The revolution will not be sponsored by your third world unity sweatshirt

Don't do it for the culture

I want to preface this newsletter with an apology. In October I posted about going to see Beyonce on tour. I posted that newsletter when the IOF had begun its October attack on Palestine. I posted it because, even though I had read the news that day, writing about the experience of going to see Beyonce still felt important. How deeply wrong I was. Over the next few months we watched Beyonce (the brand yes, but also the person) refuse to pull viewings of her Renaissance tour movie in Occupied Palestine. As hundreds of Israelis danced to Break My Soul, I thought of my last newsletter and felt a deep amount of shame. Surely my politics and praxis were not lining up at the moment when I chose to write about Beyonce while people were losing their homes, land and families. I took some time off this newsletter to think about what kind of writing I would like to devote myself to. Since then, what is important to write about, organize around, and give space to, has come into sharper focus for me.

Now that we’re here, we may as well use Beyonce as a jumping off point for this letter. Some people will say that Beyonce is an embodiment of resistance. She draws from many elements of African American culture and celebrates black power and persistence. Hence her decision to support the IOF is sad, yes, but has nothing to do with the military industrial complex or the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Beyonce is at worst adjacent to the problem, some will allow, but never the problem itself. I’m not here to criticize anyone who listens to Beyonce, but lately I’ve been wondering how this idea of resistance holds up. Is someone who makes known, endorses, or distributes ‘culture’ really advocating against the intertwined forces of patriarchy, capitalism and neoimperialism?

Over the years I will admit I’ve become a big sceptic of the cultural argument in general. Finding refuge in culture is a step too close to cultural purity for me, which is a step too close to these are our values and traditions beta, so sit down and speak when you’re spoken to. This newsletter is called Modsquad after all, so you can draw your own inferences from there. But yes, let’s start from this point of what I believe is a healthy skepticism of culture and lead up to how arguments of culture fall short in offering us revolutionary praxis.

When I say culture here I’m referring to how we’ve come to use the term almost as shorthand for talking about music, food, clothes, literature, art and wish to emphasise why this is a problem. The main point of culture is never about what is actually being created or produced, but what that thing says about a certain group of people, their lives and ecosystems. Two parties always win when we glorify culture. By glorifying culture we are thinking of it as something stable or fixed inherent to x group of people. Say we loosely define culture in the most apolitical way possible - all this tradition, values, ‘ancient’ knowledge etc etc, we can still see that culture is never a stable or fixed category. People change, hence ‘cultures’ change and that is the simple truth of it. So who then benefits from proclaiming that culture is fixed? That the traditions or values/ideals of certain groups of people have never and will never change? The foremost groups that come to mind are patriarchs, racists, proponents of caste and class. The historical relationship between regressive groups and culture cannot be dismissed so easily. Cultural arguments have always benefitted those who wish to keep our societies as unequal as possible.

Who else wishes to keep our societies unequal? The second biggest fan of culture is capitalism. In our hyper capitalist world, proclaiming something as culture or cultural is admitting that it has the potential to be commodified. An important aside: of course music, art, food, fashion, literature etc are created by people, and many people create these things in order to build practices of resistance. However, again, because what we have come to call culture is not a stable or fixed category it also cannot remain the same once it travels past a certain point. What happens once these tangible ‘signs’ of culture are out in the world, subject to multiple readings and impositions, is that they become vulnerable to the workings of capitalism. They require capitalism to shape, endorse, distribute, and are transformed into commodities. I’m not saying that other readings and meaning makings of these modes of resistance are impossible, but I am saying that because we live under capitalism and rely on capitalism in order to access these modes of resistance (sold to us as culture or cultural), we therefore engage with them as commodities. Food as an act of resistance becomes a way to get reel shares and likes, music as an act of resistance becomes a way to sell tickets (and overpriced drinks), fashion as an act of resistance becomes an convenient and thoughtless way to separate oneself from fascists. Everything is so easily and quickly interpreted as commodity that modes of resistance are never allowed to realise the full arc of their power. In this way the music, art, literature, food of oppressed and marginalised peoples, created to offer them and us alternate possibilities for life and living, are always immediately diminished under capitalism.

This might be a good time for us to ponder over who has ‘culture’ and who does not. The West is generally regarded as lacking in culture, the only culture it has is what is brought over by immigrant communities. The East on the other hand is the home of culture. In Pakistan it is widely proclaimed that we have nothing except our (historically patriarchal, and now also capitalist) culture. This culture that is inherent to us, but can be shared through food, music, clothes and so on. Food is a big one, perhaps the least sensitive in these trying times. In a partnership with Google Arts & Culture, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy has created a digital museum of Pakistani food meant to showcase the diverse culinary heritage of the country. Coca Cola sponsors countless Pakistani food bloggers as they traverse the streets of Karachi and Lahore in a bid to find the best pakoray or authentic Bohri food or biryani prepared Hyderabdi style, washing it all down with a thandi thandi Coke. This is soft power at its finest. A reification of commodifiable ‘culture’ that goes hand in hand with the continued world dominance of corporations like Coke and Google. Not only this, but Coke and Google are effectively seen as heroes for helping to preserve and protect the cultured ‘East!’ This CSR bs they’re pulling via preservation of ‘culture’ also distracts from how, say, Coca Cola directly profits from Israel’s occupation of Palestine, or how Google’s Project Nimbus provides the Israeli govt + military with cloud services, allowing for further surveillance and displacement of Palestinians. A win for capitalism AND a win for imperialism! Honourable mentions go to lean in style feminism via SOC plus patriarchy, casteism, racisim because remember that whenever culture is reified, regressive groups inevitably profit in one way or another.

Relatedly there is in the West and yes, in the diaspora, even though I don’t want my work to deepen the divide between those-of-us-who-live-in-South-Asia and those-of-us-who-do-not, but the fact remains that there is a (somewhat understandable) yearning for this ‘culture’, right? that many who live here do not have because they are stuck in the keechadh of living here and romanticization is not so high up on their list of priorities. And of course there is a commodification of this yearning too. Club nights in big cities that seek to decolonize the dancefloor, two hundred dollar sweatshirts with Urdu or Arabic printed on them (which I do not recommend wearing on a trip back home, please see what happened to this woman here) and of course there are always high end fusion food type places - What I’m trying to say is there are many entrepreneurs that have made identity politics, imperial resistance, decolonisation, and third world solidarity part of their brand identity. To buy a piece of this ‘culture’ that we are commodifying, they are saying, is to then be a part of resistance, decolonising, third world solidarity and alt world building. But this is simply untrue. Not only is this untrue, it is also antithetical to true revolutionary praxis. To the building of the future that we must embark on as we let go of the ideas of the past that have been sold to us.

How do we recognise each other under capitalism? We are constantly told that the world is shrinking and that we have never been closer to one another. Yet we have no real access one another except through an unabashed consumption of each others supposed cultures. The truth is that we haven’t done the work of being close to one another, and that work lies beyond the culture machine. It lies beyond trying each others food, buying each others art, listening to each others music. Yes these interactions are important and necessary for us to feel connected, but in a capitalist world these experiences necessitate being bought and sold and so this becomes nothing more than a glass ceiling solidarity.

There is no greater evidence of this glass ceiling solidarity than how many entrepreneurs have responded to the IOF’s continued attacks on Palestine. DJ collectives putting on Global South disco nights continued to sell tickets, claiming that they would play Palestinian music all night and provide space for people to grieve / educate themselves. Food bloggers filmed sponsored reels in which they cooked Palestinian food, promising half the proceeds would go to aid in Palestine, even though we all know that most aid has been stuck in Egypt for months now. Art shows that claim to center POC, condemn the War on Terror, and reject the white gaze may have said a few words in support before resuming their extremely profitable business of selling. Fashion houses priding themselves on reinterpreting South Asian heritage and whose clothes are endorsed by many people masquerading as progressive merely posted a link to donate to relief and recovery for Gaza’s children while also posting on IG about how Timothee Chalamet, who is clearly a Zionist, wore their clothes. The list goes on. Even in a country like Pakistan, where solidarity with Palestine is uncontroversial, our ideas of showing this solidarity have been woefully limited to selling clothes, selling prints, selling tickets to funnel into the aid abyss.

All this to say, when culture is our only understanding of each other and capitalism is our only recourse, that leads us to where we are now.

Finally, I say all this not because I think food, clothes, music, art, literature are unimportant. I say this as an ardent lover of these things. I say this because if anything I believe in their power, their ability to resist. I believe in the people who make them. We will make them again. We will remake them. We will never be without them. But we should also refuse for them to become commodities. We should question their production, we should be skeptical of how they are being distributed, we should notice who endorses what and why. We cannot allow for the art we create to fit neatly into a culture making and selling that masks who our enemies truly are.

In the end, reifying culture leads us down a dangerous slippery unwieldy slope. Where do we stop? Can we really pick and choose? Do we then also hedge and hmm around the parts of culture that are obviously patriarchal, casteist, classist, racist, because, as many of us have recognised, the ‘West’ is also no bastion of freedom? No, let’s all bffr for once. The reason that the diaspora/local, East/West divide is something we really need to move on from is because patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism have touched every single corner of the world. There are no ancient traditions, there is no ideal past, there is no going home, no easy escape from any of it.

Instead we must look to the future and to do that first we must do the hard work of recognising one another beyond capitalism, beyond the images of each other it is trying to sell us. This is where our revolutionary praxis must begin.

I rarely talk about religion on here, but there is a post I share on IG every Ramzan that serves as a fitting end to this letter.

From the river to the sea. Ramzan Mubarak, everyone.