Atheist Pilgrim

 Mont St. Michel

Took the long country walk up to Mont St. Michel, that ancient abbey surrounded by water, built on a rock island on the northwestern coast of Normandy, France. A quiet, warmish day in late October, so pleasant for tourists and pilgrims though Normandy is in a serious drought. Whitish sheep grazing the green fields as you approach the ocean, the low-slung bridge causeway and the triangle pointing to the sky. Mont St. Michel is a religious lesson written in stone, brick and mortar.

It sits on a natural island about a half mile out at high tide. It dominates that rock, as if nature had to bow down before its rider. Mt. Saint Michel started in the 700s with the first small church. Over hundreds of years, through the Vikings (who conquered it in 900+), the Normans who were the descendants of Viking raiders and Danish Kings like Rollo, arose finally a massive Gothic edifice, with its steeple the highest point – pointing to heaven. The small island village below the Abbey grew as pilgrims flocked to the rock. It is a little like an Italian mountain town in the Cinque Terre near water, but French. The village is also crowned and dominated by the Abbey. Nature and civilians take second place to God - not unusual for medieval times, but still in the hearts of so many of our Evangelical Christians.

The Abbey was also a fortress that survived the 100 Years War without being taken by the English. It still has quite effective battlements.

What of the Abbey now? Well, to this atheist it is a great film setting for the next monk murder mystery – a maze of dark chambers, massive fireplaces, crypts, a torture wheel, winding passages, alters, the eating hall, a beautiful cloister, some gardens that were probably first used to grow vegetables and fruit, and the church sanctuary itself – under reconstruction. A good part of the edifice is under reconstruction, care of the French government, a process that probably never stops.

Is it a functioning religious institution? Only if you consider a library that no one visits for books, computers or films a functioning institution.

Nicest Party of the Dark Abbey - the Cloisters

What also didn't stop was the attempt to keep Mont St. Michel the way it is. A dam built long ago to keep the flat farm land from flooding was also silting up the area around the rock, as a strong river outflow could no longer wash away the silt. They estimated that in a number of years, trees and brush would be growing around the island instead of tides, silt and mud. So they reconstructed the dam, installing flood gates for the water to go both ways – stop the tide from flooding by opening the gates, closing them to hold the water, then releasing all that water to wash away the silt. In effect, two-way water gates. It is working to keep it as it was.

A visit to this towering edifice is not without travail. If you are not sweating at the top, you have not paid for your sins. It was purposely built like this to make the 'pilgrim' suffer the steep walk, a walk of martyrs, of Jesus, of Calvary and crucifiction Luckily, its flat once you summit the stone stairway to heaven. Did I see an actual 'pilgrim'? No, only mobs of French, English, Aussie, American and Chinese tourists and a rising street lined with tourist shops. Only one young woman covered her head in the Church, reminding us that nuns, orthodox Catholics, Muslims, orthodox Mormons and other ancient tribes do love to have women cover up.

I looked through the guide-books, asked some visitors I was acquainted with, and one of the information experts this question: “Who built this?” I did not mean what individual, what church, what government. I meant what workers? The answer was either nothing or 'monks.' Now the monks – who are back with a small contingent – would have to have a skilled and strong army of thousands over many years to get this monstrous stone citadel built. Did they impress the farmers and townsfolk around the Rock into forced labor or 'volunteer' labor like some religious Stakhanovites? Did they hire skilled stonemasons, carpenters and architects from all over France? They got many of the rocks from islands down the coast. How were these many massive stones raised except by labor resembling the building of the great pyramids? Now the work is done by helicopter and probably CGT union craftspeople. But the early, hardest work was done by unknown thousands.

Even the very real material question of how water was brought up hill was not answered. Evidently it levitated.

Mont St. Michel is a monument to human ingenuity, perhaps under the magical whip of God, but more likely the very real whip of a Monseigneur and his Royal friends. During the French Revolution it was turned into a prison, as many churches were shut down by the revolutionary government due to their support of Le Roi. It is common to see noses broken off religious statues. Today it receives 3 million visitors a year, has monstrous parking lots and a shuttle bus every 10 minutes if you don't want to take the walk to the Rock. But the walk is worth it.

The Cultural Marxist

October 31, 2022

Soviet Noir

 “Gorky Park” by Martin Cruz Smith, 1982

It's the early '70s, Brezhnev time. 3 bodies are found in Moscow's central Gorky Park, mutilated, shot, crusted over with snow. Senior police investigator Arkady Renko gets the case – one he doesn't want because he suspects something bigger is going on, KGB big. It's not a routine drunken vodka murder by an incompetent suspect, as nearly all Moscow killings are. This looks careful or professional – if you can call murder that. Renko has never lost a case, but that streak might end.

That is the set-up. This story ranks right up there with LeCarre in detail, in twists and turns, in ominous dread, in precision and intelligence. Presiding over the story is the Soviet State – fat bureaucrats, an atmosphere of smooth corruption, intentional incompetence and a brutal prison and KGB system. This has produced a persistent yet cynical chief investigator, whose ironic and sometimes sarcastic quips at its expense never stop coming. Of course Arkady is also going through a divorce with his athletic, upwardly mobile blonde CP wife. He's not sufficiently careerist for her, his father or for the rest of the elite.

The story is morbid, but it is also realistic about the lives of Russian and Soviet citizens during this period, which is one of its great values. All is not a prison. It's April, spring is coming, ice cream is on sale, children shout and skate in Gorky Park - a park every Muscovite knows as a child. Why this particular popular location for the murders is the first question, followed by more, and by answers. Yeah, he's that good. There are a subtle hints buried in the text, in tapped phone calls, in autopsies, from informers, in interrogations, memories and evidence gathered at the scene.

The overly-popular detective genre seems to satisfy a need to deal with unkind death in a rigorous and scientific, rational manner. It brings satisfaction that all is right in the world if the crime is solved – a crime that really might reflect far larger, more amorphous, more powerful dramas, but now shrunk down to a manageable level. The fear of nuclear winter, of environmental Armageddon, of financial ruin, of war, of one's own death or injury, but domesticated, controlled, diminished, palatable. In a way, 'reformist' and escapist. Arkady never loses – losing upsets the template. Predictability is preferred by the reader, as death cannot be loosed – unlike the real world.

We have skull modeling, sinister American businessmen, crooked informers, an affair, excellent police work, a threatening nomenclature and KGB, the milk-fed FBI, double agents, exotic sable, more killings and the standard femme fatale. Arkady is ultimately aided by a burly, insulting New York City police detective who is a red diaper baby. Arkady travels to New York – a location that literally seems out of place, as Moscow is a central character. His trip shows the venality of the American system, especially its interest in robbing the USSR...which is the central plot point of the book.

There a streak of anti-capitalist proletarianism in Arkady, whose main suspect is 'money' incarnate. Corruption is ultimately at the center of the story – a disease of the powerful bureaucracy and also of the capitalists, though they have other ways of earning money. There is the somewhat insulting presumption that Arkady is the only honest man in Russia. Will Arkady survive? Will the killer be brought to some kind of justice? Will some kind of unlikely love live? Gorky Park is a seminal example of Soviet noir – a trend nearly every country has now embraced.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Polar Star” (Martin Cruz Smith); "Trapped and Detective Stories in General," "Streaming Run-Down," "Redbreast," "Comrade Detective," "Blood Lake," "Red Harvest" (Hammett); "Line of Duty," "The Peaky Blinders," "The Paper: Novine," "3%."

And I bought it at a used bookstore in Paris!

Red Frog

October 28, 2022

Similarities Abound

 "The Black Hundred – The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia” by Walter Laqueur, 1993

Laqueur is a liberal historian focused on the history of the ultra-right and fascist organizations in Russia and the USSR. This book is dated, but what is interesting is that many present themes of Russian conservatism and neo-fascism are still present after 1993. Slavophilism, the Russian Orthodox Church, hatred of Jews, Monarchism, worship of ‘strong leaders,’ violent nationalism, Euro-Asianism, even the obsession with ‘Satan’ – it’s as if the Black Hundreds, like the KKK in the U.S., never really went away.

It is not just Ukraine that coddles Nazis. Given the present existence of various ultra-right and neo-fascistic Russian forces involved in the war on Ukraine – the Wagner Group (Russia’s own Blackwater), Rusich, Russian Imperialist Mvmt., Slavic Union, Don, Borey, DPNI, etc. or ultra-nationalist propagandists like Dugin – it seems things have not changed. Territorial expansion is the hallmark of this kind of conservatism and geo-politics - the 'land' is sacred. 

BACKGROUND

Laqueur tracks the anti-Semitic and Tsarist history of the Black Hundreds, which carried out pogroms against Jews during and after the 1905 revolution. He shows how fascists still operated during the Civil War, and later outside the USSR. Some finally endorsed Stalin as a real example of Russian fascism, a nationalist strong man for the ages, and supported Lenin against Trotsky, the Jew. This endorsement continued in the history of many of the far right in Russia. During the late 1960s nationalist 'Russophile' sentiments began to be allowed, as the Party and the rightists both opposed the internationalist stance and both hated the liberal intelligentsia.

After Soviet ‘glasnost’ was declared in the mid-1980s by Gorbachev, the rightists became public. Every festering reactionary group, individual and idea crawled out of the woodwork. The Russian Orthodox Church became somewhat powerful once again. Slavophiles (those who celebrate Slavic ethnicity) became organized. After the counter-revolution, open fascist groupings were public – something that happened in every other fallen bureaucratic workers' state. National-Bolshevism arose, combining neo-Stalinism with rightist nationalism.

Laquer discusses the forged anti-Jewish Protocols of Zion, which were smuggled into the USSR, along with several fake histories of Russia claiming it was pagan and Aryan initially. The right pushed Russian ethnicity and Russian patriotism, saying it was the greatest country in the world – something both the bureaucrats and the Russianists agreed on. The influence of religious conservatives like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn provided heroes. The bureaucratic government promoted anti-Jewish attitudes with references to “Zionism.” But much of the discussion was not about Israel but about the nefarious doings of Jews within Russia. This was part of a campaign against the Samzidat liberals like Sakarov. Also involved was the surreptitious promotion by conservatives of a Jewish-Masonic (Judeo-Bolshevik) 'plot' to take over the world, which involved Bolshevik Jews like Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kaganovich and others. There was much familiar talk of the 'Marx-Rothschild alliance' … something that now becomes the 'Marxism-Soros' alliance.

Another contradiction presented as 'fact.'

'Westernism' and cosmopolitanism were also enemies. Conspiracy theories ran rampant. Pagan religion had a resurgence. Medievalism was encouraged against capitalism and communism. Conservative Cossacks and Tartars demanded power. After the counter-revolution in 1989 good Czarist liberals like Stolypin and Tsar Alexander II were resurrected and the White Armies openly praised. Nuclear war was declared to be a real option. Clowns like Zhirinovsky – a reactionary huckster similar to Trump - were given credence.

Laquer covers various rightist leaders, writers, organizations and their numerous splits. This includes the development of Pamyat – a successor to the Black Hundreds. At first they were a cultural organization interested in preserving churches, celebrating peasant and rural life and praising Russian generals and victories, but they also pushed the Protocols, Judeo-Masonic plots and Orthodoxy. Pamyat was later overtaken by more violent or modern rightists, like former member Dugin who was influenced by the Nouvelle Droite in France.  He first mentioned the 'new right' in 1990. The Orthodox Church had collaborated with the CP and celebrated Stalin's birthday for years, so their influence was weaker. There were a good number of priests that were KGB agents. They officiated at the inauguration of Yeltsin too, so they rode whatever donkey was available.

A continuing theme of the book is the collaboration between the Army, KGB and various rightist and National Bolshevik organizations, which definitely goes on to this day under a capitalist government and the FSB. Both lean to an authoritarian, nationalist government with theocratic undertones. Yet their politics are irrational contradictory notions like favoring the Tsar and Stalin; seeing Marx and Zionism as the same; supporting a 'people's monarchy' and advocating an oxymoron like 'national Bolshevism.' Only one side of these nonsense phrases can be true.

Laquer finishes with a discussion of the difference between good patriotism and toxic nationalism.  He is against internationalism.  He's ignored class and economics throughout the book, much like his enemies, the ultra-right. The nation is mainly a legal form used by the bourgeoisie to protect its rule. In the Russian case however, the Right moans the loss of the Baltics, “White Russia” (Bylorussia) and Ukraine. Their desire, much like other revaunchist governments, is to recover land 'lost.' This we see in the war in Ukraine, a war carried out by an autocratic government, which Laquer predicted in the book in 1993.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: 'Russia,' 'fascism,' “national Bolshevism.'

And I bought it at May Day's used section!

Red Frog

October 23, 2022

Anti-Fascist Series #10: Classical View

 “Fascism – What It is and How to Fight It” by Leon Trotsky, 1930-1940

This short pamphlet put out by Pathfinder Press contradicts all the imprecise definitions of fascism floating around in the U.S. right now.  The hippie phrase ‘friendly fascism,’ the nonsense that Trump is already a fascist, Mussolini’s idea that when government and corporations work together, that constitutes fascism, that every authoritarian or military dictator is a fascist, the idea that the whole Republican Party is fascist presently, the idea that we must unite with the Democratic leadership to ‘fight the fascist right’ – all sourced from liberal commentators.  I’ve even been told that spitting at the president is ‘fascism.’ These are all examples of a lazy, impressionistic, anti-materialist approaches which will lead to defeat.

Here Trotsky gives the classical Marxist definition, embraced until the late 1920s by the 3^rd International, by Clara Zetkin in her analysis of Italy, by Lenin in his observations of the Russian Black Hundreds around the 1905 events.  It contradicts the ‘3^rd period’ ultra-leftism of the Comintern in 1930 and later, which claimed Social Democrats were also ‘social fascists,’ thus preventing a united front with the German Social Democrats against fascism.  This disunity quite clearly allowed the triumph of Hitler.  Another erroneous understanding of fascism.

Any social revolution in the U.S. will have to combat fascist movements before it ever deals directly with the forces of the state. Hence it is best to know what you are dealing with. As capital declines, it must resort to standard governmental authoritarianism (the Anaconda) and if that doesn’t work, fascist forces to prop up its rule.  Trump is the huckster/conman/Mafia Don this movement has initially found.  Instead of a real, mass socialist movement to oppose, the rightists have manufactured one out of the sad cloth of the Democrats, calling them socialists and communist.  This is why the majority of the capitalist class is still not on board – perhaps only 10% plus a still small section of the state apparatus want to get rid of bourgeois democracy completely.  Their shock troops were out in force on Jan. 6, 2021.  However, a majority might be in favor of an authoritarian regime achieved through 'democratic' means.  Orbanism...

This is the situation we find ourselves in now.  Behind this struggle, two clear factions of the bourgeoisie also fight over which economic grouping – the old oil/gas matrix or the new energy/ technology matrix – will ultimately triumph.  I think it is a serious faction fight which weakens the capitalists and gives the Left an opening.

Here are some quotes from the pamphlet as he looks at Italy and Germany.  Nearly all of this is still applicable if one looks at the present ultra-right, MAGA/QAnon, white nationalist, Christian fascist and reactionary Oathkeepers and Proud Boys groups.

1.   “The genuine basis for fascism is the petit-bourgeoisie.”  Petit-bourgeois means small and medium businessmen, landlords, independent contractors and farmers.  These are most prominent on the Right right now. Trotsky does not examine the white–collar “PMC” – the professional / managerial strata, which Bob Seeger called the UMC – the Upper Middle Class.

2.   “Through the fascist agency, capitalism set in motion the masses of the crazed petit-bourgeoisie and bands of declassed and demoralized lumpen-proletarians – all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.”  Also ruin and conspiracy theories …

3.   Upon the unification of the fascist mass movement with the capitalist state “the workers organizations are annihilated.”  Happened yet?  No.

4.   “The reformists (social democrats, liberals) shut their eyes to the organic character of fascism as a mass movement growing out of the collapse of capitalism.” (In Germany & Italy, reformist leaderships relied on the state or conservative political leaders, even police, to save them.)

5.   “Italian comrades informed me that, with the exception of Gramsci, the Communist Party would not even allow the possibility of the fascists seizing power.”  This was also true in Germany.  “After Hitler, us.”

6.   To think that fascism and every form of capitalist reaction are identical is “vulgar Marxism.”  And factually untrue. 

7.   “…fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair.”

8.   Without a proposed united front with the Social Democracy in Germany, the CP formula of ‘social fascism’ was threatened by a real fascism, “no longer with wordy formulas of so-called radicalism but with the chemical formulas of explosives.”

9.   “The politicians of reformism... are inept boobs.”

10.       The 3 stages of bourgeois European politics – 1) Jacobinism against the landowners and royalty; 2) reformism and 3) fascism – all 3 “are basically programs of petit-bourgeois currents.”  In the U.S. 10% of the population are millionaires – a major prop to the ruling class.  The number of business owners are in the millions too.

11.       “But precisely with the war there begins the distinct decline of capitalism and, above all, its democratic form of domination.  Therefore the campaign against Marxism on the one hand, and democratic parliamentarism on the other.”  Sound familiar from the rhetoric of many Republican politicians?

12.       Capital alone cannot rule, so “they need the support of the petit-bourgeois." For this fascist purpose in times of strife, “it must be whipped up, put on its feet, mobilized, armed."  Already happening.

13.       “In all countries, the same historic laws operate, the laws of capitalist decline.”  This present alt-right is international in scope, though not in politics. See the 'elected' - Orban, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Erdogan etc.

14.       Since the army is sometimes ultimately unreliable - “that is why finance capital is obliged to create special armed bands, trained to fight the workers…”

15.       “The despairing petit-bourgeoisie sees in fascism … a fighting force against big capital.”

Meloni's troops?

The book also discusses the Spanish dictatorship under Primo de Rivera, the petit-bourgeois-backed Polish dictatorship of Pilsudski, the twists and turns of failed Comintern policy in Germany.  He points out how fascist ‘waves’ follow leftist failures. He seeks to bring the petit-bourgeoisie to the side of the working-class by the working-class having confidence in its own strength, as middle strata wobble and will follow those who can exhibit power.  Ultimately he calls for workers’ militias to combat fascist groupings, and against ‘flabby pacifism.’

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  ‘Anti-Fascist Series,’ or Fascism Today, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate; Against the Fascist Creep; Fighting Fascism (Zetkin); The Real Red Pill; No Fascist USA; The Ultra-Right; It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis); Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety; The Coming Storm; A Fascist Edge; Clandestine Occupations; Charlottesville, Virginia; What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?; Angry White Men, Alerta!.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 18, 2022

Walking Before Midnight

 “A Philosophy of Walking” by Frederic Gros, 2015

Do we really need a ‘philosophy of walking?’  If you were hoping for a somewhat well-grounded book about walking, you are out of luck.  This is not a meditation on walking so much as a description and riff off of famous artistic and philosophical walkers.  In that it is somewhat pretentious and dated, but it is written by an expert on post-modernist French philosophy - so it figures.  He romantically describes the mountain rambles of Nietzsche, the vagabond travels of Rimbaud, the nature worship of Thoreau and Rousseau, several chapters on Christian pilgrims, the poet Nerval, the philosopher Kant, the politician Gandhi, the poet Wordsworth and, in an attempt to be somewhat modern, mentions of ‘Buddhist’ hipsters Snyder and Kerouac.

Yet if you are a hiker through woods or hills or mountains or beaches, a tent camper, a town wanderer, a hitchhiker, a dog walker, an environmentalist, a writer, musician, painter, photographer or thinker, there is still something here.  Oddly, Gros seems to distain wandering in a city.  He has little to say about group walks or dog walks and would look down on step calculators.  He sees walking as a release from care which enables thinking, preferably done in solitary, certainly over several days in nature, best on mountains. So he’s really enamored with overnight hiking at higher elevations, but allows for city strolls and ‘promenades.'

Europe has a much older walking culture than the U.S., which prefers gasoline to get around.  It has many well-organized trails with shelters.  On the other hand many U.S. children whine when taken on walks. After all, walking is a form of work. Many adults never walk anywhere except from their car to the grocery store. Only recently in the U.S. has traversing the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Coast Trail and shorter ones become bragging, film and photo/selfie opportunities.  Gros himself misses the fact that hiking has become a media event on You Tube and other sites, and still thinks walkers shed society. They do not. Gros does not see how walking is related to current traveling. Travel actually forces people to walk.  Nor does he mention the carbon benefit of walking.  Many gaps here, given a dated, overly-intellectual approach.

Gros favors slowness in a walk, to imbibe the surroundings, not the hurried jockiness of fast walking.  He understands that feet and gravity become the elemental points of contact between human and earth. Walking embraces monotony and repetition, but Gros never mentions it as physical exercise.  Pray no! He points out that in normal life ‘the outside’ has become a dead, transitional space between interior places.  He is perhaps unaware of the many people who work outside all day, or who spend extensive time in their backyards, on beaches, in woods or lakes during an average day.  Many see ‘fresh air’ as an escape, as he does too. I guess his academic office job in Paris is confining and that is the template for everyone.

Gros describes the old promenades in the Tuileries gardens, where the wealthy paraded their fine clothing and accoutrements, similar to the strolls of the early rich down certain city boulevards – Nevsky Prospect, Champs Elysees, 5^th Avenue.  Another urban walker is the Parisian ‘flaneur’ – who is not in a hurry, who peeks into every nook and crevice without buying, a Situationist or Surrealist wanderer isolated in the city ... not a thief on the look-out for loose things and open doors.

FAMOUS WALKERS

The delirious misanthrope Nietzsche spent 10 good years mountain walking, which helped him to write, this after a predictable stint as a professor.  Then his body gave out and he ended up in an insane asylum.  As a young man, the poet Rimbaud walked to various cities in Belgium and France, even crossing the Alps, and sustained long treks in the desert near Aden, until his body too collapsed.  Rimbaud walked because he was poor, not because he was necessarily a ‘walker.’  His desire to ‘walk’ was really a desire to escape from wherever he was.  Both these stories show how health is crucial to the mere ability to get around like this ... a material fact Gros skips.  Workers who work physical labor might shy from walking, as they’ve already tramped thousands of steps doing a warehouse job.  Nor is the endless shuffling and outdoor life of the homeless or the long trek of migrants to el Norte or Europe relevant to Gros.  They are invisible in this romantacist assemblage.

Thoreau took hours-long daily walks around Concord, avoiding work as part of his tradition of frugality. Thoreau mediates on early morning, spring and winter walks.  He could do this party because his father was a pencil manufacturer, his patron the monied writer Emerson. Rousseau had 3 periods of walking – in early youth, in middle age after rejecting society for a time, and in ‘old’ age – at 60.  For Rousseau it was a function of individualism and being present as a natural man outside society, a society which Gros paints as wholly evil. The poet Nerval was also a walker – getting lost in Paris or farther afield.  These melancholy walks ended one day in suicide.  You could set your watch and map on the timing and path taken by Kant on his daily 5 P.M. strolls in Konigsberg.  Proust had two walks, to Swann’s house and the country villa of the Guermantes, which both show up in his books. There are Wordsworth’s ground-breaking poetic rambles in the English shires, which evidently made walking  'respectable' over and above Romani, highwaymen and tinkers.  Gandhi walked into history in his sandals and staff by going to the sea in a ‘march for salt,’ as a way to oppose the British salt tax.  Gandhi frequently walked in London and organized marches in the Transvaal.  This is similar to the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, the Chinese Red Army’s Long March, Sherman’s March to the Sea or the deadly Cherokee/Creek Trail of Tears, the Bataan Death March, the Armenian expulsion and many other historic ‘walks’ that are not mentioned.

The Greek philosophers, especially the Cynics, walked frequently.  The Cynics went from Greek town square to town square with a staff, a blanket and a bag, shoeless, like early pilgrims.  Gros also has two chapters on Christian pilgrims traveling on foot to visit relics in France, Jerusalem and Spanish Compostela. These chapters really set the tone of the book, which has the archaic psychic and textual character of something written 150 years ago or more.

This book might inspire a reader to do more walking, but there are other books, like “In Praise of Walking,” that cover this issue without this antiquated, bourgeois and overly romanticized approach.  May Day carries “In Praise of Walking” too.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Wild,” “Travel Notes – St. Petersburg,” “A Walk Through Paris,” “The Dharma Bums” (Kerouac);“Black Rain,” “Left in London,” “Time is Right For Riding in the Streets,” “Postcards From the End of America,” “The Irish Literary Trail,” “Walking With the Comrades” (Roy); “The Beach Beneath the Street – the Life and Times of the Situationist International,” “A Travelers Tale,” “The Dark Heart of Italy,” “The Listening Point” (Olson); “Into the Wild,” “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” (Solnit).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 15, 2022

Pessimistic Utopianism?

 “Hothouse Utopia – Dialectics Facing Unsavable Futures” by Ryan Gunderson, 2021

This book is influenced by Frankfurt School ‘Western’ Marxism, as Gunderson’s idea of ‘orthodox’ Marxism seems to be that it is determinist.  The Frankfurt School’s pessimism came from the Soviet / Warsaw bloc failures; the growing weaknesses of the  working class movement in 'developed' capitalist countries and the triumph of the neo-liberal market project by capital.  So it concentrated on how capital controlled the lower classes through cultural and material means, attempting to counter-act that with critical dialectics.

Hovering over Gunderson’s outlook is the dark present and future wrought by global warming and furious capital accumulation.  The environmental crisis is his main motivator. He realizes the neo-liberal project and environmental techno-utopianism is failing, which is obvious to many.  In a way the ‘alt-right project’ is next, as capital attempts to defend itself by openly authoritarian means.  In this context he looks at how “coping, hoping, doping and shopping” are the methods that many people use to endure the present and the dark future, leaving the cause of misery intact.

COPING, HOPING, DOPING & SHOPPING

To do this Gunderson attacks capital and techno apologists like Steven Pinker without falling into the trap of romantic primitivism.  Pinker claimed that ‘progressive’ intellectuals “really hate progress.” Gunderson points out that all technology is not progressive - ‘progress’ is not facial cognition software and stratospheric geo-engineering.  Instead Gunderson introduces the concept of “alienated reconciliation” in which individuals deal with the cruel contradictions in society by #1) justifying the system as ‘that’s just the way things are’; #2) engage in ineffective actions to solve problems that actually sustain the system; #3) engage in various forms of escapism.  As he puts it “Today, hope is paradoxically sustained in pessimism.”

#1 is obvious, but #2 relates to charity, small group thinking and activities, tiny picket lines – in effect, do-gooderism, moralism and activities that amount to virtue signaling, religious love, bearing witness or performative politics.  These change nothing.  Adorno called this ‘pseudo-activity.’  In a way ‘activism’ like this prohibits thinking by being busy, busy, busy … a problem for some left groups. I know who you are.

Gunderson names several more concepts:  “utopian pragmatism,” “neoliberal naturalism,” “moralizing individualism.” The former involves believing the present system will exist forever – a utopian idea if there ever was one.  The second turns capital into a ‘natural’ state, not one driven by profit, class and production or embedded in history.  The third is familiar to anyone who is in a Twitter©/ FB©/ etc. fight.  There the keyboard warriors of identity slam anyone who mentions class or materialism, or doesn’t like Obama or Harris.  As Gunderson notes, this kind of activity actually boosts the Republicans, the alt-right and the fascists. As an example he addresses the ‘fat acceptance’ movement – which justifies the capitalist food regime of morbid obesity, poverty, terrible food and bad health in the name of ‘fighting discrimination.’

#3 is “hiding” (or doping) - done with alcohol, drugs, Netflix© and entertainment.  As I’ve said before, entertainment is the new ‘opiate of the people.’  He pokes fun at the ‘vanlife’ movement, McMindfulness© and artists like Rhianna getting a billion hits while Chomsky only gets 3.6M.

Utopia / Dystopia

DIALECTICS, UTOPIANISM and a PROGRAM 

Marcuse pointed out that dialectical thinking emerges out of daily life, as contradictions become evident.  It becomes “a critique of conformist logic.”  Gunderson’s academic and odd names for the stages of dialectics are various forms of ‘immanent critique,’ ‘historization,’ and ‘contradiction-crisis diagnosis.’  He describes these three ‘flagellations’ (!?) of dialectics by referring back to the failures of the 20^th century socialist movement.  He endorses something called ‘negative dialectics’ which is open about the future but not determinist. I'm not sure any of these twists are necessary.

Gunderson first quotes Bukharin and Kautsky as to how they assumed socialism was inevitable.  It is not, as the more wide-spread socialist phrase  ‘socialism or barbarism’ originated by Luxemburg shows. Secondarily, the ‘revolutionary subject’ – the working class – was defeated, bought off or ideologically captured, living to survive, according to the Frankfurt School.  He describes the School's ‘negative dialectical thinking’ - which abstains from clear programs – resulting in a sort of pessimistic and idealist quietism where “thinking becomes a more effective means of resistance than action.” So he turns against them.  The Frankfurt School assumed Fordist / Keynesianism would be permanent.  It was not, moving first to neo-liberalism, now towards authoritarianism and fascism. Thirdly, Gunderson believes a “climate revolution” – or indeed any kind – is highly unlikely, but still a goal to work towards.  As part of this he favors a form of ‘degrowth’ in advanced capitalist countries.  (As an aside, he thinks Extinction Rebellion is a form of pseudo-activity.) 

Gunderson’s goal now is a “less bad dystopia,” (depressing idea, that…) and wonders whether “utopian thought is possible today.” He dips into Christian ideas of paradise and Walter Benjamin’s depressing insistence, like so many leftists, on only looking at the miseries and few triumphs of the past.  Gunderson ultimately stands for the liberation of the future and its children and grandchildren, not a focus on the travails of the parents, grandparents and of the past.

He considers the correct idea of ‘utopian’ to be Adorno’s position of “genuine progress as catastrophe reduction.”  Not ‘production for production’s sake’ as in the capitalist and crude Marxoid productionist versions, but the reduction or elimination of environmental, fascist, war, nuclear and poverty threats, using existing technology.  He opposes the idea that the further development of abstract productive forces are the dialectical materialist endgame and settles for a reconciliation with nature.

Lastly, Gunderson introduces another academic phrase, “anticipatory reconciliation,” which understands the present is full of possibilities to prevent a ‘less bad dystopia.’  He grounds this in the ‘dialectic of hope’ of the semi-Marxist Ernest Bloch, who, unlike the Frankfurt School, was not afraid of programmatic demands and “fact-based possibilities.”  Gunderson also endorses common-sense ‘mundane transcendence’ consisting of kindness, observation and understanding.  

What follows is a discussion of various kind of ‘possibilities’ and demands:  1) Socialize energy systems.  2) Reduce work time. 3) Economic democracy. 4) Democratize global climate governance.  He endorses familiar large-scale ‘revolutionary reforms’ (somewhat similar to transitional demands) along social-democratic lines, as part of a movement towards ‘democratic socialism.’  He is a supporter of Sanders and perhaps a member of DSA, but still mentions the need for ‘revolution.’ 

Full of perhaps unnecessary or academic formulations of common-sense or simple Marxist understandings, Gunderson attempts to deal with the weakness of the global socialist Left through making adjustments to forms of Marxism, in order to clear a way to a "less-bad future." This book is perhaps best at using the historically-based views of the Frankfurt School, with a personal twist that refutes them.       

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using terms:  “Zizek,” “McMindfulness,” “Capitalist Realism” (Fisher); “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” “John Bellamy Foster.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 11, 2022

Wired Again

 “We Own This City,” 6 episode limited series produced by David Simon, 2022

This series is a follow-up to “The Wire,” an earlier ground-breaking streaming series about crime and corruption in Baltimore by ‘semi-Marxist’ David Simon.  This mini-series is based on a non-fiction book about a rouge unit of the Baltimore police, the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF).  The unit had high arrest and conviction ‘numbers’ so it was encouraged and protected by the brass.  Their cowboy style depended on informant info and also wild guesses.  They went after dealers, non-dealers, bystanders and suspects with high-speed aggression, hoping to corral cash, drugs and guns in a wide-ranging net.  A ‘catch’ is that some of the drugs and money also ended up in their pockets, especially in the pockets of Wayne Jenkins, the lead cowboy and ‘legend.’

The GTTF on the Hunt

Some of this is in the wake of the 2015 Freddie Gray killing by police and riots that followed. After that police numbers went down, arrests went down and morale went down.  Murders are now high in Baltimore.

We see Jenkins learn the ‘trade’ from the first GTTF head, who tells him to blow off what he learned in the police academy.  Flash-backs of Jenkins’ many raids follow. Jenkins worked with a bail-bondsmen who sold his stolen drugs.  The GTTF members shared the cash, though Jenkins took the most.  A shot of the crew pocketing bricks of cash is common.  They engage in illegal high-speed chases, one of which kills an innocent driver. They plant weapons and drugs when they catch someone innocent or fuck-up, to cover themselves.  They lie in court.  Jenkins pretends he’s a Fed.  They release innocent suspects on a regular basis after those suspects are hauled downtown because they never had a case.  They file bogus overtime hours.  Street corners are cleared of anyone to ‘reduce violence.’  It’s an ineffectual dragnet in mostly black neighborhoods.    

One of the funniest scenes is at a murder trial in which voir dire for a jury is being carried out.  Out of a huge pool of jurors, they can only find 7 who don’t believe the police will lie on the stand.  One young man says the police illegally arrested and hurt him during a BLM protest, then lied about it, so he’s thrown off the panel, followed by many more.  In New York its called 'testilying.'  

Another drug gang

CAUSE?

To deal with this festering criminal element within the police, there is a new police commissioner; an investigation by the FBI and local federal district attorney; and the involvement of the Department of Justice, which is looking to implement a Consent Decree regarding police problems.  This investigation is taking place before and after Trump assumes office in 2017.  Trump will appoint Jeff Sessions to head the DOJ, who is against Consent Decrees period, so they need to get it signed.  The new mayor of Baltimore and her aides resist the decree, though someone finally signed it.  She and one aide are later found to be corrupt.   

A key character, the DOJ investigator Nicole Steele, talks to an upright and experienced police trainer.  He says everything went to hell when the ‘War on Drugs” was declared, as it became a racist war on the people.  Steele finally quits the DOJ because she sees that even a Consent Decree will not solve this problem, as the DOJ is not against that ‘war.’  This is the political point Simon is trying to make again.  What he does not mention is that people deal drugs – or take them – mostly because of poverty.  It is a lucrative money-maker.  Poverty is built into capitalism as part of its class system.  You’d think a ‘semi-Marxist’ like Simon would finally suss this out.  No luck.

Bad boy Jenkins, played by Jon Bernthal, carries the show as the lead punk, visiting strip bars, drinking bad booze, lying to his wife, even robbing a midget stripper at one point, all because he claims he needs money.  He can’t figure out why a loud, brash ‘legend’ like himself, with high arrest numbers, is so put upon.  An image of self-centered blindness is harder to come by.  A good, short series, based on reality, which makes its point well.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search bar, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “City on a Hill,” “The Wire” (Simon); “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “Bad Cops, Bad Cops,” “Defund, Disband or Abolish the Police?” “Detroit,” “Fear of a Black Rebellion,” “Minneapolis Votes,” “Notes From Minneapolis,” “It Was Only a Matter of Time,” “Summer on Fire,” “Line of Duty,” “Trapped and Detective Series in General,” “Ferguson Facts.”

The Cultural Marxist

October 8, 2022

Tongue in Speak

 Observations

·        Ultra-rightist OathKeepers’ maximum leader Stuart Rhodes graduated from Yale Law.  Figures. I guess you could call him a Rhodes scholar then. 

·        The criminal regime of Saudi Arabia has now traded allies and will block with Russia on gas prices.  No loss.  In response, Biden refuses to institute gas and diesel price controls or export restrictions.  The holy ‘market’ will not be touched. 

·        Florida real estate companies will continue to build and dredge heavy developments on barrier islands, swamps and marshes.  No one is stopping them.

Sanibel Island

·        Ron DeSantis denounced federal FEMA aid to New York and New Jersey for Superstorm Sandy.  He is welcoming FEMA aid with open arms in Florida for Hurricane Ian.  This is right up there with more than a million PPP loans to large corporations that a Trump official 'unflagged' for fraud review.  Then Republican ads appear blaming Democrats for giving money to golf courses and suchlike.

·        The qualifications for Republican office in Minnesota is that you are married and have kids.  See family photos!  And perhaps served in the military as a paper-pusher.  That is it.

·        Some alt-right ‘anti-imperialists’ oppose the demonstrations in Iran against the morality police and the mullahs, which started after the killing of a young Kurdish woman for showing a wisp of hair under her hijab.  They claim they are CIA plots.  As is everything...

·        “Maga-Communism” seems to be a small ‘thing’ now.  You know, 'leftists' that sound like Republicans.  Naz-Bol / ‘national Bolshevism’ is next.  Yes, it’s similar to the oxymoron of ‘national socialism.’  This is an example of Gramsci's 'morbid symptoms' - even on the left.

·        The degeneration of Marcyism has produced a parody of its original class content.  Don’t know what Marcyism is?  No worries. 

·         Who blew up the Nordstream pipelines?  Everyone ‘knows,’ but facts to follow.  Some circumstantial evidence is pointing at the U.S. via Hersch but now James Bamford has better proof that it was probably Ukraine.

·         Class politics or geo-politics.  Take your pick.

·         If you are getting hired by a city police department or school system to run it as head administrator, you have to mouth clichés, feign affability and tout your questionable record at the last police or education job you had.  Then you are hired and later fired or quit.  That is how it works in Democratic Minneapolis. Our two-month old 'Community Safety' director is already showing his real, vile nature.

·         Fox Weather© lives in Fort Meyers now after Hurricane Ian.  However, no reports from Puerto Rico.  Repeat…

·         Liz Truss engenders less and less trust.

·         It supposedly takes a recession to kill inflation… and more of the working class.  Ignore the fact that supply and profit issues are the real cause.  Thank you monetarist Fed!

·         The Dow© goes down 630+ points, the NASDAQ -421, the S&P -105 all because unemployment is at 3.9%, the lowest since 2000.  And you wonder why they call this a capitalist economy? 

·        Texas’ largest trade partner is Mexico.  Texas biggest source of cheap labor is Mexico.  Texas used to be part of Mexico.  In a way, Texas is now also part-Mexican.  Mexicans seeking asylum or jobs, however, are a different story.  This is what happens when Mexico and Central America are devastated by NAFTA, the cold war, the drug war, capitalism, global warming and the USMCA.

·        Hirohito was provoked into an attack on Pearl Harbor by U.S. efforts to cut off Japan’s gasoline supplies.  But the Left didn’t therefore back Hirohito or Japan.

·         Hitler was provoked into expanding his Aryan fatherland by the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, or so he said.  But the Left didn’t therefore back Hitler or Germany in their fight against 'the imperialists.'

·         The nuclear option is not an option.

·         We’ll have to christen Biden as ‘bitsy Bernie.’  A bit of marijuana legalization, a bit of student loan cancellation, a bit of global warming mitigation.  Could it be that traditional neo-liberal Democratic politics have no legs anymore, except in secret?

·         Two liberal constitutional professors on NPR both suggested our whole Constitution is an archaic document that needs to be virtually replaced.  Even they know the jig is up.

·         Hail Loretta Lynn!  Our personally feminist, initially proletarian coal miner’s daughter.

·         Has the James Webb space telescope discovered the edge of the universe yet?  No?  It never will.  But it has discovered galaxies that are too old for the present Big Bang theory to be true.  Back to the drawing board.

*    Great union supporter Biden will not tell rail companies to institute a simple thing like sick time.  In 1982 Reagan stopped a rail strike after 2 days.  What will Biden do if they do go on strike?  What do you think.

P.S. - When you hear 'leftists' praising the police, denouncing 'woke' efforts, hating on the homeless, the drugged and the loud, embracing vaccine denial, opposing birth control or abortion, loving Russia, opposing 'globalization'  and grabbing onto every event as a CIA conspiracy, you should start to wonder.  And then there is alt-right 'anti-imperialist' Tulsi Gabbard.

The Cultural Marxist  (Thanks and a tip of the HatiLo Hat to Jeffrey St. Clair)

October 8, 2022