"Each generation," Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth , "must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it." This quotation has been one of my maxims for years, a way to structure not only my activist/organizing work but also my intellectual labour as a philosopher. While it is indeed the case that every activist and organizer must necessarily abide by this maxim––to discover the mission of the conjuncture, as difficult as it might be, and to work to fulfill this mission rather than betray it––because this is what organizers do by definition, such a maxim is often lost on philosophers. Indeed, in more than a decade of blogging here I have written multiple posts on the delusions of academic philosophy . Even still, I am continuously struck by the ways in which philosophers cannot live up to this maxim by failing to discover their generational mission and thus, due to this failure, betraying it without even realizing the betrayal. S
In the weeks following Trump's defeat in the 2020 US Election the mainstream media has been obsessed by his unwillingness to concede, his intentional spreading of lies about election fraud, and the MAGA partisans' belief that their commander in chief is still the real president. Once again the term "unprecedented" is being thrown around, as it has been since 2016, and the electoral circus we have been subjected to for two years into his regime (the entire spectacle of primaries and the eventual culmination of the Sanders phenomenon ) shows no sign of ending. You would think that, by this point, pundits would realize that something is deeply wrong, and has been so for a very long time, with settler-capitalist democracy––especially since they have been croaking this adage about "unprecedented" for four years despite being shown some very stark precedents within this time. Precedents that, if these pundits bothered to study anything beyond what they've been