{"id":277872,"date":"2024-10-21T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2024-10-21T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=277872"},"modified":"2024-10-20T06:24:10","modified_gmt":"2024-10-20T05:24:10","slug":"a-world-without-context-how-to-do-a-conjunctural-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/10\/a-world-without-context-how-to-do-a-conjunctural-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"A World Without Context: How to Do a Conjunctural Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Helen Zughaib (Lebanon), Reading Coffee Cups, c. 2021<\/p><\/div>\n

17 Oct 2024 – Unlike mainstream media, which all too often distorts the truth and lies by omission \u2013 as we see with reporting on Palestine, where the death toll has reached 114,000 \u2013 conjunctural analyses help us understand the deeper forces at play and provide political and social movements with the materials to intervene to shape the future.<\/em><\/p>\n

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. And it eliminates knowledge and wisdom.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reading legacy Western media \u2013 which dominates<\/a> the world information order \u2013 is painful. During the genocidal war against Palestinians, for instance, these media outlets (such as CNN<\/em>, The New York Times<\/em>, The Guardian<\/em>, Le Monde<\/em>, and Bild<\/em>) have been unable to bring themselves to describe the Israeli military\u2019s attacks on Palestinians. At most, and when it suits them, they resort to passive voice (\u2018Palestinians die\u2019) or to a dangerous form of turning civilian areas into military targets (\u2018Hezbollah village\u2019 or \u2018Hamas command and control centre\u2019).<\/p>\n

A study<\/a> of mainstream US print media coverage during the first six weeks of the genocide in Gaza showed that \u2018for every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n

Television programmes are worse, with any critic of the genocide forced to make an admission (\u2018I condemn the 7 October attack by Hamas\u2019 or \u2018I condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine\u2019) before the conversation can proceed, and, since many critics do not want to frame the discussion around this condemnation, the conversation<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. History<\/strong>. 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.<\/li>\n
  2. Totality<\/strong>. Events are interconnected. They are part of a complex structure that encompasses various possibilities.<\/li>\n
  3. Structure<\/strong>. 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.<\/li>\n
  4. Politics<\/strong>. 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"\"<\/div>\n

    Our Asia, Africa, and Latin America offices recently published four texts based on conjunctural analyses:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Nepal\u2019s Fight for Sovereignty, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the US\u2019s New Cold War against China<\/em><\/a>, jointly produced with Bampanth<\/em><\/a> magazine and written by its chief editor Dr Mahesh Maskey, who was also Nepal\u2019s ambassador to China. This text is only in English.<\/li>\n
    2. A New World Born from the Ashes of the Old<\/em><\/a>, written by Hanna Eid and produced with input from the West African People\u2019s Organisation. This text is only in English.<\/li>\n
    3. La criminalizaci\u00f3n de los cultivadores como coartada imperialista: econom\u00eda pol\u00edtica de las drogas en Colombia<\/em><\/a> (The Criminalisation of Farmers as an Imperialist Alibi: The Political Economy of Drugs in Colombia), jointly researched and produced with Centro de Pensamiento y Di\u00e1logo Pol\u00edtico and Coordinadora Nacional de Cultivadores de Coca, Amapola y Marihuana in Colombia and written by Karen Jessenia Guti\u00e9rrez Alfonso. This text is only in Spanish.<\/li>\n
    4. A Revista\u00a0Estudos\u00a0do\u00a0Sul\u00a0Global<\/em><\/a> (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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      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\u2019s intervention about the Nepali government\u2019s acceptance of a US government grant elucidates the dynamic structure of the US-imposed New Cold War on Asia, while Hanna Eid\u2019s 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<\/a> 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\u2019s political establishment.<\/p>\n

      <\/div>\n

      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 C\u00e1rcamo (1944\u20131967), Otto Ren\u00e9 Castillo (1934\u20131967), other members of the Rebel Armed Forces\u00a0(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\u2019s mother, Clemencia C\u00e1rcamo Sandoval, told the truth commission that her daughter\u2019s 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\u20131975), wrote an elegy to \u2018apolitical intellectuals\u2019:<\/p>\n

      I<\/p>\n

      One day,
      \nthe apolitical
      \nintellectuals
      \nof my country
      \nwill be interrogated
      \nby the humblest
      \nof our people.<\/p>\n

      They will be asked
      \nwhat they did
      \nwhen
      \ntheir homeland was slowly
      \nextinguished,
      \nlike a sweet fire,
      \nsmall and alone.<\/p>\n

      No one will ask them
      \nabout their suits,
      \nor about their long
      \nsiestas
      \nafter lunch,
      \nor about their sterile
      \nbattles with nothingness,
      \nnor about
      \ntheir ontological
      \nway
      \nof making money.
      \nThey won\u2019t be questioned
      \nabout Greek mythology,
      \nor about the self-disgust they felt
      \nwhen someone, deep down,
      \naccepted the fate of dying a coward\u2019s death.
      \nThey\u2019ll be asked nothing
      \nabout their absurd
      \njustifications,
      \nborn in the shadow
      \nof a total lie.<\/p>\n

      II<\/p>\n

      On that day
      \nthe humble people will come.
      \nThose who had no place
      \nin the books and poems
      \nof the apolitical intellectuals,
      \nyet, every day, brought them
      \ntheir bread and milk,
      \ntheir eggs and tortillas,
      \nthose who mended their clothes,
      \nwho drove their cars,
      \nwho cared for their dogs and tended their gardens,
      \nwho worked for them,
      \nand they\u2019ll ask:
      \n\u2018What did you do when the poor
      \nsuffered, when the tenderness and life
      \nwas snuffed out of them?\u2019.<\/p>\n

      III<\/p>\n

      Apolitical intellectuals
      \nof my sweet country,
      \nyou will have nothing to say.<\/p>\n

      A vulture of silence
      \nwill devour your insides.
      \nYour own misery
      \nwill gnaw at your soul.
      \nAnd you will be silent,
      \nashamed of yourselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      _______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/a> Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at<\/em> Globetrotter. He is the director of <\/em>Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research<\/em><\/a> and a senior non-resident fellow at <\/em>Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies<\/em><\/a>, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including <\/em>The Darker Nations<\/a> and <\/em>The Poorer Nations<\/a>. His latest book is <\/em>Washington Bullets<\/a>, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.<\/em><\/p>\n

      Go to Original \u2013 thetricontinental.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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