Musa W. Dube writes that the Jesus of the Gospel of John must be understood in the context of Roman colonialism and modern day imperialism:

Western academic biblical readings, therefore, tend to read the Johannine texts, and other books of the Bible, as if they only refer to ancient times and having nothing to do with our current world.  The reluctance to cross the borderline of the ancient setting and to assess how the biblical texts, together with such texts as Heart of Darkness and the Aeneid, inform contemporary structures and power of the world…is one way in which biblical studies are not only colonized, but become a colonizing body of knowledge.  Biblical studies vigilantly guards the boundaries, insisting on reading biblical texts without assessing or relating them to modern and contemporary world politics.  For the most part biblical texts are read in isolation from other secular works of literature.  Whether this is intended or not, this approach maintains and perpetuates the imperialistic power of the West over non-Western and non-Christian places, peoples and cultures.

…I therefore hold that the Johannine approach to exalting Jesus to divine status, above all Jewish figures and above all other cultural figures of the world, is a colonizing ideology that is not so different from the ideology of the Aeneid and Heart of Darkness.  More importantly, John’s colonizing ideology calls upon academic readers to go beyond just expounding and explaining the construction of John’s text.  Rather, readers are called upon to decolonize its ideology and to work on readings of liberating interdependence between Christians and Jews, One-Third World and Two-Thirds World, Western and Non-Western, Christian and Non-Christian cultures, women and men, etc. (Dube, 131-132)

Source

Dube, Musa W.  “Savior of the World but not of This World: A Post-Colonial Reading of Spatial Construction in John.”  In The Postcolonial Bible edited by R.S. Sugirtharajah, 118-135.  Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.

Sociologists Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith write about race relations and white evangelicals:

The racially important cultural tools in the white evangelical tool kit are “accountable freewill individualism,” “relationism” (attaching central importance to interpersonal relationships), and antistructuralism (inability to perceive or unwillingness to accept social structural influences).

…

Absent from their accounts is the idea that poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation.  Again, understanding evangelicals’ cultural tools illuminates why this element is missing.  White evangelicals not only interpret race issues by using accountable freewill individualism and relationalism, but they often find structural explanations irrelevant or even wrongheaded…Evangelicals are thus also antistructural because they believe that invoking social structures shifts guild away from the root source—the accountable individual.  However, evangelicals are selectively aware of social institutions—they see those both impact them in their own social location and tend to undermine accountable freewill individualism.  For instance, they are aware of affirmative action because such programs can impact them in their social location, and they tend to oppose such programs because they go against evangelical understanding of accountable freewill individualism. (Emerson and Smith, 76, 78-79)

Source

Emerson, Michael O. and Christian Smith.  Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

In his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, written in 1936, economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) stated:

[T]he actual phenomena of the economic system are coloured by certain special characteristics of the propensity to consume, the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital and the rate of interests, about which we can safely generalise from experience, but which are not logically necessary.

In particular, it is an outstanding characteristic of the economic system in which we live that, whilst it is subject to severe fluctuations in respect of output and employment, it is not violently unstable.  Indeed it seems capable of remaining in a chronic condition of sub-normal activity for a considerable period without any marked tendency either towards recovery or complete collapse.  Moreover, the evidence indicates that full, or even approximately full, employment is of rare and short-lived occurrence.  Fluctuations may start briskly but seem to wear themselves out before they have proceeded to great extremes, and an intermediate situation which is neither desperate nor satisfactory is our normal lot…The same thing is true of prices, which, in response to an initiating cause of disturbance, seem to be able to find a level at which they can remain, for the time being, moderately stable. (Keynes, 249-250)

Sources

Keynes, John Maynard.  The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1964.

Quoted from John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Monopoly-Finnance Capital and the Paradox of Accumulaiton,” Monthly Review 61, no. 5 (Oct. 2009): 1-20.  http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=44371140&site=ehost-live (accessed November 2, 2009)

Antonio Gramsci

P. Kerim Friedman reviews Peter Ives‘ book Gramsci’s Politics of Language and the connections between Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) and Antonio Gramsci:

In Bourdieu’s early work with Jean-Claude Passeron, we find the term “the cultural arbitrary” used in a way which seems quite similar to Gramsci’s concept of normative grammar: “In any given social formation the cultural arbitrary which the power relations between the groups or classes making up that social formation put into the dominant position within the system of cultural arbitraries is the one which most fully, though always indirectly, expresses the objective interests (material and symbolic) of the dominant groups or classes.” In developing this concept, Bourdieu draws upon William Labov’s early work which showed that “members of a speech community can share allegiance to the same standard, despite differences in the (nonstandard) varieties they themselves speak.” Bourdieu’s work with Passeron serves to highlight how the educational system institutionalizes these arbitrary standards; thus naturalizing the success of the elite who are socialized into these norms before they ever set foot in school. Unlike normative grammar, however, the phrase “cultural arbitraries” reveals a lingering Saussurian structuralism. The specific content of the dominant cultural or linguistic form is less important for Bourdieu’s theory than the mere existence of an arbitrary standard which is recognized as legitimate even by those unable to perform it.

…

Gramsci’s historical method serves to highlight the cross-class alliances that stabilize in any given “historical bloc”-a phrase that refers to the “complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures” and corresponding “relations of production.” The hegemonic ideology of any given bloc does not simply reflect the interests of only the ruling elite, but also those of the other classes with whom they have entered into alliances and even the very process by which that alliance took shape. For instance, even though America’s financial elite share a generally secular libertarian ideology, the conservative movement was able to succeed by combining elite interests with those of evangelical southern white Christians. This has its roots in post-Civil War Reconstruction and in the “Southern strategy” adopted by Nixon’s Republican party in the wake of the civil rights movement. Choices regarding hegemonic cultural forms are not arbitrary nor do they simply reflect the cultural forms of the elite. They are the product of the “complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble” of a given historical bloc. While Bourdieu may tacitly acknowledge the importance of such processes, his theory of the “cultural arbitrary” retains its structuralist roots. (Friedman, 361-363)

Source

Friedman, P. Kerim.  “Ethical Hegemony.”  Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 3 (July 2009): 355-365.

Heidegger, writing human kind’s relation toward death and our future possibilities, states:

In anticipation of this possibility it becomes ‘greater and greater’; that is to say, the possibility reveals itself to be such that it knows no measure at all, no more no less, but signifies the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence.  In accordance with its essence, this possibility offers no support for becoming intent on something, ‘picturing’ to oneself the actuality which is possible, and so forgetting its possibility.  Being-towards-death, an anticipation of possibility, is what first makes this possibility possible, and sets free as possibility. (Heidegger, 307.  Sein und Zeit, 262)

Source

Heidegger, Martin.  Being and Time.  Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.  London: SCM Press Ltd., 1962)

The mines of Serra Pelada by Sebastião Salgado.

Jean-Paul Sartre writes:

Engels was right to say that very often, when two groups engage in a series of contractual exchanges, one of them will end up expropriated, proletarianised and, often, exploited, while the other concentrates the wealth in its own hands.  This takes place in violence, but not by violence: and experiencing exchange as a duel in this way is characteristic of the man of scarcity.  Though the result is appropriated in violence by the dominant class, it is not foreseen by the individuals who compose it. (Sartre, 153-154)

Source

Sartre, Jean-Paul.  Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume I: Theory of Practical Ensembles.  Edited by Jonathan Rée Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith.  London: New Left Books, 1976.

Julkipli Wadi, in the book The Moro Reader, writes:

It can be said thus that there are, at least, four major strings of control that operate in the Moroland; namely: (1) U.S. colonialism (historical, unclosed); (2) Philippine colonialism (direct; relative to Moros); (3) multilateral colonialism (geopolitical, strategic and economic interests; corporate globalization); and (4) current U.S. colonialism (war on international terrorism; “second coming”)…What can be generally stated this time is that when the Philippine Republic took over in 1946, the status of Moros became “neocolonial” with respect to the Philippines but “doubly colonial” in relation to the Philippines and the United States.  It is because when the United States absolved Moros’ sovereignty and transferred it arbitrarily to Filipinos in 1946 and even earlier, the Philippine Independence did not necessarily close American colonialism in Mindanao and Sulu.  What happened is that the mode of U.S. control was simply transfered to Filipinos and thence became indirect and continued to operate by proxy. (Wadi, 22)

Source

Wadi, Julkipli, “Multiple Colonialism in Moroland” in The Moro Reader: History and Contemporary Struggles of the Bangsamoro People.  Edited by Tuazon Bobby M and Oscar Evangelista.  Philippines: CenPEG Books, 2008.

In the introduction to Critique of Dialectical Reason (which in America was published separately as Search for a Method) Sartre wrote:

If philosophy is to be simultaneously a totalization of knowledge,, a method, a regulative Idea, an offensive weapon, and a community of language, if this “vision of the world” is also an instrument which ferments rotten societies, if this particular conception of a man or of a group of men becomes the culture and sometimes the nature of a whole class-then it is very clear that the periods of philosophical creation are rare…If this movement on the part of the philosophy no longer exists, one of two things is true: either the philosophy is dead or it is going through a “crisis.” In the first case there is no question of revising, but of razing a rotten building; in the second case the “philosophical crisis” is the particular expression of a social crisis, and its immobility is conditioned by the contradictions which split society.  A so-called “revision,” performed by “experts,” would be, therefore, only an idealist mystification without real significance.  It is the very movement of History, the struggle of men on all planes and on all levels of human activity, which will set free captive thought and permit it to attain its full development. (Sartre, 6-8)

Source

Sartre, Jean-Paul.  Search for a Method.  Translated by Hazel E. Barnes.  New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

Peter Caws writes that Jean-Paul Sartre was not as opposed to structuralism as the media made him out to be:

Even in the Marxist period, though, the period of overt criticism, there is evidence of Sartre’s convergence with Structuralism.  Marxism, along with psychoanalysis, literary theory, history, and anthropology, was of course one of the recognized domains of Structuralism in its moment of glory, though, as we shall see, this is not as significant a fact as we might at first be tempted to think.  As far as that goes it should be noted that Sartre has some claim to contributions in each of these other fields as well: existential psychoanalysis; What Is Literature?; the long preoccupation with history in the Critique and the third volume of the Flaubert; the “structural anthropology” of Search for a Method.  This last looks like a clear candidate for a Structuralism of his own, and under some reserve I shall accept it as part of an eventual package.  The reserve derives from two observations: “anthropology” here does not mean Levi-Strauss’s discipline but rather what has come to be called “philosophical anthropology,” while “structural” turns out to be structurelle rather than structurale; if this contrast of suffixes is construed as parallel to Heidegger’s usage (of existentiell in opposition to existential) we would have to read Sartre’s “structural” as connoting activity rather than system. (Caws, 294-295)

Source

Caws, Peter, “Sartrean Structuralism?” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre edited by Christina Howells.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.