ESSAY OUTLINE

Questions
How, or by what practices and assuming such risks as may exist in the structural
adjustments, can it be possible for the relative asymmetries and unevenness in
readily available resources be rendered less egregious between different world
communities?
How can it be that outsiders, with their own life chances and abilities, gain access
to power relationships that are typically for people born into different circumstances
(elites)?
ESSAY ARGUMENT AND ANALYSIS FLOW
1. Personal Violence (War) vs. Structural Violence (Indirect -> Poverty/Inequality)
a. NEGATIVE PEACE
i. Absence of Violence (Zinn)
1. Violence is not the only form of power. Sometimes it is the
least effective. Always it is the most vicious, for the
perpetrator as well as for the victim. And it is corrupting.
(zinn).
2. If anything was left of that romantic view of war it was
extinguished when I read Johnny Got His GunA slab
of flesh in an American uniform had been found on the
battlefield, still alive, with no legs, no arms, no face, blind,
deaf, unable to speak, but the heart still beating For
him, the oratory of the politicians who sent him off to
war--the language of freedom --is now seen as the
ultimate hypocrisy He says: Take me into the
workplaces, into the schools, show me to the little
children and to the college students, let them see what
war is like. (zinn).
ii. Personal Violence -> War (Galtung) BUT need to sow doubts as
to whether or not this is truly the most damaging form of
violence? Direct v. Indirect violence.
1. A violent structure leaves marks not only on the human
body but also on the mind and the spirit Penetration,
implanting the topdog inside the underdog
segmentation giving the underdog only a very partial view
of what goes on marginalization, keeping the underdogs
on the outside fragmentation, keeping the underdogs
away from each other exploitation and repression go
hand in hand, as violence (Galtung).
2. The culture admonishes us into seeing exploitation
as normal Sanitation of language: itself cultural
violence Yet structure and culture are usually not
included in arms control studies, both being highly
sensitive areas. (Galtung).

b. Pitfalls of the White Savior Complex

i. Imperialism Tropes (FANON)
1. The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because
he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly
indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother-country.
Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country
which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all
that she skims off, all that she violates and starves. (fanon, WotE).
2. The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away
for nothing. (Fanon, WotE).
c. Peace under authoritarian government socialism ie. Dictators ?
2. Absence of Personal Violence prioritized over promoting positive decrease in
poverty
3. Development promotes underdevelopment in Center-Periphery/MetropolisSatellite Relationships ->
a. Capitalist development is the other side of and depends upon
continuity of and acceleration of development amongst developing
societies.
b. Primitivism is seen as bad, while the modern is held as superior to the
ancient.
c. Economic Stratification and development intrinsically tied to structural
violence
4. What is Positive Peace?
a. What does transformation consist of? How do we prevent this pattern
from being replicated? What does resistance look like? (Wallerstein)
i.

ii.

iii.

It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of

progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism.
It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the
commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the
negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed,
by far, the harm. What is surprising is that their ideological
opponents, the Marxists - the anti-liberals, the representatives of
the oppressed working classes - believed in progress with at least as
much passion as the liberals. (Wallerstein).
For the other end of the spectrum, the 50 to 85 percent of the world's
population who are not the recipients of privilege, the world they know is
almost certainly worse than any their earlier counterparts knew. It is
likely they are worse off materially, despite the technological changes. In
substantive as opposed to formal terms, they are more, not less, subject to
arbitrary constraints, since the central mechanisms are more pervasive
and more efficient. And they bear the brunt of the various kinds of psychic
malaise, as well as of the destructiveness of civil wars. (Wallerstein).
Are there still other possibilities? Of course there are. What is important
to recognize is that all three historical options are really there, and the
choice will depend on our collective world behavior over the next fifty
years. Whichever option is chosen, it will not be the end of history, but in
a real sense its beginning. The human social world is still very young in

cosmological time. In 2050 or 2100, when we look back at capitalist

civilization, what will we think? (Wallerstein).
iv. Does it have to be violent? (Fanon)
1. And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are
revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the
exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no
compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and
decolonization is simply a question of relative strength. (fanon,
WotE).
2. Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority
complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and
restores his self respect (Fanon, WotE).
3. National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of
nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the
headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is
always a violent enterprise. (Fanon, WotE).
v. All leading to creating the conditions of peace where
exploitative, hierarchy producing relationships are no longer
reproduced. (Gunder Frank)
vi. Inequality as a form of structural violence (Galtung)
1. Living Conditions between two parties can increase or
decrease based upon an arrangement between centerperiphery states. The Center of the center and the
periphery of the periphery play a role in determining the
nature of this relationship.
2. Positive peace involves curtailing inequality so that LCs
are growing closer in relationships that operate under
harmony of interest
3. The structured order systematically produces inequality
by exploiting variated inequality as a motor of northern
industrial growth and development
5. Disjuncture causes fault-lines in revolutionary ideals as proletariat is
severance from feminism/race -> Yet all paths are stratified by economic
inequality
a. Capitalism isnt separable from gender, from religion, from relations of
men and women. Property is intimately tied to a patriarchal discourse.
Same with blackness and indigeneity (Fanon)
i. The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its
importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the
need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this
question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be. (fanon,
WotE).
b. CASE STUDIES
i. No bourgeoisie without proletariat and intrinsically unfair labor
contracts Within the south there is the north. It is repeating in a
viral logic the center periphery. Satellites and Metropoles
(Gunder Frank)

c. Rethink the projects. Violent set of relationships that consist of

creating, repeating and structuring the patterns and relationships such
that primitiveness = backward and are continually repeated as such
in order to maintain the system. (Gunder Frank)
6. Themes can be explored through case studies of Brazil/Chile/Argentina
a. Colonialism Effects (Personal and Structural Violence) -> Part of Global
Structure, the behindedness of developing world as an extension of
metropolitan or capital control than there wouldnt be any basis for the
growth of the center as opposed of the periphery.
i. Chile (Gunder Frank)
ii. Brazil (Gunder Frank)
1. Metropolitan, industrial west occupies Rio and Brazilia.
b. Dictatorship Effects (Personal and Structural Violence)
i. Chile Pinochet
ii. Brazil Vargas
7. Conclusions:
a. Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will - There is currently
no answer short of violent revolution
i. Even India was violent AND not possible in Tribal Setting
b. Occupy as an example -> No goals just a microphone shouting out to
the world and a scalpel surgically characterizing the unfairness of the
existing ontology. We live in a FUCKED UP system
i. Bernie Sanders may be progress maybe progress exists.
1. But weve seen populism before Weve seen it fracture
when race (white/non-white) is involved (TRUMP IS A
RECENT EXAMPLE)
Conclusion:
We come into this American Dream hearing the common phrases that one would
except in a liberatory society. That you are the captain of your fate, that one can
accomplish anything through hard work, education and luck and that this is a
society of equal opportunity. The frightening, despairing epiphany happens when
one day as you are watering your lawn you look up and down your street at the
lines of vehicles, pedestrians and homes you equate likenesses and similarities
and realize that without consciously deciding to do so you are part of a class. You
realize that on easy street the opportunities balloon when compared to your own
street. And the anger begins to ferment, it begins to bubble. In lieu of the anger an
intellectual curiosity formed within me tied to an impatience. Gramsci describes the
necessities of the revolutionary mindset as pessimism of the intellect, optimism of
the will but I find difficulty in embracing the desire within me for class conflict.
Danton tells me to Dare, dare and dare again but like Prufrock I continually do
nothing as I am forced to ask myself How should I presume?
As I write I realize that my mind, swamped up and taken in by the idealism of others
whom have accomplished feats that I can barely drink of I experience the sincerest
forms of self-doubt. I dont want to be Hugos Enjolrean. There may be a higher call
but I dont see myself tossing my life out in some despotic corner of the world in the
names of the Anti-Capitalist revolution. And perhaps that is just what the elites hope

from me and others of my likeness. The Pessimism of the Intellect is readily

attainable but I find that the optimism of the will is far difficult. For those who dont
have the gate code for Easy Street after the awakening comes the waking
nightmare. That there is no answer short of a violent upheaval to change the way
that this system functions. Even Gandhis followers had to suffer.
What did Occupy do? I marvel at the vast efforts undertaken by the media to
deliberately misinterpret the movement in the manner that they did. Occupy was
not a movement with specific goals. Such tools are the means by which the
capitalist expresses their domination. No occupy was a microphone turned towards
the voices of the oppressed. It was a scalpel cutting with surgical precision into the
heart of a world of inequality and unfairness. It expressed the realization that
liberalism has failed us and will continue to fail us. Are we moving in the right
directions? Are we moving at all?

MISCELLANIA NOTES AND QUOTES

Andre Gunder Frank
1. THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
2. CAPITALISM AND THE MYTH OF FEUDALISM IN BRAZILIAN AGRICULTURE
3. CAPITALISM AND UNDERVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA: HISTORICAL STUDIES
OF CHILE AND BRAZIL
Emmanuel Wallerstein
1. THE MODERN WORLD SYSTEM
a. 1st Chapter gives the broad outline of the overall
argument/presentation
Johanne Galtung
1. A STRUCTURAL THEORY OF IMPERIALISM
2. PEACE BY PEACEFUL MEANS
a. Ask Next Time
Frantz Fanon
1. THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH
2. BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS
Howard Zinn
Max Walzer
James Dawes
1. EVIL MEN
Antonio Gramsci
1. Letters from Prison