Satiric Space Trip - Why Not Bring It Back Down to Earth?

 “Don’t Look Up” directed by Adam McKay, 2021

This obvious political satire and allegory is about climate change and how it is being handled presently in America’s shallow, social-media packed lives.  Instead of global warming the world is facing an impending collision with a very large comet, which will destroy almost everything on earth. The film is loaded with current and past references and jokes, which is why many on Facebook are hailing the dark hoot.  We have touches of the desperately angry anchor of Network and the right-wing Southern bomber pilot in Dr. Strangelove, who is also a replacement for the elder gang in Space Cowboys or the blue-collars in Armageddon.  The young and nerdy astronomers appear to warn the public on a TV show like The Morning Show, full of light-weight chatter and obliviousness.  There is even a slobbish presidential aide straight out of Veep.

Doomsday Infotainment

The worst character is a creepy techno-positivist hybrid between the leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult and Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. The president is a blend of the smug ignorance of Sarah Palin and the cold profiteering outlook of Hillary Clinton.  She gets caught in a scandal sending pictures of her ‘cooze’ to some lover.  We see a Texan in a big black cowboy hat being sworn into the Supreme Court.  The President’s aide is a shallow hack who thinks wisecracks are the essence of politics.  A general scams the civilian visitors to the White House out of a $20 bill…though usually it is billions.

The screenplay was written by David Sirota, a left-liberal who worked for Bernie Sanders. The slogan ‘Don’t Look Up” comes from the president’s Party after the scientists tell people to ‘Just Look Up’ - since the comet is now plainly visible in the sky. This is relevant because the ersatz America News wing was saying that the comet was a hoax or no big deal.  The title is an obvious play on “Make America Great Again” and climate or vaccine denial.

With only six months to act, a government official at NASA with no background in astronomy rejects the scientists’ finding. A famous New York newspaper then kills the comet story, based on the official’s claim. But then all other scientists agree the comet is heading towards earth.  The government finally decides to send a rocket to blow the comet out of its path due to scandal and re-election concerns.  However, at the last minute the flight is diverted on the recommendation of the techno-positivist billionaire, who is also a large political donor to the president.  That rocket was filled with a nuclear warhead, so I hope that landing was ‘soft.’

The billionaire has come up with a plan to ‘mine’ the comet for trillions of dollars in valuable rare minerals, useful for his cell phone company and the capitalist (and green…) economy. The plan is not peer-reviewed, just a crack-pot scheme by private enterprise. When one astronomer challenges him, he resorts to personal attacks, which seems to be the standard method of deflection.  This about-face is a poke at disaster capitalism, which is orienting towards profiting from climate change.  It is also a commentary on geo-engineering, vanity space flights and asteroid mining.  Of course the president goes for the new plan… announcing it in a front of a battleship and fireworks, like some “Mission Accomplished” scene we know well.  The plan eventually goes awry.

The Russians, Indians and Chinese attempt to launch a diversion rocket of their own, but somehow that explodes.  They had been cut off, along with all other countries, from the benefits of the mining operation by the U.S.  Sabotage?  It is not clear from the brief bit.

In the process one of the astronomers has lost her temper on TV and she becomes a ‘meme’ for getting hysterical in public.  The other is co-opted for a while, but then can’t do it anymore and blows his top too. They work on a ‘Just Look Up’ political group out of some store-front office in D.C., but their efforts are insufficient. A lame Geldorfian “Live Aid” pop concert doesn’t work either. Eventually they decide to go back home to Michigan and Illinois. One visits her parents.  At the locked screen door her mother tells her that she “supports the jobs the mining operation will bring”…probably the saddest line in the whole film. The two of them have a ‘last supper’ with family and friends.  Oddly, this ends with a sad ‘prayer’ mumbled by a skater punk played by the worst actor in the world, Timothee Chalamet.  They all hold hands while the earth crumbles. The film ends with a riff on the Garden of Eden and cryogenic freezing.

In the last conversation at the last dinner, the astronomers said ‘We did all we could.” Well, no.  There was no mass movement to stop the government plan, just chaotic rioting. You would think there would be an armed revolt, but certainly among the U.S. population or action by the EU.  Everyone all over the world just watches the comet approach, passively.  Which does mirror the majority of humans at this point regarding climate change, who are directly affected, feel angry or worried but are helpless given the failing approach of governments and political movements.  This government won't save us, technology won't save us, the 'market' won't save us.

Actually, Look Around!

A flack film reviewer at the Guardian, Charles Bramesco, trashed the film as ‘preaching to the choir.’  As if a well-reasoned or heartfelt film would convince any climate change denier! What Bramesco doesn’t want to know is that at this point it’s a war, not a debate club.  And the ‘choir’ includes the overwhelming majority of the congregation. His favorite film is listed as Boogie Nights and he’s written for Forbes, so consider the source. His take is the aesthete equivalent of the slogan “Don’t Look Up.”  45% of critics on that Tomato site were thumbs down – which says more about what a crowd of useless middle-class fucks they 

really are.The film is marred by too many well-known mega-Hollywood stars, which undermines its message, but that is situation normal and probably a popularity tactic – for some. I imagine the Fox News crowd doesn’t watch Netflix as they’re too busy eyeballing every sporting event they can handle. Which is why Netflix thought the movie might be profitable in the urban culture sector, driving subscriptions to the site.  There is money to be made on either side of this aisle, unfortunately.  The real problem is - why hide behind a comet?  A satire of current climate denial by capitalist governments, businesses, politicians and media would be far more direct, sharp and funny.

I have noticed that the more culturally conservative people are, the less they watch films, just as they read less.  Is it just me?

At any rate, crackling laughs, a few sharp pokes, but no solution, as its a bit too Hollywood.  Changing the minds of climate deniers is not really the task – it is to build a movement that brings power to an anti-capitalist solution to the climate crisis.  Laughing at government, at capitalists and at their fools is essential.  Humor and tough satire are more corrosive than a well-written, peer-reviewed research paper.  In this case, the ‘fuck your lying ass’ meme eats the movie… as it pulls a much bigger joke than any tiny Twitter twerk by a denier troll.

(The director McKay also did Talladega Nights, Anchorman and The Big Short, which made fun of NASCAR, local TV news anchors and Wall Street, in that order.  I imagine those didn’t convince anyone either.)

P.S. - Guardian writer slams the critics who reject, basically, the existence of satire:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/01/lighten-up-satire-tall-order-life-out-crazying-even-science-fiction

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use the blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews, using these terms:  “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “This Changes Everything” and “On Fire” (Klein); “A Redder Shade of Green,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “The Vanishing Face of Gaia”(Lovelock); “Blue Covenant” (Barlow); “Extreme Cities,” “We’re Doomed, Now What?” “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers – Again,” “The Collapse of Western Civilization.” 

The Cultural Marxist

December 30, 2021

Philosophy Primer

 “The History of Philosophy – A Marxist Perspective” by Alan Woods, 2021

I read Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy in high school, which pointed me to the actual writings of philosophers who made sense, like Socrates, Nietzsche, Voltaire and Spinoza.  Unfortunately that book was written in 1924 and had a conventional angle, ignoring Hegel and Marx among others.  I didn’t know about Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, as that would have been better.  But it put me on the trail, eventually leading to existentialism and then Marxism.  Now that Woods has published his history, this is definitely the place every leftist, no matter their age, could start.

Woods openly says the book is a Marxist look at mostly western philosophy, so unlike people like Durant, he’s not hiding his perspective.  Woods, like Marx, Engels and Lenin, tracks the development of philosophy as a battle between forms of materialism and forms of idealism, linking it to class struggle and the historical / economic context of each period. As is clear from history, philosophy begins where religion ends.  This is a sketch of Wood’s narrative.

IONIA, GREECE & ROME

Western philosophy (philo-sophos – ‘lover of wisdom’) originally came about around the Ionian Sea in Turkey as a break with religion and superstition.  The first Ionian philosophers were materialists, dedicating to understanding the world through their senses, through reason and logic, through observation and experimentation. Later Greek materialists developed dialectics by understanding the role of contradictions in everything (dialectike – art of discourse and discussion.)  The dialecticians, early sophists, atheists, materialists and atomists developed many basic principles of the physical sciences, reasoning and argument – Thales, Anaximander, Democritus, Epicurus, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Lucretius.  

Philosophy’s goal is the closest perception of reality, and they took giant steps towards understanding the real world.

On the other side of the tracks, Woods traces the first inspiration for idealist philosophy to Pythagoras, who thought reality consisted only of numbers derived from math, a math which was based on a supra-normal reality, not on our 10 fingers and 10 toes or our feet. He inspired Plato, who considered reality to be a shabby version of pure forms, archetypes and ideas residing in some ethereal location. Aristotle broke with Plato, pursuing actual investigation of reality, but not completely from idealism. These two philosophic schools were not equal, as the subjective idealists were supported by the rulers and the religious – and still are. This was in the context of slave revolts, which gave a push to their intolerance.

Some of the ideas developed by Ionian materialists and dialecticians:  the idea of atoms; the concept of infinity and the infinite universe; the role of contradictions; opposition to dualistic thinking; the sun as the center of the solar system; induction and generalization; the limitations of formal logic; understanding motion as a contradiction; knowledge coming from sense information; matter could not be created or destroyed; evolution of humans out of fish; geometry; a primitive steam engine; that matter is invested with energy; that the earth was round. 

MEDIEVAL TIMES

The Roman Emperor Constantine incorporated Christianity into his rule, deciding on the content of the Bible at the Council of Nicea.  This changed Christianity into an ideology in league with ignorance and the colonial and slave economy.  The last philosopher and scientist of the Greek/Roman period, a woman named Hypatia, was executed by a mob of fanatical Christian monks in Alexandria for her alleged paganism on orders of the local Bishop.  They also went about destroying the Library of Alexandria.  During the subsequent Dark Ages based on feudalism, the only relief from the cruel and backward obscurantism of the Catholic Church in Europe were the Islamic Moors of Spain, who kept alive Greek philosophic gains, materialism and continued to develop astronomy, math, medicine, science and practical arts like irrigation, glass-making, weaving, metal and leather-work. They tolerated other religions and were eventually crushed by cruel Christian crusaders. This dark period in Europe lasted 1,000 years. 

Feudalism did not demand many scientific improvements, only a rigid ideology adapted to a rigid economic pyramid. St. Augustine was the first theoretical pillar of this Church, decreeing mystical and neo-Platonic idealism, the ‘truth’ residing in the mind of God and nowhere else. As feudalism reached a high point and the productive forces – mercantilism – began to develop, debates occurred, first only about religious ideas, then about the validity of Augustine’s philosophy, led by Abelard.  Thomas Aquinas attempted to forge remnants of Augustinian thought with distorted ideas of Aristotle, and to this day the Catholic Church is still based on his Thomism… an ideology from the mid-1200s.

Some Want to go Back to the Dark Ages

SCIENCE and PHILOSOPHY REVIVE

A philosophy that understands reality will result in scientific and social advances.  One that has no relation to anything but groundless ideas will not. As capital developed and feudalism/Catholicism became stagnant and defeated, scientific methods and inventions multiplied with a return to materialist and rationalist solutions.  English utilitarianism, empiricism (much of which was imported into the U.S.) and the ‘industrial revolution’ led to mechanical materialism in the philosophic realm – Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Newton. They were theists who believed perhaps God got the ball rolling, but then became a bystander. Theism has always been a cover for thinkers who do not want to be accused of the dangerous ‘heresy’ of atheism.  Many of the founders of the U.S. were theists.

The idealist and religious counter-attack was by Bishop Berkley, who claimed that all knowledge of the world was subjective and that nothing existed independently of the human mind - except in God’s ‘cosmic mind.’  Sound familiar? Hume later announced that causality itself was impossible to verify, just unconnected facts, supporting the idea of pure skepticism and anti-science attitudes.  The English were then over-shown by the revolutionary materialists and rationalists of France – Descartes, Voltaire, Diderot, Concordet.  Their ideas led to the French Revolution and the formal overthrow of the monarchy, feudalism and it’s Church.

THE FRACTURED BATTLE CONTINUES    

Baruch Spinoza studied Descartes but unlike him, theorized that mind and body were the same and so were ‘God’ and nature, all of which were eternal and could not be created or destroyed.  This undermined the political and religious authorities.  Leibniz brought these unified thoughts down to the almost atomic level, but with the understanding that every ‘thing’ was in flux and motion.  Both were still imbued with idealist metaphysics, but scientific discoveries were beginning to undermine metaphysics.

Woods then tackles Kant and Hegel. Kant, an idealist, believed time and space were ‘a priori’ – known separate from experience and matter, at birth.  He also postulated that the out-there ‘Thing in Itself’ could never be known by the cognizant mind.  This reintroduced an alienation between the world and human cognition, a cognition which actually forms a bridge between them.  Kant tried to ban contradiction in his theory, claiming they were only part of the sensual world, separate from the judgments of the mind, which were based on an absolute unity. 

Hegel corrected Kant’s empty abstractions but used the dialectic, though on Kant's idealist basis, seeing it as only operating in thought, not in everything. He determined the difference between the base level of sense impressions, the medium level of understanding and the highest level – the use of reason – in which dialectics was the most explanatory form.  This refuted abstract logic, which he saw as limited.  Hegel backed the concepts of unity of opposites, the universal presence of contradiction and quantity into quality, based on his accurate study of the history of philosophy and science.  Just as an example of the first, how did organic life occur out of inorganic compounds? Yet it did.  Even chaos hides organization, perhaps at another level, but it is there.  A north demands a south, a positive electrical pole demands a negative.  And so on.

GWF Hegel - All but Forgotten Until ...

Marx ‘right-sided’ Hegel, basing dialectics instead on material developments, not just thought.  He could not accept Hegel's "Absolute Idea" behind realty. In the process Marx and Engels had to combat the "Young Hegelians" and later Feuerbach, who, while a hard atheist and materialist who challenged Hegel, still endorsed individualism and solutions like 'love.' Here we reach Marx and Engels great achievement and method of understanding the motion of reality and thought, based on the development of philosophy, science, history and society since Ionia – dialectical materialism.  As Woods puts it, abstract philosophy is superseded by practice as a "non-philosophy" philosophy - by the scientific method and the entrance of the conscious human majority into history.  Thought is not a separate strand, it is a function of the whole body, of social development.  It is a product of practice, of human labor, not of abstractions.

The one drawback to this book is the somewhat giddy and positivist tone about how science will always continue to illuminate the dark corners of existence and the universe.  Given an understanding of history, it is quite possible that we can also be thrown back into a 'new dark age'  where science is again an outcast from society.  Given science has also been used for reactionary purposes, that also gives pause.

The book is a clear, fascinating read, which gets a bit repetitive at times towards the end in dealing with Hegel.  It is not really a history of all philosophy, but a history of the battle between idealism and materialism up to Marx.  It ignores certain philosophers not germane to the main subject matter, like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Nietzsche or those who came later, like Dewey, Russell and Sartre, on up to the movement of post-modernism.  Woods says that Kantian subjective idealism is still current in various 'wordy' modern philosophic forms in bourgeois society like post-modernism. Or as the Bush administration once said, "...we create our own reality."

So these issues are still hugely relevant, especially regarding the current and openly reactionary role of religion in society, whether we are talking about the U.S, Hungary, Poland, Myanmar, India, Israel, Brazil or Saudi Arabia.  Religion functions as idealism's bedfellow and prop, and a prop to the very real ruling classes.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Reason in Revolt” (Woods/Grant); “The Philosophy of Space/Time” and “The Einsteinian Universe”(Malek); “The Ten Assumptions of Science,” “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukacs); “Marx and Human Nature,” “Living in the End Times” (Zizek); “The Young Marx,” "Spinoza Lives!" "Ubiquity," "Monsters of the Market" (McNally).         

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 26, 2021

Slings and Arrows and Lawsuits

 “Goliath,” Seasons 1,2 & 3 out of 4, 2016-2019

This LA noir kind of legal drama is the West Coast version of The Wire – showing the corruption of various players in L.A. and California through the lens of one pugnacious and alcoholic lawyer – Billy Bob Thornton, aka Billie McBride.

At the Law Office

Season 1 (2016) centers around a large criminal ‘defense’ contractor whose illegal weapon kills one of their engineers, aided by a top-end tassled-loafer law firm that covers for them.  Season 2 (2018) takes on prominent real estate developers and a Latina running for mayor of Los Angeles, all involved with a Mexican drug cartel.  Season 3 (2019) is like a re-run of the film Chinatown, this time involving billionaire growers in the drought-stricken Central Valley, their water theft and the support they get from the newly elected mayor of L.A.  Season 4 (2021) is set in San Francisco and the target is a Big Pharma opioid producer.

The obvious parallel here is a “David” and his small raggedy band of allies – two female paralegals, one hilarious female lawyer, one solicitous daughter, one neutral ex-wife, one FBI agent and a grizzled, short investigator – against various ‘goliaths’ of U.S. capitalism. One of the paralegals is a heavyset woman who actually works, while the other is a beautiful ex-prostitute and fuckup who still has a crush on Billie.  Billie’s secret investigator is a brilliant former lawyer who now lives in a shabby trailer like Rockford.  His co-counsel is Patty, a loud, aggressive DUI/real estate lawyer who becomes a perfect ally for him, while getting some of the best lines.  Her refusal to date the FBI agent is classic.  She looks at him and just says “No!”  Women flock around Billie in this series, even when he’s an asshole, just like the 6 marriages Thornton’s had in real life.

The immediate setting is Santa Monica, where McBride lives in motel rooms near the pier and beach, while drinking at the darkened Chez Jay, a real bar next door to his motel.  You can’t get any more noir than having your office on a barstool. Scenes of him downing whiskey as the troubled lawyer, while sitting against the life guard stand near the pier are frequent.  He drives a red convertible Mustang to make the retro angle complete.  Scenes on the famous Santa Monica pier or in Venice, outside the Capitol Records roundhouse, up at the Griffith Observatory, at the downtown courthouse and the Gehry concert hall remind one you are in Los Angeles. 

Unfortunately Goliath Usually Wins

There Is A Season

The 1st season’s story concerns a law firm that McBride helped found, now helmed by a crazed boss, Donald Cooperman, who lives in a darkened office wired for secret video surveillance.  Cooperman hates McBride, especially for burning half his face long before.  Cooperman is a lawyer who is aware of the crimes of his war-profiteering ‘defense’ client, but does not report them.  He recruits a hungry, mousy lawyer to his bed and finally as first defense counsel, fighting a lawsuit McBride brings against the weapons manufacturer for helping kill one of their employees on a boat.  They claim the man committed suicide, using as proof what seems like suspicious suicide notes. They use patriotic ‘war on terror’ rhetoric in court to hide the specific facts.  Cooperman is aided by a thug who kills witnesses, intimidates Billie through a bought-and-paid-for cop and sets up other witnesses with drug raids.  Cooperman’s lead, a vicious careerist lawyer, has the job of slinging personal mud at any surviving witnesses and McBride while back-biting the mouse.   

The 2nd season’s story is about Marisol Silva, a look-alike clone of  Penelope Cruz who is running for mayor of L.A.  When she finds out Billie is representing a young Latino protégé of hers falsely accused of a gangland murder, she literally gets into bed with him.  However she is intimately and secretly tied to a notorious Mexican cartel which is backing her mayoral bid, along with two large real estate developers in L.A.  A hit man for the cartel was actually behind the killings, while two cops cover up the actual murderer.  One of the real estate moguls, an overly-talkative twit dressed in ugly leisure wear, reputedly built ‘half of downtown’ and has the most twisted sex predilection ever…something that is so repulsive and cruel I question whether they should have included it.  If Silva wins, they will be able to operate freely in the city. These murderous scum hide behind her pretty face and vapid community concern rhetoric, but she’s in on it too.

Let the Desert Bloom

The 3rd season’s story takes a surreal turn, perhaps copying The Big Lewbowski.  The tipoff is a casino lounge singer belting out “Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In,” a song that accompanied the Dude’s dream sequence in Lebowski. Aggressive crows, mysterious grinning adopted sons, blackouts, weird dreams and drugs follow. It involves a cabal of opium-smoking almond farmers in the parched, dusty landscape of the Central Valley.  This time McBride takes up residence at the local casino after being comped a room by Blackman, the largest grower.  Blackman’s sister is illegally pumping water out from under other’s lands, including Federal Land, similar to the oil ‘straw’ in the California film There Will Be Blood. This bunch controls the local county water board and have lowered the water table under a whole town and outlying houses, so bottled water has to be used to replace the ground water. (This is the actual present  situation in Teviston, CA.) The town is a company town where most of the jobs hinge on the water-stealing growers.  Another consequence of ground-water pumping is the settling of the soil.  A woman has died in a sinkhole and this sets off the case.

One of the themes is that ‘relationships,’ especially romantic ones, are deceptive and serve more as opposition research. McBride himself gets in the face of his enemies or reluctant witnesses, as he shows up to talk up front.  But behind his sometime geniality he doesn’t claim to be their buddy.  The other theme is that the 'bad guys' lose - which happens rarely in real life.

The film industry hasn’t been included as one of the local ‘goliaths’ – perhaps because they produced the series and that wouldn’t be prudent.

This is a legal drama that has to go somewhat by the rules of the court system, but shows prejudiced judges, obnoxious court behavior by attorneys, obvious missing evidence and facts, flawed witnesses, prison and police corruption and jack-shit rulings.  It makes you question the legal system, given it is actually part of a bigger ‘goliath.’  The role of attorneys in U.S. law is not to find ‘the truth’ but to defend their clients no matter what.  Mostly the legal system, FBI, prosecutors and even judges come out looking good in the end. After all, McBride believes in the law.  Though its so bad in a state court in the Central Valley that he has only one alternative.

So far this series is a piecemeal but excellent attempt at looking at various goliaths, without seeing the larger Goliath behind its plagued manifestations.  Los Angeles or California itself might be the goliath in this series, much as Upton Sinclair saw society and Chicago as The Jungle or as David Simon’s The Wire identified Baltimore.  Viewers could put the whole picture together, but odds are this is just more entertainment, not affecting politics at all, just verifying that there are definitely “some bad eggs out there!”  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, with these terms:  The word “streaming” for prior streaming series political reviews or: “Ozark,” “American Made,” “Drug War Capitalism,”  “Vulture’s Picnic,” “The Latino Question,” “Los Angeles Stories”(Cooder); “Camino Real”(Williams); “In Praise of Barbarians”(Davis); “War is a Racket” (Butler); “The Wire,” “The Jungle,” “Oil / There Will Be Blood.”    

The Kultur Kommissar

December 20, 2021

Happy Solstice! (4 PM Greenwich Mean Time)

U.S. – 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 9 AM MST, 8 AM PST

Not A Christmas Story

 “The Six Pointed Star”by Manuel Tiago / Alvaro Cunhal, 2020 (Eng. Translation)

Cunhal was a Communist militant in Portugal jailed by the fascist dictatorship between 1949 and 1960, when he finally escaped.  This is the story of a massive prison in Lisbon used by the regime, shaped like a six-pointed star, a panopticon surrounded by massive walls, moats and trenches that looked from the outside like a palace.  It was not.

The stories of a prison are of the men inside.  Cunhal describes some of the 500 in this jail – murderers, rapists, thieves, con artists and swindlers, thugs, smugglers, black marketeers  – as human beings.  Some were justified in their crimes, some not.  The prison had kind and cruel guards, inept and efficient doctors, intelligent and moronic prisoners, general terrors and scared figures and a general administrative incompetence.  The inmates are known by nicknames or numbers.  

The most poorly treated by the prison administration were communists - ‘the politicals’ – kept in isolation on the 3^rd floor of Ward C, always watched by a member of the PIDE – the vicious Portuguese secret police.  Some inmates feel sorry for their terrible isolation and smuggle items into the last political's cell, as two of them disappear.  Cunhal himself was a political, so it is odd that he retails stories about prisoners he would not have met if he’d been kept in isolation in this prison.  He was in another prison that did not have isolation, and from which he and some comrades escaped, so it is possible these stories are combined.  

Nor does Cunhal apply a socialist template to the jail, but approaches it more as a humanist.  There is a lover who has a crush on his cell-mates’ sister.  A metals expert who fixes motorbikes and a bronze casting.  A thug who attacks other prisoners who stand up to him and is thrown in isolation.  A new, young prison director who attempts to improve the prison food, clothing and exercise times and later fails.  A romance and sex expert who gives lectures in the exercise yard.  A religious nut mumbling about God and Jesus all the time.  A war profiteer who swindled the government.  A man who tries to escape and ruins his leg due to a bone-shattering fall.  Enraptured prisoners showing off for a distant woman in a window.  A prisoner theorizing on evolution and relativity.  And one man, the Lizard, who committed such a horrible crime, no one would talk to him.  While another, a doctor, was too arrogant to talk to anyone else. 

The prison has a furniture shop, cardboard manufacture and a motorbike repair facility, where the workers are paid almost nothing to learn a ‘skill.’  The food consists of the same rancid fare.  An occasional escape, a bloody fight where guards pound prisoners into a pulp; a suicide, a murder – these events break the crushing predictability and routine of each day in prison, every year after every year after every year.  Given it’s a high security fortress with long sentences, it seems as if almost no one ever gets out – though one escapes using a very long work ladder.  The other way to get ‘conditional release’ was to claim a pious Christianity in order to impress the prison officials.

The story is not just 500 men times many years, but a building, a massive prison, a tomb for the living. 

The author, Alvaro Cunhal, was the Secretary General of the Portuguese Communist Party for many years.  This included the period of the overthrow of the Portuguese capitalist/fascist dictatorship in 1974, which came with the liberation of Angola from colonialism.  After this he was a Minister Without Portfolio in the transitional governments for a time.  He published a number of other books.  If you are oddly attracted to prison stories or films as I am, this book is for you.    

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive with these terms:  “Are Prisons Obsolete?”(Davis); “The Unseen” (Belestrini); “Slavery by Another Name” (Blackmon); “Prison Strike,” “The Heart Goes Last” (Atwood); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “The Marijuana Manifesto” (Ventura); “Washington Bullets” (Prashad); “The Bachelor,” “Nazare.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

          December 17, 2021

Culture Vulture

 “Intersectional Class Struggle - Theory and Practice,” by Michael Beyea Reagan, 2021

This is a somewhat labored academic exercise by a proletarian anarchist who wishes to insert a ‘new’ paradigm of class struggle against Marxism and identity liberalism.  It is not really about class struggle.  Much of this book is repetitive for those familiar with labor history, Marxist and anarchist thinking or the debates around identity.  It might be helpful to liberals who don’t understand the role of class in every struggle.  Reagan’s real purpose however is to erect a straw man – a crude Marxist who supposedly ignores the roles of racism, sexism, nationalism and the like, doing his part to echo the archaic claim that Marxism is ‘class reductionist’ or ‘determinist’ and doesn’t understand culture.  

Reagan equates economics and culture as equals, as both are material forces.  True enough, but culture ultimately serves economics – that is if you are actually paying attention to the root of social materiality.  The exploitation of women is not really about male chauvinism, it is to provide free labor in the home and cheap labor outside it.  The root of slavery and the present super exploitation of ‘people of color’ is not really about white supremacy, but about profits.  The root of indigenous genocide and destruction is about land, oil and minerals. The hostility to other countries is not really about patriotism or group cohesion, it is in order to dominate them.  These are the actual positions of the ruling class at least.  The others are positive byproducts for them.

Certainly the holders of these views, if they are workers, benefit in certain emotional and even material ways, but not as much as the capitalists.  Dubois pointed this out years ago. They can also be damaged materially, though they might not be aware of it.  At present, male chauvinism, white supremacy and nationalism are cruel and crude ideologies to enable and justify exploitation, while weakening the working-class by creating color and gender semi-castes within the working class.  Patriotism is meant to embrace a ‘national’ solidarity with the capitalists, our enemies.  All these have to be opposed in any class struggle against capital and nearly every actual socialist understands this. Certainly Marxists have been in the forefront of these fights. 

Reagan does not mention nationalism by the way, which I’ll get into later.

Reagan goes through historical examples of the special exploitation of factory girls in Lowell, Massachusetts and Bacon’s Rebellion, which united U.S. ‘white’ indentured servants and ‘black’ slaves against the wealthy, giving rise to the first divisive Black Codes. He talks about a ‘black’ union organizer in Memphis and Latino migrants in the Central Valley.  He mentions how racism and sexism have been used in the past, sometimes by unions, to privilege certain sectors of the working class.  None of this is new information.

Materialism

Reagan explores the early history of materialism through the labor theory of value, John Locke, Alex de Touqueville, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Pyotr Kropotkin and Karl Marx. With no criticisms of Proudhon or Kropotkin, he gives a lukewarm thumbs up to Marxism, while decrying its supposed crude materialist errors - which he is about to fix. He claims Marx had no theory of class (or at least one he didn’t write down) but oddly, Marxists have somehow developed an excellent theoretical class understanding.  His focus on the labor theory of value ignores Marx’s more accurate insight in Critique of the Gotha Program – that labor AND nature produce all wealth. 

Reagan’s two examples of mostly cultural phenomena are the inferior treatment of women and fascism.  Yet both have heavy material influences.  Women have had a whole history of earlier class societies in which they were second-class citizens, mostly centered on their role in village, slave, tribute and feudal social structures before they were proletarianized.  Added to this are the very material facts of child-birth, breastfeeding and resulting childcare, which made it easier for class society to relegate women to a ‘private’ sphere.  Then there is the role of physical strength in warfare, hunting and early manual labor like coal mining, construction and the like, where women were relegated to the home or village due to their smaller size or their child-care role.  They flooded into the proletariat in England when their finer motor skills came into play in textile factories, which was the position of the mill owners.

On fascism, the need of severely crisis-ridden capital for a fascist movement is obvious.  Most fascist ideas are cartoonish, absolute versions of ‘normal’ colonial, racist, sexist, geographic, violent, religious and mythical ideas promoted by capital.  But when they hit the ground and are realized, for some they result in jobs, wealth, profits, taking over businesses and land – i.e. material goods. 

The real issue is whether culture is autonomous. This is actually also the perspective of the Republican Party, which uses the ‘culture wars’ to obscure class, or the Democrats, who act like identity is their electoral strategy. It is also the position of post-modernism.  Certainly, like a bird, ideas can fly above the ground, untethered yet motivated, but eventually the bird must return to earth.  Some 'birds' fly too high towards the sun, and their wings melt off. Even Engels criticized ‘mechanistic materialism,’ which seems to be what Reagan is doing here. In fact, I’ll buy a six-pack of good beer to the first person who can cite a cultural artifact that has no material roots.

Critics of Marxism

Reagan cites Social-Democrat Eduard Bernstein as one of the first critics of Marx’s focus on the material roots of culture, i.e. base and super-structure. Bernstein complained in the 1890s that Marx’s predictions of an ‘imminent’ social revolution were unfounded and went on to develop an evolutionary and reformist agenda.  In 1917 the Bolsheviks proved him wrong.  Right now the SDP that Bernstein inspired is in a coalition government running social-capitalist Germany, which is where that particular bird landed.

Reagan goes on to attack dialectical materialism through the writings of various anarchists; talks about Marxist E.P. Thompson’s focus on the dialogue between material reality and cultural reality; references Stuart Hall’s attacks on ‘dogmatic materialism.’  Two actual examples of ‘cultural' issues that Reagan uses are the prohibitions against homosexuality and marijuana.  This is laughingly untrue, as they are rooted in material needs of capital.  Homosexuality weakens the nuclear family and the reproduction of the working class - according to the boss class. They need more workers and consumers, not sex.  Marijuana laws are used as a club against Latinos, African-Americans and Euro-American youth, hipsters and workers as part of labor discipline and the terrorist incarceration state.

Reagan cites many later varieties of Marxists and revolutionaries – Dubois, Fanon, C.L.R. James, Cedric Robinson, Silvia Federici, The Combabee River Collective - who discuss culture, racism, sexism and sometimes ‘intersectionality.’  He is aware that nearly all present applications of ‘intersectionality’ omit or ignore class, which indicates their petit-bourgeois source and duplicity, many coming out of academe.

CLASS

Marxists don’t think class is just another intersection.  Tell me if I’m wrong. It is quite significant that nearly all of Reagan’s examples come from the U.S., not a more homogeneous society like Japan where ethnicity is not so prominent and where women are the second-class citizens. Reagan avoids looking at nations that are more homogeneous, which is why his focus is exclusively on the U.S. Many colonial countries in the 1800s were not teaming with the citizens of their empires as yet, so he ignores history too.  Yet Marx still wrote extensively on the deep oppression of the Irish and the African-American slave.  At the basis of class is economics - your role in production.  Ignoring that is like ignoring farmers and food.  In a sense, class is the universal.

There is only one brief mention of classes within ethnic communities in the book.  This consists of African-American professionals, entertainers or capitalist business people; Latino store owners; Asian-American professionals, Arab or Indian proprietors – name your nationality.  Nor is there a mention of classes within the Euro-American population.  Or a citation to middle-class, upper-class or capitalist women. These omissions show the truly universal quality of the class ‘intersection’ under capitalism – which cuts across every nation; every ethnicity; every gender, every religion, every sexual orientation.  This is why they are omitted by Reagan I suspect.

If the materialism and class that Reagan thinks he understands is rooted in economic life and our role in the universal requirement of production and survival as human bodies, then class remains the foundation, the ‘mother’ of all material intersections. Nor is this argument about ‘culture’ new at all.  Within Marxism it has been perfected for years, starting with people like Gramsci.  With the development of fully developed (and even overripe) capital in some countries, pure force is less and less necessary.  Ideology, propaganda and ‘culture’ replace other forms of coercion or 'togetherness.'  This has resulted in much more attention being paid by radicals to culture, propaganda and ideas in present capitalism than in the 1800s or even early to mid-1900s.

After a typical laundry list of struggles from the Paris Commune to Black Lives Matter protests, Reagan caps off the book with a true insight.  While he can’t define class either, (!!) he does say that the class structure in the U.S. is greatly variegated, mitigating against one party leading a revolution. This is part of a diatribe against Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who he claim ran a counter-revolution in 1918.  By the way Lenin’s What Is To Be Done doesn’t use the phrase ‘vanguard party’ – something adopted later by others. At this point in history it is quite likely, and certainly true today, that no one party is developing.  But a number of different socialist organizations that actually want social revolution might arise from different parts of the class. This raises the possibility of a Left Front, which could combine these groups in an organizational way and either join them into one, keep a broad governing alliance in a workers’ democracy or filter some out.

Nevertheless what this last section reveals is that the book is really not about intersectionality but is instead a sectarian anarchist attack on Marxism. Given anarchism, even proletarian anarchism, leans heavily in an ‘idealist’ direction, the overwhelming emphasis is on culture figures.  If you are a proletarian anarchist, you will enjoy this book.  If you are an academic liberal who has an incomplete understanding of ‘intersectionality’ you may benefit.  If you are a Marxist or an independent activist you will be bored. 

P.S. - Like so many liberals, government figures, media spokespeople and imprecise leftists, Reagan continues to use terminology that asserts there are multiple 'races.'  There is only one race, the human one.

P.P.S. - A Left Front has grown massively in Argentina, led by Trotskyists.  The left coalition in Chile just won an election, of which the Communist Party was part.  These efforts mirror the failed efforts of Syriza and Podemos in Europe several years ago, but presages a more revolutionary unity of the whole Left.  Latin American leftists are certainly light-years ahead of the Left in the U.S.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, with these terms:  “Towards Freedom - The Case Against Race Reductionism” (Reed); “Mistaken Identity”(Haider); “A Marxist Education”(Au); “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight” (Zizek); “The Populists Guide to 2020”(Ball); “White Trash” or the word “Marx.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 14, 2021

Soldiers of Misfortune

 “Lieutenant Dangerous – A Vietnam War Memoir” by Jeff Danziger, 2021

SNAFU – Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.  You bet, Yossarian.  Catch .223 or drop a 105 Howitzer from a Huey.  “War is interesting if you can avoid getting killed and don’t mind loud noises.”  Follow this “soldier of misfortune” as he loudly choppers into LZs, badly learns and forgets Vietnamese; gets assigned to replace Howitzer barrels; hides in an air-conditioned tin computer hut, gives away supplies to the ARVN, takes on surreal tasks and tries to complain. 

“Sorry Sir, this is my first war” said the grunt to the asshole.

Danziger was a smart but clueless and conformist middle-class kid when he was drafted in 1967.  He gradually understood what he was up against in the Army and spent time hiding out - badly learning Vietnamese and training in ordnance – but eventually ended up in the bush.  After the war Danziger became a political cartoonist and yes, this guy still spent 4 years in the Army and one year of that in Vietnam.  Pretty sad for a guy who thought it was all an avoidable circus.  As even he says, “I was … a failure at avoiding the worst ideas.”  Which is perhaps why he became an officer.

This is what is called a ‘rollicking read’ and indeed it is.  Sardonic, humorous, absurd, revealing and hostile to the whole FTA Army and Vietnam SNAFU, it will crank you through the worn-out clichés of army training, army life, army lies and deadly idiocy.  Orders become optional after a few weeks of warfare.  The sacred grail of ‘bombing our way to victory’ is revealed as contradictory.   All Danziger wanted to do was avoid being killed or wounded – and he succeeded - without perching in a tree naked.

Danziger describes Long Binh, a cesspool of American war garbage and baking hot shipping container jails for recalcitrant GIs.  Out of 20,000 male grads of Ivy League schools between 1965 and 1975, only 11 were killed in the ‘Nam – reflecting another class cesspool closer to home.  The U.S. and South Vietnamese government had agreed to leave the huge French-owned Michelin rubber tree plantations alone as an economic deal – so the Viet Cong set up inside.  Lame-ass comedians like Bob Hope were loathed by smoke-covered soldiers, who were still ordered to attend his tits and beer-soaked USO tours.  One of Danziger’s random ‘officer’ duties at his main base at Phuoc Vinh was to visit the refrigerated morgue trailers to certify the U.S. dead.  One U.S. “Mengele” commander got the itch to operate on wounded Viet Cong without anesthesia so they’d scream out secrets.  That cruel idea did not work, as secrets are not on your mind when being cut open.  Danziger was there to take notes and regretted it.  He caps his tour by accompanying a foolish invasion of Laos and the Ho Chi Minh trail by the South Vietnamese ARVN, who clung to the helicopters rather than drop onto the mountain tops.  

Danziger voted for Nixon, so that should give you an idea of where he was/is coming from.  But even he eventually realized Nixon has lost his nut.  As an example of Danziger's politics he continually frames the war as one of ‘north’ versus ‘south,’ ignoring the southern Viet Cong, the southern NLF or the southern peasantry, instead promoting a major Pentagon lie.  

Nevertheless this is the funniest book on the American War in Vietnam, if such a thing is possible.  Not wanting to die serves the trick.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews, with these terms:   “Matterhorn,” “Kill Anything That Moves,” “People’s History of the Vietnam War,” "Soldiers in Revolt,” “In the Crossfire – Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary,” “The Sympathizer” “Working-Class War,” “Da 5 Bloods,” “What It Is Like to Go To War,” “The Latitude of Mercy,” “Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's 'Balanced' Whitewash of the American War,” “A Viet Cong Memoir,” “Soldiers in Revolt.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog (the Frog has been traveling…)

December 10, 2021

Anthropophagy

 “Strategy of Deception,” by Paul Virilio, 2000

This is a theoretical book puncturing holes in the ‘humanitarian war’ ideology promoted by the Clinton administration in its military intervention in Yugoslavia and Kosovo.  This war was the first land war since World War II on the European mainland, promoted by Germany and later, the U.S., to further unravel the old Yugoslav state and allow the increased penetration of western European capital.  It succeeded in its purpose.

Virilio focuses on the use of air and space-wars in the modern era, enabled by ‘precision’ – or at least digital - technology.  Kosovo / Serbia / former Yugoslavia was one of the first to be conducted by the imperial countries mostly by air.  “War” is now seemingly absent humans – at least from the perspective of the power attacking from the air.  This campaign became a template for later interventions.  50 satellites and 20 different space stations above the Balkans kept the U.S. and other militaries informed about all physical movements in this central/southern European ‘battlespace.’ This is part of “the revolution in military affairs / network centric warfare” approach also discussed by Mike Davis in his 2007 book In Praise of Barbarians (reviewed below).     

Virilio writes with seemingly elegant turns of phrase and new usages, which is the style of certain political writers.  Sometimes it pays off with an actual insight.  One of his best quips is that ethnic cleansing was replaced by “ethical cleansing.”   He was actually quite prescient, as this was written in 2000, not 2021. Virilio finds in this military action a U.S. attempt at real hegemony  -  over its allies, over the U.N., over most of NATO, over every nation it can control from the sky.  In this way, 'nationalism' becomes outmoded from above.  Kosovo and Yugoslavia were examples of the new extended battlefield – in space, above the ground, in the realm of information and in the network of civilian utilities.  Among other things, the U.S. bombing campaign hit the Chinese embassy (with ‘smart’ bombs!); blew up Belgrade’s television station and destroyed/blacked out the electrical grid in all of Yugoslavia.  They even sent 5 Cruise missiles into Sofia, Bulgaria. (!)

This military campaign was run by the Atlantic Council, a group of cold-warriors dominated by the U.S. – which consulted with Germany, France and the U.K. but acted unilaterally, not as a real coalition, with ‘silence’ the response from the rest of NATO.  If you want to be up-to-date on their opinions, listen to NPR - National Government Radio.

Bombed Belgrade, which hurt anti-Milosevic forces.  

Viriolio’s points:  (Remember, this is 2000)

*War has become a “tela-war,” ‘the panopticon,’ a new Cyclops, an “areo-spatial” war. 

*In April 1999 the Pentagon claimed that Yugoslavia had a ‘chemical weapons capability.” (This is prior to the 2003 2^nd Iraq bombing and invasion over fake  “weapons of mass destruction”).  The Pentagon claimed they had a “duty to intervene,” which he dubs a “secular holy war.”

*The “revolution in military affairs” promoted by the Clinton administration is assigned to the “tragi-comic infantilization of this century’s end.”

*The use of airpower, satellites and drones makes the U.S. a “weightless nation” in combat. 

*Part of the tactic is to interfere in any rational or knowledgeable understanding of what is going on by civilians on both sides.  He calls this a “logic bomb,” a part of “global information dominance.” The U.S. flew propaganda hardware and operators out of Fort Bragg (named after a Confederate general) into the battle zones to broadcast locally.  Then there was our own ‘independent’ private/government media.  Part of the plan is to control all images out of the war zone, which is coordinated through a government organization called NIMA.  This anticipates the 'embedding' of the 2nd Iraq War.

*The Pentagon called this a “human-rights war.” (Orwell just rolled over.)

*55K TV channels and FM radio stations, if tapped in, provide a web of data that allows surveillance of airspace over 2 continents.

*Accidents are an inevitable part of warfare, hence taking advantage of ‘accidents’ whitewashes a war - as if the warmkers were not responsible.  He calls it “a jackpot of accidents.”

*Over-information, the saturation of unconnected factoids, is a method of disinformation.

*Essentially, air and space superiority abolish nations.  It is the imperialist form of ‘internationalism.’

*Capitalism has created a world of shanty-towns, favelas, ghettos, townships, sink estates – essentially an “urban wasteland.” These “zone of uselessness” are populated and ruled by criminal gangs, becoming a “war against civilians” which results in “anthropophagy” (eating humans.)  Which is one reason why massive population transfers are happening all over the globe. 

*The Kosovo/Yugoslav war was illegal – contravening the UN Charter and the Charter of the Atlantic Alliance.  So NATO convened a tiny “judicial laboratory” called the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to spruce things up.

*Kosovo was a “globalist putsch.”

*Lastly, Francis Fukuyama, who falsely predicted “the end of history” predicted, in 2010, the abolishment “of humans as such.”  Hmmmm… quite a turn - but perhaps not.

Virilio was not a supporter of Milosevic or Serbian ethnic cleansing, seeing the wars from a broader perspective.  This book serves as a good insight into modern conflict.  

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, using these terms:  “Yugoslavia – Peace, War & Dissolution” (Chomsky); “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “Quo Vadis, Aida?”  “WR:  Mysteries of the Organism,” “War With Russia” (Cohen); “Living in the End Times”(Zizek); “The Paper/Novine” or the name "Orban." 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 4, 2021