IT’S DIGNITY STUPID

NOW FREE: While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon.

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In an interview for Italian TV from 1980, Louis Althusser mentions football (soccer) as an example of Communism, of a small Communist area that already exists in our reality (his other examples are religious communities, trade unions, and some cells of a Communist Party):

“Look at how football is played, what happens? It’s not about market relationships, it’s not about political domination, it’s not about ideological intimidation. There are people from different teams that oppose each other, they respect the rules, that is, they respect each other. Communism is the respect for humankind.”¹

Althusser knows well this is not the social reality of big football clubs and competitions: they are deep in market relationships (billions changing hands), political domination (just recall Trump’s manipulation of FIFA), and ideological intimidation (the use of football to assert national unity – due to my total ignorance of football, I was often designated as a non‑patriotic traitor). However, he is far from being naïve: he just correctly notices the emancipatory core inscribed into the very form of football – market, politics, and ideology are parasitizing on this core.

And my idea is that Mamdani’s demand that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested if he visits New York should be read in a similar way. Mamdani is well aware that our justice system, national and international, is deeply corrupted and biased; however, he is no less aware that the demand for justice should not be dismissed because of these facts, and that when (as an exception, as it were) some legal body does its proper duty, it should be unconditionally supported. Mamdani begins with a simple and clear description of facts often avoided by our big media:

“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people. He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people; for the maiming of tens of thousands of children, as those who survive undergo amputation without anesthesia; for the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers, denying newborns even the chance to live; for the countless people he starved as he blocked food and humanitarian aid from reaching them; for the gunning down of hundreds of aid workers and journalists. And just last month, the U.N. confirmed that Palestinian children continue to be deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli armed forces — more than eight months after the so‑called ceasefire. The list goes on and on, all as we, as Americans, pay for the bombs that do the killing. There is a reason the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest.”

What follows is a simple and straightforward logical implication of these facts:

“It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant. And I want to be equally clear: Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large. While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon. And we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people. That is my commitment to you.”²

The first reaction of a common cynical reader is, of course, that Mamdani is playing a naïve game: he is making an empty gesture, knowing well that nothing will happen to Netanyahu even if he slowly walks on Fifth Avenue for a whole hour (except for being bothered by some protesters and protected by police). His aim was just to gain attention and assert himself again as anti‑Israeli. However, while it is true that in a formal sense Mamdani made an empty gesture, I think that in the concrete situation this gesture was very important. The ICC, the only universal criminal court, issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu with a large majority of votes, and the warrant also includes key figures of Hamas (who were already killed by Israel). While Israel and the US practice the policy of killing or arresting the leaders of states which are in conflict with them, measures which are not grounded in any legal frame, they ignore internationally recognized legal decisions which should bind them. If we don’t talk about this publicly again and again, such a situation will be – and already is – gradually normalized. The silent reasoning that will prevail is: “Let’s be realists, let’s accept the way things are instead of losing time with impossible demands!” What should worry us here is not Israel but its military executor, the US. Like Russia, the US is run by a big war criminal; on top of it, the US allows itself to be used by another country to fight its war:

“Israel’s far‑right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has described the renewed US war on Iran as the ideal outcome for Israel, provided Israelis do not have to fight it themselves. ‘Israel has no interest in joining the campaign – the current situation is the best for us,’ Smotrich said.”³

If the ICC were to be really autonomous and consistent, it should add Trump to the arrest list. But what we should worry about even more is the hypocritical role of most European states which, while in principle supporting the ICC decision, do everything possible to avoid a situation in which they will be compelled to enact it. What they do is like agreeing that a well‑known criminal should be arrested but collaborating with the criminal to make sure he will not be arrested. Such a role unequivocally deprives the European states of the minimum of their dignity – and the topic of dignity is crucial here. In his statement, Mamdani talks about the defense of “humanity and dignity” – what the best humanitarian organizations within the existing order can offer is humanitarian help which as a rule deprives people receiving help of their dignity. Just recall the humiliation people in Gaza were submitted to when they were receiving humanitarian help – it was as if the distributors of this help put its receivers into a forced choice: you may get some help on condition that you are ready to lose your dignity.

It is not noted often enough that dignity is the key demand of today’s protests everywhere around the world. On July 23, 2026, a strange letter appeared in the UK: “A group of 120 millionaires in the United Kingdom have asked the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to increase taxes on the ultra‑wealthy, saying they are willing to pay more so that the country can reinvest back into its people. In a ‘Proud to Pay’ letter released on Thursday, the millionaires, including sports broadcaster Gary Lineker and actress Julia Davies, told Burnham: ‘As millionaires we have a clear message for you, our new Prime Minister: tax us. We are proud to pay and here to stay.’”⁴ I think one should move beyond simple moralistic or utilitarian interpretation of this demand: it’s not just the result of a utilitarian calculation (if people are not taken care of, they will rebel and cause disorder) or of a moral self‑awareness (it is the duty of the rich to provide welfare to the majority). We should rather recognize in this demand a sign of the awareness that people do not live on bread alone, that they also deserve to be treated with respect. Recall the motto Bill Clinton used in his electoral campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid!” Today, we should rather say: “It’s dignity, stupid!”

And, at a totally different level, the same goes for the big protests that exploded in India in July 2026, with the protesters ironically designating their acts as “cockroach protests” (a defiant reaction to the fact that the minister of education called protesters cockroaches).⁵ The protests brought together Hindus and Muslims, women and men, and they are carried out in a non‑violent Gandhian way, just with a non‑Gandhian spirit of irony and comedy – say, when the protesters encounter a police barrier with water cannons, they ask the policemen to shoot water at them and then dance in the shower. Their enormous achievement is that they broke the spell of Modi’s Hindu nationalism: they devastated its ideological hegemony, people now laugh at it openly, they are no longer afraid of Modi and his state power even if they are beaten by the police. The cockroach protests gave patriotism a new spin: hundreds of public figures are declaring that for the first time in more than a decade they are proud to be Indians. So these protests should be supported unconditionally and with full enthusiasm, but also with the full awareness of their limitation. What happens if they win and Modi’s regime crumbles? In the best case, a new party (or coalition) will take power (probably the old secular Congress Party), but the big problems which cannot be dealt with in this way will remain. However, what we should emphasize here is that what sustains the cockroach protests is also an unconditional demand to be treated with dignity by the state power. The comic form of the protests shouldn’t deceive us: they are not a comedy but a very serious movement to restore the dignity of common people.

Although totally different in their form, the cockroach protests and Mamdani’s declaration are part of the same global movement. Their target is the system which, unlike Althusser’s football team, doesn’t respect its own rules. And one should avoid here the pseudo‑Leftist trap of evoking the need for “symptomal reading” of the corrupted and biased legal system, triumphantly claiming that corruption and bias are not contingent deviations but the dark underside of the system itself. Although this is in principle true (up to a point, at least), it makes even stronger the emancipatory feeling when we compel the state to ignore its bias and follow its principles. Recall the origin of the notion of human rights: yes, when first formulated they were biased, silently privileging white rich men – however, instead of rejecting the notion of human rights as ideological mystification, was it not much more productive to gradually erase this bias and expand them to women, the poor, other races…? Each of these steps, even if not fully actualized, provided women, slaves, etc., with full human dignity. And the same goes for Mamdani’s declaration: it provides the victims of war criminals like Netanyahu with full human dignity and thereby makes it much more difficult to ignore their plight. As Ernst Bloch once said⁶: “People do not live on bread alone – especially when they do not have it.”

1

2. https://www.democracynow.org/2026/7/23/omer_bartov_on_gaza.

3. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-minister-says-current-us-iran-war-best-us-will-not-join.

4. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/23/more-than-100-uk-millionaires-ask-new-pm-andy-burnham-to-tax-them-more.

5. See Arundhati Roy’s comment on “Democracy Now,”

6. Or rather wrote – see https://www.academia.edu/43724972/Heritage_of_our_times_Ernst_Bloch.