(Counter)Insurgency in the Entangled History of Racial Capitalism, Colonialism, and Fascism

• In Event: Collective Organizing and Scholarship for Social Justice

Abstract

It’s not uncommon in academia for so-called radical scholars to say that wherever there’s domination one is surely to find resistance. It’s also not rare for liberals and conservatives to have a skewed perspective on insurgencies and the ways in which they should be handled through counterinsurgency or “special operations.” For the most part, the term insurgency in the US has a negative connotation, especially when an insurgency emerges from Black and Indigenous communities, as well as other historically oppressed peoples.
What’s not so common is admitting that counterinsurgency greatly depends on those who should otherwise form part of an uprising or insurrection. The greatest enemies of a revolutionary movement come from within. Those who one would expect to hold more radical positions instead offer their services to counterinsurgency. Reactionary forces in colonial and neocolonial contexts are easily activated when signatories—and aspiring signatories—of a centrally gendered racial-colonial capitalist system of domination and exploitation perceive that the privileges they’ve attained through violence will be stripped away by the insurgents who have a stronger claim of what has been denied to them for far too long.
It’s not surprising that radical movements and the knowledge produced therein are often captured within the gradualist liberal framework of institutional reform. This liberal frame constitutes and limits what is politically possible, which portrays more militant anti-State action as against liberal notions of change. All that matters is small incremental gains to maintain rather than subvert and destroy a racial-colonial capitalist system that views and treats the global majority as disposable. Liberal counterinsurgency maintains the disposability of others while portraying itself as transformative, thus religitimizing liberalism’s racial-colonial possessive individualist annihilatory logics of dispossession, criminalization, anti-Black violence, and carcerality.
I thus trace the historical archive of counterinsurgency to evince the varying ways the university and academia in general, particularly the broker intellectual class, have served dominant interests. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the complicity of the Western(ized) university in shielding Israel of all criticism, not to mention the criminalization of dissident faculty, staff, and students, demonstrated with universities collaborating with ICE (e.g., Johns Hopkins University) to arrest and deport international students who have spoken out and organized against the genocide in Gaza. The counterinsurgency we’re seeing today can be unveiled with the hypocrisy of liberal academics suddenly worrying about rising fascism’s attack on democracy and education, disassociating once again from yet another undeniable fact: liberal silence, indifference, moral apathy, complicity, and active participation in genocide is intimately linked to the fascist problem they’re just now recognizing (which Black radical thinkers have interrogated in relation to colonial and racial domination). This form of counterinsurgency finds expression in even the most “progressive” circles where pseudo-solidarity always outweighs direct action.

Author

• Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech University