Ghassan Kanafani and the Co-Optation of Radical Thought

On March 11, 1968, Ghassan Kanfani delivered a speech later translated under the titled Thoughts on Change and the ‘Blind Language’. Although his focus was not academia, many of his arguments against what he called “blind language” could easily be applied to examine how academic knowledge production, including institutionalize radical theory, can be wielded to give an appearance of transformation while in reality the concepts employed by so-called radical academics are emptied of their political aims in the present. That is to say, theories and concepts are uprooted from the material contexts and struggles that created the conditions of possibility for said theories and concepts to emerge in the first place. Once institutionalized, theories are refined like any other extracted resource, repackaged, and commodified. The illusion of change is sold and consumed, replacing concrete struggles for language that dilutes and defangs radical discourse, reducing it to liberal notions of social justice, equality, and representation.

Kanafani made it clear in his speech that the “most significant words” have lost all meaning because they have been stripped of their historical specificity and relation to struggles for liberation. Despite their historical significance, concepts thus no longer signify concrete social relations, institutions, processes, and modes of resistance. Every writer and intellectual, according to Kanafani, is individually concerned with assigning their own meaning to concepts without contextualizing them within their historically specific material conditions, using instead their “private understanding…that had no consensus and which thus meant nothing.” Words such as revolutionary and socialist may very well be used and widely disseminated but they are not necessarily tied to material reality and the movements, including armed resistance, seeking to destroy the material systems of domination and exploitation, such as racial capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Kanafani urged us to re-evaluate concepts so that they can be given “definite and meaningful specificities”, which means that concepts must necessarily be grounded in the concrete struggles and in the social reality in which these struggles unfold. The “total absence of meaning in discourse”, as he put, has led many astray, convincing them that radical language in and of itself, particularly when disassociated from social reality, can lead to revolutionary action. The use of radical terms rather than an insurgent praxis (thought, action, and reflection) is all that matters.

In this sense, radical terms can very well be used by any individual but these tend “to conceal his own impotencies or to hide his intentions. We now have a lore of blind language that has managed to empty discourse of any effective value, making it possible to employ it for contradictory aims at one and the same time.”

The “exploitation of language” is what Kanafani saw as one of the counterinsurgent weapons used by the dominant class who hide “behind a cloud of words” and at the same time hide their impotence in thinking clearly and incisively about material reality. This “incantatory thought”, as he referred to it, may very well seduce people to believe that change is possible but in reality the use of certain terms “replaces clarity with sound and disguises the absence of a goal with ringing words that satisfy the emotionality in the depths of us all without ever illuminating a vision” of a concrete political project. This in turn creates “a sense of security for those who are frightened by change, and provides a curtain of fog over the movement that they truly fear.” On the one hand, discourse, even if radical in content, may serve the interest of the dominant class when its form is purely aesthetic. On the other hand, social movements risk becoming influenced by an empty discourse lacking a genuine revolutionary commitment that is both unwavering and militant.

Kanafani asks, “if language is the means of the exploiter, what then can serve as the defense of the exploited? And if the exploiter goes beyond the exploitation of language used to obtain his own objectives, then what is to be the strategy for the exploited?” This question not only points to epistemological concerns but more importantlty to a necessary praxis that is not reduced to the production of knowledge, theory, and concepts alone. Decolonial theory, especially the way it has been consumed, diluted, and defanged, shows a tendency to reduce radical change to epistemology. Other theories are also not immune to becoming what they claim to be against. I mention this to assign historical specificity once again to the theories that may lose sight of and detach themselves from concrete struggles of liberation once confined to academia.

In the face of the genocidal imperial and settler colonial projects of the US and Israel, the above question guides us to realize that we cannot write our way out of domination, exploitation, and dispossession. It forces us to ask Lenin’s revolutionary question, “What is to be done?”

What is to be done during the ethnic cleansing of immigrant communities in the US, the policing and incarceration of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, the geopolitical reconfiguration of imperialism and fascism with “Making America Great Again” leading the way, the criminalization of protests, and the increasing surveillance and counterinsurgent technologies within and beyond academia?

Although the institutionalization of radical thought has been critiqued for quite some time now, it is only within the context of the genocide in Gaza where the contradiction between academic knowledge production and material commitments to liberation have become more heightened. We all perhaps could make a list of colleagues who have built their careers on the most radical traditions, including anticolonial and decolonial theory, yet have stood idly by while university administrators called the police on students, faculty, and staff protesting the genocide in Gaza and the university’s complicity and active participation in it. There’s no need to discuss this point any further since it has already been addressed in previous posts and by others such as the Resistance Archives who accurately examine the quiet capture of academics. They write:

Liberation is talked about often—in classrooms, in books, across social media - but the material struggle behind those words has faded. Those who suffer most under capitalism are trapped in survival, forced to navigate a system that leaves them little time or space to organize. Those with enough comfort to study revolution, to imagine something different, often find themselves unwilling to risk what they have. Comfort turns into a quiet form of captivity… the people with enough stability to think about change are often the ones least willing to risk it. Comfort, even when it is modest, becomes a quiet captor. A steady job, a roof over your head, access to healthcare, the chance to own a home, the easy promises of consumer goods; these things are dangled as proof that the system can work if you just play by its rules… Consumerism has replaced the dream of collective freedom with private ambition, and solidarity has been traded away for individual survival. The fear of losing what little you have becomes stronger than the anger at injustice…

Fred Hampton was certainly right to say that “Theory’s Cool, But Theory With No Practice Ain’t Shit”. The Resistance Archives and A. Tahrir (2025) echo this point and write in detail that,

In the heart of the West, revolution survives mostly in theory. It is debated in universities, passed around in books and podcasts, thrown into slogans and branding. But without material sacrifice, theory is nothing… In a society where even rebellion can be marketed and sold back to us, the sharp edge of revolutionary thought is dulled. We live in a world where outrage is not a threat but a product. Anger is turned into spectacle. Radical words are packaged into careers, personal brands, and performances that leave real power untouched… Talking about liberation replaces fighting for it. Revolution becomes something we consume, not something we build. Without the willingness to step beyond discourse into action, even the most sophisticated analysis collapses into another pillar of the system it claims to oppose… In Palestine, the idea of revolution has never been an academic exercise or a lifestyle choice. It is a necessity born from survival, faith, and an unbroken connection to the land… Revolution in Palestine is not romanticized. It is survival. It is faith carried through generations, collective memory made flesh, and the unbreakable refusal to be erased… If revolution is to have meaning again in the heart of empire, it must move beyond theory and reclaim the courage to sacrifice. It must confront the fear that clings to comfort, the fear that survival will be harder if we resist. True change has always demanded risk, loss, and the willingness to stand firm even when the ground shifts… Comfort is not freedom. It is the quiet reward for obedience, the gilded chain that binds potential to stagnation. The examples of struggle from places like Gaza remind us that when everything is stripped away, what remains is not despair but an unbreakable will to live with dignity. Revolution demands that we remember what matters beyond survival and beyond comfort. It demands that we live, not just speak, the struggle we claim to believe in… We cannot theorize our way out of the chains we are too afraid to break. We cannot speak of struggle while defending the small comforts handed down by the very system we claim to oppose. Every privilege that binds us is a weapon turned against the world we say we want to build. Empire does not fear our anger. It fears our willingness to give up everything we were taught to hold sacred. To fight for the future demands that we let go of the illusions that tie us to the present. It demands a life lived with clarity, with courage, and without apology. (para. 9-12; 14; 18-20)

As the genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran continues, we must therefore position ourselves clearly and militantly. We must continue to organize and disrupt the spaces that we know will one day forget that they, too, justified, enabled, and participated in genocide and imperialist wars. We know that those who remain silent today will one day write books and articles on genocide and imperialism but only after the fact. In the present, we cannot become what Rabea Eghbariah (2023) referred to as the “scholars [who] tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent” (para. 7). To act and write with urgency, we must refuse to play the careerist and opportunist game academia loves to play as the world burns around its ivory towers. Mohammed El-Kurd (2025) states, that they will one day lecture the world about genocide and the war against Iran in the past tense when in fact they said and did nothing while it unfolded for their unwilling eyes to see. These vultures, as El-Kurd labels them, are in our midst. We can probably picture one or more colleagues who are unbothered by genocide or even rejoice that there will finally be a “regime” change yet will likely write about it when the literal “dust settles”—when the bodies buried under the rubble are reduced to footnotes in yet another published book, when making land acknowledgements can be made on Palestinian land without consequences. These vultures will one day romanticize what they once condemned, what they did not defend, and what they enabled through their silence. They will not only romanticize the past but also depoliticize, mystify, and commodify it. El Kurd (2025) states that these “vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh” (p. 2) so that the past can be frozen in time in some museum. That’s exactly how counterinsurgency works.

We must, therefore, heed Kanafani’s call to avoid incantatory thought and re-inscribe concepts with political content that is both historically specific, praxis-oriented, and militant. Or, as Bassel al-Araj expressed, “If you don’t want to be engaged – if you don’t want to confront oppression – your role as an intellectual is pointless.”