now comes missionary Maye Musk’s great advice to girls and women
“You don’t have to go to the movies, you don’t have to go out for dinner; you can just spend time with the most wonderful gifts you can ever have, is the children.”
but why did Maye Musk stop producing children after her third child?
there may be some reason: financial, health, career, or whatever
similarly women and girls, she is advising, have problems too
does she know how expensive it is to have a child in today’s world?
(in 2015, it cost $233,610 to raise a child; it is much higher in 2024)
does she know how many children are barely surviving?
Abstract: A core issue for media
outlets and politicians since the assassination of Abe Shinz? has been
monetary transactions between religious organizations and their current
or former members. Anxieties surrounding religion’s role in the public
sphere have informed legal arguments about consumer issues. A category
of fraud called “spiritual sales” has become a particular concern. In
this article, I describe how interpretations of consumer law have been
instrumental in dealing with spiritual sales and I discuss reasons why
problematic consumption practices associated with religions that have
attracted intense criticism have led the Japanese government to
comprehensively revise regulatory protections as they reassess consumer
vulnerabilities.
Money has been at the center of accusations, debates, and legal
responses that followed the assassination of former Prime Minister Abe
Shinz? on 8 July 2022. The main motive for the murder immediately
reported in the news was financial destitution experienced by the
assassin Yamagami Tetsuya (b.1980) and his siblings after their mother
joined the Unification Church (hereafter UC), a religious organization
to which Abe maintained connections. Soon after the shooting,
journalists reported that Yamagami’s mother, who had been a member of
the UC since the 1990s, had donated over 100 million yen to the group,
forcing her to declare bankruptcy in 2002 (Asahi 2022a). The church
retorted that by the mid-2010s the organization had returned 50 million
yen to the family (Asahi 2022b). However, Yamagami’s uncle testified
that Tetsuya and his siblings endured a very difficult childhood due to
continuous neglect and a lack of money to cover their most basic needs
(Asahi 2022c).
Ideological connections between Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and
the Unification Church have attracted attention since July 2022 (Asahi
2022d; see also Sait? 2024), as have testimonies by those raised in
religious groups other than the UC that have been accused of imposing
hardships on children raised in their communities (Asahi Shinbun 2022e).
Though media and public attention have focused primarily on these
matters, legal responses by the Japanese government to the Unification
Church have mainly targeted regulation of monetary transactions. In this
article, I argue that attention to financial malfeasance and lawsuits
demanding compensation for transactions that are perceived as forced
donations to the UC have been instrumental in shaping ways “religion” is
interpreted through legislation and political discourse. Although there
has been much discussion of court cases concerned with the separation
of religion and state in Japan (see Larsson 2020 for a recent analysis),
financial transactions have also played a significant role in
understandings of religion in Japanese society. Legal initiatives framed
as consumer protection issues that played out in Japanese courts from
the 1980s were brought to light by the murder of Abe Shinz?.
Understanding the backstory of legal wrangling over consumer affairs
occasioned by the UC’s exploitative monetary demands is vital to
understanding why it took a relatively quick one year and three months
following the assassination for the Japanese government to call for the
legal dissolution of the Unification Church, even though it was not
directly involved in the violent event of July 2022.
In this article, I argue that a legal emphasis on proper uses of
money and consumer contracts in lieu of directly addressing religion’s
role in the public sphere reveals anxieties about religion that prevail
in Japan today. I make my argument in four parts. In the first section, I
examine updates since July 2022 to laws and regulations concerning
consumer protection, shedding light thereby on how transactions
designated as “spiritual sales” carried out with the UC have been framed
as bad consumption practices. In the second section, I describe what
the adjective “spiritual” implies by considering court judgements that
implicate the UC. Judges, lawyers, and legislators have treated
spiritual sales as not related directly to religious belief, focusing instead on perceived problems that actions
associated with widely criticized individuals and groups provoke in
public spaces. I proceed in the third section to describe how illegality
is proven in a specific case concerning the UC. I conclude in the
fourth section with an analysis of a “spiritual sales” clause in the
Consumer Contract Act that shows how, in their attempts to avoid
discriminating against religion while they tweak regulatory
interventions to target contentious consumer issues, lawyers and
legislators have ended up defining “religion” based on consumer ethics. I
conclude by taking up the most recent debates regarding consumer
protection to show the lasting impact of spiritual sales on Japanese
consumer legislation.
No one in Gaza, including children, is getting enough to eat as Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war. IMAGE/ Doaa Albaz ActiveStills
Here in Gaza, every loaf of bread – when one can be found – has a
special taste. A sip of water, when available, has a unique flavor. A
meal, no matter how meager, carries a distinct sense of satisfaction.
And even amidst the bombing, there is a strange sense of peace found in
sleep. Even fear, loss, sadness and hunger awaken oneself to appreciate
hidden joys, a reminder of the essence of our humanity, far from the
endless chase for luxury that knows no finish line.
My 5-year-old niece, Lana, seemed unusually cheerful, as if expecting
something special. Curious, I asked, “Why are you so happy, Lana?” With
a wide smile on her face, she replied, “I’m hungry, and I want to eat
basil,” as if it were a party snack. The remark struck me. How could
such desperation and happiness coexist?
It then dawned on me that children are truly resilient. They are
among the hardest hit by the deprivation and harshness of war yet are
usually the first to forgive, brush off the hardships, and get on with
life.
Given the severe food shortages here in Gaza’s north, I consider
myself incredibly lucky as occasionally we get to eat sandwiches of
basil leaves mixed with oil and salt as a meal. My family created this
type of sandwich, something we never ate before the war, given the
scarcity of vegetables. Others are nowhere near this fortunate.
As Lana took a bite to eat, I noticed how she ate as slowly as she
could, hoping the meal would last as long as possible. The other trick
we Gazans have come to appreciate is to chew as slowly as we can for as
long as possible so as to extend the time spent over a meal. Grateful
for being able to eat but sad there isn’t more to go around, every bite
we take is wrapped in delight and sadness in equal proportion.
As the sandwich shrank with every bite taken, Lana tried not to look. Instead, she imagined she was having her fill.
“I miss Baba”
Lana had lost her father a few weeks earlier. Moataz Rajab, a
37-year-old postgraduate in economics, is fondly remembered in the
family as a very loving husband and father of four very young children,
including a 1-year-old baby that will never get to know his father.
Lana, terrified by the aerial bombings, tank shells and loud explosions,
has yet to fully grasp the reality of her father’s absence. She
sometimes says the gut-piercing words “Mama, I’m sad. I miss Baba,” as
if he is at work and late coming home.
CRPF paramilitary soldier in Srinagar in 2008. IMAGE/ Fredrik Naumann/Panos
India’s ongoing subjugation of Kashmir holds portentous lessons about the nature of contemporary colonialism
In April 1955, at a closed session of the Asian-African Conference in
Bandung, Indonesia, India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke
forcefully about the need for countries in Asia and Africa to refuse to
join either of the two great powers – the United States and the Soviet
Union – and to remain unaligned. Arguing that alignment with either
power during the Cold War would degrade or humiliate those countries
that had ‘come out of bondage into freedom’, Nehru maintained that the
moral force of postcolonial nations should serve as a counter to the
military force of the great powers. At one point, Nehru chided the Iraqi
and Turkish delegates at the conference who had simultaneously spoken
favourably about the Western bloc and the formation of NATO while
lamenting the continued French colonisation of North Africa. Nehru said:
We must take a complete view of the situation and not be contradictory ourselves when we talk about colonialism, when we say ‘colonialism must go’, and in the same voice say that we support every policy or some policies that confirm colonialism. It is an extraordinary attitude to take up.
A few years later, in 1961, along with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Nehru became one of the founders of the non-aligned movement. Having lifted the yoke of British colonialism, India presented itself as poised to take on the moral and political leadership of the decolonising world. This was perhaps to be expected, especially given that India was the largest and most populous country to become independent from European colonial rule. The story of India’s anticolonial struggle, too, had been mythologised by the nonviolent resistance offered by Indian figures such as Mahatma (‘great soul’) Gandhi. Nehru, too, was perceived as a charismatic and well-read leader who spoke for the people of Asia and Africa, and attempted to find what the scholar Ian Hall has called a ‘different way to conduct international relations’. The stature of both men played a critical role in establishing Indian dominance in the Third World order, and also in establishing ‘the idea of India’ as a secular liberal democracy that was built on the foundational idea of unity in diversity.
Even as Nehru proclaimed the moral superiority of India for taking a
stance against colonialism in all forms, he oversaw India’s colonial
occupation of Kashmir. In Kashmir, Nehru said, ‘democracy and morality
can wait’.
In the middle of the 20th century, a wave of anticolonial and
national liberation movements gained independence from European powers,
by exercising their right to self-determination. Nationalist leaders of
the former colonies, however, remained committed to the ideals of the
nation-state and its territorial sovereignty that derived from European
modernity. Independence, it was widely accepted, came in the form of the
nation-state, which outshone other forms of political organisation or
possibilities. The borders of the nation-state became contested, as
European powers often imposed boundaries that ill suited visions of what
constituted the political community. This would have deleterious
consequences for places where geography, demographics, history or
political aspirations posed serious challenges to nationality. In turn,
newly formed nation-states asserted their newfound sovereignty through
violence and coercion, which had implications for Indigenous and
stateless peoples within their borders whose parallel movements for
self-determination were depicted as illegitimate to the sovereign
nation-state order. Mona Bhan and Haley Duschinski call this process ‘Third World imperialism’.
Some anticolonial nationalists were real nationalists, that is, they
saw claims of self-determination within their imagined community of a
nation as ‘separatist’, ‘secessionist’, ‘ethnonationalist insurgencies’
or ‘terrorism’. Such framings, rife in Indian discourses on Kashmir, are
ahistorical and dehumanising. When we move beyond seeing these regions
from the perspective of the dominant nation-state, we come to see how
they are places with their own histories, imaginaries and political
aspirations – some of which may reinscribe the nation, while others seek
to move beyond it through understandings of other forms of sovereignty.
In popular and even scholarly discourses, colonialism is often seen
as happening ‘overseas’ – from Europe to somewhere in the Global South.
Many people see colonialism as something that we are past temporally,
despite acknowledgement of its ongoing legacies. Forms of colonialism
within the Global South remain more difficult for many to see because
many of these regions are geographically contiguous to one another and,
thus, seen as having some form of cultural or racial unity that would
form a nation. This results in what Goldie Osuri calls
a ‘structural concealment of the relationship between postcolonial
nation-states and their [own colonies],’ as well as the concealment of
‘the manner in which postcolonial nationalism is also an expansionist
project.’ Contemporary colonies – like Kashmir, Western Sahara, Puerto
Rico, Palestine, East Turkestan, among others – show the porous boundary
between colonialism and postcolonialism, raising some difficult
questions about the current global order.
Manning
Marable reminds us that US fascism is institutional and normalized. The
parallels of his 1981 essay with the present are obvious – US fascism
remains ascendant.
What is an anatomy of American fascism? The
late African-American historian Manning Marable asked this question in a
two-part article titled, “The Prospects for Fascism,” published in 1981
in the New Journal and Guide, the longstanding Black newspaper
from Norfolk, Virginia. Writing at the beginning of the Ronald Reagan
era, Marable suggests a genealogy of US fascism that began with Lyndon
B. Jonson’s escalation of the “genocidal war” in Vietnam, continued
through the vicious “peanut-brained schemes and dreams” of Jimmy Carter,
and appeared to be on the verge of an explosion with the rise of Reagan
and the New Right in the early 1980s.
Marable’s
genealogy is important. He does not argue fascism appears fully formed
in the satanic presence of Ronald Reagan, but that the structural and
institutional basis of US fascism had existed long before Reagan’s
election, giving Reagan a platform for fascism’s intensification and
expansion. Marable also argues for the exceptional nature of US fascism –
an exceptionalism based on normalization. That is, US fascism does not
occur through coup d’etats and the spectacle of regime change but
through so-called democratic institutions. For Marable, two other
characteristics are significant. First, the intensification of racism
and the mainstreaming of white supremacy. Second, the consolidation of
corporate power and the attack on labor and the working classes as a
response to declining rates of corporate profit.
The parallels
with the present are obvious; the historical continuity with the past is
apparent; US fascism remains ascendant. Without further comment, we
reprint Manning Marable’s “The Prospects for Fascism” below.
The prospects for fascism
by MANNING MARABLE
The victories of the New Right in the election of 1980, combined with the revival of the Cold War abroad and racial prejudice at home, represent a new phase of American politics.
There is
growing concern among the world’s progressive and Third World countries,
and among the oppressed peoples of this nation, that there is something
seriously wrong in the United States. A mood of racial bigotry and
social intolerance which generated the neoconservative political thirst
in the 1970s is maturing into an ominous and starling political movement
for white power. Without exaggeration, many critics of the political
scene are describing the new mood in one simple yet devastating word,
fascism.
Many of us told
ourselves that fascism was just around the corner during the 1960s. We
saw the Johnson Administration’s genocidal war in Southeast Asia, and we
denounced it as fascist. We learned about “Tricky Dick” Nixon’s
Watergate burglaries, his illegal war into Cambodia, and the development
of the COINTELPRO to destroy the black movement, and we declared that
he was fascist. We read about Gerald Ford’s stumbling, bumbling pardon
of Nixon, his cutbacks in affirmative action programs and environmental
controls, and some of us called him a fascist. We endured four years of
peanut-brained schemes and dreams, the revival of the Cold War, and the
murder of hundreds of black women, men and children in the streets of
this nation, under James Earl Carter. Some of us called him fascist. The
term fascist was used so often that many people no longer listened. As
in the fable of the boy who cried “wolf!”, many working and poor people
were ill prepared when the real thing began to materialize.
What we must
understand is that American facism will not look like anything the world
has seen to date. Under a fascist regime, no wall portraits of the
criminal Adolf Hitler will be in view. Mussolini and Juan Peron will not
re-emerge. In fact, the formal institutions of U. S. democracy, the
Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court, may still exist,
although radically transformed. Elections will still occur, commercial
television and the media will be broadcasting the same old garbage; the
rhetoric of New Right will be trumpeted from the heights of governmental
power and within cultural institutions, but the “appearance” of
normalcy will still prevail.
Fascism is not
necessarily a coup d’etat, or the overthrow of a formally elected
government by the armed forces, as in Chile in 1973. Under U.S. fascism,
in all probability, not a single soldier will leave the barracks.
Fascism, then,
must be understood in the U.S. as a covert, rather than overt,
transferral of authority into the hands of a very small fraction of
racist and capitalist elites. It is the final, desperate attempt of
those social forces to maintain their control over the economic and
social order, at the expense of constitutional democracy.
What is an anatomy of American fascism? What are the critical variables that may comprise the nexus of white power and economic dictatorship in this country?
To open by listing author Anis Shivani’s many
accomplishments — the prestigious journals where his work has appeared,
the awards, the accolades — would be to take up half my column-space.
Suffice it to say that Shivani, who writes short fiction, poetry,
criticism, and has his first novel coming out this fall, has been humbly
sharpening his craft here, in his adopted home, since the mid-90s.
What brought you to Houston? From where did you come?
By the mid-1990s I felt like I needed to get away from the
New England/New York bubble if I was ever going to become a “real”
writer. The decision to move to Houston, or any culturally
less-sophisticated place (which Houston was then, but is less so now),
extracted a heavy toll in terms of alienation, but it was a price worth
paying.
I wrote a tremendous amount of crap in the late 1990s,
making every literary mistake possible, but it’s an unavoidable process.
I must have written a million terrible words of fiction before anything
good came out. I had to overcome a tendency toward didacticism, because
I’d done a fair amount of journalism, and I also had to get past the
scholarly attitude and instead think like a writer. That started
happening when I cut myself off from academic ties, and tried to make
sense of writing from many different time periods and genres, as someone
in the 1920s or 1930s might have done in some bohemian enclave in New
York or Paris without the institutional support and grant money which is
the staple of the artistic life today. I acted as though the structural
mechanisms of writing didn’t exist, so I could discover my own style
without any pressure to conform. My writing would have been utterly
different had I not followed this idiosyncratic path. In the early years
I socialized very little, lived in a miserable ghetto, and spent all
day every day at the library; I couldn’t exert a fraction of that sort
of inhuman discipline if I wanted to now.
The conservatism of the South was a shock; I’d never
encountered such belief in faith, family, and homeland before, but I did
appreciate that the people seemed more “real” than the theory-besotted
pseudo-intellectuals in our bohemian capitals. I still appreciate that.
What do you think of the local literary scene? How
do you fit in (or not)? In other words, what is your place in the
local literary “scene?”?
The local literary scene is becoming more diverse by the
day. Different aesthetics can now flourish on their own without being
pushed by competing tendencies. The growing interaction of the broader
arts community with the literary community is an exceptional
development. The geographical concentration of artistic and literary
activity in a single district is also great, because such density is
helpful for organic evolution. Lately I’ve become worried though about
the accelerated gentrification of the arts district, which can damage
the critical mass that’s already developed. The neighborhood has barely
had time to take off before the vultures have swept in.
All kinds of fiction and poetry are being written here; you
can always start a group or movement to suit your tendency. I love what
Fran Sanders does with Houston Public Poetry, and I’m happy to be part
of it. It’s great exposure for KUHF’s Front Row to interview poets
reading in that series! The Mongoose vs. Cobra series run by Shafer Hall
brings in diverse voices from around the country; Houstonians should go
out of their way to support it. I’m thrilled to be reading at Kaboom
Books soon, as part of Steven Wolfe’s LitFuse series. There’s some
interesting literary event or other always going on. Brazos Bookstore
brings exciting writers almost every day. Poet Kevin Prufer has started a
series bringing in readers from far away. The Inprint reading series
has its all-time most impressive lineup this year, including Mohsin
Hamid in March, so all credit to Rich Levy. It’s exciting that a major
poet like Fady Joudah, who just won the Griffin Prize, lives in our
midst. Being part of this scene is very rewarding.
My one big reservation is the dominance of the UH creative
writing program, but I hope we’ve created enough of a base that their
hegemony is less threatening. It’s never healthy when a city has a
well-known MFA program that monopolizes every outlet and establishes an
exclusivist sense of hierarchy, based on the necessity of supporting
members of the in-group alone. This still happens-for example, the UH
clique’s tendency not to attend readings by anyone else outside their
own group-but there’s so much else going on that we can safely ignore
them.
I would love to see even more interaction between the arts
and literary communities. It would be nice to have more discussions, not
just readings of one’s own work, but this goes against the MFA
aesthetic of reciting one’s musings as though they were revelations from
on high, not susceptible to critical analysis. It’s time to take it to
the next level in Houston by becoming more collaborative and
sophisticated. The emergence of more informal salons, rather than the
usual established venues, would be welcome. This will all happen over
time. Much of what one experiences as “readings” hardly ascends to the
level of art, it is simply confessional/memoiristic outpouring little
touched by the subtleties of technique, but in a dynamic environment
there are ways to get past that.
Sometimes you use non-English words which may not
be familiar to all your readers (murshid, pehelwan, parathas, tamasha,
lathis, etc). Why do you do this? What is gained by this, and is it
worth it to risk alienating some readers to this end? (I also do this,
but I will refrain from sharing my reasons unless you want to know.)
Some literary agents have wondered about that in the past,
and I haven’t liked it. I always provide enough context within the
narrative to make sense of the unfamiliar vocabulary. It’s the lazy
reader not willing to invest in the concreteness of the world I’m
creating who gets so easily alienated. It’s a dead giveaway of someone
who comes to my work with a preconceived bias. The other common ones
are, “Your female characters are too strong” (a prominent agent on the
west coast told me that about Anatolia), or that “Your work is too real”
(a top editor felt that way about Karachi Raj).
The question often asked but rarely explored or answered is why the
Arab Middle East has remained quiet and on the sidelines as their fellow
Arabs in Palestine and Lebanon are being slaughtered. Although they
wield enormous economic clout that could be used to end the genocide,
they have chosen instead to be butlers to the United States and Israel.
When I observe Arab rulers who look to the United States to maintain
power, I am reminded of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act I,
Scene 2), when Cassius counsels his fellow senators, “The fault, dear
Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
For decades, Arab regimes have been subservient to the United States,
not due to fate, but because of their choices, which have often been
few.
The why of their decisions to serve foreign masters are many. Among
them are the drawing of manufactured boundaries by the victorious
imperial powers after World War I (1914-18); the imposition of foreign
state systems, and the occupation and exploitation of Arab land.
Because most of the Arab states were newly contrived by the imperial
powers, their political cultures tended to be the same. Political power
centers maintained by a ruler or ruling groups thrived, while political
communities (umma) did not. The rulers, chosen by the colonizers to
administer the nascent states, became the new oppressors of their own
people.
The carved up Middle East became a flea market for the victorious
British and French. They became the colonial draftsmen of the Arab
future, crushing Arab national aspirations and creating a legacy of
turbulence and instability that haunts the region to this day.
Under the Mandate System—an
internationally-sanctioned form of colonialism established in 1919 by
the League of Nations to administer Ottoman territories—Syria and
Lebanon were colonized by the French, while Iraq, Jordan and Palestine
by the British.
These territorial divisions, drawn to serve imperial interests, took
no account of regional ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. While
the mandate powers preached self-determination, they undermined its
practice, believing that the Arabs were incapable of self-government.
The British goal of transforming the Arab world into a superior version of British India was reflected in a famous line from
T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” in 1919, “My own ambition” he
said, “is that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion, and not our
last brown colony.”
Former Arab client states of the British, who would become American
clients after World War II, with borders imposed on them, had no
substantial unifying political culture on which to build viable
institutions.
In addition, their hopes for change and unity were overshadowed by
another foreign colonizer on their doorstep; one determined to steal
Arab land to create “Greater Israel”—“River to River” from the river
Euphrates in Iraq to the river Nile in Egypt and all the land in
between.
The case of Palestine was unlike the other post-war mandates. Support
for European Zionism became official British policy with the 1917 Balfour Declaration —Britain’s commitment to help establish a Jewish national home in Palestine in the heart of the Islamic world.
Soon after the British unloaded the Palestine quagmire in the newly
created United Nations and the General Assembly voted to partition
Palestine in 1947, both sides prepared for war.
The Arab states, many of which had just gained independence, entered
the war against Israel weakened and fragmented. Their humiliating defeat
in 1948 and massive loss of all of historic Palestine in the 1967 War
dealt a serious blow to pan-Arab prospects and convinced Palestinian
nationalists to act independent of their fellow Arabs.
Speaking in general terms, fascism, as it exists in Germany and
Italy, is one form which imperialism assumes in the age of wars of
redivision. The present chapter will be devoted to the elaboration of
this theme on the foundation of the theory of imperialism set forth in
the preceding pages.
1. The Conditions of Fascism
Fascism arises under certain specific historical conditions which are
in turn the product of the impact of imperialist wars of redivision on
the economic and social structure of advanced capitalist nations.
According to military and diplomatic usage, at the end of a war
belligerent nations are put into two categories, those on the winning
side and those on the losing side. The extent of the damage to the
internal social structure of the various countries, however, provides a
more significant basis for classification. According to the extent and
severity of the damage suffered it is possible to arrange the countries
in a series, ranging from those which emerge virtually unscathed or even
actually strengthened to those in which the pre-existing structure of
economic, political, and social relations is completely shattered.
Usually the nations on the winning side stand nearer the top and those
on the losing side nearer the bottom of the scale, but the correlation
is far from perfect.
It is not easy to establish criteria by which to judge the extent and
severity of the damage suffered by a country as a result of war, but
certain related symptoms would no doubt be widely recognized as
indicative: extreme scarcity of food and other necessaries of life;
partial breakdown of ‘law and order’; disorganization, poor discipline,
and unreliability in the armed forces; loss of confidence on the part
of the ruling class; and lack of regard for established habits of
thought and behavior among wide sections of the population. Conditions
of this sort are almost certain to give rise to revolutionary struggles
which may eventuate in a decisive victory for the counter-revolution; in
an overthrow of the existing structure of property relations and the
establishment of socialism—as happened in Russia in 1917; or in a
temporary stalemate in which neither of the major contending forces,
the working class or the capitalist class, is able to gain a decisive
triumph—as happened in Germany and, less unambiguously, in other parts
of central and eastern Europe in 1918 and 1919. It is the last case
which interests us here.
The fact that the revolution stops short of a socialist consummation
is, in a very real sense, the key to subsequent developments. What
emerges may best be described as a transitional condition of class
equilibrium resting on a foundation of capitalist property relations.
Juridically this balance of class forces tends to express itself in an
ultra-democratic state form, to which the name of the ‘people’s
republic’ was applied by Otto Bauer.* The people’s republic leaves the
capitalists in control of the economy but at the same time affords to
the working class a share in state power and freedom to organize and
agitate for the achievement of its own ends. The personnel of the state
apparatus is largely unchanged, but the weakness and unreliability of
the armed forces at the disposal of the state obliges the capitalists
to pursue a policy of temporization and compromise.
Drink Palestina currently offers four different flavors of sada as seen in the warehouse in Garfield, NJ, Friday, Nov. 22, 2024. IMAGE/Anne-Marie Caruso/NorthJersey.com
Customers reaching for a soft drink at restaurants
and markets in some ethnic communities may find that their options have
grown far beyond Coke and Pepsi.
Nowadays,
shelves are stocked with brands like the British-based Salaam Cola and
Drink Palestina, launched in July by three North Jersey businessmen.
After strong sales in Europe, the Sweden-based Palestine Drinks plans to
bring its products to North America in December.
In South Paterson, home to a large Arab American community, the cans have been hard to keep in stock, said business owners.
“It
did insanely well. It got the point where I was ordering a couple of
cases a week. People tried it and kept buying it,” said George Noury,
owner of Nouri’s Restaurant, who had run out of Drink Palestina cans
except diet and was waiting for a larger order.
The United States is the newest market for a bevy of soda brands that have grown popular in parts of the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe. Consumers are turning to independent soda sellers to support a boycott of companies they believe are aligned with Israel, amid outrage over war in Gaza and Lebanon and its attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Some are shunning major American companies altogether in protest of U.S. support for war.
Locally, customers said they were eager to support
products that spread awareness about Palestine and that also raise
money for charity. The soda companies have pledged to donate part or all
of their profits to organizations helping Palestinians.
Sandra
Haddad, a college student from Little Ferry, saw Instagram reels about
Drink Palestina and was glad to find it at R & M Halal Meat Market
in South Paterson. She grabbed the only flavor that was left — orange —
and took a swig from the can, adorned with a keffiyeh pattern and a
Palestine land outline.
“It tastes really good, like Fanta,” she said. “These other companies support Israel. We’re not going to be drinking it.”
PTB leader Peter Mertens (left) with the party’s MP Raoul Hedebouw
For the Marxist Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB), electoral success doesn’t come at the expense but because of building strong organisation.
While the PTB’s electoral performance has been encouraging, the party refuses to rest on its laurels and play politics according to the polls.
A
few metres from the North Sea, in the Flemish town of Ostend, the
Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB) celebrated its political comeback last
September with a major Manifiesta attended by 15,000 people. The
programme included a number of international guests, including British
MP Jeremy Corbyn, American trade unionist Shawn Fain and French
journalist Serge Halimi, as well as political, cultural and sports
workshops for party supporters. Throughout all the debates, there was
one common thread: reclaiming the heritage of Marxism and working to
rebuild it.
In this way, the PTB aims to be more offensive than the French
Communist Party (PCF), which has faltered and received weak electoral
results. Time after time, the radical left party has demonstrated its
growing capacity to organise the working class in various bodies, on the
model of the mass parties of the 20th century. Beyond electoral
campaigns, which are seen as just another way of politicising people,
the party’s president, Raoul Hedebouw, gave a clear reminder of the
PTB’s objectives: to “awaken class consciousness” and to enable “the
people to structure themselves, against atomisation” in order to
“materialise counter-power”.
A Party That Cannot Be Ignored
While the PTB has become a major party in Belgian politics,
there is still much to be done. In the elections on 9 June — when
Belgians elected their national, regional and European MPs — the PTB
made new progress. It sent a second member to the European Parliament,
went from 12 to 15 seats nationally and considerably improved its
representation in the Brussels region and in Flanders, going from 11 to
16 and from 4 to 9 elected members respectively. For the first time, the
party was even consulted by the King of Belgium with a view to joining
the government, although this was quickly ruled out by all the other
parties.
As such, the PTB had good reason to celebrate this successful
campaign. Its grassroots mobilisation in Flanders undoubtedly helped to
divert part of the working class from voting for the far right, which
had been predicted as the winner in this part of the country for several
months. While the Vlaams Belang (Flemish pro-independence far-right)
has long been established, the PTB (known as the PVDA in Flanders) has
succeeded, at the cost of a great deal of investment by and into its
militants, in embodying an alternative for voters angry at the status
quo. By placing second in Antwerp, the major port city in the north, the
party even surprised in a city often described as a bastion of the
right.
The only fly in the ointment was a slight setback in Wallonia, where
the left as a whole lost votes as a consequence of a successful campaign
led by the Mouvement Réformateur (right) and its ambitious president Georges-Louis Bouchez.
Admittedly, the PTB had focused particularly on Flanders this year in
order to rebalance its forces across the country, which was essential
for it as the only party defending Belgian unity. However, major
mobilisation efforts will be needed to regain a foothold in Wallonia,
which, although it does not have a far-right party, has been seduced by
the rhetoric of an increasingly conservative MR that has skilfully
reappropriated the ‘value of work’ by pitting workers against the
unemployed. According to the Right, the Socialist Party is deliberately
keeping these people on welfare, thereby securing an electoral
clientele.
