Shine On, You Lazy Money River

 “The Wealth Hoarders – How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions,” by Chuck Collins, 2021

This is written by a person who rejected his inheritance and instead works to limit the dynastic wealth of the .1%.  He calls it ‘The Money River.'  Collins takes the reader through the nuts and bolts of how the multi-millionaires and 2,153 billionaires protect their money in perpetuity through certain trusts, shell companies, family offices, tax havens and political power.  These same methods also work for embezzlers, money-launderers, crooks, debtors, kleptocrats and divorcees.  Collins thinks if the U.S. and the U.K. just got their act together, they could tax this money and limit inequality.  Collins assumes at this point that the capitalist system can be tweaked and its ruling class brought to heel by (their) concerned governments.  Let’s take him at his word for now.

Collins calls the army of tax and trust lawyers, accountants, advisors, charity and real estate agents the “Wealth Defense Industry” (WDI).  Much of what they do is legal. Which means the capitalist state has enabled and protected these oligarchs and even criminals world-wide.  In fact the U.S. is now the leading destination for hiding cash by kleptocrats and capitalists, far bigger than the Cayman Islands or Panama.  There is still no U.S. federal plan to prevent this ‘race to the bottom’ of avoiding taxes and guaranteeing generational wealth forever, as states 'rights’ dominates.  I’m going to highlight some main factual points so you can better understand how they do it.

     1.     “States’ Rights.”  Delaware is the top location for tens of thousands of LLC shell companies which allow the real owners to be hidden.  40% of U.S. ‘foreign direct investment’ (FDI) comes from shell companies! El Chapo, Madoff, the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth fund scandal, Michael Cohen and Paul Manfort all used its services.  Additionally Delaware does not tax trademarks, royalties, leases or copyrights.  Only in 2018 did Joe Biden, the long-time senator from Delaware’s banks, finally make a quiet noise about some of this.

     2.     South Dakota.  Passed a law that allows asset protection trusts to be ‘in perpetuity’ – which allows a wealth trust to exist forever while bypassing any tax event.  This enables generations of wealth.  It also does not tax credit card companies, the reason credit cards like Citibank moved there. South Dakota also repealed usury laws, which allows credit card companies to charge high interest rates.

3.     New Hampshire.  Created a non-charitable foundation that allows ownership to be hidden and transferred tax-free.

4.     The U.S. is not part of FACTA, an international compact which requires OTHER nations to provide the names of the beneficial owner of bank accounts in their home countries to the IRS.  But for the U.S., the reverse is not true.  Which is why the U.S. is such a great tax haven.

5.     The 2017 Trump tax bill further raised the amount of money that can be passed to a future generation without an estate tax to $11.4M for an individual and twice that for a couple.  “Only morons pay the estate tax” is a famous saying among the WDI.  It also lowered the tax rate for the top 400 families to 23% - which they don’t pay either. 

6.     Wealthy families (In the U.S. the Waltons on down…) establish unregulated ‘family offices’ set up to limit taxes, hide ownership, transfer as much money as possible to heirs and are becoming dark money pools for investing.  Between 7,000-10,000 now exist world-wide holding around $6 trillion in assets.

7.     Collins tells the stories of the founder of “Blue Hippo” who stole millions from customers and then successfully hid his money in a trust in the Cook Islands.  Or Isabel de Santos of Angola who siphoned millions from her country’s coffers, as exposed in Luanda Leaks.  Or a wealthy spouse who successfully hid assets from his ex-wife which she never recovered.

8.     U.S. banks must provide beneficiary information on account holders.  However tax and trust lawyers, accountants, wealth managers and ‘consultants’ are not required to ‘know their customer’ and can then serve the ‘anonymous.’

9.     Only a handful of ‘suspicious activity reports’ (SARS re money laundering or criminal activity) provided to FINCEN are acted upon.  In the same way, the IRS spends their time auditing poor people over the earned income credit instead of billionaires, due to lack of staff, funds and politics.

10.   Billions are being plowed into real estate in large cities like New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong and Miami as ‘wealth storage units’ for the multi-millionaires and billionaires of the world, pushing gentrification to new heights, while leaving 30+% of this housing empty.

11.  A key part of the WDI and its associations is writing new laws to protect generational wealth.  The American Bar Association, McKinsey, Boston Consulting, the Chamber of Commerce and other groups back them up. 

12.  While the focus of the book is not on corporations, Collins mentions they use ‘transfer pricing’ to move profits and royalties out of the U.S. by having their ‘foreign’ subsidiaries in low tax or no tax jurisdictions bill them for things like patents or intellectual property.

13.  The Panama Papers revealed that one clerk at Mossack Fonseca in Panama was the director of 3,143 shell companies while making $4,800 a year.

14. There are actually ‘free trade zones’ (FTZ) in various countries, including the U.S., where art is stored as a wealth asset and unable to be taxed on purchase or sale.  Art has become another commodity for hiding money.

15. There is $21 trillion dollars in ‘offshore’ bank accounts, along with the trillions more in U.S. ‘on-shore’ ones. 

The libertarian WDI says they are ‘helping families,’ or ‘someone else will do it if we don’t’ or ‘protecting privacy’ or ‘obeying the law’ for their 'wealth creators.'  All of these excuses are rotten.  Collins has 7 sets of detailed suggestions about what to do with dynastic and perpetual wealth and tax evasion (which the WDI calls ‘tax avoidance.’)  In the process he mentions Bernie Sanders’ suggestion of shutting down a whole raft of crooked trusts or Elizabeth Warren’s desire, following Piketty, to tax billionaire and multi-millionaire wealth, not just income.  You can read the book to see his list of correcting policies.

The real question is, at this point can the wealth of the world-wide ruling class be reigned in by ‘good government’ methods?  Collins cites some examples of slow progress in law and enforcement.  But the essence of the system is class power, which shows up as political and legal power.  Both parties in the U.S. for instance are controlled by different – and sometimes the same – oligarchs and plutocrats.  Collins leans on the ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ of the rich, Harvard grads, whistle-blowers and the WDI to reform themselves!  This is a thin reed. Even Collins’ recognizes that wealth-preservation and hiding is "not a sideshow" for the ruling elites.  It is their raison d’etre - wealth accumulation is the point of their lives and the system as a whole.  Without a massive class-based struggle for control of the U.S. the U.K. and the "English-speaking world" (the main centers of corruption) by the working-class most affected by these scams, no amount of targeted, individual laws will be able to counter this aristocratic endgame of wealth.

Nevertheless, Marxists would support some of Collins' moves.  Expropriation is the more complete answer to the permanent accumulation of multi-millionaire and billionaire wealth.  Collins never mentions that solution.

P.S. - Today Archegos, the family office of 'religious' financier Bill Hwang, "was forced to liquidate $20B in stocks," sending other bank shares sliding, with lossses at Credit Suisse and Nomura.  This is due to margin debt calls by contra-parties on massive derivatives trades. Family offices look like another source of financial instability.  (Bloomberg)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: “Perfectly Legal” (DC Johnson); “J is For Junk Economics” (Hudson); “Modern Monetary Theory” (Kelton); “Viking Economics” (Lakey);  “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty); “Monopoly Capital” (Baran and Sweezy); “Trade Wars are Class Wars,” “Ozark,” “Yesterday’s Man.”

And I Bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

March 30, 2021

The Confederacy Lives On

 U.S. Army Bases Named After Confederates

This is a list of major U.S. Army bases located in the South with names derived from the Confederacy of Slavers.  The U.S. government, through Keynesian methods, sends billions of dollars into the South to prop up their economies. The South is also the most ‘militaristic’ part of the country, which makes their placement logical. These bases are named after Confederate generals – who to the U.S. military are objectively traitors.  Supposedly the U.S. military is now thinking of changing the names.  But this will not change the bases' essential nature - now globalizing 'Indian" wars and propping up wage slavery.

Notorious Fort Benning, Georgia

     1.    Fort Lee (Virginia) – Named after the most successful Confederate general and slave-owner Robert E. Lee, who still lost the key battles of Antietam, Gettysburg and the war.

     2.    Fort Bragg (North Carolina) – Named after Confederate general Braxton Bragg, who lost every battle and campaign he fought in except Chickamaugua – that with help from General Longstreet. 

     3.    Fort Benning (Georgia) – Named after secessionist and Confederate general Henry Benning, who fought under Longstreet and Lee.  He later became a leader of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan.  Fort Benning is also home to ‘The School of Americas’ where the U.S. teaches fascists, torturers, dictators and killers from the Central and South American militaries.

4.    Fort Pickett (Virginia) – Named after Confederate general George Pickett, who to his credit resisted Lee’s order to charge on the 3^rd day of Gettysburg and never owned slaves, though like so many he was born on a plantation.

5.    Fort Gordon (Georgia) – Named after Confederate general and slaveholder John B. Gordon, who fought under Lee.  Gordon became a virulent anti-Reconstruction senator from Georgia.

6.    Fort Stewart (Georgia) –Is NOT named after Confederate cavalry general J.E.B. Stewart but for Daniel Stewart, a revolutionary war leader.  

7.    Fort Polk (Louisiana) – Named after Confederate general Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal bishop who lost nearly every battle he fought in and was killed when a cannon ball almost cut him in two on Pine Mountain, Georgia.  His original idiocy in occupying Columbus, Kentucky with Confederate soldiers forced the Kentucky legislature (which was ‘neutral’) to request assistance from the U.S. Army.

8.    Fort Jackson (South Carolina) – Is  NOT named after Confederate general Stonewall Jackson but Andrew Jackson, former president and slave-owner.  As a soldier Jackson fought against native Seminoles and Creeks and later organized the criminal Cherokee ‘Trail of Tears.’  He opposed abolitionism as president, which should not be a surprise. 

9.    Fort Hood (Texas) – Named after overly-aggressive Confederate general John B. Hood who lost the battles of Nashville, Franklin and Atlanta with all the fire-breathing gusto he could muster. 

10.  Fort A.P. Hill (Virginia) – Named after Confederate general and slave-owner Ambrose Powell Hill, who fought under Lee and died at the battle of Petersburg.

11.   Camp Beauregard (Louisiana) – Named after Confederate general and plantation owner P.G.T. Beauregard.  He lost nearly every battle he fought after starting the war by shelling Fort Sumter and succeeding at First Bull Run.  He developed the Confederate ‘battle flag’ now beloved by white supremacists and good ‘ol boys everywhere.  However after the war he advocated African-Americans be allowed to vote.

12.   Camp Pendleton (Virginia) – Named after Confederate artillery general and Episcopal priest William Pendleton who fought under Lee. Pendleton became a prime peddler of the “Lost Cause,” lying and blaming Longstreet for Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg.

13.   Fort Rucker (Alabama) – Named after Confederate colonel Edmund Rucker who fought under notorious KKK founder and Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest.  Forrest got him back in a prisoner exchange and they later worked together.  Rucker became a Birmingham, Alabama industrialist and a beneficiary of Jim Crow’s incarcerated labor system.

14.  Camp Maxey (Texas) – Named after Confederate general and secessionist Samuel Maxey, who was an officer in the Confederate cabinet and later became a Texas senator after being pardoned … perhaps not such a jump.

5 other U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals – Van Dorn (Mississippi), Breckenridge (Kentucky), Forrest (Tennessee), Wheeler (Georgia) and Pike (Arkansas) have been closed.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use the blog search box, upper left with the term: “Civil War” and ‘slavery.’ 

The Cranky Yankee

March 28, 2021

Same Sh*t, Different Day

 “The Circle of the Snake – Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech” by Grafton Tanner, 2020

Sometimes you wonder why certain books are even written.  This book is an attack on the corporate techno-utopians promoting ‘the digital sublime’ who dominate Silicon Valley, and as such, relatively familiar fare.  It is also a somewhat less than penetrating look at the uses of nostalgia for conserving capitalism.  The latter topic is important because reactionary movements like fascism rely on social ‘nostalgia’ to gain narrative power.  Gadsden flags, tri-corner hats, Constitution worship, Viking imagery, Bible thumping, the 1950s, Confederate flags, bro country, the ‘lost cause,’ the traditional family, archaic sex and color roles – all play into an attempt to drag society backwards and preserve "the oldest democracy on earth."  

Tanner touches on none of the latter.  His take on nostalgia involves millennial retro-love for the 1980s in music, technology and the '80s supposed stability.  Tanner dates the begining of the fall from 9/11/2001; then the 2008 recession and probably now the pandemic, so his nostalgia is for younger people.  As someone who lived through the miserable Reaganite 1980s as a factory worker, it was truly a capitalist low point and nothing to pine for.  But for those growing up in the 1980s it was their childhood.  Infantilization is another aspect of social nostalgia. 

Tanner’s main image of nostalgia is the snake that eats its own tail – Ouroboros. He sees the U.S. as a ‘control society’ that wants to capture everyone in a snake-like time loop, where change is only an appearance.  Big Tech’s internet, streaming and cable services enable this by allowing users to revisit the near past on a daily basis. This is part of the ‘attention economy’ where eyeballs and data are sold to advertisers, relying on anger to fuel clicks in the ‘infoglut.’  Children are now a large target for these methods, even in school, so they are already preparing the future past.

Tanner quotes some social theorists on ‘post-Fordist’ ideology – Benjamin, Jameson, Guattari, Sontag, Adorno, DeLeuze, Bazin.  As a musician he references the function of nostalgia in Taylor Swift, synthwave, Arcade Fire, along with many film sequels and ‘canons’ - Star Wars, Stranger Things, It Follows, Halloween, Ready Player One.  Benjamin predicted the descent of bourgeois politics into a show, a harlequinade, a spectacle – and he was certainly right.  A social system running on empty cannot actually look ahead anymore, no matter how high-tech its gadgets or cool its celluloid products.  

It seems logical that a stagnant economy and a stagnant political system would produce a stagnant culture full of simplicity, sequels, repetition and recursion. As some used to put it in the factory, ‘Same shit, different day.’

Tanner’s discussion of Big Tech’s manipulation involves virtual reality and programs like Black Mirror, games like Bandersnatch, YouTube channels like TierZoo and films like Tron and The Matrix.  He touches on ‘the userverse’ where the individual becomes the controller of their own little mirror kingdom.  Or denizens of a retro-futuristic utopia, especially as illustrated in the Black Mirror episode San Junipero.

Tanner is not a Marxist, though he seems dimly aware of the role capital plays in technology. He’s a musician who lives in Athens, Georgia, which might account for his mild take. He casually endorses ideas like RussiaGate, dabbles in the idea that Big Tech is really ‘patriarchal’ technology and mentions the need to ‘break-up the tech monopolies’ instead of socializing them. He thinks that unplugging from Big Tech’s matrix of ‘mediated narcissism’ is not a real solution. If you are a millennial who has never read about these issues, this might ring some bells.  For the rest of us…

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Bit Tyrants,” “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “The New New Thing,” “Ponzi Unicorns!” “Cyber-Proletariat,” “New Dark Age,” “The Real Red Pill,” “Capitalist Realism.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

March 24, 2021            

College Library Browsing #4

 “From the Factory to the Metropolis,” by Antonio Negri, (Essays, Vol. II), 2018

(This is the fourth in a series of four looking at purely academic books, as I’ve run out of books by public intellectuals or left authors.  This is part 1 of the review...)

This book of essays is unusual because it attempts to deal with what Negri calls the ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-industrial’ economy, i.e. the exploitation of white collar labor in Europe/U.S./Japan, where intellectual labor produces intellectual commodities and property like patent rent. What is also unusual about this is that Negri was an advocate of blue-collar ‘workerism’ (operaismo) and a leading proponent of spontaneous ‘libertarian’ socialism (autonomia) in the 1970s-1980s during the severe class war in Italy.  Here he tries to extend his ‘workerist’ analysis to another strata of the class. (Part of workerism is that it is against party organizations...) He now lives in Paris and Venice after spending years in jail for a political crime he did not commit.

IMMATERIAL ECONOMY

This thesis of ‘post-industrialism’ is not new.  Negri’s contention is that the biggest profits are now garnered not by blue collar surplus value, but by ‘immaterial’ digital corporations like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, AirBnB, Uber and Microsoft.  So it is a twist on the old theory, still focusing on profit.  It reflects a section of big capital’s parallel move to financial speculation and profiteering in markets and real estate, related to the profit stagnation of a broad range of older technologies.  The issue for Negri is proving this.  

Negri’s focus on ‘intellectual labor’ might be a reflection of his own life as a professor.  His insistence that Europe is ‘post-industrial’ ignores imperialism’s global reach, as capital is a world system not limited to a set of countries.  It also ignores the quite real nature of European industrial and rural capitalism, not to mention the massive industrial infrastructure supporting ‘immaterial’ corporations – fiber lines, wifi routers, satellites, server farms, electrical grids, computers, phones, undersea cables, robots, etc.  This kind of technology is built upon industrial labor, just as industry is built on agricultural labor.  There is a reason that Bill Gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the U.S. In the same way, ‘post-modernism’ is usually understood as distaining any systems theory, especially Marxism.  He uses it in a different way.  So his ‘hip’ use of these two terms is odd.  

Negri understands that capital, through advertising and data, monetarizes the internet with much content provided free by ‘social users.’  (This blog is an example.) This he calls part of a ‘new primitive accumulation’ - “immaterial post-modern production” – by white collar workers who ‘produce subjectivity.’  His contention is that this is part of the ‘knowledge economy’ and the twilight of industrial capitalism’– a key transition.  

He maintains that white collar / service workers produce ‘social wealth’ – telecommunications and education being most prominent to him. But all workers are hired for their skills and knowledge.  Take a retail hairdresser, while using only a few products, mainly contribute their skill in cutting or styling hair.  Capital essentially commodifies their knowledge or their ability to learn...and then profits off their labor.  No 'commodity' is produced, unless you call a haircut a 'commodity.'  Digital coders produce software code, which is intellectual property.  Lawyers produce documents - again, a form of intellectual property.  Chemists might produce a patent for rent, architects a blue-print, bartenders a drink, janitors a clean office so that work can continue. Teachers produce skills and health workers heal - their 'products' are immaterial.  Although an A on a test or a cast on a leg or removal of a diseased organ might be a 'product.'  And sex workers?    

The rebellion of the Metropolis. Fritz Lang Would Be Proud...

RIGHT TO THE METRO

It is also a book similar to the thesis of the ‘right to the city’ first mentioned by the Situationists and later elucidated by leftists like David Harvey.  Hence the name of this book.  Negri considers city dwellers who honor strikes, such as the 12/1995 transport strikes in France, as ‘co-producers’ with the striking workers, uniting both groups. These events he calls, not a general strike, but a ‘metro strike’ based on a certain territory, a ‘metropolitan beehive.’  Those in the precariat who aid these strikes he cleverly calls ‘the sans papiers,’ riffing off of their probable role as blue-collar or retail workers who don’t work with ‘paper.’  He reminds readers of the ‘red bases’ in Italy in 2002, when the left controlled sections of some cities.  This evolved into the ‘squares’ revolts after the 2008 crash.

As you can see, part of philosophy is ‘naming’ new concepts, or renaming old ones.  While Negri focuses on ‘intellectual’ as a catch-all term, it actually involves emotional, linguistic and artistic skills too.   

Negri bases his argument about a new division of labor by referring to Marx’s concept of the ‘general intellect.’  His main contention is that at this point intellectual labor has become a social product and has outstripped the capitalists, pointing the way to post-capitalism.  The worldwide spread of post-Fordist, post-Smithian ‘cognitive capital’ in cities makes economic measurement more and more difficult according to Negri - or even impossible. In this you can see his enjoyment at throwing out basic ideas, which gives the impression that he is over-stating for emphasis, not fact.

(Traveling.  This review will be continued...)    

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left: “The Unseen,” (forward by Negri); “Wageless Life,” “In Letters of Fire and Blood.”

And I got it at the University of Georgia library!

Red Frog

March 18, 2021    

Watching the Detectives

 “Trapped” and Detective Series in General…

If you watch enough detective series – or are encouraged to watch them by your partner – you will see certain patterns, almost like a long ‘pick and choose’ list of conventions tacked to the wall in a writers’ conference room come to life.  Trapped is a series set in Iceland with two seasons on Amazon Prime.   While generally believable, the characters likable – especially the lead bear-like detective Andri – the setting exotic for most, the artifice wears thin.

Andri and Hinrika in "Trapped."

One of the leading staples of the genre is the angry, stupid or obnoxious teen-aged daughter.  Season Two has this is spades. Andri's daughter Thorhildur seems to have a grudge about nothing. And, per usual, the kids soon learn the rules of reality as they are put in jeopardy. Another staple is that the lead detective has a bad home-life or better yet, is divorced.  He’s got a job to do!  In this case Andri is divorced and even lives at his ex-wife’s parent’s house for awhile, like some sad, temporarily homeless man.

Then there is the exotic location, which provides a vicarious tourist jolt for those who go nowhere.  Who wants to have a murder happen in your boring back yard? Usually it is in a small town or city where in reality, no murders would ever happen.  But in Nordic detective series and others, killings are routine in these places - even if the motives seem especially weak, as it does here.  The small fishing port in Trapped, Siglufjörður, is in the far north of Iceland, nestled in a fjord with mountains, sheep farms, rattle-trap fishing boats and snow.  The weather is also malevolent, as a storm isolates the town in the first season.  The town becomes the murder capital of Iceland, much to the consternation of the fictional residents.

Another thing that happens time and time again is that everyone who talks to a cop on these shows lies or hides something.  And it is always obvious to the audience.  Witnesses are many times of no help, busy themselves doing something else as if the cops aren't there.  In Trapped, there are so many secrets, lies and cover-ups, it seems only the police are straight-forward.  Mis or non-communication is standard as well.  The lead detective usually has a somewhat troubled relationship with liquor, his temper or some horrible past event, but he’s always a genius.  Yup.  Andri figures nearly everything out quickly, pays attention to facts, psychology and detail and rarely fucks up.  But he’s running from some failure in Reykjavik, which is why he is the police chief in tiny Siglufjörður for the first season.

In these shows the crime has to be especially gruesome, or the body has to be found in the woods or sea, decomposing or somehow unrecognizable.  Here it is a headless and armless torso.  And in too many shows, it is a woman.  The ‘dead woman’ thing never ends, which is both a reflection of reality and perhaps a suggestion.  Yet these series never deal with male chauvinism or 'femicide.'  The murders in Trapped are especially horrid.  It seems burning to death is a thing that many Icelander’s fear the most. Can’t you just shoot someone?

There are always several red herrings dragged in front of the audience. Most are obvious and eventually the ‘bad guy’ appears at the end, sometimes dropped from the sky to be taken down. But throwing suspicion on as many people as possible is consistent, as everyone seems guilty or stupid in some way.  In this series the perpetrators are neatly caught after 10 episodes, with so many plot twists that the writers themselves have to be laughing in their conference room.  The more convoluted the plot, the more the police seem like geniuses for following through to the end.  Another convention is that people in deadly peril never act like it.  They remain pathetically oblivious and complacent until the criminal shows up with his gun.  And he always does.  “Your life is in danger!”  “Duh... whaaaat?”

Evidently people got tired of murders in the tropics

 Politicians uniformly seem suspicious, as do rich people.  The head cop is many times a bureaucratic obstructionist.  Environmental or political themes play a role if the show is trying to reflect reality. In both Icelandic series I’ve seen (The Cliff is the other...) the environmental issue of building in rural areas was key.  In the first season of Trapped, human smuggling (yes, even in this micro-dot town which somehow has a ferry from Denmark every week) and arson for profit play a role.  In the second season, rural Thor-like fascists, a gay relationship, imported workers and environmental pollution are all involved.  So the shows always have a bit of politics, but the shows never take a position.  The only permanent position is the decency of the police and ‘the law.'

The flood of detective stories and police procedurals from country after country seems to reflect anxiety about the real role of policing in the world.  In reality, many crimes are not solved, though ‘murder’ has one of the best resolution rates in the States according to statistics.  If that is true, other countries might be even better.  Yet every day we watch on TV or the internet police attacking or killing protesters all over the world, or police crimes (especially in the U.S.) being exposed.  But on streaming series they are the most decent and smartest people on the planet. Perhaps in Iceland and other Nordics the police truly are this overly competent - though they didn't solve the murder of Olaf Palme, the biggest murder in recent Swedish history.  Given they have less unequal societies, less violence and less rapacious capitalism, that could be true.  But for those of us in the U.S., these shows are a clear ideological prop to the state.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows” “Bad Cops,” “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “Defund, Disband or Abolish the Police?” “Notes From Minneapolis,” “Who Killed Olaf Palme?” “Detroit,” “Fear of a Black Rebellion,” “It Was Only a Matter of Time,” “The Wire,” “Ferguson Facts,”  or “Viking Economics,” “Independent People,” “The Vikings,” “The Cliff,” “Redbreast,” “Bordertown.”  

The Cultural Marxist

March 14, 2021   

College Library Browsing #3

 “Class – the New Critical Idiom,”by Gary Day, 2001

(This is the third in a series of 4 looking at purely academic books, as I’ve run out of books by public intellectuals or left authors.)

The title is somewhat of a joke, as the concept of ‘class’ is several hundred years old.  It refers to the ignoring of class by bourgeois politics and post-modern and corporate academe.  In this book Day does an historical analysis of the development of modern classes in England, bolstered by the literature of the time.  His focus on England starts with the medieval chivalric period, continuing through the English Renaissance using Shakespeare, then to the English Revolution and “Paradise Lost;” the rudimentary capitalism of the 1700s shown by way of Fielding, Defoe, Johnson, Pope and Adam Smith; the Industrial Revolution and Scott and Dickens; to capitalist modernity in its various forms - and then post-modernity.  The latter has been defined as being ‘incredulous over meta-narratives,' which means it doesn't like systemic thinking.  Too bad. 

Day uses the concepts of status, ‘station’ and culture to make more subtle distinctions within class, while highlighting literature as a double-edged sword regarding various stages of English society. It is double-edged in the sense of being both conformist and/or subversive.  In the process of identifying class, he doesn’t use the concepts of "class in itself" and "class for itself," thus making class more invisible in certain periods.  So there is a bit of a wobble in his thinking, especially when he discusses the English Revolution, which set royalty against the rising bourgeoisie, and later in the 1700s when the market began to take hold in England.  He thinks that if the working class is not a majority, then class does not exist – something that E.P. Thompson disagreed with.

While many academic Marxists concentrate on culture, this book uses culture as a background to describe material class in detail.  Under capital the two main classes are those who sell their labor and those who profit from it; those who create surplus value and those who bank or invest it; those who have to work for a living and those who can live off their inheritance, investments or rents.  As Day notes, even in early capitalist times, there were many gradations within each class - different statuses, compensation and skills - with a middle class / petit-bourgeoisie of various ‘stations’ as well.  This has not changed.  Class complexity is actually one of the key sociological difficulties in labor organizing.

DYADS

What are Day’s unique contributions? He sets up similar dyads in the transition from feudal relations to capitalism.  Basic divisions of plebeian and patrician; ‘ploughman’ and nobility; ‘commoner and ‘gentleman;’ debtor and creditor; upper and lower class and labor and capital - like a picture slowly coming into focus.  For language, it is either verbose and rhetorical or plain; words are real or deceptive; there are appearances and then there is reality; there is a separate mind and a separate body.  He links these splits to the growth of the money economy and the division of labor, both which introduced alienation into society and a metabolic split with nature. His examples in literature show the writers grappling with how the money/exchange economy was intruding into the old society of ironclad ‘natural’ roles.  Everything becomes a material transaction.  This was in the transition from land wealth to money wealth, the latter creating the modern concept of individualism.

Day explains how in the 1700s poetic heroic couplets were limited hierarchical forms of poetry imposed even on plebian writers, while the picaresque novel was an expansive and plain look at the wide impact of capital in society, though the earliest portrayals of proletarians was limited to servants. (Upstairs, Downstairs; Downton Abbey!)  The novel is considered the literary form of the bourgeoisie, usually focused on personal /individual /family issues.  This developed into the mainstream bourgeois novel we know today, though film seems to be supplanting it at this point. Day deals with the omnipresent literary topic of chastity, births out of wedlock and illicit love affairs as dire issues related to the retention of property and inheritance - a topic still plumbed.  See the series "Bridgerton" for this.

THE PROLETARIAN CLASS APPEARS IN FORCE

In the 1800s class becomes prominent as the aristocracy and the capitalist class joined hands in various ways.  Engels writes of the English proletariat and Tom Paine manifestos for them, while others – Walter Scott or the Romantics – dream of a long-lost medieval English isle or a time before machines. This reactionary yearning for medievalism or deep ecology is with us even today. The reverberations of the French Revolution in the 1790s in England increased English government and business oppression but also class cohesion and understanding.  Chartist proletarian writers attempted to propel working-class political rights like voting, but they still accepted capitalism. Attempts by writers like Dickens to emphasize the humanity of both rich and poor ignored the economic and unequal nature of their actual relation.  As if both were stranded on a desert isle with no hope of escape! This is part of the ongoing failure of humanism as an ideology.  The beginning leisure industry promoted crude and conformist music hall fare among workers while the aesthetic movement promoted pleasure for the upper classes.  As Marx pointed out the commodity form must be obscured, so Day thinks these examples show there is an inherent bias in capitalism against clear representation. Diversion, misrepresentation, misdirection and invisibility are those tools.

MODERNISM

Day sees the advent of modernism in the 1900s to be mostly about raising form over content; separating itself from ‘the masses’ as ‘high’ culture, and concentrating on the individual, all steps away from the naturalistic/realist model of writing and more proletarian ways of thinking.  He cites T.S. Eliot, Virginia Wolff and E.M. Forster as evidence.  This is part of how the abstract money and exchange economy intruded into literature, reflecting the capitalist division between mental and physical labor, promoting a dynamic away from a class understanding by writers who more and more identified as purely 'mental.'

Day reviews some English proletarian writing and films in the 20^th Century, citing Robert Tressell’s “Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” and a few proletarian novels and films of the 1930s – though none challenged the class structure.  On the other hand Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” explained the passivity of the working class due to its conditions of life.  In the ‘50s and ‘60s the middle class grew, blue collar jobs declined and new industries emerged.  Instead of class solidarity, the focus for culture and politics became working class culture and its unique consumerism.

Like many British leftists, Day’s idea of the working class is limited to blue collar work, not white or 'pink' collar or retail workers.  Day undermines the myth that British workers were becoming middle class as statistically untrue; and illustrates how the made-up Thatcherite term of "underclass" was intentionally deceptive.  The culture industry emerges fully during this period as a pacification program, but Day points out that workers, especially young ones, don’t kowtow to this hegemony automatically, even making end-runs around it.  Day ends with a discussion of anti-class methods like post-structuralism and "micro-struggles" and micro-aggressions.

This book is an excellent example of how class influences culture, especially writing, but also delves into the vagaries of class stratification.  It could be valuable for writers, historians and Marxist sociologists, but with limited use to anyone else.

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left:  “Citizen Tom Paine,” “The Young Karl Marx,” “Factory Days,” "Chavs" or words like “Engels” or phrases like ‘proletarian literature,’ ‘proletarian fiction’ or ‘working class literature.’

And I got it at the University of Georgia Library!

The Kulture Kommissar

March 10, 2021            

College Library Browsing #2

 “Marxist Criticism of the Bible,” by Roland Boer, 2003

(This is the second in a series of 4 looking at purely academic books, as I’ve run out of books by public intellectuals or left authors.) 

This book is not so much an atheist take-down as a historical materialist analysis of the real roots of the Bible.  Boer focuses on ‘mode of production,’ which is key in understanding the Bible and how and why it was written.  He also uses the methods of a number of more modern Marxist thinkers – Althusser, Gramsci, Eagleton, Lefebrvre, Lukacs, Bloch, Adorno, Jameson and Benjamin – to penetrate various ‘books’ of the Bible. 

This is a book for specialists or those deeply knowledgeable of the Bible itself. I am only concerned with one ‘book’ – “The Book of Daniel” – otherwise known as Revelations.  It ends the ‘new’ Testament, a part of the Bible seen by liberal regligionists as less cruel, less misogynist, less bloodthirsty, less weird and less backward than the ‘old’ Testament. Yet it is what you might call the bloodiest book of all.  I’d call it a pretty incredible revenge fantasy.  Holy shit!

Revelations concerns the apocalypse or ‘Armaged’don’, which in Greek, (apokálypsis) is the ‘unveiling,’ ‘uncovering’ or revelation of what is to come when Christ returns.  This apocalypse is supposed to be a positive thing.  But it involves the ‘whore of Babylon,’ the 4 Horsemen – power, war, famine and death; a Beast, dragons, locusts, the Mark of the Devil – 666, stars falling to earth, the moon turning blood red, poisoned waters and islands flying away.  Then there are the 7 plagues – 1. sores on human bodies, 2. the death of everything in the sea, 3. river waters all turning into blood, 4. a scorching sun, 5. endless darkness, 6. a drying-up of the Euphrates 7. a massive earthquake and hailstones.  Then there is “blood as high as a horse’s bridle,” a third of mankind dead and Christ and angels with sickles hacking humans down.  This evidently leaves 144, 000 chosen ones from the ‘tribes of Israel’, which is where the Armageddon cult Jehovah's Witnesses get their heavenly limitation.

Boer looks at this creepy fever-dream through the lens of Walter Benjamin, an atheist who thought that Biblical language is some kind of ‘basic’ return to the roots of language, to the original ‘naming’ of things in the misty past.  Boer doesn’t think so.  He understands Revelations to be a ‘closed system’ of allegorical thought, dominated by the sacred Yahweh (God).  Revelations itself combines myth and historical names without any real ability to parse one from another.  In it a religious apocalypse is supposed to ‘end time.’  Revelations says “I am the First and the Last … the Alpha and Omega.” Marxists understand that, like Fukuyama’s failed ‘end of history,’ history and time actually never stop.    

Hieronymous Bosch?  The Bible's hell on 'earth'

Material Roots

Who is the all-encompassing Yahweh in this historical world?  Boer likens him to the ruling despot of Marx’s ‘Asiatic mode of production,’ dominating an empire through cruel military force, with ‘the sacred’ as the overwhelming cultural power binding his empire together.  The ‘Asiatic’ form of production involved tribute paid by vassal states, and tribute (somewhat like taxes…) paid by peasants and a few traders to those vassals in exchange for some protection.  When an empire got too large, smaller kingdoms would revolt and break off, which accounts for the many conflicts mentioned in the Bible. Boer thinks Revelations might be written as ‘code’ by possible insurrectionists or rebels against an oppressive king or kingdom, using symbols and metaphors instead of naming names.  Their anger is wrought large in a violent and fantastic revenge parable of eventual triumph.  Sound familiar?

Mode of production is key to any understanding of society and even literary texts like the Bible, wrapped in Yahweh as it is.  It relates to how humans survived at that time in history – how they obtained food, clothing, shelter, protection, solidarity, children and family, etc.  Boer himself practices a text-dense look at the Bible and notes a huge gap – the frequently missing role of women and childbirth, which makes sense in a patriarchal society. 

Boer goes over other Marxists’ various versions of Marx and Engel’s “Asiatic” mode of production in the Bible and Palestine at the time.  Some think production was a combination of the ancient (slave) and Asiatic forms of production; some a patron/client system; others see early Palestine as a more collective ‘communitarian’ economy among ‘tributary’ states; others see it as Neolithic and ‘kinship’ based.  Obviously some have objections to the name, which is old-fashioned.  Boer himself looks at each ‘mode of production’ and sees smaller ‘regimes of production’ within it – derived from what academics weirdly call ‘regulation theory.”  Regulation theory involves “regimes of allocation or distribution” within a mode of production.  In the case of Biblical time the allocation or distribution is of male sons, of land, of tribute, of the war machine and lastly, corvee labor given to the rulers.  According to Boer these were the various bases for the Biblical economy, all dominated by Yahweh, by ‘the sacred’ as the dominant ideology.  After all, the temples also housed treasure.  They were the ‘banks’ for the ruling theocratic elite.

This is another academic book with limited use except to specialists, but which shows the breadth and depth of applying the historical materialist method to any text, even the Bible, in order to demystify and reveal.

 P.S. - The 'death' count in the Bible decreed by God was counted by Steve Wells.  He counted 2.82 million verified dead and estimated 24.99M estimated dead.  Bloodiest work of fiction ever!

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Da Vinci Code’ (Brown); “God is Not Great” (Hitchens); “The Dark Side of Christian History,” “The Rise of the Nones,” “To Serve God and Wal-Mart,”  “Religulous” (Maher); “Go Tell it on the Mountain” (Baldwin); “The Jesus Comics,” “Jude the Obscure” (Hardy).

And I got it at the University of Georgia Library

The Cultural Marxist

March 6, 2021