The following conversation was held on August 28, 2024, a few days after the participants took part in protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The discussion is structured around six theses (in bold), which we circulated amongst ourselves in advance. This transcript has been edited and condensed for publication.
Nolan Perla-Ward: There was an expectation that Chicago in 2024 would register the world-historical quality of ’68. That did not happen. I’m struck by the sentiment echoed by bystanders who observed the protests: “Well, 2020 didn’t work, what’s this going to do?”
I’ve thought of the past year as having been made possible by 2020, and also as distinct from it. I read 2020 as a synthesis of two strands of American left politics—BLM and anti-police organizing on one hand, beginning in the 2010s; and on the other the anti-capitalist organizing that took place from the ’90s through Occupy. It’s hard to read at least the initial outbursts of the street protests and reactions to October 7 within those lines. They don’t fit those political lineages. The mid-’80s student movement against apartheid might get us to a better understanding of the contours of the conjuncture, replete with campus sit-ins and coalitions between labor unions and student organizers. If it is true that the sun has set on the spontaneous expression of dissent we saw in 2020 and the initial operative energy processing the genocide, how do we understand this moment?
Ismail Ibrahim: I walked away from the DNC with a really different understanding of what protest is for. Going into Chicago, none of us was delusional enough to think that we would end the genocide at that protest, though I still hoped for something to happen, tangibly, to prove this wasn’t a waste of time. After the first few days I was really dispirited when it didn’t. On the last day of protests, I started to think that perhaps the outcome of it—for better and for worse—could not really be assessed in real time, but that it amounted to a kind of consciousness-raising activity. If you think about 2020, its legacy might be, in part, that abolition is now part of the national discourse. And because of Occupy, the framework of the 1 percent and the 99 percent is now part of the national discourse. Maybe it was more like ’68 than we’re letting on, even though there weren’t clashes. SDS, the Yippies—they didn’t end the Vietnam War. They just helped cement it as a stain on the national consciousness.
Dylan Saba: Consciousness-raising or -expanding is how I would characterize the mobilizations last fall, but we are at a different point now. I’m not sure I have a historical comparison for it. The demand of the protests is very much not a pie-in-the-sky demand. It is not abolition. It is not an end to capitalism. It’s not even comparable to demanding that the US government end the Vietnam War. The demand of the protests is to implement the one policy tool that everyone agrees can achieve a very moderate objective—an end to the genocide that has extended for eleven months—that the government itself insists it wants to end. Doing so would not even necessitate anything other than applying the laws already on the books!
We’ve come all the way to the finish line. Everyone is saying what we want them to say; we’ve identified the correct tool of change, galvanized cross-factional movement support behind the demand, and, broadly speaking, pressed on the correct levers. And nevertheless, all of us correctly went in last week with the attitude that we were going to fail. To my mind, what this means is that if the fall was about consciousness-raising, this period has been about exposing the deep cynicism and imperialist structure of the United States government.
Lakshmi Padmanabhan: I can’t unsee the level of contradiction on display at the DNC. We saw Bernie, for example, going up and railing against the billionaire class, followed immediately by Pritzker, an actual billionaire. The most striking, of course, was the sense of a multicultural coalition and the “big tent” rhetoric, even as a Palestinian speaker was refused entry to this stage. As viewers, we’re watching this ridiculous celebration of the DNC and its manufacturing of political hegemony while also watching the brutal live-streamed spectacle of the US-backed genocide in Gaza. But these contradictions themselves are connected: the alliance between racial uplift within the United States, and horrific colonial violence abroad, is mediated by capital. This is obviously a shorthand analysis, but: war is profitable. We’ve been coming up against the military-industrial complex since Vietnam for precisely this very reason, right? And that’s one part of why the Palestinian speaker cannot speak, but everyone else can—because everyone would have to acknowledge the threat their perspective presents to the war economy, too.
Ibrahim: I think there has to be something more at play than the profitability of war. This war is headed to a place that will be wildly unpopular and damaging to the American economy. Israel’s economy is at an all-time low. There is some other calculus at play. I don’t want to say pure racism, though that’s certainly a motivating factor. Some notion of East versus West, or some other mythology, seems to be the motivating principle that’s allowing people in the halls of power to continue pursuing an unstrategic war. If they get pulled in with Iran and Hezbollah, it’ll be terrible. It’s going to be an absolute quagmire. Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing will do fine, but overall, it’s not as if we have or would have a wartime economy in the same way we did during, say, World War II.
Saba: I’ve played out this argument many times over the past eleven months. What is the true motivating factor here? On the one hand, you have what I call “AmeriKKKan Devils analysis,” according to which white supremacy structures everything. On the other hand, you have a neorealist calculus of state and private interests. Ultimately, of course, it’s both. You can’t have the AmeriKKKan Devils analysis without it being informed by the structural logics of capitalism, and vice versa. We dump so much of our spending into war because of racial imperialism. And we’re a colonial state in part because of the financial interests of private capitals, which require a colonial or neocolonial structure to reproduce themselves.
It’s important to think about Biden himself as an avatar for this. He is famously an uncorrupted senator, a true ideologue; he has absorbed all the worst lessons of 20th-century America and basically embodies them on his own. Those lessons—and that ideology—are what they are in part due to the role of weapons manufacturers in our economy, and so on. In any case, I’d like to affirm what both of you are saying as constitutive and interdependent logics of how the hell we ended up here.
Padmanabhan: To clarify, I’m not saying that capitalism is the final horizon, but the inverse. Focusing on this question of profit allows us to understand colonialism as more than just racial violence. This is a moment in which we’re having to situate US national history within an international frame, even though that history is often made to appear insular. The thing that gives me hope is precisely that we have to have a more robust and complicated understanding of what colonialism is. And we need to invent a language of anti-colonialism that is not just the national-liberation form. That form has been fully co-opted, including in formerly decolonized states like India, which is largely aligning itself with Israel and reproducing a settler-colonial economy in Kashmir—a place I would guess is now the most militarized zone in the world, after Palestine. None of this is an accident.
Alex Colston: The way I’ve begun to think about this is that it’s just not possible to have a US imperial fortress state with Rainbow Coalition characteristics—the most multiracial genocidal coalition in the history of the world. It’s a strange fact, and it can’t be resolved.
I was thinking, too, Ish, about what you were saying about consciousness-raising. I almost want to be a bit more bleak about it. I think we’re at the terminal point of consciousness-raising, a situation embodied by Democratic delegates closing their ears to the names of Palestinian children as they walked out of the United Center. They’re like, “We don’t want to hear anything else.” Because if they hear about it, they’ll have to think through the questions Lakshmi is talking about: what are the histories that got us to this moment? How am I implicated in them? What’s my position in this? When those questions are shut down, it makes for all kinds of strange speeches that don’t add up to anything. They’re empty.
Ibrahim: They’re shutting their ears because they know what it will do to them to hear what is being said, and that, in turn, may prevent them from being the functionaries they so desire to be.
Perla-Ward: I think this expresses the sort of cold truth that I took away from the DNC: a lot of Americans just don’t care about Gaza. How do we situate ourselves in the face of so much apathy?
Ari M. Brostoff: I want to go back to where we started, trying to define this historical moment and comparing it to 1968. We’ve talked about some different frameworks through which we can understand what is at issue in the Democratic Party’s refusal to acknowledge what is happening—where’s race, where’s capital—and unsurprisingly we’ve landed at colonialism as a kind of master frame. That’s helpful in relation to the ’68 question because colonialism forces the issue of historicity itself: there’s really no way of thinking about colonialism other than as a historical phenomenon, unless you’re a colonist.
That seems telling in relation to the ’68 question. What’s so striking about this moment is the sense that we’re escalating toward a war that nobody wants, outside of a handful of neocons who have been pushing for it for twenty years. There’s not a mass drumbeat to war in the way you saw in 2003. We’re not dealing with the baseline patriotism that still existed in the Vietnam period. What we’re seeing is the way that colonialism, precisely because it only makes sense as something that plays out historically, has a mind of its own. This is very much to Dylan’s point about the minimalness of the demand for an arms embargo and the party’s refusal to respond to it. The empire will do the thing that the empire believes it needs to do to perpetuate itself, or die trying. I’m not saying that there’s no room for agency and resistance; there absolutely is, and in fact, the laws of history also point us to the fact that the empire will ultimately fall. But the fact that it just will not agree to take the steps to start disbanding itself does feel deterministic in some way, and that seems related to the way all of this feels very overdetermined in relation to ’68.
Colston: The “deterministic” element—the feeling of it—to me seems to be more about the systematic security apparatus of the US domestic state preparing for crackdowns. Not only in the fall, when consciousness was being raised, as we were saying, but also after 2020. They are prepared, more or less across the board: across corporate actors, government actors, university actors, police actors, they have been training to preempt protest.
But that has led to another overdetermined preemption at the level of foreign policy and war-making. The protest demands are partly about preempting a war. We’re saying, “Don’t do this. Stop doing what you’re doing, or you’re also going to embroil the US in an impossible war—more so than what’s already going on—and that would be incomprehensibly more catastrophic.”
But they’ve shut their ears to that demand. Instead, they have substituted a half-articulate fait accompli, which is just like, “Oh, well, we had to do this all along. And it was a regrettable thing and a tragedy but, you know, we were forced into this situation because of the US’s ironclad military alliance with Israel.” That’s a puzzling place to be, where the normative demand of protests is to pull the emergency brake on further imperial disaster. And yet there’s no way that Democrats can hear that particular demand, not only because of the domestic security state, but because a different kind of logic is animating the war itself.
Saba: I struggle with calling things determined. It never really makes sense to me to think about things being determined or contingent in a zero-sum relationship. But I do think it makes sense to think about structures and to think about contingency in relation to or alongside structures. The empire is following the logic of its own reproduction from the point of view of itself, which is how capital works, too. The challenge for us is to try to tease out what those logics are so we can anticipate the motion of the structure and identify a correct point of intervention.
It’s been hard to figure that out, because it seems like the empire is acting irrationally, right? At every turn, Netanyahu, and behind him Israel, and behind Israel the US, seems to be throwing good money after bad—if you’ll excuse a heinously callous expression—raising the stakes and increasing instability instead of deescalating.
I think the reason for that is what October 7 meant and represented, which was a total destruction of Israel’s image of security. Even though Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel in pure material terms, losing that image of power and allowing Hamas a military victory—even if it could be advisable in the short and medium term—poses long-term threats to the security of Israel. A military victory would vindicate the strategy of armed struggle and precipitate future attacks. For Israel, that is intolerable, so Netanyahu will keep going “double or nothing” until he can claim victory.
That same logic is why the US is willing to raise the stakes on a regional confrontation from which we should not expect to walk away victorious. Because while that risk is real, the US cannot countenance Israeli defeat. We cannot lose such a key component of our global imperial apparatus. And so yes, on the one hand, we could say that it is in the United States’ interest to end this war and not risk further accelerating its own decline. But in another sense, the writing is on the wall about American decline. I think that fear of imperial decline is motivating some of these actions, which we should still consider to be rational from the perspective of the structure itself.
Padmanabhan: I wanted to go back to what Ari said, that no one wants this war, and Dylan, to your point about the rationality of the structure, because I think we can also talk about what the structure desires beyond what individual politicians want. I was watching Kamala Harris’s remarks about Palestine, and there is this chilling jingoism that sets the tone when she says she wants to make America the “most lethal fighting force” in the world. Saying that when America is already, by several orders of magnitude, the most lethal fighting force in the history of the world is a precise articulation of this structural desire for war. And we should read that comment too in relation to the good vibes she and Tim Walz have tried so hard to generate in their campaign: they are two sides of the same coin. Both rhetorical approaches are aiming to shore up the jouissance of the structure, or cultivating the libidinal attachment to war.
Perla-Ward: I would say it’s the absence of Palestine that glues the DNC and the Democratic Party together. And the absence of Palestine as a repression of what the Democratic Party has to contend with, which is that it doesn’t have moral superiority over the Republicans anymore. The Democratic Party has positioned itself as not responsible for the atrocities of the Iraq War, and that has given it some moral legitimacy for the past fifteen years or so. But that no longer holds up. So, then what?
Ibrahim: The Gaza genocide represents a new attempt to reassert American hegemony. It is not that the war “got out of hand,” as so many people want us to believe—that Israel is just defending itself and has just been overzealous in their defense. The “overzealousness” is the point. What the DNC laid bare is that the Democrats do not support Israel simply as a matter of political expediency. If it were about votes, they would have made some symbolic concession to gather an extra million votes—those who voted Uncommitted in the primary—but it is desire that makes them continue funding it and supporting it.
This brutality abroad is mirrored in the threat of violence implied by the militarized police force deputized in Chicago to squash dissent. So in the same way that we’re seeing excesses of military power abroad, we saw these really excessive police forces marshaled for protests that remained peaceful.
The question this thesis raises for me is—what does the Palestinian represent? What is it about Palestinians, as a group, that is so threatening to America that they must be completely liquidated in Palestine and their voices silenced here?
Saba: The existence of Palestinians as such is a threat to Israel. That’s a core piece of the logic of settler colonialism, whereby the success of Zionism is premised on the elimination of Palestinian political expression, national identity, and resistance. Yet that expression, identity, and resistance continue to form a potent political force. So Zionism has not yet succeeded and will continue to violently repress Palestinians. Insofar as Israel remains a key to American hegemony, the United States will participate in that repression without qualms.
However, I think there is another way in which the Palestinians are significant and potentially even anachronistic—not because they represent an older form of colonialism, but because they signal a future form of oppression. In the 21st century, we are likely to see mass migrations caused by climate change. There will be huge communities of stateless or otherwise displaced peoples desperate to gain access to increasingly xenophobic states in the global north. The United States is likely to be the largest and richest fortress in the world. And if access represents the only way to live with dignity, then people will likely be willing to fight and die to achieve it in ways that threaten the security of the state (from the perspective of the state).
So taking the long view on declining American hegemony in a time of ecological collapse, the struggle of Palestinians in Gaza may presage a lot of the fights to come. I don’t know that imperialists are thinking along these terms exactly, but it’s a very meaningful struggle.
Ibrahim: I just finished Richard Beck’s new book Homeland yesterday, and he makes a lot of these points that you’re making, Dylan. There is a share of people who are “surplus.” They cannot meaningfully contribute to the global economy, nor do they represent legitimate consumers of commodities. And this is how Beck links Ferguson to Iraq to Palestine. These people are basically useless to hegemony, and the ways they’re policed are similar. I think you’re right that it presages future forms of oppression, and that the native as such represents a threat to the colonial project. Why is the US so invested in the project of Zionism? Is it because Zionism becomes a way to retroactively justify the cleansing of this country of its indigenous people? If you can say that what’s happening to the people of Palestine is moral, then you can say, “What we did to the Dakota and the Lakota and the Muscogee is fine, actually.”
Colston: There’s a retrospective mythical justification of the origins of the US playing out in a displaced way. It’s a way of saying, “The way this state was constituted is just and moral, and the only way we can remain in our bully pulpit is to stand on our laurels about that.” Because to reckon with what you’re saying would mean undoing the fortress that keeps out recomposing surplus populations—the immiserated, the precarious and insecure, the unhoused, the incarcerated, those categorically pathologized as mentally ill or deemed deviant, migrants, the list goes on. Homelessness has been criminalized to a massive extent since 2020, worse than it has been in a long time. All these surplus populations—those cut out of the conventional labor-capital compact, or otherwise—are preemptively being robbed of their democratic capacity as constituents.
Ibrahim: Just to bring it back to the DNC, at the protest we attended on Thursday, there were a lot of flags that said Land Back. I did feel real joy seeing the way people understand these struggles to be interlinked. Showing up creates a kind of counter-hegemony among people who are surplus or feel themselves threatened with becoming surplus.
Perla-Ward: And the alternative is the construction of cop cities nationwide, it’s a genocide of Palestinians, it’s a politics of exclusion based on surplus populations. To salvage some optimism from this, what we’re up against is becoming clearer. And the way solidarity has been drawn out this past year has made it clear what some of the ways forward might look like.
Padmanabhan: I want to add one detail to this point about the way Palestine figures as a reminder of US settler colonialism. In addition to this, it also neatly lines up with Europe’s own fascist history. Palestine is also the libidinal price for the legacy of Nazism and fascism in Europe. Why isn’t Germany, France, or Italy being parceled out to account for Nazism? Or any of the other countries where antisemitism has been a consistent feature of their national life? Palestine is only in the crosshairs of the world’s most powerful military because of a British colonial arrangement, which the US has entirely taken on as its own project, despite its own history of agitating against British colonial rule.
Brostoff: Watching the interminable DNC roll call, it was clear that—at least at the local level—the party is run by women of color. In some ways, remembering this made me feel more sympathetic toward the convention as a social event—like, who am I to judge community organizers and public-school moms trying to hold it together in red states? It’s their chance to meet up and party. And you can see, too, how easy it would be to slide from that acknowledgment to a sense of “mission accomplished.” Like, we did it Joe, we have a Democratic Party whose leadership actually reflects its base. There was a lot of “Indiana, home of the nation’s fourth bisexual Latina congresswoman” kind of thing—the stuff everyone makes fun of liberals about. But this sense of representational victory really is a trap. I’ve been thinking about it as peak co-optation, a realization of the liberal fantasy that representation in the cultural sphere, or at the level of “voice,” would eventually turn into real representation at the political level. It creates a sense of closure, like, “Look at this stage, it’s everyone!” Which made it that much more violent that they wouldn’t let a Palestinian speak. And, of course, all of this is coming on the heels of the serious threat the Palestine solidarity movement has posed to the politics of co-optation itself.
I think this situation obviously speaks to the question of Palestine’s singularity and universality in this moment—it’s the primary contradiction that can’t be named, because it names the elephant in the room. It’s what Dylan was saying: Palestine is the exception in part because it represents a kind of global future.
Saba: I see the representation-pilled vibe of the DNC as consistent with the exclusion of Palestinians. Because the way that standpoint epistemology functions—and this is something that Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò wrote an excellent essay on—is that deference applies to everyone who’s in the room. The person closest to the experience at question in the room is deferred to, which is why, when the DNC addresses Israel/Palestine, you have the families of hostages on stage as the closest people to the scary, bad thing that’s happening. That’s who gets to be deferred to. But if you allow a Palestinian on stage, the logic of standpoint epistemology would demand that you actually defer to them and elevate their experience as a representative of a harmed party. That’s what’s so threatening about inclusion, and ultimately, I think, why it didn’t happen.
Ibrahim: If you defer to their experience, and what they say when they get onstage is, “We are being ethnically cleansed,” representational politics can’t say, “Well, actually, no, you’re not.”
Brostoff: This relates pretty closely to your thesis, Dylan—should we move to that?
Saba: October 7 was a historical intervention that broke a lot of structures. And one of those structures appears to be the left-liberal coalition in US politics that has really carried the day for the Democratic Party since the first Bernie campaign.
The argument made by Bernie in the primary against Hillary Clinton was that the way to win is to motivate turnout—and the way to motivate turnout is to foreground popular, universal policies as a reaction against Obama-era technocracy. Obviously the argument failed insofar as Bernie lost, and also insofar as Hillary was pushed left by Bernie in that primary but then also lost. But it remained a dominant argument. And during the Trump era, there was a concerted effort on the left to inject ideas of social democracy, and ultimately democratic socialism, into the electoral sphere, and to run Bernie again in 2020 under the same theory that you can do mass politics by running on popular universal programs. Once again it pushed the party to the left during the primary; we saw, for example, Kamala Harris endorsing Medicare for All. And although Biden won, Jake Sullivan, who basically was the administration, bought into this to some degree. And so we got Bidenomics, make of that what you will.
October 7 has shoved a huge wedge into that entire project. In its wake, the Biden Administration has revealed to the world that it is committed to genocide. Everyone who’s bought into the governing coalition as it stands has to endorse that commitment, whether directly or by condemning its critics. They can tell themselves a story about what they’re doing, but ultimately, it’s something that they have to accept. But a person of conscience cannot accept that. Genocide is the worst crime that exists. Morally, ending it should be a top priority. If that means taking an antagonistic approach to the institutions of the state, then so be it.
AOC to me typifies the impossibility of trying to straddle both positions. How can you acknowledge that what is taking place is a genocide, and, nevertheless, practically make the argument for it continuing? The image from this week that sticks out to me here is AOC FaceTiming in with the uncommitted delegates, who are themselves desperately trying to still play the game of participation and of being part of the coalition. They’re failing for the reasons that we’ve articulated. They tried exercising their “voice,” which didn’t work. So then they tried to “exit” within the context of the electoral game, and the most AOC can do is show her face on the screen as an act of solidarity.
Padmanabhan: I want to pick up on your point, Dylan, about the figure of AOC and the kind of political organizing that she perhaps represents for us. It clarifies something I was thinking about while listening to some of the mainstream liberal media debriefs of the DNC, and their diagnosis of the political calculations of allowing a Palestinian or uncommitted delegate to speak. In their view, the calculus for DNC electoral politics is weighing the “costs” of that against their stated political goals of, for example, securing abortion rights, or fighting inflation. That basically means they see genocide as politically fungible, making it equatable with, for example, the legal protections for bodily autonomy. And they’re framing it as such for US voters by making this an “issue” that people can be on two sides of, e.g. will it cost too many “x” voters to support “y” issue. AOC, by embracing this ethically bankrupt position and then FaceTiming into a sit-in, encapsulates what this position entails, which is schizophrenic at best and hypocritical at least.
Trying to integrate a genocide into this kind of political calculus is perverse. There are obvious measures to prevent it that do not need to wait until November: an arms embargo, more political pressure on Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire deal, and a whole range of other strategic levers I’m unaware of, I’m sure. My point is that this is a basic failure of our political structure, and the measure of the cravenness of this political leadership, that allows genocide to dissipate into the gibberish of hypothetical political calculations.
Brostoff: I’m thinking about this again in relation to our starting point of overdetermination and ’68. Part of the question that the non-event of the DNC raises is: what do we do in a moment where it seems structurally clear that the rift Dylan describes has taken place, but you don’t have the kind of event that everybody could point to and say, “We recognize this as a break, it happened the way it happened that other time.” Like—is “1968” something that you can “call” at a certain point? As in, “OK, we’ve decided that, in terms of our own political, intellectual, spiritual projects, a rupture has happened, and so we’re simply going to act as though it has.” Does anyone get to do that—and if so, who? Does a movement get to do that? Can people just do that? Is it, in the context of this conversation, a thing that intellectuals can do, and should they?
Colston: I’m reminded immediately of Althusser in “Overdetermination and Contradiction,” where he argues, in effect: When the forces and relations come into contradiction, the rupture happens well beyond the immediate agents of that rupture and spreads. That’s his theory of 1917, not 1968, but it’s the same structural consideration. But he also makes the point that intellectuals always trail behind. There’s no way to be out in front of it, as if you can wave a flag and then everyone follows. The ironic—sort of depressed, in multiple ways—turnout to this particular protest maybe pointed to this: it was as if the DNC was holding a rally for itself, and we were holding a rally for us, with a galaxy of distance between them. And the world outside kept turning, and it keeps turning in an even bleaker direction.
But that doesn’t mean that rupture is not available in the US context. The exceptional moment is always now, as it’s said. As ever, the question is: to what extent are left movements responsive to tragedy as their only motivating force? To what extent is it possible that the forces and relations come into contradiction—as they always do—so much so that a positive programmatic rupture is made available? One that everyone plugs into, moves into place, in different ways. That’s a speculative structural possibility, but one that remains. There are openings. If the United States ends up in another world-destroying, irrational war, we can’t rule out the possibility that this is itself another opening—a world-historically tragic choice by the US state, on the one hand, but an opening for a positive programmatic rupture via the refusal to support it, on the other.
Colston:Let me respin Freud’s “Theme of the Three Caskets” as an allegory of the DNC’s political unconscious, such as it pathetically exists. Freud analyzes this theme through myths of a forced choice between three options. Choosing right appears to overpromise greater satisfaction, wealth, and health. Yet there’s a dilemma: it’s not clear which of the three caskets harbor death—even as they all do. Let’s apply this dilemma to the election, where most of the electorate believes the two more promising choices are between the two US parties.
In King Lear—one of the myths of the three caskets—this is staged as a tragedy, where Lear demands competitive bids of fealty and devotion from all three of his daughters. Yet Cordelia, his favorite, remains stubbornly silent and uncommitted. She resolves, undermining Lear, “to love and be silent.” Lear goes mad, loses his kingdom, and Cordelia is hanged in prison. Through Lear, it’s too easy to treat the US as befuddled by a problem of succession, gerontocracy, and generations, too, focusing mostly on Lear’s short-sighted ruling mentality. But Freud’s analysis suggests that succession dramas are more directly denials of death—bids for rejuvenation, based in a willing deafness. For Lear, the unforced error (the transcription software heard “era”) is concerned with listening—or not listening—to the figure of death in his daughter grown silent with despair and grief.
To be more concrete, the scene I can’t get out of my mind is the DNC attendees plugging their ears to the deaths and names of Palestinian children. It’s more than just symptomatic; it’s indicative of all the political-economic problems we’re talking about. But the denial of death, which is quotidian—everyone has that problem—has taken on a crazed hue in the face of complicity with genocide. The delegates are plugging their ears to the reality of countless deaths their party has already helped to cause, and this denial is one motivation for their insistence on letting the catastrophe in Palestine continue to unfold. Their inability to reckon with this fact has led them to believe that they are making the best choice, the choice that isn’t the choice of death. But it is. All the choices are. Those are the actual stakes of the electoral choice, and it’s about choosing what kind of death—how many unjustly imposed deaths.
Listened to at a slant, the parable of the three caskets is trying to tell us this. We’re talking about a succession drama: who’s going to take over the state? Who gets to shape the reassertion of American hegemony, even though the predicate for that—now, again, in our moment—is this administration’s knowing and willing complicity in genocidal war-making? And we might ask in response: what does it mean to succeed to power in a state that has delegitimized itself on the grounds of international law? What does it mean to contend for that kind of participation? What kind of fear and favor are you looking to secure for yourself in such a coalition, and at what cost? All these questions have been sidelined, because of the things we’re talking about—they simply cannot be integrated into the calculus of exceptional American hegemony. But there’s a more everyday dynamic at play: the mundane and existential denial of death that has been ratcheted up, and up, in preposterous ways.
Saba: I find that really provocative, and the two things that came to mind for me are 1) in the microcosm, Joe Biden continuing to be President despite the fact that he’s literally dying: how has his own personal denial of death factored into seemingly irrational US policy? And then 2) in the macrocosm, declining US hegemony as its own denial of death and the succession fight being played out for the fate of the world economy: to what extent is a refusal to accept the decline of the unipolar moment motivating the outlandish and genocidal policies of the United States?
Brostoff: When I said earlier that it seems like the empire is doing what it wants, that’s kind of what I mean: that it feels not so much rational as it is consistent with a denial of death that inadvertently but obviously expresses the desire to die.
Colston: Right after the beginning of World War I, Freud said, “If you wish for life, prepare for death.” He said that as the “Great Nations” were going into a calamitous war. I think that’s what’s been quietly so devastating to many people. The profanity of people who are murdered and incapable of being buried. Basically, there are no death rites, there are no memorials. I mean, we can talk about the politics of grief, but the fact of the matter is that Palestinian people are right now being forced into death in unimaginably barbaric ways—to die without any amount of respect the grave fact of death deserves. And that’s a nightmare, a stain upon our collective society of human animals.
Padmanabhan: Capitalism is the infrastructure of colonialism, spectacle is its dominant form of mediation.
I’m thinking here not just about the media spectacle of the DNC, but about how we periodize this historic conjuncture. If spectacle is the default appearance of the existing system, it is also the form that fuels our despair and disengagement. At the start of this conversation, Nolan pointed to a pessimistic mood on the left, one rooted in the sense that the uprisings of 2020 didn’t change anything, so how can we expect any better now. I think the way to respond to this is to understand that any moment can be the moment of rupture we’re looking for. There are scenes of extreme violence and protest all the time, but when we experience them as merely spectacle, that becomes a way to give in to the existing structure. It’s important to avoid this trap in part because even when we dismiss our own ruptural moments as failures, our enemies learn from them. Cops recommitted to their work after 2020, making 2023 a brutal year of anti-Black violence. They didn’t view the George Floyd rebellion merely as an ineffective spectacle—they were galvanized. We too need to think about what forms of organization and mediation we want besides spectacle: how can we realize our own place in this scene of violence? How can we not just consume violence at a distance, or take for granted that this violent spectacle is all there will ever be?
Perla-Ward: As I’ve tried to think about what’s being carried into this moment from 2020 and then what distinguishes it, it’s really worth mentioning that the level of organization post–October 7, at least in terms of protests and direct actions, is unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. If 2020 made that possible, both in terms of scale and organization, then we should look at some of the tactical lessons from four years ago. In New York, for instance, we learned you can just take the bridge. The counterpoint is that the cops can let you take the bridge, and then what happens? As it becomes clearer what we’re up against, some of the ways forward might be seen in some of the coalitions being built, in the groups showing up to street protests. Ish was talking earlier about seeing Land Back flags at protests as a way to begin parsing out the sort of politics that’s going to take us into the future. That’s what has been grounding me in this moment—that if we’re up against something new, we are still building our approach on the left.
Padmanabhan: Yeah, absolutely. My thought about the problem of strategy right now is that it’s not actually one correct organizing mode, but that every form of protest that happens works as a safety net for more. So, living through the past few years of a stronger labor movement means that we’re also seeing more solidarity across political issues. For example, student union drives were the immediate precursor to the encampments last spring in support for Gaza. Campus labor coalitions and Palestine activists did not necessarily have a clear vision of this shared political horizon before that happened, but one form of organizing becomes a training ground for others and makes material shifts happen in ways that aren’t preordained. I also think we have to work against some of the more questionable unifying narratives about strategy that we’re being sold right now. I can totally imagine a DNC operative arguing that Kamala Harris’s candidacy is a direct response to the George Floyd protests, and that this multicultural coalition represents true social progress. That’s when the work of mediation has gone horribly wrong, and we need to rethink the whole enterprise.
Perla-Ward: Yeah—the politics that we’re going to rely on and that will move us forward are not yet substantiated and have only just begun to be articulated. As you were speaking, I was thinking about how the recent history of grad student organizing at UC Santa Cruz—the wildcat strike and other radical campaigns—set a precedent for the strike earlier this year in response to the UC’s handling of the encampments. It’s precisely through the organizing of the past 10 years that we’re drawing new lines of solidarity and articulating a politics that relates to Palestine.
Ibrahim: Do you feel like there’s a way for resistance to American militarism and empire not to devolve into pure spectacle?
Padmanabhan: For me, it’s always a question of, where does the abstract political horizon become a material reality? The direct action we’ve seen over the past ten months, like blocking arms shipments—these are scenes that translate the kind of abstract anti-war ideal into the material plane. I think these are concrete actions that still circulate within a spectacular economy and have a clear vision of what their intervention aims to be.
Saba: That to me is the whole question of left strategy. We’re in this moment of rupture, of facing the possibility of being free from the constraints of the Democratic Party. But then what? Making demands from within the coalition has failed. The next move is to say, we’re going to leave and impose political costs on you. Well, what happens when those political costs are insubstantial? Then the question becomes, how else can you impose political costs? And maybe that’s through spectacle. Though also, how else can you impose other kinds of costs—for example, economic costs? That’s where jamming up the supply lines and other economic strategies can come into play.
Going back to Ari’s question of who gets to call it: the left is in a perpetual state of having “called” rupture in various forms since 1968, and it’s always arguing against itself about continuity versus rupture, and differing strategic approaches to power. But insofar as there’s something larger happening, if there is a holistic shift away from engagement with electoral politics, it opens up new terrains at new scales. I think the maximum thing we can hope for at this moment is to stop litigating the question of rupture and start living in its aftermath.
Ibrahim: I did go into Chicago thinking that it would be a moment of “fuck you, we’re breaking shit”—but nothing really got broken as far as I know, no windows, no looting, nothing of the sort.
Perla-Ward: For myself, at least, the sense is overwhelmingly that the rupture has already happened. What could be more of a moment of rupture than 2020, and then October 7? What more could a historian want? These things were unimaginable a year before they happened. I think the sooner we acknowledge that that’s the case and that we’re living in something else, the better off we will be. The only way I’ve been able to navigate this moment is by experiencing it and talking about it alongside other people, whether through organizing or by going to check out the vibe, as we did in Chicago. It’s just a matter of feeling our way out in the dark for a while.
Padmanabhan: In terms of this shadow of ‘68 that we’ve had over this conversation, I just want to say: fuck that. There is no romantic legacy of ’68 for us. What we’ve seen in the past half century is only more violence and repression. We’re watching another genocide from within a country that is actively enabling it. So who gives a fuck about ’68. What we’re facing now is a measure of the limits of our own organizing capacity. And what we need to do is figure out forms of international solidarity, which is always a question, but feels perhaps more urgent in this moment because of the horror we’re watching. Ish, to your point that nothing seems to have broken in the protests at Chicago, or that it feels like nothing has happened, that’s a measure also of our failures to organize enough to explain to a largely insulated public why this matters. And that’s our problem to face.
Brostoff: Any final thoughts?
Ibrahim: Fuck the Democrats. Free Palestine.
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