Capital's Doppelgangers

“The Peaky Blinders,”Seasons 1-5

This BBC/Netflix series is one odd duck – edgy, violent, politically involved and quite hostile to the British secret service.  Pounding British rock and folk music is used in each episode – even Black Sabbath doing ‘War Pigs.'  At its center is a charismatic Birmingham gangster and Romani gypsy Tommy Shelby and his family – Polly, Arthur, Ada, John, Finn, Michael, along with their wives and husbands.  There was a real gang in Birmingham called the Peaky Blinders – named because their hats came to a peak over one eye.  But the real Peakys were penny-ante criminals in the 1880s, not these hardened and brilliant murderers of the 1920s.

Here they come, walkin' down the street...

The reason is nearly every man in the series survived World War I in one way or another, so they know military skills, guns, bombs, tunnel-digging and the like.  Grenades and machine guns are no stranger to them, nor is digging bullets out of flesh. They have a class hatred for those officers who did not fill the trenches and sat in the back lines, and solidarity among themselves because of the war.

The Peaky Blinders go from gambling and fixing races at horse tracks to running gin and whiskey even to the U.S., then on to owning factories and producing vehicles for the English military, trying to launder their gains into legitimate businesses.  Tommy gets himself elected to the House of Commons as a Labour Party member, even while trying to smuggle opium to the U.S.  Born on a canal boat, Shelby ends up in a massive manor house in the country.  Everyone else in the family gets a big house too, though they still go back to the gypsy caravan at times.  In the process the thug Tommy Shelby becomes an agent of the British crown working for Winston Churchill.  He informs on the Birmingham Communist Party, though he has a close relationship with some of its members, including his own sister.  He also informs on the IRA and lastly on the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, an aristocrat and founder of British fascism.

In a sense, this is similar to the series “Deadwood,” which shows the progression from crime to capitalist success – primitive accumulation even in the 1920s.  The effect of the October 29, 1929 market crash on the Shelby’s wealth is severe, which shows to what extent they were integrated into the larger capitalist economy.

Oswald Mosley - British Fascist doing his best Hitler

The series involves conflicts and compromises with a Jewish gang in London; a war against an Italian gang in London and later, the U.S. Mafia; against pro-fascist Ulster Protestant gangsters from Scotland; against local rivals.  These bloody conflicts lead the Shelbys to suffer bouts of depression, PTSD, drinking, rifts, anger and deaths.  Almost every scene involves a glass of Irish or Scotch whiskey and later, cocaine and laudanum.  The British secret services (Section D – and the Economic League) blackmail Tommy into killing for them.  The latter protect Mosley from the gang’s attempts to assassinate him, as Section D sympathizes with the fascists.  A deal with some arrogant White Czarists to smuggle military tanks out of England for the Russian civil war has the finger prints of British intelligence over it.  It almost gets Tommy killed, per usual.

Tommy believes in nothing but making money, but he also has a soft spot for the Birmingham working-class.  He funds two orphanages, eventually gives equal raises to his male and female workers and ‘allows’ the Shelby women to play a large role in Shelby Co. Ltd’s deliberations, especially Polly, the ‘gypsy queen.’  One of the local Communists marries his sister Ada and he ends up trying to protect him.  There are certain current references – an obnoxious priest who is a pedophile; Mosley’s platform is stated as ‘Britain First!’ much like Brexit; a solidarity for the British working class, gypsies and Jews against prejudice.  The British General Strike of 1926 is portrayed evenhandedly.

The head of a Jewish gang in Camden Town, Alfie Solomons, speaks in a thick cockney accent and rakes anyone over the coals hostile to Jews.  He’s hilarious.  “Littlefinger” Lord Baelish from GoT shows up as a killer for the Shelby’s and prospective husband to Polly.  Adrien Brody appears as the sinister leader of a Mafia hit squad and Sam Neill as an ominous Ulster-based intelligence detective.

“Peaky Blinders” is another glorification of the anti-hero typical of modern gangster films.  Tommy is handsome and well-dressed, appearing in the same dandified golfer’s cap, 3-piece suit and watch fob in nearly every scene, as do the rest of the Peakys.  He sleeps with every woman he wants. He is also thoughtful and sometimes kind, but bosses everyone around constantly.  Violence is his métier for ‘making people listen’ - which he has to do frequently.

The glorification of human and clever gangsters is an on-going theme in many capitalist films and television shows.  In fact this theme is so overwhelming as to be deeply significant.  The handgun pointed at someone’s head (frequent in this series) seems to be the star prop of our degraded capitalist culture.  This bloody fascination breaches normal money-grubbing.  It appears as the dark side of the same ‘legitimate’ economy that the rich dominate every day – its shadow, its almost literal doppelganger – hinting that crime and capital are inextricably combined.  The difference is the obvious violence, a violence hidden under normal capitalist functioning but always there beneath the surface.  Churchill’s embrace of the Shelbys cements this link.

As Al Capone said:  "This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we seize it with both hands and make the most of it."

But it is more than that.  It advertises a route out of the under-class for the poor and downtrodden to essentially rise in class status - even if you have to use violence.  Criminals sometimes dress well to announce their higher role, as the Peaky’s do.  In the old days, both gangsters and businessmen wore suits, which is telling. When the criminals side with the majority, as in marijuana or booze provision, they become heroes. Even robbing predatory banks or casinos seems heroic, as everyone with their head on straight hates banks and knows casinos are a con. (See 2016’s “Come Hell or Highwater” about robbing modern Texas banks.) Thuggery and crime are glamorized to the indigent, to immigrants, to the outcast in place of social revolution. This glorification of crime is in essence a social and material diversion for a part of the working class.

“At the base of every great fortune is a great crime” seems to be the link, a saying first suggested by Honore Balzac from “Le Pere Goriot” in 1834 but later reported on at a London dinner in 1912. This was followed by many similar quotes afterwards, including in “The Godfather” and in C. Wright Mills’ “The Power Elite.”  Of course Marx also understood this idea, as his theory of ‘primitive accumulation’ makes clear.   Balzac’s exact translation was:  “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.”    Which is exactly how the Shelby family function.

Other reviews of streaming series below, use blog search box upper left:  “Game of Thrones,” “Deadwood,” “The Golden Age,” “Treme,” “Fargo,” “Damnation,” “Bad Cops,” “Mayans,” “Rebellion,” “Handmaid’s Tale,” “Comrade Detective.”

The Kulture Kommissar

November 29, 2019

Political Neglect...

What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?

I lived in two small towns for a total of 13 years as a kid, so I have not forgotten these areas.  14% of the U.S. population lives in rural areas.  Thomas Frank, in his famous book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” pointed out that rural areas in Kansas were getting hammered by neo-liberal capitalism and still thought guns, gay marriage or abortion were the key issues to be concerned with.  This while rural and small town hospitals, farms, schools and businesses were closing or going bankrupt, and while young people left for the city.

Ghost town in Texas

That was 2004.  15 years later and the situation in the rural and small town U.S. is even worse. Farms have continued to increase in size as smaller farmers and ranchers bail.  Farm bankruptcies have increased, especially during Trump’s present trade war, while loan delinquencies are increasing too. Both are the highest since 2011.  Farmer suicides are up. The meth and opiod drug epidemics are hitting these areas especially hard, while obesity is high and life expectancy is lower than urban areas.  Doctors and dentists do not want to practice in places with a shrinking population and no money. Rural schools are smaller and more limited, so the education they provide is of a lower standard.  Schools are consolidating, so children have to go longer distances.  These areas still do not have adequate fast internet.  Bus service has disappeared so everyone is overly-dependent on cars and gasoline.  Of course, the poorest rural regions are in the Mississippi Delta, the Rio Grande borderlands, reservations like Pine Ridge and the hills of Appalachia.  Nearly all of these are predominantly non-European Americans.

Corporations like Monsanto dominate the seed and pesticide industry and sue anyone they want while Wal-Mart destroys small local businesses.  Wages are low, poverty is increasing, unemployment is up and the population is aging.  Land prices are high, so young farmers have difficulty buying in.  Farm equipment is extremely expensive, driving debt. Year after year the U.S. Farm bill and subsequent federal aid is dominated by corporate agriculture, which is true even for Trump’s present trade war ‘aid’ program, giving 60% of the aid to the upper 10% of farms.  Towns with one manufacturing or food processing plant lose it to robotics, Mexico, the U.S. south or overseas.  Some small towns do not even have sewage treatment plants.

·        13,000 total farms disappeared in 2018.

·        95% of poverty in the U.S. is in rural counties.

·        Since 2005, 120 rural hospitals closed and 673 more hospitals were vulnerable to closure, especially in the U.S. South and areas with unhealthy populations.

·        Since 2005, 2,700 rural schools have closed.

·        Bankruptcies are up 24% this year. (Farm Bureau)

All this while the view of what is desirable food is shifting in the U.S., though not in rural areas.  The recent bankruptcy of milk producer Dean Foods and its court sale to Dairy Farmers of America (a milk oligopolist) is proof of this.  So is the protection of hog waste lagoons, the hiding of animal cruelty and the rabid fight against meat, milk and cheese substitutes.  Agriculture in the U.S. is still mainly based on plant monocultures and heavy pesticide use; antibiotics routinely given to animals; artificial fertilizer; destructive industrial cow, hog and poultry industrial ‘harvesting’; intensive technology; ground-water depletion; heavy carbon inputs; cheap migrant labor and corn grown for gasoline and animal feed, not humans.  Just eating at small town cafes tells you the story – the quality is low, the food is retro based on fat, salt, sugar and heavy meat.  It is like the 1950s never ended.  And yet they did.

Medicare for All won't work if there is no hospital

Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp have had ‘Farm Aid’ concerts since 1985, yet charity efforts have not stemmed the tide. What rural areas need is a revival of left-wing farmer and land populism, not right-wing culture wars from the same people that are destroying the rural U.S. This revival will be more difficult than the days of the Farmer’s Holiday (Iowa), the Farmer-Labor Party (Minnesota and Wisconsin), the Non-Partisan League (Dakotas) or the southern Tenant Farmer’s Union in the 1930s.  This is because the number of small farmers is far less. As an example, the present Farm Bureau has been captured by large corporations, large farmers and large ranchers.

The only increase in small farming is in agro-ecology, organic, vegetable, bison, marijuana and hemp farming, along with indigenous ricing.  These farms use lower acreages than the large farms dominating the rural U.S.  The other positive increase is the development of wind and solar farms, which also might push farmers to the left.  There are still organizations and unions for farm and food workers, as well as Latino and ‘black’ farmers, along with indigenous reservations, which have their own plans for land, animals and food.

Interestingly, the 1850 Communist Manifesto had points about these issues.  It called for “improving the soil under a common plan;” reducing the division between town and country and spreading out populations concentrated in urban areas.  It also called for socializing land – taking it out of the hands of market profiteers.  Moving to a kind of agro-ecology agriculture, which is part of the basis of organic farming, is one way to re-populate and revive the rural U.S.  It is more labor-intensive, produces healthier food, has a much lower carbon footprint and is less destructive to the soil, workers, animals and ecology.  Large corporate farms could be broken up slowly, as studies show smaller farms are actually more productive, replaced by cooperatives and a restored 'commons.' Local plant closings can be stopped through tough labor action. If rural areas move to the left, that will direct government funds to public hospitals and school systems in these areas.  Corporate America has planted itself in large cities, demanding you move there.  Just as they concentrate profits in their pockets, they concentrate people near their offices.

These ideas are outside the typical template of Big Ag, which is the real source of misery in the rural U.S.  Farmers are typically contract slaves to Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Dole, Tyson – name your big Ag conglomerate.  Or in debt to expensive farm equipment manufacturers –Deere & Co., Case, Caterpillar - all based on mono-cropping. So why love your bosses?  Reports indicate that 40% of farm income this year is coming from federal or state government welfare payments, much of that going to the largest corporate farmers and ranchers.

At some point there will come a break in rural areas and small towns.  Underpaid local workers who have lived under the thumb of local businessmen, along with some small farmers and small businessmen may realize they have been conned by the Republican Party and Democratic Party centrists, the farm elite and the corporate monsters.  The soil and environment suffer from pesticides, artificial fertilizers and mono-cropping; the water quality and quantity decrease and they themselves fall further into economic and social trouble.  Whether any left populist organization or political candidate captures this sentiment is another matter, as most do not have a real program for the rural U.S.
P.S. - on 1/6/20, Borden Dairy announced its bankruptcy.

Other reviews on this topic below, use blog search box, upper left with these terms: “Foodopoly,” “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism,” “Damnation,” “Salt, Sugar, Fat,” “Land Grabbing,” “Behind the Kitchen Door,” “Farmer-Labor Party.”

 
Red Frog

November 25, 2019

Universal Emancipation

“Like a Thief in Broad Daylight – Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism,” by Slavoj Zizek, 2019

This is another ‘far-ranging’ Zizek thought-muffin, giving just enough to chew on.  He tackles the present sad state of the Left; ‘post-human’ rumblings of direct computer-human implants; disastrous identity and multi-culturalist politics and also the current Me-Too movement; old 1930s -1940s Ernst Lubitsch movies and their hidden sexuality; and lastly nationalism, war and nuclear weapons.  He retains his fascination with Lenin and Hegel while contradicting conventional clichés and on occasion, himself.  Freud and Lacan retreat into the distant background while Trotsky seems to be having a renaissance. For Zizek, besides liberals and Trump, Stalinism remains the biggest cruel ‘joke’ on the Left.

Zizek’s goal is world-wide revolutionary and universal emancipation.  The ‘non-Marxist’ again references Marx dozens of times. This book creates Marxist straw-men he can knock down, attributing positions to Marx he did not have.  So I’ll use his 'psych' method.  This position seems to be almost psychological – his philosophic revolt against ‘big daddy.’

I’ll bullet-point some more obvious parts of the book so you get an idea of what it contains:

     1.     He sees the Shanghai Commune, ended by Mao, as a model to supplant corrupt parliamentary ‘democracy.’

     2.     Science is needed for profits, but the capitalists do not want it applied to society.

     3.     “Capital is openly disintegrating and changing into something else.”

     4.     Bill Gates admitted capital could not deal with climate change.

     5.     Zizek thinks China is capitalist, but then admits that a “non-capitalist state could have strong elements of capitalism.”  I.E. he’s confused about China.

6.     He throws shade on typical liberal ideas of migration, instant land reform or the ‘romanticization of refugees.’  As I noted years ago, refugees of whatever kind do not really want to leave their home countries, so the key issues are actually war, climate change and economic collapse.

7.     He thinks the main task of trade unions is retraining workers for new jobs, which is a Democratic Party attitude.

8.     Some ostensibly right-wing governments institute social gains, as in present-day Poland.

9.      The transitional programs of the Communist International and the 4^th International are invisible to Zizek.

10.    Tech and IT workers now have immense power if they follow Trotsky’s strategy in the Bolshevik seizure of power – control of the technical levers of capital prior to any political seizure.  As a consequence, Zizek thinks the web is now ‘the most’ important commons and controlling it is the struggle for today.

11.     Biogentics is his name for superseding the purely human with computerization contained in the human body.  I.E. a ‘terminator’ like being, a plan of the ‘cognitive-military complex.’  This he calls ‘post-humanity.’

12.    He’s against pay for housework, because he thinks it just commodifies another area of life.  In that vein, the Communist Manifesto pointed out that ‘patriarchy’ had been dominated by capitalism.  At the same time, Zizek understands that women are now in the forefront of many emancipatory struggles.

13.     Of course automation would be a key part of socialism – allowing less work, not unemployment and starvation as in the present system.

14.    Zizek has a long section on the film “Blade Runner 2049” which goes nowhere that I can tell.

Zizek's hero and cadre of the Greek KKE in St. Petersburg, Nov. 2017 (CGG)

15.      In discussions of Lenin, he shows that revolutionaries are in a completely new situation with no clear roadmap.

16.     Lenin’s “April Theses” and “State and Revolution” broke through the inertia and tailism of the Bolshevik Party.

17.     Identity politics opposes the universal.  Republican “white Identity” politics are the mirror image of Democratic Party identity politics.  Yet class cuts across them all.  Zizek: “The only reality is the universal capitalist system.”

18.     Making the right ‘diabolique” (La Pen, Trump, Orban etc.) is actually a strategy to keep out the Left.  New capitalist parties (I.E. Macron and Five Star, etc.) are signs of weakening capitalist politics.

19.     Tax havens, like slavery, are integral to late capital.

20.     Europe carries the enlightenment and French Revolution values of post-national universality, which must be advanced against liberal ‘tolerance,’ religious fundamentalism and capitalist nationalism.  Europe could lead the way in getting rid of the dollar as the dominant global currency.

21.    He opposes an alliance between Western ‘leftists’ and ostensibly ‘anti-imperialist’ political Islam.  He calls it ‘an ideological abomination.’

22.    There are instances where two emancipatory issues collide, which is the difficult nature of class struggle.

23.    The British embraced the caste system in India by law.

24.   “Catholicism offers a devious stratagem to indulge in our desires without having to pay the price for them.”

25.     Deception is now out in the open.  (Trump et al…)

26.     Sexual contracts are mostly unworkable.  Manners are not matters of law.

27.     Zizek looks at the films “La La Land” and “Black Panther.”  His analysis of Black Panther follows a traditional Marxist line (I beat him to it…) while pointing out that at the end of the film the reviled revolutionary Killmonger / Eric becomes a bit of an anti-hero.

28.     Modern millionaire liberal comics (Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, John Oliver, etc.) merely ‘dust the balls’ of the ruling class – they do not actually threaten them.

Again, the title of the book only touches on what it’s partly about, as every Zizek book is really about the same thing – revolutionary emancipation from capital, its ideology and its culture in a somewhat unique, dialectical and quirky way.

Prior reviews of Zizek books, along with others referenced, use blog search box upper left: “Living in the End Times,” “Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?” “Violence,” “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” (All by Zizek) “Black Panther,” “October,” “The Struggle for Power – Russia in 1923,” “A People’s History of the Russian Revolution,” “Maoism and the Chinese Revolution, A Critical Introduction,” ‘What Can You Say About Bill Maher?” “Multi-millionaire Comedians,” "Blade Runner 2049."

And I bought it at May Day Books, where we carry a deep bench of Zizek.

Red Frog

November 21, 2019

Notes From the Underground

“Parasite,”film directed by Bong Joon-Ho, 2019

This comedic horror film has a large buzz going for it.  It is similar to “Get Out” and Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You," as the villains are all upper-class people.  Here a South Korean family in Seoul, the Kims – father, mother, older son and daughter - work at folding pizza boxes to make a living.  Their living is so sad they try to negotiate with the young pizza store manager for a higher piece rate.  The four of them live in a crowded basement apartment and none of them has any other job.  None of them has a higher education and seem clueless about how to improve their situation. They can’t even fold the boxes properly.

Class in South Korea

But the tide turns as a rich friend who teaches English to a girl from a wealthy family, the Parks, offers his job temporarily to the son, Ki-woo.  The Parks are a typical upper-middle class family – a beautiful modern house designed by a top architect; a young neurotic wife who has no skills except shopping; a bored daughter; a spoiled little boy who has the run of the house and the corporate father, smug and aloof.  He doesn’t want anyone to ‘cross any lines.’ 

The class system is very apparent, unlike most films.  The South Korean working-class and the noveau-riche upper classes have had little in common since the founding of South Korea.  So in the film we already detest the Parks and their damn house, which becomes a symbol of the difference between classes.  In one terrible scene, the Kim’s basement apartment is flooded by heavy rains, wrecking everything, and the Parks are completely oblivious to what happened to them.  The Park’s house did not get a drop inside and this is certainly a parable of climate change.  Even odor plays a role.  The Kim family has a stale and unpleasant ‘smell’ that is noticed by the Parks, who do not live in a moldy basement penetrated with cooking smells.  The Kims have to discuss using different soaps to hide their family identity.  So far, so good as a class –conscious film.

Eventually the whole Kim family get jobs with the Parks – the uneducated daughter as an ‘art therapist’ to the spoiled son, the unmotivated father as an excellent chauffeur, the quiet mother as a versatile, sophisticated cook.  To do this they hide their family relationship and push out the staff who already work for the Parks through clever tricks.  All of a sudden the somewhat buffoonish family is absolutely excellent at everything they do, including their deceptions.  Even not looking while driving is a skill the father has mastered.

So who are the parasites?  In Marxism, the upper-classes are parasites on the working-classes, as the latter do all the work which is then partially appropriated by the rich through profits and surplus value, rent or interest and dividends.  But in this film it seems the workers are parasites, duping the Parks while getting prior workers fired, acting like fleas on a dog. Yet the Kims still do all the work for the Parks as part of the servant economy.  We can marvel at their sudden cleverness but at the same time they show almost zero class solidarity, just a desperation foisted on them by living in a capitalist system. Dog eat dog; worker eat worker.  But they do outsmart the Parks, especially the befuddled wife.  That is the main source of the humor.    

Then the story takes an odd twist.  After the Park’s go on a camping trip, the Kim’s engage in a celebratory night of drunken partying in the Park’s glass and steel house.  Suddenly they are not so smart.  They do not anticipate the Park’s returning early.  They make another ‘small mistake’ by letting the former housekeeper they replaced into the house, as she has somehow forgotten some of her personal stuff in the basement.  And here it becomes not a real story of class conflict, but a tense horror show. 

I won’t describe the rest of the film except to say that it further reflects the desperation brought about by the South Korean class structure, which damages both workers and the rich into acting in abominable and bloody ways.  As an example, South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world for persons under 40.  Analysts report that internet use has atomized a good part of the population. As would be predicted, in this film the Kim family end up in an even worse position, giving the notion of ‘notes from the underground’ a new meaning. The creepy last act left me thinking this film failed in its potential and went for a cheap, sensationalist ending, transitioning from believable to unbelievable and in that, pulling its final punch.    

Many other films are reviewed below from a left point of view.  Use the blog search box in the upper left with the words ‘film’ or ‘television’ or ‘movie.’  The film “Get Out” is reviewed.  Also the book "The Servant Economy"  Use the word "Korea" to find books on Korea: "King of Spies," "The End of Free Speech," "The Grass," "The Vegetarian."

The Kulture Kommissar

November 18, 2019

Art for Peace's Sake

Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975 – Minneapolis Institute of Art through Jan 5, 2020.

This exhibition contains over 100 works by 58 artists who challenged the apolitical styles of abstract expressionism, pop and op art in the 1960s and 1970s.  They saw art as connected to social and political reality, not the simple manipulation of color and form leading only to ‘cool’ aesthetic contemplation.   This is why they focused on one of the most important issues of the day – the American war in Vietnam.  Nearly all of this art is anti-war, as most young artists opposed the war.

A paralyzed U.S. vet paints his life after the War.

Many forms of art are represented in the show – photography, installations, painting, prints and posters, performance, dance, conceptual, street theater, collage, newspapers.  There are a significant number of women artists - in fact it is quite surprising how women artists hated this war.  One even made a picture she considered to be the most ‘ugly’ she could, based on GI bathroom graffiti, reflecting their anger.  Chicano, indigenous, veteran and darker-skinned artists are also represented, as are artists from other countries who moved to the U.S.  Organizations like the Chicano Moratorium, Artists and Writers Against the War in Vietnam, Black Emerging Cultural Coalition, the Artworkers Coalition and Consafo have art in this show.  

Some famous names pop up – Yoko Ono and John Lennon; Judy Chicago; Claus Oldenburg; Ed Paschke.  Reviled figures like LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, Robert McNamara, Madame Nhu and Richard Nixon are pilloried.  Napalm, defoliation, executions, blood and death are the theme of course. 

Some of the notable work:  A living room with a TV showing the day’s death count in Vietnam.  The famous “War is Over – if you want it” poster by Ono.  A swearing and angry painting by Bernstein, a feminist.  Photos of anti-war activists being arrested and photographed.  “Big Daddy” – a large painting of a line-up – a KKK thug, a soldier, a cop, a butcher and ‘big Daddy’ sitting in the middle with a bulldog on his lap.  A deformed Nixon with a club-foot.  A monumental torn canvas of Vietnamese civilians hiding from U.S. soldiers.  “A Medal for Johnnie” by Chapin, in which a grotesque LBJ pins a medal on a dead soldiers chest, while Hubert Humprey grins like a idiot in the background.  “Mudman” – a Viet vet walks up and down 17 miles of Santa Monica boulevard dressed in red Vietnamese mud and sticks.   A massive picture of the injured, by Trevino.  A portrait of McNamara trying to make sense of the illogical.  LBJ as a Texas cowboy.  Ed Paschke’s “Tet” about the Tet Offensive in 1968.   A ‘democratic’ bomb being forced down the throat of a man. 

At the end there are some sensitive pen and ink portraits by NVA and Viet Cong artists, collected by Dinh Q Lě.  Unfortunately there are also portraits of Laotian Hmong collaborator generals, who worked with the CIA.  Their presence evidently shows pressure from the local St. Paul Hmong right-wing.  The main Plain of Jars in Laos was bombed to smithereens by U.S. aircraft, which evidently did not upset the Hmong generals hiding in the hills. 

 This show is free to veterans and their families.  It runs through January 5, 2020.

To read other reviews of art shows below, use these terms in the search box at the upper left:  “Hermitage,” “Tate,” “Street Art,” “Museum of Russian Art,” “Minneapolis Institute of Art,” “Walker Art Center,” “Desert of Forbidden Art,” “Art Basel Miami” and “Biennale Arte di Veniza.” 

The Cultural Marxist

November 15, 2019

The Cowboy Way

“This Land – How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West,” by Christopher Ketcham, 2019

Ketcham is a reporter and backpacker who knows the western U.S., especially the ‘intermountain west,’ intimately well.  He lived in Escalante, Utah for a number of years near the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument that was recently decimated by Trump, and so is able to tell that story. This book tracks the continued raping of the public commons and nature in the west by ranchers and their cows and the government agencies, bureaucrats and politicians in league with the ranchers.  The Utah-based Mormon religion plays a role in proclaiming that man must dominate nature, as the majority of local politicians are Mormons like Orrin Hatch - which perhaps makes Utah a theocracy!  Timber, oil and gas-fracking companies have piled in with the ranchers and are rarely denied government permits.  Added to this are the collaborationist fake ‘Green’ groups that partner with the destroyers.   It’s not a pretty picture.

CONTINUING ENCLOSURE of the COMMONS

Marxists have understood for years that ‘the destruction of the commons’ in England (and other countries) was part of the way capital developed and still develops – by enclosing public agricultural and forest land as private, owned by landlords.  The operative word is ‘develops.’  What many don’t realize is that this process is still going on in the West.  There is a massive amount of federal land other than our national parks in the west: millions of acres set aside as wilderness; national forests, wildlife preserves; national monuments, far more than in the east or north.  All of this is protected by a large series of environmental laws passed between 1964 and 1976 – the Endangered Species Act being one of the most important. 

As part of the private enclosure movement, the exploits of the violent Bundy rancher clan and their ‘sovereign citizen’ views are well known.  These ‘sagebrush rebels’ deny any role for the federal government in the intermountain west and even deny the existence of public land.  Ketcham actually reveals that the FBI and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service allowed the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge invasion by Bundy’s militia to happen.  Not to mention the mistakes in prosecution by the US DOJ that allowed them to go free.  The Bundys are the poster-children for what is happening in the intermountain West but they are only the visible tip of the cowberg.

COWPOCALYPSE

I say ‘cowberg’ because cows grazing almost for free on public land are the key force destroying western nature.  They are an invasive species.  Their hooves, their shit,  their munching, their very profitable presence is the reason ranchers and the government kill wolves, cougars, grizzlies, coyotes, buffalo, gophers, wolverines, lynx and other animals while profitably locking up wild horses.  Over the 20^th century, tens of millions have been killed.  One whole federal agency, Wildlife Services, just kills animals for the ranching industry!  The delisting of grizzlies or wolves from the Endangered Species Act draws 95% opposition from the public, but goes on anyway for the benefit of the ranchers.  Science shows that top predators are necessary to reduce the numbers of deer and elk and for a healthy ecosystem, but instead they are shot. The crypto-biotic soil and the riparian creeks are damaged or destroyed, roads are built, habitats chopped up.  Desertification, deforestation, topsoil loss, species extinction – chock it up to cows.  This even though ranching in the intermountain west provides only 2% of the beef produced in the U.S. Beef itself, the SUV of foods, is unsustainable and carbon intensive anyway.  As Ketcham has found, the cowpocalypse has arrived.

CUTTING CARBON SINKS

Compounding this is the profitable and private ‘harvesting’ of public trees, subsidized by the Forest Service and the taxpayer.  Logging is actually right up there with coal in carbon emissions.  Trees are carbon sinks and ecologically necessary.  The massive road building, soil erosion and natural destruction that come from chopped-up habitats benefits only the likes of Boise Cascade.  Excuses that clear-cuts and ‘thinning’ are anti-fire strategies have been disproved by science – they are useful myths for the timber companies.  Fire is actually part of the natural cycle.  But as Ketcham makes very clear, science is no longer used by government agency top bureaucrats, and certainly not by the timber companies or stockmen.  Profit is the only marker.

Ketcham goes into great detail on these issues, interviewing many government and ex-government scientists, botanists and biologists, environmental activists, whistle-blowers and even one of the Bundys.  As the main philosophic argument puts it – are we ‘part’ of nature or are we ‘the lord’ of nature?  If the former, then killing nature is killing ourselves.  If the latter, the Biblical and Mormon reading of Genesis 1:27 coincides with the capitalist profit motive and the collaborationism of the fake Green groups – the Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy, some local groups along with some local Sierra Club chapters.  Eco-pragmatism is a recipe for destruction but it has been embraced by big-money liberals, who one activist hilariously describes as “milquetoast, sweet, upper-middle class numbnuts.”  

They Look Innocent, don't they?

‘SOVEREIGN’ CITIZENS

The ‘sovereign citizen’ idea claims the county is the only legal entity to be recognized – giving even the Republican idea of ‘states rights’ a run for its money.  These militia bozos carry around copies of the Constitution and cite one passage – A1,S8,C17 - they erroneously seem to think prohibits the federal government from owning land.  It does not.  Ultimately these people want to graze their cattle for free on public land while happily receiving millions in USDA government welfare monies.  You could not find better hypocrites. Western ranching actually needs to be shut down, like the plantations of old.    

GOVERNMENT CAPTURE

Government agencies key to the intermountain west like the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services and the Park Service have been captured by the corporations and businesses they are supposed to ‘regulate.’  As such, they no longer actually follow environmental laws.  This has happened under both Republican and Democratic Party administrations.  Over-tourism and overhunting are also part of the problem.  Ketcham takes particular aim at Obama’s ‘compromises’ with the ranching and extractive industries and the policy of the fake Green groups towards collaboration and ‘multiple use.’  The latter actually get PAID by the government to ‘consult’ on environmental issues, so their cash flow is dependent on not litigating and instead having beer with the bastards. 

As a prerequisite to saving the land and animals, the leading corrupt government bureaucrats have to be removed and scientists put back in charge.  This will only happen through a political revolution in the U.S. The government we get is a function of the struggle between classes.  If a government is mostly controlled by the wealthy and corporate entities, then that means they are winning the class struggle. 

Ketcham sees value in nature itself, going into rhapsodies over myriad birdlife, fragile vegetation, the sage-brush steppe, red-rock formations, clear streams that still have healthy trout and the last remaining bits of unspoiled forest and old-growth timber.  He makes fun of the cowboy myth which covers for ecological wrecking.  He at times sounds like a ‘deep ecology’ advocate.  But he also draws links between human social survival and preserving the intermountain west.  It seems he endorses eco-sabotage when necessary.  Beyond that, what we need is a mass socialist movement that is an implacable enemy of the capitalists, their government lackeys and their rancid politicians over the continuing enclosure of the commons, in the intermountain west and everywhere else.

Other reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left with these terms: "Born Under a Bad Sky," "Red State Rebels," "Vanishing Face of Gaia," "Manny's Steakhouse," "Archaic Thanksgiving," "The Emotional Lives of Animals," "Green is the New Red," "Good News," "Hayduke Lives," "The Monkey Wrench Gang." (Last three by Edward Abbey.)

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 11, 2019