[News] How to Do a Conjunctural Analysis
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Thu Oct 17 12:36:24 EDT 2024
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*How to Do a Conjunctural Analysis: The Forty-Second Newsletter (2024)*
Helen Zughaib (Lebanon), Reading Coffee Cups, c. 2021.
Helen Zughaib (Lebanon), /Reading Coffee Cups/, c. 2021.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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Reading legacy Western media – which dominates
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the world information order – is painful. During the genocidal war
against Palestinians, for instance, these media outlets (such as /CNN/,
/The New York Times/, /The Guardian/, /Le Monde/, and /Bild/) have been
unable to bring themselves to describe the Israeli military’s attacks on
Palestinians. At most, and when it suits them, they resort to passive
voice (‘Palestinians die’) or to a dangerous form of turning civilian
areas into military targets (‘Hezbollah village’ or ‘Hamas command and
control centre’).
A study
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of mainstream US print media coverage during the first six weeks of the
genocide in Gaza showed that ‘for every two Palestinian deaths,
Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are
mentioned eight times’. In other words, in mainstream media, an Israeli
who dies will be mentioned 16 times more than a Palestinian who dies.
This trend, which erases and dehumanises Palestinian casualties, seems
to have accelerated as the number of Palestinians killed has increased
exponentially, with an estimated 114,000 dead. There is no excuse for
this abysmal coverage, which ignores the steady stream of information
provided by the live reporting of a large number of Palestinian
journalists and social media users in Gaza, at great risk to their
lives, as well the deeper context for the US-Israeli occupation,
apartheid, and genocidal war provided by a wide range of analysis.
Television programmes are worse, with any critic of the genocide forced
to make an admission (‘I condemn the 7 October attack by Hamas’ or ‘I
condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine’) before the conversation can
proceed, and, since many critics do not want to frame the discussion
around this condemnation, the conversation
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never proceeds. This ritual act of condemnation is not merely an entry
ticket into a conversation but an ideological concession that narrows
the space for a genuine debate about the facts of when conflicts and
crises begin, how to understand the structure of a conflict, and how
best to ascertain the paths forward based on this longer-term historical
and structural assessment. This type of discussion is called a
conjunctural analysis, which provides political and social movements
with the materials to intervene to shape the future and grounds the work
of our institute. This newsletter will introduce you to four texts that
are based on conjunctural analyses, but first I want to explain what
such an analysis entails.
Alia-Ahmad-(Saudi-Arabia),-The-Field,-2022.
Alia Ahmad (Saudi Arabia), /The Field/, 2022.
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.
Conjunctural analyses are an important tool for understanding that
complexity, since they seek to explain the dynamic process of history at
a certain point in time. Any given point in time is rooted in a past and
a future: the past shapes the present, but the present also presages
what may come in the future depending on how one intervenes now. 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:
1. *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.
2. *Totality*. Events are interconnected. They are part of a complex
structure that encompasses various possibilities.
3. *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.
4. *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.
Our Asia, Africa, and Latin America offices recently published four
texts based on conjunctural analyses:
1. /Nepal’s Fight for Sovereignty, the Millennium Challenge
Corporation, and the US’s New Cold War against China/
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jointly produced with /Bampanth/
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magazine and written by its chief editor Dr Mahesh Maskey, who was
also Nepal’s ambassador to China. This text is only in English.
2. /A New World Born from the Ashes of the Old/
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written by Hanna Eid and produced with input from the West African
People’s Organisation. This text is only in English.
3. /La criminalización de los cultivadores como coartada imperialista:
economía política de las drogas en Colombia/
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(The Criminalisation of Farmers as an Imperialist Alibi: The
Political Economy of Drugs in Colombia), jointly researched and
produced with Centro de Pensamiento y Diálogo Político and
Coordinadora Nacional de Cultivadores de Coca, Amapola y Marihuana
in Colombia and written by Karen Jessenia Gutiérrez Alfonso. This
text is only in Spanish.
4. /A Revista Estudos do Sul Global/
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(Journal of Global South Studies), which contains articles on themes
such as imperialism, the character of finance in our times, and the
tempo of the class struggle. This text is only in Portuguese.
I will write about each of these texts at greater length in the coming
months, as their depth and quality help us navigate beneath the
superficiality and sensationalism that typically define analyses of the
present. For instance, Maskey’s intervention about the Nepali
government’s acceptance of a US government grant elucidates the dynamic
structure of the US-imposed New Cold War on Asia, while Hanna Eid’s
assessment of the Alliance of Sahel States (Burkina Faso, Mali, and
Niger) enables us to understand the fight for sovereignty across West
Africa as a whole. The report on the war on drugs provides a window into
the pressures
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upon the government of President Gustavo Petro in Colombia, which
requires an acknowledgment of the role of the lucrative international
drug mafia in the country’s political establishment.
Years ago, I visited the Zacapa barracks, about two hours east of
Guatemala City. The scene at the barracks was near-idyllic, its stone
walls surrounded by green pastures, yet the sinister watch towers hinted
of the bloodshed that took place here: this is where Nora Paiz Cárcamo
(1944–1967), Otto René Castillo (1934–1967), other members of the Rebel
Armed Forces (FAR), and about a dozen peasants were brutally tortured
and burned alive. Both Nora and Otto were members of the communist
movement that fought against the Guatemalan dictatorship; trained in the
German Democratic Republic and Soviet Union, respectively; and joined
the armed struggle in the Sierra de las Minas (named for the mines of
jade, marble, and asbestos), where they were killed in March 1967.
Later, Nora’s mother, Clemencia Cárcamo Sandoval, told the truth
commission that her daughter’s bloody, fractured corpse was found with
clubs fused into it, a sign of how brutally she had been beaten. Two
years before he was murdered alongside his comrades, Otto, whose
beautiful poems were inspired by the El Salvadoran guerrilla 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.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research · Shadipur · New Delhi,
NCT 110008 · India
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