nature of class formation, the balance of political forces, and cultural traditions that could advance a certain political agenda.
How to do a conjunctural analysis by Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, October 18, 2024
The statement above that events are interconnected reminded me of this Minute that was approved at our Quaker Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) in 2016
Interconnections Among Dilemmas
Poet Roque Dalton (1935–1975), wrote an elegy to ‘apolitical intellectuals’:
I
One day,
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the humblest
of our people.
They will be asked
what they did
when
their homeland was slowly
extinguished,
like a sweet fire,
small and alone.
No one will ask them
about their suits,
or about their long
siestas
after lunch,
or about their sterile
battles with nothingness,
nor about
their ontological
way
of making money.
They won’t be questioned
about Greek mythology,
or about the self-disgust they felt
when someone, deep down,
accepted the fate of dying a coward’s death.
They’ll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of a total lie.
II
On that day
the humble people will come.
Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
yet, every day, brought them
their bread and milk,
their eggs and tortillas,
those who mended their clothes,
who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and tended their gardens,
who worked for them,
and they’ll ask:
‘What did you do when the poor
suffered, when the tenderness and life
was snuffed out of them?’.
III
Apolitical intellectuals
of my sweet country,
you will have nothing to say.
A vulture of silence
will devour your insides.
Your own misery
will gnaw at your soul.
And you will be silent,
ashamed of yourselves.
unflinching 