'Run this town'

reposted from the Duke Chronicle column by Michael Stauch

"Only thing that's on my mind / Is who's gonna run this town tonight"-Rihanna, on Jay-Z's "Run This Town."

Since October 2008, the world has undergone an economic crisis on a scale unknown in over half a century. With it, all the accepted wisdom of textbooks, of professors and school administrators, of public figures great and small and of official society more generally, has been thrown out the window. Never in our lifetimes has there been a crisis so total.

Everything is up in the air, and everyone is searching for answers. How will society be governed? According to what economic principles? Based on what social contracts, between whom and with whose consent? Most importantly and succinctly, who is gonna run this town tonight?

All around us, forces both left and right are emerging and, in the wake of the collapse of official society's legitimacy, providing answers to these questions.

In the streets of Iran this summer, a democratic movement of students, workers, white-collar professionals and others brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the authoritarian Iranian regime to its knees. Recently in the rainforests of Peru, a militant movement of indigenous people forced Peru's Congress to repeal its efforts to privatize the Peruvian Amazon. On the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique this spring, lengthy general strikes won significant concessions from the French government. More locally, laid-off Latino workers occupied the Republic Windows factory in Chicago, winning severance pay from Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, and highlighting the hypocritical logic of a government bailout that saved huge banks from bankruptcy while threatening ordinary folks with destitution.

Although these struggles seem random and unrelated, they are embers of a common fire, flung far and wide by years in which the flames of freedom have been trampled on. Together, they suggest one answer to the questions we face today-a society organized from the ground up, committed to justice and freedom and ready to fight back.

But victory is by no means certain. The forces of darkness are also on the march, and they have answers of their own. In recent elections to the European parliament, far right and anti-immigration parties made historic gains at the expense of liberals and social democratic parties. Two members of the conservative British National Party in the U.K. were elected to the European Parliament. A right-wing nationalist party in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders' "Party for Freedom," took second place in national elections. In Hungary, the far right Jobbik party is organizing a right wing militia with insignia reminiscent of the uniforms World War II era fascists wore while sending hundreds of thousands of Jews to death camps.

In the U.S., right wing violence is on the rise against immigrants, abortion rights advocates and Jewish people, or simply those that like to visit Holocaust museums. Just down Tobacco Road, the nationalist student group Youth for Western Civilization has also revived fascist-era symbolism-the Italian "fasces" on which the word "fascism" is based-in their logo, while also bringing anti-immigration speakers like Tom Tancredo to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's campus. Somewhat further afield, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement is planning a national conference in Greensboro, N.C. this weekend, seeking to draw in fascist supporters from across the U.S.

Although by no means a complete picture, these developments also suggest an answer to the problems facing our society today. That answer represents not a vision of a new society, a new social order, but the continuation of the status quo, a ratcheting up of the barbarism of the world we've known so long, a reversion, even, to the bloodiest and most violent era in human history-the 20th century, a century that knew genocide on a greater scale than any other, and a time when the greatest of human achievements were applied not to the advancement of human freedom but to the greatest destruction of human life.

And yet, we live in a time of great promise. People are questioning the old order on an unprecedented scale.

In an era when the old visions of social order have come crashing down, the question before us is, "Who's gonna run this town tonight?" The answer is up to us, and depends on our actions today.

Michael Stauch is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in history. His column runs every other Friday.