Sentient Bodies

 “Materialism” by Terry Eagleton, 2016

In this book Eagleton looks at various kinds of materialisms,11 in all, somewhat from a Marxist perspective. He's most adept at analyzing culture and in this book there is a bit of quasi-religious intellectual peacocking which I'm going to ignore. What here is useful or new to the Left in theoretical terms?

Eagleton takes a look at the “New Materialism”, a pagan environmental analysis that is similar to the concept of Gaia and deep ecology. It borrows from other materialisms in that it posits connections between all matter, consciousness and energy, but reduces the role of humans to just another form of matter. Rocks, sky, wind, water, soil, animals, trees, humans, frogs, etc. It dispenses with idealism by investing matter with vitalism, but ignores society, human uniqueness and the role of labor.

Other forms of materialism that Eagleton mentions are historical, dialectical, mechanical, cultural, reductive, semantic, speculative, greedy (the common understanding, ala Madonna's Material Girl) and anthropological / somatic materialism. In Eagleton's understanding, this latter puts the human body at the center of social life. He makes fun of dialectical materialism by referring to others' comments on it as 'bullshit' and nonsense. He does not mention the long tradition of philosophic / scientific materialism. He is an opponent of cultural relativism and post modernism.

Eagleton's main initial focus is bodily materialism – the role of the physical human body as the center of thought and society. Or as Marx put it, our “sensuous consciousness,” a view which completely bypasses the false mind/body dualism. Here is where he associates Aquinas with Marx, with language and sensory / emotional experience, with labor and agency as outgrowths of our bodily nature. Somatic materialism eventually turns into historical materialism.

Some quotes:

* Marx came up with “an anthropological theory of cognition.”

* “Sensory capabilities and social institutions are sides of the same coin.”

* Marx … “had a brisk way with what he thought of as fancy ideas.”

* “It is the body that lies at the root of human history.”

* “In Marx's eyes, Nature is more fundamental than history...since it allows us to have a history in the first place.”

* Capitalism reduces the poor to alienated abstraction: “You do not care what you eat if you are starving, or what kind of work you can obtain if the alternative is to go hungry.”

* The only reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you find disagreeable, is that you don't like having to work.”

* For Marx: “Philosophy is an activity whose primary aim is its own abolition.”

* “The anarchist and the authoritarian are terrible twins. The laid-back libertarian is the prodigal son of the paranoid father...they share the same logic.”

* Wittgenstein makes: “...a material rebuke to the callow intellectualism which hopes to repair our human ills by rearranging our speech...”

* “Bourgeois individualism's … defiant cry is “You can't have my experience!”

Eagleton compares materialists and anti-philosophers like Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein to Marx, especially in their focus on the human body. He admits Nietzsche's far-right politics and 'will to power' would be called a form of cosmic capitalism by Marx. Eagleton thinks Nietzsche has aspects of a Boy Scout and a personal trainer, which is an example of Eagleton's sly wit. He looks at both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in critical detail, but I'm not sure why except they both practice different forms of materialism and anti-metaphysics – which is the loose subject of this book. Ultimately the book is a grounded philosophic attack on philosophy.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: "Marx" (Eagleton); “Marx and Human Nature,” “The Robbery of Nature” and “Marx and the Earth” (both by JB Foster); “History of the World in Seven Cheap Things,” "Marxist Criticism of the Bible."

And I bought it at an English bookstore in Budapest

Red Frog

November 28, 2022

The Materialist 'Myth'

 "On Revolution” essays by John Paul Sartre, 1946-1950

I cut some of my teeth early on by reading nearly everything by Sartre, but these essays are new to me. Sartre here styles himself as a “revolutionary philosopher” in solidarity with the working class. But at the same time he rocks the boat quite roughly.

THE FIRST ESSAY - 1949

The first 1949 essay on materialism seems to reflect Sartre's transitioning from existentialism to a socialism of a sort. It is a rejection of what he calls 'materialism' or 'dialectical materialism' or 'historical materialism' as professed by the French Communist Party honchos of 1949. Sartre goes after Engels too when Engels discusses nature, and Lenin when Lenin talks about the base and superstructure. Sartre maintains that the Marxist notion of dialectics or materialism only applies to the class struggle, not to natural phenomena. In a footnote he contends Marx had a far more sophisticated view of materialism, but says no more about that.

I sense a bit of bad faith in this first essay, as Sartre disliked the Stalinism of the French CP and so attacked their mechanical and reductionist view of materialism as 'determinist' – which it probably was. This is really not so much a philosophic dialog, but reflects his dislike of their bureaucratic and crude politics. This is reflected in a concrete discussion of Trotskyism – which he opposed. But unlike the CP intellectuals who labeled Trotskyists as 'police agents' for political reasons - Sartre knew that to be an untrue slander.

In the end Sartre does embrace materialism – not as any absolute truth but as the chosen viewpoint most useful to revolutionary workers. He calls it a useful 'materialist myth' first expounded by people like Epicurus. Calling materialism 'a choice' and 'an act' is an existentialist tactic. Yet dialectics presupposes no 'ultimate truth' is to be found, so his assumption that it claims that is off. History never stops, so neither does social or intellectual development. Sartre understands that a 'materialist myth' has no meaning in a classless society, quite as Marx understood that philosophy disappears upon the advent of proletarian struggle.

Sartre is oddly afraid to declare God non-existent, even though he himself is an atheist. He looks narrowly at scientific work as dealing with isolated 'things,' and compares it with dialectical methods - even in an aside that mostly passes over the question of energy as a form of matter. He styles animal 'nature' as the stronger eating the weaker, implying that cooperation has no place in nature. His discussion of ice turning to water turning to steam is fraught, as he thinks the essence of dialectics is synthesis, not internal conditions. His idea of science is of circular events, when even climate has a linear or spiral development and has always been historical. He also discusses the endless question of the relationship between the economic base and the social or ideological superstructure, alleging the CP honchos thought ideas cannot sometimes have a life of their own. They can.

Funeral of JP Sartre attended by 15-20 Thousand in Montparnasse

THE SECOND ESSAY - 1946

The second essay concerns the outlook of the revolutionary who refuses to be co-opted by capital and mostly has no chance of it either. Sartre seeks to replace the revolutionary 'materialist myth' with clear-eyed philosophy, one which denies both materialism and idealism and leaves human choice instead. In this he's a Leninist! Oddly, he discounts that very real material events and experience like exploitation, layoffs, poverty, class violence or war will lead to revolutionary class consciousness. This is because he thinks socialism comes from a standpoint of 'the future,' not the present or past. Why do I feel like these are sophomoric arguments?

He does outline how work provides the worker with an idea that the world can be transformed, just as the worker or cook or farmer or mother transforms natural substances in the process of their labor. As he puts it: “...workers (are) an essential structure of society and the hinge between human beings and nature...”

An aside on an earlier Sartre book Nausea. A central scene in Nausea is a man contemplating the absolute 'otherness' and “Thing In Itself”-ness of a tree. As if the tree was not a process or has internal development, but a 'thing.' Yet trees are planted, grow and die. We now know they talk to other trees through their roots. They provide habitat and shade, eat carbon, provide oxygen and nuts sometimes and interact with their environment. They are not really 'things.' Sartre's idea of materialism is that it involves static things completely isolated from motion, the rest of the world or humans. Things are only affected by forces outside themselves. This is alienated Cartesian dualism to my mind and it infects his idea of materialism in these essays.

In the end, Sartre calls for a universal “revolutionary humanism,” as communism is a humanist goal without classes, oppression or war. At the same time he says the French Communist Party is the revolutionary party. I wonder what he would say now, as internal contradictions transformed that Party even more than its status in 1946.

THIRD ESSAY - 1950

The third essay concerns artists and their conscience. It centers on music and the 1948 socialist-realist “Prague Manifesto” issued by pro-USSR artists. His sole focus here is on classical music in various formats from opera to ballet, like Schonberg. Popular forms of music – jazz, folk, blues, early rock, popular, dance, Romani, international, etc. are almost invisible to him. Sartre does not think music itself can be directly political, which is why the Prague Manifesto advocates styles like Opera which use words. He opposes reducing music to this. Behind this manifesto was Zhdanov, the Soviet culture minister. Sartre believes culture should be 'from the future' and freely transcend both the clutches of the bourgeoisie and their specialists, or the control of the Party bureaucrats. He shows no awareness, however, of the Independent Federation of Revolutionary Art, of Breton, Rivera and others, which had a position similar to this. Nor does he directly advocate revolutionary art, as he is mostly concerned with music. And music only hints at politics by how advanced it is beyond the sound cliches of current society.  He sees good music as a transcendence of the present.

This essay is highly speculative and ends with this quote: “Reaction or terror? Art free but abstract, art concrete but encumbered? A mass audience that is uneducated, a specialist listenership, but a bourgeois one?”

While Sartre makes a good attempt at undermining  materialism here, subsequent Marxists unconnected to the PCF have done a superior job of illustrating the connections between material social reality and the realm of ideas. Even Gramsci worked this territory. Nevertheless it remains that Sartre was a 'fellow traveler' of the revolutionary movement – not of the PCF so much as the revolutionary movement itself, which was and is bigger than the PCF then and now.

Prior blog posts on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “The Ghost of Stalin” (Sartre); “The French Communist Party versus the Students,” “Thieves of the Wood,” “The Coming Insurrection,” “The Left and Islamic Literalism,” “The Committed,” “Thomas Piketty,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “The Age of Uprising,” “The Merry Month of May,” “Society of the Spectacle,” “Something in the Air,” “The Conspiracy,” “Finks.”

Red Frog

Budapest, Hungary / 11/24/22

Crusin' for Prosecco

 "Triangle of Sadness” film by Rueben Ostland, 2022

This 'black comedy' is a film that might remind you of others. It got a standing “O” at Cannes and the Palme d'Or. It tracks a young female influencer and male model who find themselves on a free cruise with a group of rich people, including some billionaires. One is a fertilizer magnate from Russia; one a sad software billionaire traveling alone; and two aging but very proper British arms dealers. The captain is Woody Harrelson, a left-wing drunk or weed-smoker who doesn't want to come out of his cabin.

The Craptin's Din Din

Films that might remind you of this one? The class reversal of Swept Away by Lina Wertmueller; the hedonistic cruise and its termination in The Wolf of Wall Street by Martin Scorsese; the idiotic 'blue steel' looks of Zoolander by Ben Stiller; or the poor treatment of tourism workers in White Lotus, Season 1. There's even a bit of Lord of the Flies here at the end. We've come a long way from Love Boat or Gilligan's Island folks.

The two seemingly central characters are good looking air-heads – almost a parody of 20-somethings. They live marginal lives making money while barely working except to take selfies in bathing suits and with pasta they don't eat. They have idiotic arguments yet still care for each other... kinda. They get a free cruise on some body of water...it's not clear. And that cruise goes very wrong.

The over-priced gluttony of the wealthy (and by implication, probably every other cruise) is highlighted at a chaotic 'captains dinner' in the middle of a vicious storm. Not one of these rich hedonists is ever without some champagne or prosecco in a flute glass, suppled by a willing servant. The  guests make capricious demands - the sail should be properly laundered; a male crew member offensively took off his shirt; the crew should all go swimming. This latter puts one poor serving girl in a precarious position related to her job; the second gets another fired; the first leads to a smile by Harrelson, as there are no sails on this ship.

The workers and servers closest to the guests are all light-skinned Europeans from a Scandinavian country; the lower reaches – the engine room, the toilet detail and cleaning squads, the cooks – are darker-skinned. The Marxist captain and the Russian billionaire get into a hilarious political argument between socialism and capitalism during the storm. (Yes, it's a European film...) Harrelson even gets some points in about the assassinations of King, the Kennedy's and Malcolm X by the U.S. government. The storm produces another one of those projectile vomiting scenes so beloved in comedies, like the famous pie-eating contest in Steven King's Stand By Me. Then the servants get to clean up.  The ship becomes a metaphor for what is going on in the world at large.

The dictatorship of the Female Toilet Help

Eventually the ship sinks due to an explosion caused by African pirates ... and only a few on board survive, cast away on an ostensibly deserted island. In the process, the arms dealers experience a bit of fatal irony.

In the real world the castaways would be discovered pretty quickly. Stranded, they have to arrange themselves into a new society... a matriarchy run by an Asian cleaning woman who knows how to fish and make fires, while the rest are almost incompetent. Two men are caught stealing food and letting the fire grow cold and are punished for it. The cute male model becomes a whore for fish. The billionaires can't get anything for their Rolex watches. The cruise supervisor is relegated to a lower position. It's a tiny dictatorship of the proletariat. The kinder billionaire finally kills a wild donkey, and is celebrated as a real 'hunter.' The ending lets you guess whether that dictatorship continues, or whether the outside class system reasserts itself.

One of the funniest lines is when the Russian oligarch reminds the Asian woman, when she is telling them they will get less food than her because she does most of the work, that she should remember the famous Marxist line: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” He dumps his capitalist thinking immediately when the props to his wealth disappear.

This film is over-the-top on purpose and still engaging. I also paid only 3 Euros for it. What the 'art crowd' of Hungarians I was sitting with thought of the socialistic points I don't know. I would have preferred a subtler exposure of wealth and stupidity, which would have struck more viewers as realistic and closer to their lives, and ultimately been even more subversive. Clearly the rich are not having a good time in many films, as they are a no-holds barred target in many movies. This reflects the growing class-consciousness among the masses of people and even artists. The Triangle of Sadness (the crease area between and above your eyebrows...?) or it's French title Without Filters is another movie in this tradition of bashing the wealthy.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “White Lotus,” “Parasite,” “Wolf of Wall Street,” “Squid Game,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Nomadland,” “High Hopes,” “The Hunger Games,” “In Dubious Battle,” “New Order.”

The Kultur Kommissar

November 21, 2022 / Budapest

More A-Political War

 "All Quiet on the Western Front” film directed by Edward Berger, 2022

This is a recent German version of the classic book by Erich Remarque about the bloody crime of World War 1. If follows a new and excited recruit, Paul, who is drafted with his 3 young buddies into the German Army in Spring 1917. They are thrilled to be in the Army until they reach the front lines, where the mud, mayhem, violence and constant death upend all their naive ideas.  

I guess that is better than the war prettification we usually see in war films.

Unlike the worse film by Sam Mendes on WWI, “1917” (see review below) this film doesn't hide the mass bloodletting, terror, stupidity and the kicker, a final taste of insane war-mongering. A general Friedrichs with the German High Command looks down on the surrender-monkey civilian Social Democrats who have come to negotiate an armistice with the unforgiving French on the 11^th day of the 11^th hour of the 11^th month of 1918. He orders an attack on unsuspecting French positions who are celebrating peace 15 minutes before 11 AM … giving us a foretaste of Corporal Hitler and the subsequent devilment of the Versailles Treaty.

At this point, Paul is the only one left alive of his companions. Anyone want to be the last person to die in WWI? Anyone want to be Johnny Got His Gun? The last person to die was actually an American soldier charging German soldiers 60 seconds before 11:00 AM. Freidrichs is not a real person, but added by the director. He reflects commanders on both sides who still engaged in fighting up to the last minute. U.S. General Pershing was another who disapproved of the armistice. Pershing refused to tell U.S. troops the war was over until it was. 10,934 were injured and 2,738 men died on that last day.  (Pershing is celebrated on the Mall in Washington D.C.)

The film relies on pacifism and horror to dissuade people from engaging in war. It's like Sherman's 1879 claim that "war is hell" is news. War certainly does overshadow the stupid 'horror' genre in the U.S.  But that didn't seem to stop WWII by the very same German nation a bit more than 20 years later. Pacifism and horror are not enough to stop war. This film is nearly all apolitical, as was 1917. It shows almost no dissent among German soldiers until the last few minutes, something you might even miss. This film mentions the abdication of the Kaiser, who was a promoter of the war and Hindenburg's agreement to end it. Yet this event is not explained.  Why would the German ruling class do this except as a response to rising antiwar sentiment? A German revolution was already starting in 1918, partly because of the war!  The very next year, 1919, saw an attempted proletarian revolution in Germany against the Junkers and capitalists, which included many soldiers' and sailors' councils. How did that happen? Two years earlier, Russian workers and peasants threw out their war-making Czar and capitalists over the very same war. The Eastern Front was already quiet. Rebellion was in the air … but not a whiff in these movies.  The war is just another 'tragic' event.  

German soldiers and sailors overthrow Kaiser and try to overthrow Capital.  

Given the film-makers took liberties with the original text, this resistance might have been hinted at too. But showing soldiers opposing war points to an end to capitalist war, a direction which even pacifistic directors might shy away from. There is a moment when Paul stabs a French soldier, then has remorse and tries to staunch his bleeding. He fishes out pictures of the man's wife and child and identity in his pocket and promises to visit them. This is the only hint that perhaps ordinary men have been dragged into killing other ordinary men for no reason.

In 1930, Brownshirts disrupted the first screenings of the original film based on Remarque's book. In 1933 the Nazi regime censored that film. Now we can read and watch anti-war Vietnam books and films in the U.S. - even a few about Iraq - yet the U.S. carries on with it's militarist tradition. Pacifism and anti-militarism safely 'co-exist' with imperialism and militarism because they do not directly challenge the roots of militarism, which are embedded in the capitalist financial system. Going to that root is a 'bridge too far.' Without an anti-war movement that is explicitly anti-capitalist and proletarian, we cannot stop these wars, or the financial system that demands them. 

Crude capitalist territorial control through military force is a throw-back to WWI / WWII methods, as in Ukraine.  Trenches, artillery barrages, widespread devastation of cities and towns, throwing untrained troops into the maw - all similar to parts of this film, which might make it hit a nerve.  “Imperialism” by a Marxist definition is not primarily military - it is economic control and enrichment. Those two are the real horrors at present, battling it out as two forms of the same thing.  When will there be 'all quiet on all fronts?'  Only with the overthrow of the insatiable competitions of capital.

P.S. - German Critics take the film apart as a terrible adaptation of Remarque's book:  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/27/oscar-all-quiet-on-the-western-front-germany-critics

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Sam Mendes,” “War is a Racket” (Butler); “Russian Revolution,” “Radek,” “Workers' Councils,” “All Power to the Councils!”

The Kultur Kommissar

November 17, 2022

Sorry, Standard Fiction

 “Canada” by Richard Ford, 2012

Canada has always been a safe space for runaways from the violent gargantua of the United States. Indigenous leaders and tribes like Sitting Bull and the Dakota escaped across the Northern Border. Runaway slaves continued north across Lake Champlain to its waiting arms. Draft evaders headed north in their thousands to evade fighting the imperialist war in Vietnam. Even during Iraq and Afghanistan some anti-war Gis tried to make the trip, but the doors were closing.

Fiction follows fact. Sinclair Lewis' anti-fascist liberal hid in Canada in It Can't Happen Here. Wade Whitehorse from Russell Banks' book Affliction left for Canada after setting his vicious father's house on fire in New Hampshire. The anti-sexist rebels of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale went there for refuge. Criminals have also found it a haven, certainly during Prohibition, but also the prohibition against weed which continues in some U.S. states. But the doors are closing, especially as they did during the deadly U.S. CoVid epidemic.

This story centers around a 15 year old boy in 1960, Dell. He's quiet, obedient and observant, living in the ordinary range town of Great Falls, Montana. He's looking forward to school as its August, where he can deepen his hobbies of chess and bee-keeping. He has two parents that should never have married and one gangly, pimply twin sister Berner whose not quite up to the task either. It's written from Dell's point of view years later, combining his childish naivete with hindsight.

His dad is an Air Force veteran from a small town in Alabama. His mother is a tiny Jewish woman from Tacoma. They got married after a brief fling, then traveled around the U.S. living on air force bases while having their two kids. Like many army spawn, the kids made no friends. Bev – dad – is a hail-met country boy, not cruel, tries to be funny, is kind, but thinks he can outwit the world with sweet talk and a nice face. Yeah, he's a bit of a simpleton. Geneva – Ma - on the other hand went to college, teaches school and probably should have married someone a little higher up the class and education strata. These two have nothing in common except their children – a regular occurrence in marriages. Opposites attract – and then repel. Another commonplace.

So what's the drama? Well, Bev quits the Air Force, tries his hand at selling cars and then real estate, and fails at that. Instead he gets into a scheme with some local Cree indigenous who rustle cattle for meat, which he sells to the railroad for steak. The scheme goes wrong as it predictably would and suddenly, Bev needs money.

The solution he comes up with is to … wait for it … rob a bank. This numb-nuts goes into a small bank in North Dakota with no mask, his southern accent, wearing an identifiable air force jacket, with his own car he'd already driven into town once before, waving his Air Force issued gun around. He stood out in this tiny burg like a sore thumb. They jack $2,500 and tiny mom (yes he roped her into it) drives the getaway car. Predictably ... they are caught a few days later. Both Dell and his sister Berner are left alone in the house while the parents are in jail. Ma was going to leave her husband the next day with both kids on a train for Seattle - but that is one day late. She has, however, made arrangements for the kids to be spirited across the loose Canadian border to escape an orphanage.

Bleak, wheat and geese.

Instead wayward Berner runs off to San Francisco as an incipient hippie, ignoring her mother's instructions. Dell is driven north into Saskatchewan, Canada to the town of Fort Royal to live under the protection of a man named Arthur Remlinger. He runs the local hotel in this one-horse prairie ville. Arthur puts Dell up in a shack outside of town, puts him to work cleaning the hotel and working the 'geese' - as shooters come from the States to kill geese. Eventually we find out Remlinger too is a refugee from the law in the U.S. – the bombing murder of a union man in Detroit. He's virulently anti-union, went to Harvard for awhile and affects fancy clothes and sophistication. He later snuffs two men who come looking for him. You can't make this stuff up – though I guess you can.

Dell eventually gets away from this thug, goes to school in Winnipeg and lives a normal life as a teacher. His sister on the other hand stays fucked up, drinks too much, can't hold a job and eventually dies of cancer in a trailer park in Minnesota. The mother commits suicide in jail and dad disappears. The moral of this story is that some people should not get married or have children evidently. This is not news to anyone. Perhaps the book should be required reading for newlyweds or new parents?

Dell is observant about nearly everything and this saves him in some sense. The story is told in extreme detail on some days – every facial expression, every emotion, every thought, every minute is tracked by Dell – so that it takes over 500 pages to tell. In one scene in the shack outside Fort Royal he actually describes the contents of a bunch of storage boxes that contribute nothing to the story. It's exhausting in a way. Why did I read it? I was in isolation due to CoVid.

A standard, 'coming-of-age,' family saga with a 'criminal' twist thrown in.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Handmaid's Tale,” “Affliction,” “It Can't Happen Here,” “Factory Days,” “Oh Canada,” “A Less Modest Proposal,” “Northland,” “Tar Sands,” “NAFTA 2,” “The Listening Point.”

Red Frog

November 15, 2022

Gnome of Bowls

 “House of the Dragon,” Season 1

House of the Dragon is a prequel to Game of Thrones. It is impossible not to compare the two. On my first viewing of the former, I was irritated beyond belief. After a second viewing, its strengths are more evident. But so are its weaknesses, especially the main one, its obsession with monarchy.

If you've had to trudge through the many 'queen' series – The Crown, Catherine the Great, Versailles, Reign, Elizabeth, anything with Helen Mirren, even gentry fiction like Downton Abbey or Bridgerton - all come off as aristocratic feminism. Instead of a corporate pant suit they've substituted a frock and gown set in the past and called it 'progressive.' House of the Dragon does the same. It is medieval feminism, with several women contenders for the Iron Throne, as well as a powerful women behind the throne. One is young Rhaenyra, the daughter of Viserys the Peaceful, who is named the Targaryen heir to the Iron Throne by Viserys. Another is the older Rhaenys Velaryon, the 'Queen that Never Was' due to being female. And one is Alicent Hightower, the Queen and power behind Viserys.

Naming a women heir to the throne creates a conflict in a patriarchal system, along with the blonde/white haired Rhaenyra's penchant for siring 'bastards' with brown hair out of wedlock (the 'lock' of a wedding). This becomes the one and only story line. In a way HotD tries to mimic the royal tragedies of Shakespeare and it sometimes succeeds. If your disgust at the pack of vultures, relics and bloody-minded royals who populate both sides of this conflict doesn't overwhelm your pity, you might see their lives as tragedy, not farce.

COMPAIRISON

If you look at this season from other angles, it falls far below Game of Thrones. GoT already had its feminist icons - Daenerys Targaryen and even Hillary Clinton's Cersei Lannister. In HotD, there is no humor, no Tyrion or Bron, not even cheerful cads like Jaime Lannister. There is no anti-Royal faction - no Wildings, no Free Folk, no Jon Snow, no Samwell Tarly, no Hound, no Brotherhood Without Banners. This is telling. It is interior and static, as there is only one setting, Kings Landing, with other castles serving as sets, not really power centers as yet. The variety of kingly pretenders in GoT is absent. The White Walkers and the contest for power among many kingdoms and several lands, along with 'Winter is Coming' gave GoT a rationale above throne-throttling. Here we have a narrow fight among two royal Houses for power. There are several parallels in characters between the two, like the sinister club-foot Lord Larys Strong, running his 'little birds' with swords somewhat like Little Finger, but few beyond that.

There is editing in the two versions I saw – the second non-HBO source edited out some of the scenes of the growing sores on Viserys' body and also removed the white text of 'ten years later' and 'six years later.' Those sores indicated Viserys should have died long ago. This is accompanied by at least 3 disconcerting changes of younger characters for older actors as they age - as nothing happens in these intervening years. This idea of extending the time period gives absolutely no gravitas to the story. It just reminds us of the time scales of corny fairy tales we saw as children.

CLASS and BIRTH

Only one person, a former prostitute, Mysaria, the White Worm living in Fleabottom, protests from a plebian point of view the bloody pit fighting of children tolerated by the royals and the Gold Cloaks. Her quarters are supposedly put to the torch, but I suspect she escapes. Class wise, its like the viewers have not gone beyond mourning the recent passing of the monied monarch Queen Elizabeth II. If HotD is relevant, it reveals that as a social structure we are still retrograde, still living in the past, cheering for one side or another in their see-saw battle of genetic twins. Even the current yearning for a 'strong man' (or woman) is part of this. Yet it is 2022, so this show becomes another symbol of the backward state of culture, of princesses and Burger Kings. War is still acceptable here too, along with this focus on monarchies.

"Women's battlefield" - the Birthing Bed

The most intense part of this series is the birth scenes – two mother's sacrificed for their heirs, which still didn't help, and one baby pulled out dead. The role of giving birth is something constant for each woman aristocrat here. Their 'blood,' their royal line, their name, their children. Each woman is fighting to keep their spawn alive against other mothers. This returns feminism back to saving their children ... which is unavoidable for most mothers, but also a foundational plot line here. This might come as a shock to the post-modernists who relegate the ability to have babies to a textual nugget. But for many women viewers, this might be a key to HotD's emotional impact. Regarding sexuality itself, one sacrifices her sexuality for being Queen and the other engages in a fake marriage to a gay husband, while pursuing her sexuality elsewhere, as does he.  And of course, incest of sorts.

I have not read J.R.R. Martin's Ice and Fire, the book this series is based on, nor do I intend to. So I cannot geek out about comparison's with the original text. Season One ends with war between the Targaryens and Velaryons on the horizon, though neither queen wants war. Part of the reason might be that they were close friends in their youth. We'll see if that plays out, but, like capitalism, war is built into this social system and this drama.

(Reviews like this are why we're not just another Critical Drunk.)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Game of Thrones,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “Dune,” “Age of Uprising,” “The Dawn of Everything”(Graeber); “The Age of the Vikings,” “Class – the New Critical Idiom.”

P.S. - John Oliver goes after the English Monarchy:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWterDbJKjY

Communa di Cortona, Italie

Kultur Kommissar  / November 12,2022

Mumbai Cricketeers

 "Selection Day” by Arvand Adiga, 2016

Cricket – the game – is probably not something you are familiar with, especially Indian cricket. If it is, this book is for you. As Adiga puts it, only 10 nations play cricket and only 5 are serious contenders. But the book goes beyond cricket. It is about two slum-dwelling brothers, Radha and Manju Kumar, growing up in Mumbai, who play excellent cricket – their way of standing out. They are dominated by an odd, abusive and driven father, who also drove their mother out of the family home. At some point these young men will be selected to be on the Mumbai cricket team... or not. If so, their future is secure. It is a familiar story in poverty-stricken neighborhoods across the world – in football, soccer, basketball, boxing, what have you.

They are both adopted as teenagers by a cricket scout and an investor after much prodding by their father Mohan. They bank on them to rise to a top level as 'Young Lions' and make lots of money. Radha is big and strong and stands out in several big matches as a local celebrity to the sports' press. Manju, smaller and dreamy, in one game scores 497 runs, a record in junior cricket. Manju actually wants to be a scientist like on the CSI TV show and go to junior college. These two are threatened by a rich Muslim boy, Javed, who arrives in chauffeured cars to practices, eventually befriending Manju. They are also threatened by a possible rivalry between the two of them.

There are homosexuals and homosexual undertones, along with humor. Manju, after his sterling performance, is awarded a trip to England to study English cricket. He says of the Brits: “...the white people eat cheese for breakfast and smell of it all day!” Javed tries to convince Manju he is a slave and he should quit cricket and go into science. Both brothers hang with rich kids. The story wanders inconsequentially for too long. The plot languishes as selection day approaches, but it finally arrives.

Mumbai Slum

Mumbai is part of the story – it's lighthouse and harbor, streets, cricket fields, schools, rail stations, malls and slums. A denizen would be delighted and identify. A foreigner needs a map and protection.  As Adiga says: "...the maiming carelessness of life in Mumbai."  Or:  "...the uninterruptible madness of the urban night." 

Will they succeed? Will they quit? Will they become 'slum dog millionaires?' Do we care? I don't. At this point in history, non-political or a-political art is a decoration or diversion.  A harsh sentiment, but I think necessary.

Sports stories that are not bios of famous athletes are always haunted by failure as young, mostly male lives are temporarily wasted for a shot at the ring of success. Many are called, few are chosen. Adiga in his prior stories focused on class. In this one he is cynical, looking at the twists of the sports' business in a 'coming of age' prism of old men's wealth and money. The old investor wants to 'short all the exchanges in the world' and get very rich when his plans look like they will fall through. Adiga is cynical about the Indian population, nation and culture, but goes no further. While this story is not as tough as “White Tiger,” Adiga's debut, the establishment reviewers were happy to relegate that stronger story to a start, probably relishing the gay backstory here.  Given what is happening in India, it misses the mark.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Last Man in Tower” and “White Tiger” (both by Adiga); “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety - Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture" and “Playing as if the World Mattered” (both by Kuhn); “Hey, How ‘Bout that NFL?” “Reflections on the Olympics 2012,”  “The English Game,” “The Queen’s Gambit,”  “Concussion,” “Missoula – Rape and the Justice System in a College Town,” “Super Weed Bowl.”

And I bought it at the English Bookstore in Antibes, France!

The Cultured Marxist

November 8, 2022

The Russia Game Again

 "Agent Running in the Field” by John leCarré / David Cornwall 2019

This is LeCarré's last book. A 'retiring' middle-class agent, Nat, with a skill in badminton, is called to head a decrepit wing of the British MI5 in London to spy on Russian agents in the city. It is Brexit / Trump time - a detail that is at the heart of the story. Nat's never shot anyone, he's a mild English patriot and his daughter is a politically-correct terror. Oddly, he is befriended by an enthusiastic young badminton player while working for the service. This young man thunders against Brexit and Trump after every game and Nat listens. He is not suspicious.

The unit – The Haven - plan to bug the enormous flat of a Russian billionaire who has contacts with the FSB. This plan is spiked because the wife of one of the MI5 higher ups does business hiding money in Nevis with this particular oligarch. The story evolves into tracking a 'high up' Russian mole inside the security services. As it turns out, it is all a mistake because the mole has discovered a U.S./British plan to sabotage the EU's economy.  It has nothing to really do with the Russians.  So the 'bad guys' turn out to be closer to home.

The real target here is not the tired 'Russian' one but the political powers-that-be in London and Washington. LeCarré is always cynical about the motives of his compatriots in MI5 – are they defending their version of bourgeois 'democracy' or actually money? In one scene they bang on at him about how the 'mole' hates Trump, Brexit, Putin and what-not, which Nat also opposes – calling these views into question as somehow 'unpatriotic.'

If you are interested in 'trade craft' the role of psychology is huge here. Every emotional and physical detail is noticed by these spies on their targets, their agents, their contacts. Clothes, body posture, words, habits, personality, jobs, family, relationships, everything. LeCarré is especially good at describing this. His Nat is expert at controlling his temper for the most part, charming and coaxing people into doing what he wants them to do. A bland, pleasant, middle-class exterior, genial, who listens, who observes. Leftists might learn something from these descriptions, as the Left is also penetrated by police types sometimes.

LeCarré shows how MI5 – and by extension other intelligence services - have a massive surveillance technique, both human and digital. In one scene 100 humans are employed to staff a restaurant, provide diners, surveill everything outside, watch a bank of monitors and mics – literally flood a space with their people. These agents are trained like actors never to break cover, to be as ordinary and convincing as can be.

Eventually, someone will start writing 'spy' stories about the Chinese, but that author has not yet appeared, as our cold war with China is somewhat new, dating back to the Obama period. LeCarré returns to his old Russian saw, but gives it a familiar twist that reveals British capitalism as the corrosive and hypocritical power that it is.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “A Most Wanted Man” (LeCarre); “Official Secrets,” “Citizen Four,” “The Russians Are Coming, Again...” “King of Spies,” “Gorky Park,” “The Sympathizer”(Nguyen); “CypherPunks” (Assange); “American Made.”

And I bought it in Antibes, France!

The Cultured Marxist

November 3, 2022