Satire for Sanity

 “The Playbook – How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World” by Jennifer Jacquet, 2022

This book masquerades as a secret guide for corporations on how to stop or delay science findings that kill profits.  It is constructed as a how-to for a generic ‘Corporation’ to stymie consumer, environmental, health and safety alarms sent up by activists, scientists, journalists and the government which will lead to ‘onerous regulation.’ 

Jacquet in this book mentions the history of dozens of different scientific issues – at least 40+ specifically - and how Corporations dealt and deal with them in the past and present.  Among them are global warming, cigarette smoking and vaping, factory farming and meat, DDT, glyphosate (Round-Up), atrazine, overfishing and bycatches, obesity, sugar, tanning salons, oil spills, fracking and pipelines, vinyl chloride, lead, asbestos, nuclear energy, water pollution, Teflon, toxic food additives, insecticides, antibiotics overuse – the list is long. 

Tongue in cheek, Jacquet illustrates how denial is part of the fiduciary duty of every Corporation.  She shows ways to buy or buy off University professors, experts, researchers, institutes and think tanks.  She retails how to flood the media-sphere with advertising, adverts, press releases, bought-and-paid-for science studies, editorials, letters-to-the-editor, internet posts, websites and Astro-turf groups.  The whole point is to cast doubt, delay and hopefully kill any regulation, divestment or drop in sales or in the worst case, the complete scrapping of a product.  Every bit of delay and stalling adds millions to corporate coffers, which is the plus.

The Corporations’ allies are found in law firms, think tanks, P.R. firms, consultants, universities and their professors, paid experts, fake public front groups, trade associations, the Chamber of Commerce, even some non-profits, unions and liberal advocacy groups. Search results on Google, etc. can be massaged or have ads placed above certain search results.  Schools can be inundated with corporate educational materials.  The Playbook points out that no professor has ever been sanctioned for conflict of interest problems. It illustrates how to hide financial ties to Corporations for various players, like funneling cash through secretive entities like Donors Trust.        

A blinding omission in this book is the buying or influencing of regulators and politicians, which is the most lucrative strategy of all.  ‘Regulatory capture,’ Congressional members’ own stock ownership and massive campaign donations are never mentioned by Jacquet. Nor are explicitly political organizations like the Republican ALEC or the massive corporate funding of both official Parties in the 2-Party System.  This is a significant gap and shows her liberal fear of engaging the corporate state or appearing ‘partisan.’

Nor does Jacquet mention the key military or financial sectors, as both are not quite ‘consumer’ facing sectors.  Yet they use many of these same tactics when confronted with evidence of their problems and failings – financial products or planes that don’t work or are too expensive or just plain deadly.

Serial Corporate Criminals

HOW TO

The Playbook advises corporations to hide or destroy incriminating evidence or statistics, lie, dissemble, embrace hypocrisy, buy and stash research that goes against their product, keep a low profile and let the front groups do their work. They should always play on the open-ended nature of science, advocate doubt, cast aspersions on opponents by character assassination – and, based on circumstances, fully deny any allegations.  It details the myriad ways to deal with a scientific problems – full denial, say they are being looked into, say they’re very small, say there are bigger problems and the grand-daddy, saying in various ways, “correlation is not causation.”  Always allege bias, i.e. vegan researchers are biased; meat eaters are not, or that there are alternative causes.  Critics are ‘boring,’ ‘alarmist’ or have financial ulterior motives (pot calling kettle black...)  Another method is to finance very carefully constructed science studies to prove the Corporation is right or not so bad.

Change the language – use euphemisms that hide the nature of what is going on. Cancer becomes ‘biological activity; global warming becomes climate change; toxic sludge become ‘biosolids;’ tetraethyl lead becomes ethyl.   Added strategies are green-washing, woke-washing, women-washing and what-have-you washing – always claim you care.  The most common is claiming any regulation will result in unemployment or that minorities will be harmed. In this regard ‘progressive social advertising’ is quite prominent now and she gives it less focus that it should have.  Other tacks are to blame consumers, workers or the failure of regulators in the government for problems. ‘Human nature’ can be blamed – as if human ‘nature’ always lies in lazy unconcern.  Then there is the political mantra of ‘look forward, not back.’  Jacquet does not allude to this, but the political allies of corporations promote anti-science attitudes in the general population so as to hide the real role of science in corporate profits.  Things like this she calls “the creation of ignorance.”

Internal dissent must be suppressed, whistle-blowers rooted out and fired if they exist. Lawsuits, claims of scientific misconduct, intimidation, retaliation by employers, allegations of ‘elitism’ and even up to assassination – popular in certain countries – are recommended (the latter recommendation should not be in print). 212 environmental activists were assassinated in 2019 worldwide.

This book doesn’t look at capitalism as a ‘system of denial,’ but the glacial pace of real change in the U.S. – something she alludes to – points to the strength of corporations in society, which are the bulwark of reaction.  Not sure how you can write a book like this without pointing that out.  It is more for people either trying to understand how Corporations function in this realm, or those organizing a fight against one.  It will resonate, as these are all clichés and methods we have heard or seen.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Propaganda” (Bernays);“The Tragedy of American Science,” “People’s History of Science” (both by Conner); “Reason in Revolt” (Woods-Grant); “Big Bang,” “Ted Assumptions of Science,” “Fashionable Nonsense,” “The 5^th Risk” (Lewis); “Dead Epidemiologists” (Wallace); “environmentalism,” ‘Advertising Shits in Your Head,” “Psychology and Capitalism,” “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” “Animal, Vegetable, Junk.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / December 30, 2022 (Happy Another Year!)

The Little Pope of Mystery

 “The Ego and Its Hyperstate – a Psychoanalytically-Informed Dialectical Analysis of Self-Interest” by Eliot Rosenstock, 2021

Woo.  This is a weirdly written book, like some breathless podcaster or telemarketer telling you he is going to reveal the secrets of the universe – or in this case, reality – but then keeps avoiding the ‘secret.’  Rosenstock’s main point seems to be that self-interest is the continuing motivation for all human beings, and that this does not lead to either capitalist self-centeredness or its seeming opposite, religious moralism and ‘unselfishness.’

Human ‘nature’ requires food, clothing, shelter and more.  It is well known that individual survival relies on aide from other people.  This is folk wisdom that every person knows and lives every day. Social reality contradicts the vicious reactionaries who promote a ‘human eat human’ capitalist ethos.  Those individuals living in isolated cabins, who have NO contact with the outside world, are few to none.  Even Dick Proenneke, the guy who hand-built his Alaska cabin along Lake Clark in the 1960s, used regular air resupply of certain items over his 30 years. Is community Rosenstock’s point?

In what can only be described as a constant, repetitive word salad of semi-Freudian, semi-Structuralist rhetoric avoiding concrete examples and method, Rosenstock tiptoes around using veiled illusions, obscure tacks and archaic jargon.  Do academics get paid by their use of the most jargon or the substitution of clear language for semi-nonsense?  Capitalizing words in the middle of a sentence to give it fake gravitas?  Do they win points by having no empirical basis or references?  You basically have to interpret certain words or text into clear terms.  For instance, ‘fantasy’ in his usage means ideas like racism.  Yet racism is not a fantasy, it is materially grounded in capitalist society and has very real effects.  Why call it a fantasy, unless you are breezily blasting some witless racist Twitter post? 

This is a familiar philosophic style that reads ‘bullshit’ to the layman.  It occasionally occurs in the Lacanian wanderings of Zizek.  (By the way, I just drove through Slovenia but did not stop at the statute of Zizek in Lubjiana.)  Here is a sample:  “Self-interest in process, which is what we are calling the Hyperstate due to its nature of being both outside the realm of consciousness, process-based, and frankly just quite large, is used to understand self-interest through the basis of fantasy.”  Which might mean:  The unconscious promotes self-interest and bad ideas even when we don’t know it.   You tell me.

You could probably write a parody of this bad Freudian game-playing, much as Sokol and Bricmont made fun of post-modernist French merde and got it published by a reputable academic journal.  (“Fashionable Nonsense – Post-modern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science” reviewed below.)  Where are Orwell and DF Wallace’s clarity when you need them?  (“All Art is Propaganda” and “Consider the Lobster” reviewed below.)  But I digress, or perhaps not.  Maybe his unconscious self-interest prompted him to be a pompous writer?  Perhaps getting a higher profile for his LA clinical psychology business called “Mind Diagnostics?”  Odds are not one health plan covers his business, so its mostly rich people that use his services in Freudian talk therapy.  Businessmen gotta do what they gotta do...

Anyway, I can draw no sensible analysis of this book, the first time ever.  Unless you are truly obsessed by very, very abstract Freudianism – a hyper- mirror of dream analysis, ego / superego, the unconscious and cockeyed dialectics - do not buy this book! It is like a bad dream.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Zizek,” “The Melancholia of the Working Class,” “Psychology and Capitalism,” “Bright Sided” (Ehrenreich); “The Happiness Industry,” “Lost Connections” (Hari); “McMindfulness,” “Love or the Alternative.”

And I unfortunately bought it at May Day Books, which will not stock it again.

Red Frog

December 27, 2022

From Each According to Her Abilities ...

 The Voluntariat

A new term for you.  One thing leftists know is donating time and energy to projects, for years on end, without pay.  It is part of cadre status. As the Jefferson Airplane said, “Volunteers of America!”  Most left groups only have a few paid staffers, so this is the way things get done.  Unions also have members who contribute outside their pay and position structure.  But what about the general economy?  What is the worth of this ‘Stakhanovite’ unpaid labor in a capitalist context?  It is massive.

Clearing trails...

As we in Minnesota grapple with an 8 day snowfall, a certain fact stands out.  That neighbor with a snow blower who just did a whole block worth of snow clearing?  Those people who help you push your car out of the snow?  The one that lends you some sand for icy spots?  The neighbor that helped the old lady shovel?  The friend that checks the heat in your house?  All outside the commodity system.

FREE LABOR

These are all part of the voluntariat.  I see volunteers as going beyond this, greasing the wheels of many institutions – activist organizations, non-profits, interest groups, museums, hospitals, music venues, some stores, charities, tribes, churches and what have you.  Volunteers guide tours, do internet work, answer phones, prepare envelopes for mailing, feed people, build homes, clean up river banks and roads, work on organic farms, repair broken items, care for animals, plant trees, teach various skills or subjects, mentor children, knock on doors, distribute emergency goods, work in nursing homes, provide free legal and medical services, help at sporting events, staff clubs and non-profits, shovel snow, mow lawns, deliver food, write and perform, work for the mainstream political parties, do health checks, clear trails – and intern at a capitalist corporation, though now that is required to be paid. Like crime, volunteer labor is not included in the ‘GDP’ or standard labor statistics or any external costs.

Families, of course, are a center for free labor and so are friends and neighbors. These 3 groups do many things for each other in uncounted ways outside the home … similar to the unpaid social reproduction occurring inside the home.  But volunteerism extends beyond personal connections to the overall economy. 

Just the value of seniors donating time and energy is said to be worth $77B in ‘pro bono economics.’  The projected value of all volunteers is $130B.  The value of a donated hour is now estimated to be $29.95 – far higher than I would think.  I’m not sure of the methodology here, but I suspect it is a vast undercount. It is not just retirees who volunteer, -though they are supposed to be useless to the economy and society after they quit work.  Working people donate some of their time, even though they are already over-worked.  The unemployed and people on disability also contribute free labor.  The amount done by family members, friends and neighbors for each other is uncountable.

That neighbor that just did your walk...

VALUE

Here are quotes that relate to the issue of the economic basis and value of a certain kind of free labor.

According to J.M. Roberts:

”Hardt and Negri argue that exploitation is now located in numerous ‘non-factory’ spheres of social life; for example, in social media websites.  To make this claim, however, Roberts says that they “conflate the exploitation of productive labour, based in the extraction of surplus value, with the oppression of unproductive labour, based in the extraction of surplus labour. Making this conflation enables some critical theorists to then argue that so-called ‘free labour’ of social media users acts as a type of ‘productive labour’ for capital.” 

According to Michael Roberts, who disagrees:  

“…this so-called ‘free labour’ is not usually productive, nor does it, in most cases, create surplus value.” 

Advertising is part of the selling of commodities and advertising and sales are at the heart of social media, so I’m not sure the M Roberts is quite right as to their lack of value.  Certainly surplus value is still centered in commodity production, not social media websites, web surfers or volunteerism. Yet social media contributes to the advertising sales effort and the collection of data, so not directly to surplus value, but indirectly.  Social reproduction plays a similar role in the home maintaining the working class, as does the voluntariat in the community at large, which serves the capitalist system in an indirect way, but also goes beyond it.  Capital could  not function without volunteerism or home reproduction.

Volunteerism is not about the Protestant work ethic, as bourgeois Weberian sociology might claim.  It is that humans and workers see beyond the wage relation, even while they are trapped in it or after they leave it.  It points to the communist idea of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" as Marx wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Yeah, but don’t tell those churchy types.  They may get irritated.  And unfortunately religious and spiritual cults institute almost slave labor conditions for their members too.  Profit and monied non-profit entities also exploit free volunteer labor - like in profit-based hospitals.  This might take work away from paid employees.  So carefully understand what kind of ‘free work’ you are providing and to whom.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  "Mutual Aid," "Marxism, Bolshevism and Mutual Aid," "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded," “Patriarchy of the Wage” (Federici); “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Intersectional Class Struggle,” “In Letters of Blood and Fire” (Caffentzis); “From Factory to Metropolis” (Negri), “Monopoly Capital” (Baran & Sweezy); "The Long Depression" (Roberts).     

The Cultural Marxist

December 24, 2022 / Happy Stolen Christmas!      

What's Really Going on in Brazil

 “The Politics of the Precariat – From Populism to Lulista Hegemony” by Ruy Braga, 2018

This is a sociological analysis of the precarious proletariat of Brazil.  It is written in a somewhat painful academic sociological style and could have been edited in half.  I read and skimmed it so you don’t have.  Braga rejects Guy Standing’s idea of the precariat as a ‘new class’ – instead showing it is part of the proletariat, identified that way by Marx long ago too.  Marx identified various strata in the unstable part of the working-class – floating, latent and ‘stagnant.’  Paupers - the extremely poor who couldn't or didn't work - and the lumpen-proletariat - the criminal element - had fallen outside the working class.  Braga initially uses the first 3 categories in his discussion of the precariat too, but because of their antiquity abandons their usage.  Many of the young, temp workers he's talking about came from rural northeast Brazil, from Bahia, and due to prejudice, were looked down on because of it.

Oddly, it is not clear why he calls many precarious workers ‘the precariat proletariat,’ as many of them seem to have full-time jobs, though with much turnover. After the military coup in 1964, companies regularly dismissed workers to save money by stopping raises.  Turnover could also be related to the vicious ‘business-police alliance,’ the coup-driven ‘corporate-military alliance’ and continuous factory despotism, so a reflection on the kinds of jobs they had.   

Because of the focus on Brazil, this kind of Marxist sociology could be applied to other so-called peripheral and semi-peripheral economies.  Brazil is now in the G20 and Lula’s recent 3^rd re-election brings immediacy to Braga’s discussion of “Lulista hegemony” and it social-democratic relation to capital. 

Braga thinks Brazil’s economy went from ‘primitive Taylorism’ to ‘peripheral Fordism’ to financialized sub-industrialism.  He spends much time refuting prior sociologists who think the precariat working in the factories around Sao Paulo were not radical because of their ‘unskilled’ status, their passivity and their rural roots.  He shows how they were actually more aggressive than many older and higher-standing workers in those same factories.  This is based on an analysis of workers during the massive local and general strikes of the 1950s and 1960s, a period terminated by capital in the 1964 military coup, a coup backed by the CIA.

Unsurprisingly, unlike Brazil I know of no sociological examinations of the U.S. proletariat and precarious proletariat in the recent past.  It seems an issue beneath bourgeois sociology.  Correct me if I’m wrong.

CONCLUSIONS

Of key concern is how the Brazilian CUT trade-union bureaucracy joined with the state apparatus to provide left-populist benefits to the poorer and working-class parts of society under Lula and the Workers Party (PT).  This is similar to social-democratic efforts in European countries and in other ‘pink tide’ countries in Latin America.  According to Braga this strategy was successful in diluting class consciousness and class struggle.  He thinks the success was not primarily because of Lula’s personality but because of these efforts.   He locates these benefits as first coming from ‘proletarian political praxis.’  After massive strikes in 1981 and 1995, the PT grew in influence and was able to first elect Lula in 2002. 

Of note, the U.S. does not even have the beginnings of a mass Workers’ Party of any kind.  The AFL-CIO/CTW labor bureaucracies and even some left formations like DSA and the CP still tail the Democratic Party, a bourgeois-led formation.  This is the real root of the weakness of the labor movement.

2013 June Days Rebellion in Brazil under PT-Rousseff

Lula has now been elected 3 times, while Dilma Rousseff of the WP was elected once.  Both were ‘legally’ deposed in two ‘palace coups.’  According to Braga, in 2002 the WP started to develop an alliance between the union bureaucracy, the state and through union pension funds, a sector of finance capital, while still helping poorer workers through the Family Fund. This brought Brazil into the orbit of world financialization.  He thinks that financialization and precarity work together and ‘economic growth’ alone – the capitalist solution - is unable to overcome under-development in Brazil.  Cheap labor is the enduring basis of Brazilian capitalism according to Braga. 

Braga looks at call center workers, students, domestic workers, the homeless and the massive fare rebellions and strikes of 2013 while Rousseff was in power, now called ‘the June Days.’  Many of these were led by, not the more established ‘European’ top level of the working-class, but the proletarian precariat – which he finally defines as young, underpaid, subject to high job turnover, with lower skills, working in difficult jobs or looking for their first job.  Job accidents, outsourcing and bad working conditions spurred this activity, but it did not lead to a break with the PT because most saw no real alternative.  This is a familiar situation, as we all know.  (This book pre-dates Bolsonaro.)  The PT had to increase social credit, hike the minimum wage and increase social spending as a response.  ‘Training programs’ also were offered, though few jobs were attained through them.  2013 showed a break between the PT’s approach and the masses of working-class Brazilians. 

What will surprise U.S. readers is that Braga reveals the descent of the PT and Lula from class-struggle unionism to the ‘regulation’ of society with capital, doing so through left populist measures. As he says:  “…the PT’s transformation strengthened these productive relations by ensuring that the extraction of surplus value would meet less resistance among the subalterns.”   But he concludes that Lulaism is a ‘precarious hegemony' as it relies on a base that can never be fully satisfied under a capitalist regime.  

We'll see if Braga updates his analysis regarding Bolsonaro, as it seems the alliance with capital carried out by the PT, which was seen as a betrayal by the precarious masses, might have led to the electoral victory of the military thug Bolsonaro.   This seems similar to the situation in the U.S. with Trump and the Democrats before him, where Democrats quite clearly abandoned the working class in favor of the professional strata and Trump took rhetorical advantage of that failure. 

Prior reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “The Dream of the Celt” (Llosa);  “Open Veins of Latin America” (Galeano); “Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism,” “The Law of Worldwide Value” (Amin); “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “Blood and Earth,” “The Long Revolution of the Global South” (Amin); “Value Chains,” “Building the Commune,” “Nazare,” “An Anthology of the Writings of Jose Carlos Mariategui.”   

And I got it at the cut-out/used section of May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 20, 2022 - Happy Solstice!

OK Boomer...

Geezers – "Talkin’ ‘bout ma geeeneration…”

Well, the boomers didn’t fade away … yet.  Frankly I’m tired of how many older people I know have fallen into the clichés of being elderly.  Statistically, people over 65, of which I am one, are the bedrock for the Republican Party and the right-wing and center of the Democratic Party.  This is true even among people of more color.  Evidently the anti-war, anti-racist, pro-feminist, environmental upheavals of the 1960s-1970s made far less of an impact than would be expected.  The tired weight of reactionary capitalism has damped that down for years.  Or as Marx called it: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Or maybe it’s the money?  Workers were made almost invisible and looked down on for many years in the U.S., so going for upscale pleasures and socio-political wonderment instead is standard. Even while collecting Social Security and Medicare a good chunk of reactionaries think 'government' is still the enemy.  Maybe they are just tired, worn-out or checked out.  I’m being generous here.

At least its electric...

I know many older people who can’t figure out computers, won’t figure out computers or are terrible at using them.  Yet personal computers have been around for more than 40 years. They have sad or inefficient ingrained habits that they can’t or won’t break.  Their thinking is archaic. Their diet is reminiscent of their childhood in the 1950s.  Their cultural taste is somewhere near nowhere.  Even what they read is from dusty volumes. They still believe in the shop-worn verities of the U.S., its sad holidays, its somewhat silly myths.  They uphold marriage, religion, automobiles, bad television, sports and all the traditional hokum of the U.S.  They read the paper press, the radio or the internet as if Chomsky’s point about the propaganda media passed them by.  It did. 

Many live in the past – stubbornly clinging to old events, or their trip 40 years ago, weird outdated methods, archaic culture - all the present equivalents of the horse-and-buggy.  This is unfortunately like the stereotypes of stubborn old people down through time.  Is it more comfortable to look backward or actually to look forward?  I think the latter.   Memory can be comforting and necessary, but not at the expense of the present.

Is it the money?  Are they too comfortable? This is certainly true for some, especially those in the middle-class.  ‘Stuff’ is high up on their ownership lists – RVs, boats – all the toys, all the crap. At best a kind of libertarian noblesse oblige intrudes, like maybe taking a puff of marijuana or tolerating the gays at the theater.  A poster child for this kind of life is “The Villages” – a massive, Disney-like geezer land of over 55s in Florida, which voted for Trump overwhelmingly and drives tricked-out golf carts.  It is the largest retirement community in the world – an embarrassment of semi-riches, some of whom indulge in wife-swapping when they are not golfing.   Did I say libertarian?  I did.

A Hedonistic 2nd childhood at the Villages, FL

I’m ashamed of ‘my generation’ – and that includes Tory multi-millionaires like Pete Townshend.  They are not the ‘greatest generation.’ Nearly all of those have almost passed from the scene, as few from the depression and WWII are left.  Boomers are the inheritors of the military victories over Germany and Japan, the “American Century” – which hasn’t lasted 100 years - the ‘shining city on the hill,’ the ‘indispensable nation,’ God’s perfect country, the international hegemon, in the aftermath of a horrific war and a deep depression. 

I certainly appreciate it when my grey hair allows some people to be kinder to me.  I especially experienced that in Europe.  In the U.S. I am not treated as an ‘elder’ even though I know way more than many younger blowhards.  Nevertheless I understand why “OK, Boomer” could be a non-class response to the sad generation of out-of-touch ‘traditionalists’ I’m now part of.

Thank goodness for youth, for change, for death, for the thinning of the ranks of the elderly, because that is also happening.  Nature has its way, clearing the dead-wood in time, even through pandemics - though it has led to labor shortages and mass retirements. 

The small cohort of ‘60s and ‘70s radicals that I belong to will also be gone.   The majority still seem transfixed by events in the past unfortunately. Most are now retired, aging, some sick, some dying too, but the living still engaged in the struggle for socialism in their various ways. Will the 40-and-50 somethings, who grew up in neo-liberal Reagan/Clinton time, be any better than the boomers?  I have my doubts, as U.S. capitalism is a terrible master. It is the much younger teens, 20-somethings and 30-somethings who will fully inherit the economic, political and environmental crises impacting their lives for decades to come. They see capital visibly losing credibility every day, so its no secret.

To the Youth!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year review archive, using these terms:  "The Brown Plague," "Something In the Air," "How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin," "The Coming Insurrection," "A New Movement," "Subculture," "Rock and Roll," "The Conspiracy," "The French Communist Party versus the Students," "Capitalism on Campus," "Jasic Factory Struggle," "A Marxist Education," "Like Ho Chi Minh!  Like Che Guevara!" "May Made Me."

The Cultural Marxist

December 17, 2022

When the Music's Over...

 “The Playlist,” limited series by Per-Olav Sørensen, 2022

This is the mostly giddy success story of Spotify, the audio streaming service that still dominates music downloads, even over iTunes.  It has the mood of a typical Techno-Utopian juggernaut movie at first.  Spotify was developed in Sweden by what is portrayed as a crew of risk-taking geniuses.  A too-happy investor, a visionary founder, a quiet techie, a bored lawyer, an old-school industry boss, a perky marketing guru and a rag-tag bunch of excellent coders.  Most have their stories told in 1 of 6 episodes – including ‘the artist,’ who comes last. 

They start out trying to build a faster, more beautiful, user-friendly version of the crude, anarchist Pirate Bay online audio player, which is eventually shut down by the courts and the state for music piracy.  Pirate Bay’s ‘business plan’ was to sell porn advertising while hosting music for free to offer to listeners.  In a capitalist society, this is illegal due to intellectual property rights.  Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek starts with the same advertising plan – though without the porn.  He thinks this is going to work...

Only a budding naïve would believe that they could get music for free from record companies and musicians based on giving them part of the advertising proceeds or just ‘free exposure.’  The progression from libertarian entrepreneurs to the reality of the marketplace is the story arc.  We witness them going from pounding the table for ‘free music’ to suggestions of a paywall, then a ‘premium service’ that holds playlists, then allowing the record companies to own 20% of Spotify shares, then the admission – only mentioned once – that the record companies now make 70% of the profit off streaming.   Prior to that, CDs and LPs were dying as piracy was killing the music corporations. Spotify became the front-end of the record labels. 

Spotify needed early outside investors and in one ridiculous scene Peter Thiel, the Trumpist billionaire owner of Paypal, dispenses diagnoses and money to the trippy investor wrangler for Spotify.

The lead anarchist coder eventually grows dissatisfied with the bourgeois direction the company is taking.  He has built an easy, fast interface that downloads in 24 nanoseconds or something – first made possible by combining peer to peer and server music sources.  This is faster than other downloads which have to ‘buffer.’  This speed is finally accomplished by stripping the music of some of its data to speed up the download – the .mp3 method that musicians like Neil Young have complained about for years.

Ek is a tough perfectionist and a dick.  The lawyer is a realist.  The industry boss has to be pushed out of his archaic ideas about music delivery.  The investor is ‘on the spectrum’ and just wants to have fun with his kroner millions, snubbing ‘the grey socialists.’  The coder is creative, and we see how he comes up with some ideas.  The artist, Bobbi T, is a black woman who sings soulful bluesy tunes and gets signed eventually.  She becomes a personal thorn in Ek’s side, as she knew him in high school. 

Ek the stubborn libertarian eventually becomes wealthy, renovating a mansion on the shore of some Swedish lake, while throwing an expensive wedding bash in Italy where Silicon Valley greats mingle.  It is apparent that behind Ek’s anti-system verbiage was the stale and ordinary desire to get rich. He fires the ‘neuro-diverse’ funder, who is too erratic for his new tastes.  His lawyer suggests he sell Spotify and he refuses.  This is ‘his art’ and he still owns it.

Neil can leave - most can't yet

THE CATCH 

The catch, of course, is that Spotify pays most artists pennies on the dollar.  At one point in 2014 its biggest star Taylor Swift deserted the platform due to its exploitation of artists.  (She rejoined in 2018).  Bobbi T, the formerly non-political artist, eventually joins a musicians’ campaign in Sweden called “Scratch the Record” to demand Spotify pay more royalties to musicians.  Oddly Ek doesn’t point the finger at the music companies except in private, as they are getting the lion’s share of the proceeds.  Bobbi eventually testifies against Spotify at a Congressional hearing in 2026… where Ek is grilled about being a cartel and a monopoly.  Of course, when was the last time the U.S. Congress did anything about monopolies or oligopolies?  

In the real world Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren left in 2020 when Spotify bought Joe Rogan’s babbling bullshit podcast. A German label recently pulled its catalog. A whole raft of international stars are leaving or would like to leave, but leaving is tricky due to record company contracts.  Ek has announced in 2021 that Spotify would invest 100M Euros in an AI defense firm that works with various militaries, so his transition to corporate normality is complete.  They even dropped controversial leftist podcasts like comedian Lee Camp.  Profits for music corporations Universal, Sony and Warner were up 20+% to 30+% in 2021, mostly on the backs of music streaming.

Intellectual property has grown in importance in capitalist wealth.  No one in this limited series advocates the ‘socialization of art’ – where musicians, writers, painters, film-makers, actors, etc. - get a modest stipend to support their work.   They would work for the state or a community, a firm or a union or some other entity.  Instead the vast, democratic majority of artists of all kinds work for very little, eking out a living while trying to do gigs or other work to fund their art.  Art has become democratic, but wealth has not - as this series makes clear if you stay to the end.

Note:  May Day carries many books about music. 

The author does not stream.  Instead he listens to a large collection of new and used LPs and CDs using 6 speakers and 2 amps, not some tiny ear buds. Boom!

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “In Search of the Blues,” “Cool Town,” Kids”(Patti Smith); “Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “Grateful Dead,” “Mississippi Delta,” “Life”(Keith Richards); “Janis Joplin,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” "33 Revolutions Per Minute," "Searching for Sugarman," "Marie and Rosetta,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Echo in the Canyon,” “The Music Sell-Outs,” “Palmer’s Bar,” “Treme,” “Subculture,” “The Long Strange Trip, “If it Sounds Good, It Is Good, “Really the Blues, “Music is Power.” 

The Kultur Kommissar

December 13, 2022           

A Nuanced Defense of the Manifesto

 “A Spectre Haunting – On the Communist Manifesto” by China Mieville, 2022

The Communist Manifesto (CM) is a common entry point or discarded classic for many radical readers.  It is ‘a revolutionary call to arms’ combining poetry, facts, polemic, theory, prophesy, melodrama and tragedy.  “Manifestos” are by their nature different from other kinds of writing and the CM is one of the most memorable.  Miéville analyses its seismic impact, looking at its 1848 context – one of proletarian misery, the living memory of the 1789-’94 Great French Revolution and subsequent French rebellions in 1830 and 1832, a German weaver’s revolt in 1844, the terrible Irish potato famine of 1847 and the Europe-wide 1848 overturns that followed publication of the Manifesto later that year.  Then there is its legacy – it was first forgotten, then revived around the 1871 Paris Commune, the 1905 events in Russia and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.  At one point, it became the most printed book in the world.

Miéville treats this book as a companion volume to the Manifesto, which it includes as an Appendix, along with later Prefaces.  He discusses the prior works and ideas by Marx and Engels that infused the Manifesto – “On the Jewish Question,” “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” “The Holy Family” and “The German Ideology.”  

The League of the Just, which changed its name to the Communist League, wanted a Manifesto and assigned Marx to write it, based on Engel’s prior work and idea for a manifesto.  This after debates with the romantic and conspiratorial socialists inside the League were won by Marx and Engels, as poorly depicted in the film The Young Karl Marx. 

Miéville goes over the Manifesto, describing at least 18 famous points it made, ending with WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! in caps.  Its method was not determinist or stagiest, but historically grounded, as in its discussion of the communist potential of the peasant obshchina (communally-owned land) in ‘backward’ Russia. It gave a practical and transitional reform program of 10 points, which later prefaces said represented 1848 but might be adjusted later.  It denounced various mistaken socialist tendencies, some of whom had disappeared by the time the Paris Commune rolled around in 1871, so the document is partially rooted in its time.

EVALUATION

Miéville, who at this point has left behind his science fiction career and is a sort of reporter and historian, mostly positively evaluates the Manifesto as to its present resonance and accuracy.  He understands that Marx’s points about class struggle and exploitation are true under capital.  The real rub for most people is whether a revolution – an overturning of the whole structure in favor of the majority – would be possible or would be worth it. After all, since the Manifesto was written, capital has become more entrenched world-wife, more ‘totalizing,’ more pervasive, even more brutal.  And it has also provided material benefits to sectors of the population, contrary to assertions that immiseration is the fate of all workers.  

After 1848 Marx and Engels dispensed with any idea of an alliance with the bourgeoisie against feudalism (hinted at in the CM), given the events in Germany in which the bourgeoisie linked itself to the landed aristocracy.  They understood then that democratic tasks were the province of the working class itself.  They abandoned any idea of a popular front or stages and moved towards the concept of permanent revolution.  Many of their later followers didn’t do this, both reformist and Stalinist, even up to this day. 

Miéville takes a dim view of the CM’s paens to the world-wide revolutionary activities of capital, as do others.  At the time capital was quite disruptive to the feudal / subsistence agrarian scheme of things, which was the alternative.  Citing Marx and Engel’s hope that socialism could come peacefully in some countries, he advocates looking at different forms of non-violent ‘rupture’ – such as a ‘struggle within the state.’  However he has no concrete ideas as to where this might apply.  Nor does he mention electoral politics as one way ‘into’ the state, as a way to create conflict. 

From Bulgaria's Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia

CRITICISMS

Miéville sees that the Manifesto did not fully anticipate how difficult the overthrow of capitalism would be, though it was frailer in 1848.  He thinks the CM’s ‘immiseration thesis’ is weak, though the CM identified labor forces opposing it.  It’s understanding of periodic capitalist crises still stands the test of time according to him.  He questions whether proletarian ethics are embedded within it, in spite of Marx's distain for moralistic hokum. Most problematic for him is the idea of the ‘inevitability’ of socialism.  Miévillle doesn’t think the Manifesto meant this literally, but as an exhortation to revolutionaries, to give them some kind of ‘confidence of the will.’  Nor does the Manifesto really deal with other intermediate classes, which have grown under capitalism, though he refutes one critic who thinks white-collar ‘clerks’ aren’t working-class.  He dispenses with other, more clueless or crude criticisms easily.

The Manifesto denounces the oppression and exploitation of women and the bourgeois family, but doesn’t follow up, including the concept of ‘social reproduction.’  Partly behind this is the Chartist opposition to the factory’s destruction of the working-class family at the time, something Miéville ignores in his argument.  Engels expanded on the women’s question in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” Miéville also focuses on the strong internationalist take on nationalism, though he argues that Marx understood nationalisms power quite well, even in the CM.  Same goes for the approaches to colonialism and imperialism, racism and ethno-nationalism, which are not deeply explored in the CM either.  He recognizes that Marx and Engels elucidated more on these issues, especially on the subjects of U.S. slavery and the colonized Irish.  He writes a long discussion of racism’s relation to class using Dubois, and allegations that M/E’s approach was European-centered.  He concludes this was not due to prejudice but to lack of extensive knowledge, i.e. ‘epistemic.’    

Miéville makes fun of the lame accusation that Marxism is a ‘religion,’  Yet in a story about how pre-WWI workers in Coburg, Bavaria wished to be buried with the Manifesto, not the Bible, he points out that something else is going on here too.  Because the book “cleaves unremittingly to liberation,” containing a “millennial hope for justice” for the worker, it rises above reason to ‘the affective.”  Quite clearly, it gives hope of a better world in a dire situation, appealing to emotions too.      

Miéville ends by going into a long look at present neo-liberal capitalism, which is more adaptable than Marx & Engels expected, able to work with theocracy, virtual slavery, pre-market agriculture, royalty, subsistence economies, street vendors, pauperization, war, crime and a massive precariat.  Marx understood that individual capitalists and the capitalist class as a whole would have differences over these issues.  This  was shown by the 1864 ‘Factory Acts’ in Britain, which made labor conditions better after much pressure from labor, but hated by some capitalists.  This is the logic of almost every reform allowed under capital and also faction fights within the ruling class, but it does not negate socialist support for certain reforms.   Certainly Marx advocated full suffrage for all those above 18, no matter the flaws in bourgeois democracy.   The author also takes on the issue of ‘the Party' organization, counseling humility to Marxist comrades; advocates a ‘better hate’ and shows how ‘woke capitalism’ is used against unions and class struggle.

This is an excellent modern study guide, not slavish, and will make readers think, not just believe.   We have a good number in stock.  This is another book 'celebrity book clubs' would never read.  Take that, Oprah and Reese and ...

Prior blog posts on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “October – the Story of the Russian Revolution”(Miévillle); “The Young Karl Marx” (Peck); “Marx” (Eagleton); “The Melancholia of the Working-Class,” “No Is Not Enough” (Klein); “Mistaken Identity.”

And I got it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 10, 2022

Observational Astronomy, Not Math

 Anyone Seen the Edge of the Universe Yet?

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a massive improvement over the Hubble telescope in its abilities to see into deep space.  Are there any tentative insights we can draw so far other than being in awe of the gorgeous pictures sent back by it?

Its iris size is 25 square meters, with 100 times the power of Hubble, with the ability to detect far more infrared light.   It has shown baby stars in formation out of dust and gas, and dying stars slowly darkening.  It shows black holes emitting gases, not sucking them in.  Water vapor has been detected on a giant planet 1,150 light years away. Of most import is the first Deep Field photo of an area of the universe the size of a grain of sand, which shows a countless variety of galaxies receding into the distance.

Infinity is a concept that Einstein ruled out of his conception of the space / time continuum.  Humans cannot literally grasp the concept, as it overwhelms thought and emotion.  The Deep Field photo hints at how large the universe is… with no end in sight as yet, no curving back, no edge...  The other photos show that objects in the universe are not static objects, but evolve in both directions, dying and being born.  The universe is not heading towards a general ‘heat-death’ at all given these photos, much as Engels and Lenin argued long ago.  It is a changing universe...

Some of the galaxies in these photos are almost the supposed age of the Big Bang (13.8B years), which is making some cosmologists wonder how a fully-formed galaxy could exist so soon after its ‘birth.’  One of the oldest is dubbed “Glassy,” whose age is 13.4B. This is not the first time massive objects have been discovered that could not have formed in time – like a full-grown human out of a woman’s womb, or the earth in 7 days.  In short, the conventional Big Bang theory of galaxy formation cannot account for how these massive structures formed so quickly.  Also of consequence is the composition of these galaxies – of heavier elements than hydrogen and helium, confounding the conventional theory of the Big Bang which limits them to hydrogen and helium.  

Size is also an issue – especially as structures in the universe have to be limited to 250 million light years wide by the theory.  In 2021 observational astronomers – not mathematicians – located the “Giant Arc,” which is 3.3B light years long, another so-called impossibility.  Lerner himself notes that some of these galaxies are too small and smooth in size, or big ones too smooth, to pair up with the BB theory that galaxies are products of collisions, especially large ones. 

Some traditional cosmologists are having second thoughts, while the majority are circling the wagons once again by adjusting galaxy birth rates.  After all, research time, academic positions, publication, intellectual prestige, pay and grants all hinge on being on the side of the BB.  Eric Lerner, one of a number of cosmologists who are against the Big Bang and have been sidelined and censored for it, has written about the JWST discoveries in a more expansive article: “The Big Bang Didn’t Happen.” Big Bang Didn't Happen Article

Ref:  In Defense of Marxism, #39, ‘The James Webb Telescope.’

P.S. - Even Neil deGrasse Tyson is having to defend the Big Bang in public now.

P.P.S. - YouTube astronomy podcasts are now full of disses of the flawed Big Bang theory, which has been teetering for years.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “The Big Bang Never Happened,” “Big Bang Goes Boom!” “The Philosophy of Space-Time,” “The Dialectical Universe,” “Reason in Revolt,” “The Big Bang Theory is a Situation Comedy,” “Marx and the Earth,” “The Ten Assumptions of Science,” “Ubiquity – Why Catastrophes Happen,” “Astrology,” “Tired Light – an Explanation of Redshifts in a Static Universe,” “The Crisis in Cosmology: A Marxist Analysis,” “The Einsteinian Universe?” "Seeing Red - Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science." 

The Cultural Marxist

12/7/2022