An Almost Unreadable Book

 “Uncomfortable Television” by Hunter Hargraves, 2023

This is a turgid, jargon-filled academic work on how neo-liberal television after 2000 is acculturating people to a declining and more brutal society.  At least that is my take. The writing style in the book puts one off, and yes, the first quote is from Foucault. If anyone ever teaches academics and lawyers how to write – and that is probably impossible – they should take hints from David Foster Wallace and George Orwell.  That is not happening here, as Hargraves is a professor of Cinema and Television Arts at UC Fullerton.  Clearly, he’s not trying to be a public intellectual.

“I regard academic English not as a dialectal variant of Standard Written English, but as a gross debasement.,,” - David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage.
          Academic English is “a mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” in which “it is common to come across long passages which are almost completely devoid of meaning.” - George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.
           Wallace again: “…the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own resume. In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed … by opaque abstraction” - Wallace, Authority and American Usage.

That said, let’s get to the heart of the matter, if we can.  You see, the ‘heart’ is so elusive it might not even be there, as the style is so elliptical and murky its hard to decipher. Hargraves uses specific examples of comedy, reality TV, fan remixes, detective series and ‘woke’ television after 2000 to make his points.  His introduction dwells on Louis CK, seeming surprised that a series centered around an obnoxious male comic might be problematic.  Anyone who has watched enough comedy acts or shows basically knows when to turn them off, as the tight, drunken world of intimate and adult comedy clubs has been mainstreamed onto Netflix.  A Marxist might put it this way, that the commodification of ‘transgressive’ jokes is fake dissent, or as Orwell put it, just an exciting “escape into wickedness.”  Some of these comics are cheap and lazy ‘boat-rockers,’ if not outright reactionaries.  Some are not.  It’s the difference between liberal 1^st Amendment absolutism and actual liberation.

‘Discomfort’ in Hargraves analysis is the feeling that something is not quite right with the images, plot, characters, language or point of a TV show.  He thinks this is a symptom of “the television industry that late capitalism depends on in order to maintain its ideological hegemony.”  This means depicting ‘unlikeable protagonists, profanity, graphic violence, explicit sex and abuse of cultural minorities, women and children.’  Drug dealers, assassins, hit men, Mafia and serial killers are prominent.  Or “cringeworthy interactions between co-workers, friends and potential romantic partners” and “irritating or mentally unstable” characters.  No shit.  It is actually hard to find normal, grounded people in movies or on TV.

Hargraves does not discuss class, seemingly oblivious to the sea of class references found on television.  The military, CIA or FBI are also invisible in his analysis. He seems to think that ‘woke’ TV will somehow be liberating.  His comedy section focuses on Lena Dunham’s Girls. The reality TV section is on the recovery series Intervention.  The fan ‘remix’ is an adultified, lumpen version of Jem & the Holograms.  The cop series covered are The Wire, CSI and Law & Order. The ‘woke’ TV section is about 30 Rock and Atlanta.  His selections seem mostly frothy. He omits the biggest streaming blockbuster of all, Game of Thrones. Since I’ve not watched most of this, I’ll focus on the detective series section and his conclusion. 

In the 'Lab' at CSI Las Vegas

The Cop Shows

If it’s not obvious by now, CSI and Law & Order SVU are both very pro-police procedurals.  They are the heroes and techie geniuses in ‘our’ fight against crime, with the viewer getting the serial satisfaction of nailing the bad guy, an actual rarity.  Dick Wolf, the producer of L&O: SVU, is openly pro-cop and close to the NYPD.  Anthony Zuicker, who created the CSIs, promoted surveillance, almost laughably-accurate tech science gimmicks and lax civil rights. 

The Wire first focused on an efficient police surveillance unit dealing with black ghetto crime and violence in Baltimore, though surrounded by corrupt or incompetent cops and brass.  In additional seasons it extended to corrupt politicians, schools, unions and newspapers, so it’s not a typical take, but it still carried over the eternal ghetto theme in each season. The showrunner David Simon – a semi-Marxist – is still semi.  This is why he had to make the great Treme series set in New Orleans as a mea culpa.  Hargraves finally makes the point about the show’s focus on black crime, along with another obvious point about the violence in the show.  Is the violence real or imagined is a question he does not address.  Nor does he mention class in regards to The Wire.

What else does Hargraves have to say?  Well, he thinks it’s all about ‘white guilt.’ At least that is his chapter title but I could not find it in the text.  Watching cops abuse process and suspects, or omnipresent swat team raids is not ‘uncomfortable’ television?  This is unmentioned.  He contends that the ‘high-quality’ series loved by critics like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire and Deadwood are all full of conflicted male anti-heroes.  Yet not everyone in the Wire police unit are ‘anti-heroes.’ I’ve seen Deadwood and there are some – like Swearengen – who ‘might’ be - and there are others – like Seth Bullock and Sol Star – who are not.  Swearengen is no kind of ‘hero,’ he’s an interesting shit, one of those unlikable protagonists.  Anti-hero seems to be an outdated way of phrasing it. 

Hargraves whines about how these series are called ‘quality’ without explaining why they are not the same as CSI/L&O SVU, which he says is ‘middle-brow.’  Perhaps it’s the money invested and the audience aimed at?!  Instead he claims they are ‘intermedial’ and ‘televisual.’  So?  This is in line with the frequent resort to a ‘lit review’ of other academics opinions that overly clutter the book like its a Ph.D thesis. 

In CSI, the episode he cites about a “Las Vegas real estate magnate’ being murdered misses the fact that the man’s infantile perversities – and they are gross – blackens the image of the rich.  Again, missing class.  In L&O, he pokes at the alleged feminism of the series and actually quotes people who buy the fact that the male cop Stabler is some kind of feminist hero.  Stabler is a disturbed thug playing the ‘protector’ role for his ever-in-danger and stupid teenage daughter, another trope.  This shows’ focus on sex crimes makes it one of the more lurid, which is uncomfortable. After all, how many dead female bodies do we see, not just here, but constantly? Or imprisoned or kidnapped girls?  Talk about getting us used to crumbling, late capitalism in the U.S.!  At least Olivia Benson / Mariska Hargitay has played a real role in getting incompetent and sexist police departments to actually investigate rape with their unused rape kits. 

Another side of these two shows which he ignores is that the ‘ripped from the headlines’ style used which is frequently focused on rich or powerful people committing crimes. Hargraves misses that, as he’s an identity academic under all the verbiage, abstractions and bow-ties.    

The Wire

Solutions?

The change from ‘family friendly’ TV to uncomfortable ‘realistic’ TV after 2000 is Hargraves’ theme.  This corresponds to the technical changes from 4 TV networks to a sprawling geography of hundreds of media outlets.  That parallels a corresponding decay in U.S. capitalism, which is reflected in the culture industry, normalized by it as ‘just the way things are.’  Hargraves thinks that the new media landscape has also allowed ‘cultural minorities’ to gain access for ‘woke TV’ - which is also ‘uncomfortable.’ His understanding of who are involved in this opening are color castes, women, queer folks and disabled people, but it will only go to the ‘awareness’ level and not that of actual action.  He knows these efforts can be and are commodified and co-opted by media.  

Hargraves points to a ridiculous glut of content and uses 30 Rock and Atlanta for his point about woke TV – shows I have not watched – while ignoring the profusion of muck-raking documentaries.  He does note the handmaid cloaks in The Handmaid’s Tale were used in protests against Bible thumpers and Trump’s sexism, just as the hand signal in the Hunger Games was used in Thai protests against the dictatorship there.  Both to no avail.

This book is for the TV academic or TV geeks.  But it’s all weak tea for anyone else.  No mention of 6 capitalist combines owning nearly all the media in the U.S. No mention of socialization of these sources.  No discussion of public television or collaborative efforts by workers in media – many of whom are currently on strike. Seemingly ‘late capitalism’ still has things in the bag.

P.S. - I've been told by current college students that it is common for cultural studies writing to be incomprehensible and bloated.  Here are the so-called top 100 series:  https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows,” “Bad Cops, Bad Cops – What Ya Gonna Do,” “Trapped and Detective Series in General,”  “Handmaid’s Tale," "Treme" or the word ‘streaming.’

The Kultur Kommissar

August 29, 2023

Direct This!

 “Chasing the Light” by Oliver Stone, 2020

This is an autobiography of Stone, a director and screen-writer who had a reputation for liberal-left politics, wild or intoxicated behavior and kamikaze directing.  It tells the first part of his life, from his parents in Paris and later New York, the education at Yale that he abandoned and his stint as a grunt in Vietnam.  This last formative experience led him to a real career in film, which really went into overdrive with Platoon, his Oscar-winning Vietnam epic. 

Prior to that Stone discusses working on the scripts for Midnight Express, which was about being jailed in a Turkish prison for hashish; Scarface, the story of a violent Marielista Cuban thug getting rich in Miami’s drug trade; and Year of the Dragon, about the Chinese tong gangs in New York.  If you sense a certain theme here, you wouldn’t be far off.  Stone was not just an angry veteran but also a heavy drug user like a lot of Hollywood types, until he kicked the habit before Platoon.  In between he directed a film called The Hand with Michael Caine, a psych-horror film that no one watched. 

The book opens with the chaotic filming of the last scenes of Salvador, as leftist rebels overrun a government military unit in a small Salvadorean town, a town which was really in Mexico.  What’s funny about this is that Stone admits he voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 – later the sponsor of El Salvador’s bloody dictatorship.  His politics before, during and after Vietnam were somewhat muddled for a long time.

His father was a Republican Wall Street finance broker; his mother a French-born socialite and bon vivant.  They finally got divorced when Ollie was 15.  He went to a strict boarding school in Pennsylvania, then on to Yale where he failed to attend classes and instead began to write.  Oddly, he taught English in Saigon for a while before enlisting.  As his career takes off, the book drops names of producers, directors, actors and films like he’s trying to bomb his own insignificance out of existence. And he does!

This is a book that will probably thrill movie fans, wannabe directors and screen-writers with the inside dope. It’s personal and a bit self-obsessed, but then this is an autobiography.  His sexual liaisons, LSD and cocaine use are mentioned, but in no detail.  He has a soft spot for Paris, his mother’s home town; he also feels at home in the jungle after his 15 months around the A Shau Valley with the 1st Air Cavalry and 25^th Infantry of I Corps in Vietnam.  He was in a firebase during the attacks of Tet in ’68. These direct experiences allowed him to make Platoon and Salvador.  The violence he saw also led him to make Scarface, Midnight Express and Year of the Dragon.  He’d worked on an early script version of Born on the 4^th of July and had gotten to know Ron Kovic well.  He also had a hand in the Conan script with Schwarzenegger, which was later butchered.

A journalist, photographer and 'guide' walk into a bar in El Salvador 

Salvador and Platoon

Stone had to sue Dino DeLaurentis for his Platoon script back, which is one of the stories he tells about the massive problems in making films.  He had to deal with nasty reviews by the faux doyen of American film criticism, Pauline Kael of the New Yorker until the end.  Shortness of money, broken promises, fickle studios, the odd variety of actors and the stupidity of some script changes are prominent.  And ‘chasing the light’ to get every shot needed on each day’s shooting schedule.  The experience in Mexico making Salvador is epic. Stars walk off the set, extras go on strike, actors get drunk, equipment is late, money always tight or non-existent, stunt men are injured, a case of heat stroke, a conservative Mexican censor, camera and sound people unreliable, a bad film lab, personal antagonisms galore and money-men telling him to ‘cut, cut, cut’ the script to save cash.  He still doesn’t know how the film was paid for, but it finally got shot.

That experience prepared him for Platoon, as the films were tied together by the studio.  It had more money behind it courtesy of Orion, but was staged in the Philippines just after an election ousted Marcos, so turmoil was at its birth.  They had to clear the jungle for the set and the actors were trained by a hard-ass military man to achieve realism.  Some of the film’s choppers were so overloaded they almost crashed. His crew of mostly young actors were ‘blooded.’ Problems occurred – heavy rain, bugs, bad light, snake bites, truck accidents and a strike due to Stone losing his temper with the Philippine crew, but it, like Salvador, eventually wrapped.  It was not a disaster like the filming of Apocalypse Now or as difficult as Salvador.

These two were both leftist films subject to the winds of politics.  Stone put in an unreal, untruthful scene in Salvador about rebels executing National Guard soldiers after they surrendered, which never happened.  The rebels were interested in making surrenders easier, not harder.  He regrets that decision in trying to appeal to the typical government narrative on Central America, in the pursuit of ‘balance.’

Above all this is a careerist story, as being a famous director was the goal and Stone succeeded.  His glory at Platoon’s Oscar is palpable. Even his conservative father finally approved of his hippie son.  Whether that would be possible now, with the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s fading away, is debatable, as those were different times in Hollywood. Movies are now being supplanted by streaming series.  ‘Safe’ cash outlays are even more prominent, as the profusion of sequels attests.  And world cinema is intruding on Hollywood. Autobiographies are self-aggrandizing for the most part, and he lets his opinion of figures in Hollywood show.  He’s famous enough now, in spite of his bete noire image, so he can. This book shows that even people with incoherent political instincts come around if enough facts from their own life experience start to accumulate, as did Stone, who became a liberal-leftie after being an amorphous aesthete.  That is the influence of material reality, of materialism.  

Stone went on to make two Wall Streets, Born on the 4^th of July, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Snowden and The Untold Story of the United States, among others.  As you can by this selection, his films were not too radical, but they all undermine conservative orthodoxy about Wall Street, Vietnam, hippies, the JFK assassination, porn, surveillance and history.  They are all a bit sensationalist and do not focus on capitalism or class.  Yet many in Hollywood intensely dislike Stone because of his ‘slant,’ including liberals and centrists. So you wannabe Stone’s out there, here is how it worked for him.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Chasing the Light,” “Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps” (Stone); “On the Trail of the Assassins”(Garrison); “November – A Novel,” “Central America’s Forgotten History” (A. Chomsky); “Manufacturing Consent” (N. Chomsky) or the word “Vietnam,” which will give you multiple hits, as the blog specializes in books about Vietnam.

And I bought it at May Day Books! … which has solid fiction and culture sections.

The Cultural Marxist

August 25, 2023

Bloody Hungry

 “Hunger” film directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri, 2023

No, it’s not the Hunger Games series or the film about the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland in 1981; nor is it the book by Knut Hamsun about poverty in rural Norway, a memoir by Roxanne Gay or a triple CD rap release.  It is a Thai film taking a look at Bangkok’s high-living upper class and their obsession with food and the chef(s) that cater to them.  It comes out of the same class conscious Asian approach as the south Korean gems Parasite, Squid Games and Snowpiercer. 

Ruling class pigs out

A brutal and driven Chef Paul is the pivotal character.  He says that the more money you have, the ‘hungrier’ you get.  “What you eat reflects your social status” according to him.  Or as another puts it, when reflecting on Chef Paul’s autocratic style:  “In kitchen, there is no room for democracy – it’s a dictatorship.”  This reflects the Thai government itself, a militarized authoritarian, monarchist clan coddling the self-same rich gobbling down the Chef’s ‘perfect’ delicacies.  The Chef runs a catered, on-site kitchen for upscale parties.  We are taken to the birthday party of one of the bloody and aging military men of Thailand, also attended by celebrities, politicians and businessmen. Then to a pool party by a bunch of drunken and obnoxious rich kids; and a ‘hunters’ outdoor lunch consisting of a protected species of bird.  A secretly-fraught private dinner for a rich family, later discovered to be bankrupt, is next.  Lastly, a leading Thai socialite’s huge bash, where two chefs battle it out for her ignorant approval. 

If this all sounds like a darker version of Crazy Rich Asians you wouldn’t be far wrong. Class understanding is something that seems obvious across the world now.  Class consciousness is no theoretical concept to most - it’s everywhere, which is a good sign. Chef Paul himself came from poverty – his mother was a maid to a wealthy family, but he saw how they ate.  He accidentally broke one of their caviar jars and tasted its terrible contents, and he decided then and there to be the yelling, pan and plate throwing, brow-beating asshole that he became – a Thai Gordon Ramsey.  Sometimes the worst petit-bourgeois are former proletarians, and he’s no exception.

Into this mix is a dead-faced noodle-shop cook named Aoy who wants to become ‘special’ and so she joins Chef Paul’s crew after a harrowing cooking test.  The hunter’s dinner of a dead rare bird forces her to leave and she joins another restauranteur, highlighting her ‘burning wok’ style.  She partially mimics Chef Paul's brutal attitude towards her own kitchen staff.  Eventually she realizes that cooking pretentious and very expensive food for rich people is a no-go.  She returns to her noddle shop to make ‘Cry-Baby Noodles,’ a family favorite, and create her own menu for her neighbors.  It is somewhat similar to the other cooking series The Bear where an upscale chef returns to a hot beef sandwich shop in Chicago, and perhaps has the intention of upgrading it.  The Bear, being U.S. based, has an undertow of class consciousness in the debate between Richie and Carmen, but it’s really a typical family story.  Not so in this film, where class is up front. The neo-liberal obsession with eating, cooking and chefs is widespread – the flip side of the real hunger affecting millions. 

Food is a fraught topic with class and knowledge overtones.  The less income and education you have in the U.S., usually the worse the quality of the food you eat – though it may taste addictively good.  Marx saw this in his time in London – workers eating toxic, non-nutritious and cheap food that barely kept them alive.  Even Little Shop of Horrors is a play on that idea. Now U.S. food eventually makes many proletarians sick with obesity, hypertension, cancer, heart disease and diabetes, let alone its animal, social and environmental impacts.

Meat and fish seem to be the gastronomic stars in this movie … the bloodier or wetter the better. Claiming the lives of animals is a form of power to this upper class.  But without saying it, this animal focus is a quiet commentary on the unjust and expensive gluttony of the Thai capitalists … a class that is not unique, but spread across the world in nearly every country.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “The Bear,” “Hunger Games,” “Parasite,” “Squid Game,” “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Salt, Sugar, Fat,” “Vegan Freak,” “Animal, Vegetable, Junk,” “Kraft-Heinz,” “Foodopoly,” “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism.”

P.S. - An ex-Primer Minister of Thailand returned from exile yesterday and was immediately put in jail.  The winner of the May election has been blocked from taking office by the military/monarchist bloc. An unelected real estate tycoon has been backed by the king and generals for prime minister.  Maybe they'll appoint an authoritarian chef next.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

August 22, 2023

A Guide Book

 “Obstacle Course – The Everyday Struggle to get an Abortion in America,” by David S. Cohen, Carole Joffe, 2020

This is a primer on going through the whole experience of abortion in the U.S.  It is based on over 70 interviews – women that have had an abortion; providers, volunteers and allies.  That experience is closely based on what state you live in, your age, whether you have health insurance, a car, money, various kinds of support and a strong stomach to deal with fake clinics and lunatic anti-abortion protesters.  There is also the tight web of abortion restrictions that occurred prior to the reversal of Roe v. Wade, both national and state. This book is written before that ruling, so the picture now is even more difficult – making miscarriages and non-viable fetuses subject to the new law in some states, which additionally threaten women’s health.  This was seen in the recent lawsuit against Texas by 13 women.  The south and prairie states are the worst offenders, as they are in favor of forced child bearing.

The authors take you, in detail, through ‘making the decision’ to terminate the pregnancy; finding a clinic; coming up with the money; waiting periods; transport; getting past the clowns; clinic counseling and the procedure – whether it be medical or drug-induced.  They end by trying to paint a picture of what a sane approach would be, which in their mind is very limited.  

Of most import is that working-class people, many times of color, have the most difficult time accessing reproductive health services like abortion.  Abortion rights are part of working-class struggle, especially of working-class women’s rights.  It is pretty clear that the Democratic Party talk to ‘just elect us’ went on while abortion rights were being whittled away for years, clearly leading to an overturn of the 1973 law.  The Dems were asleep at the wheel – when they had it and when they didn’t.  Trusting them again is fraught.

Here are some relevant facts from the authors:

     1.    They call the treatment of abortion as a medical condition ‘abortion exceptionalism’ due to the multiple restrictions on the practice.

     2.    From their 2018-2019 figures:  half of women seeking abortions are below the federal poverty line, and another quarter just above.

     3.    A quarter have no health insurance.

4.    A third have Medicaid, but at that time only 16 states allowed its use for the procedure.

5.    60% of patients are already parents.

6.    Three in five patients are women of color – African-American at 28%; Hispanic at 25%; Asian/PI at 6%; European-Americans at 39%; 3% other.

7.    The rate of abortion is going down because of better contraceptive practice.  There were 862K abortions in 2017, down from 1.2M in 2008. The rate has not dropped as much in conservative / Republican-dominated states.

8.    1 in 4 women will have an abortion by age 45.

9.    39% of abortions in 2017 were through medication.

10.                Abortion is incredibly safe, at 2%; far safer than childbirth, colonoscopies, liposuction and vasectomies.

11.                 The large “Turnaway’ Study showed that the economic, social, medical and psychological health of women declines if they fail to get an abortion they wanted or needed.  They are more likely to be a, poorer; b, on public assistance; c, have a negative outlook on the future; d, bad partner relationships; e, the children are worse off; f, lower health overall; g, and introduces them to the high mortality rate of pregnancy in the U.S.

The 'pro-lifers' love a good bomb or burning

They cover the legal decisions that whittled away at abortion since 1973 – Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992; Gonzales v. Carhart in 2007; Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt in 2013 - a case which supposedly slowed restrictions.  The latter was mostly ignored until the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which came out of Alabama and led the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade. 

Their solutions are to follow the best practices in states where abortion is still fully legal.  Added to that they want Medicaid to cover abortion; advanced-practice clinicians to be allowed to do the procedure and making abortion by mail, using Mifipristone, fully legal.  They go into the questionable practice of self-managed abortion.  Stunningly they do not call for nationalized health care, an independent and militant abortion-rights movement or any political recommendations like a labor-left-populist party.  They instead have some weak language about ‘seeking allies.’  They limit themselves to the most conservative approach, which has proved to be a failure.

If you are an activist, a volunteer, a patient, a medical professional or just curious, this book will provide a guide to the situation of getting an abortion in backasswards 'America.' 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Without Apology,” “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Lets Rent a Train!” “Feminists and Feminists,” “TexAss,” “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,” “Really?  Rape?  Still?” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 19, 2023

Noose of Silver

 “The Debt System – A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation,” by Eric Toussaint, 2019

This book contains extremely detailed case studies of national debt in 5 countries in the 1800s: Mexico, Greece, Egypt, Tunisia and Latin America re: 'Gran Columbia' – the area of Columbia, Venezuela, Panama and Ecuador. It is the roots of present-day national debt problems. There are also successful examples of debt repudiation after revolutions in Mexico and Russia, along with many others. These sovereign debts reflect the methods of neo-colonialism and later, modern imperialism.

There are certain consistencies across all the stories. The most well known is the pursuit of extractive profit by European and U.S. banks through 'free trade' and sovereign loans. This is nothing new and Toussaint shows this has been going on for 200 years after formal independence had been declared by the indebted nations. This extraction relates to the theory of 3^rd world underdevelopment verbalized by Gunder Frank. There was even a debt 'troika' consisting of Russia, England and France in the 1820s loaning to Greece after their 'national liberation' fight. The heavy fact most reformists, nationalists and geopoliticians ignore is that in each country the local ruling class or comprador bourgeoisie actively support their country going into debt so as to avoid taxes, among other significant reasons. In other words, 'national' debt is actually a class question in the indebted country – it is not simply a national problem of a poor country oppressed by foreign banks. The simplistic 'north-south' dyad hides this.

The second point Toussaint makes is that actual 'independence' is a rarity for most countries. A world capitalist economy mitigates against this – no matter who their lenders are or what country they partner with. Lenin defined imperialism as the need of big capital to export capital and this was present in spades in the 1800s. Bukharin identified the state and national capital functioning together, but now production is spread across the world. Toussaint uses a grid of capitalist crises developed by Ernest Mandel to show the 4 main crises world capital went through from the early 1800s until the early 1900s. These started in 1825; 1846; 1873; 1890 and are not regular like Krondratiev waves. He is insistent on the point that the suspension of debt payments by debtor countries during these collapses was not the cause but the consequence of the economic failures in the imperial centers.

ODIOUS DEBT

The normal sovereign loan was heavily extractive. The debtor countries did not get the face amount of the loan – sometimes only 30% though they had to pay interest as if they had received 100%! This was because of bank commissions, bonds sold under their par value to third-parties, secondary market speculation, penalties, war debts, bribes and high rates. Simon Bolivar, after getting British loans for newly 'independent' Gran Columbia, realized the countries were in a 'debt trap' that would drain them for years. In addition, local political hacks would steal funds, while local capitalists would profit from national government loans coming from the international debt. In Mexico, much of the loan money went to the railroad barons. Other funds went to buy products or arms from the same countries loaning the money, thus enervating the local economy. The local population, working-class and peasant, were the last consideration.

Local capitalist classes – landowners, latifundists, merchant capital, rail bosses and industrialists - wanted to evade taxes, so promoted getting money from overseas sources. They invested in their countries' government bonds, thus becoming enriched too. Local merchant capital gained because they could import goods from the creditor country. The wealthy were the main recipients of the international loans from their governments. Ignoring the role of local capital is an idea common among some reformist leftists. Approval of every loan is based on a relationship between creditor and debtor and not always forced at the point of a bayonet.  You can't loan money to countries that don't want a loan.

The French occupation of Tunis

Loan periods lasted for many years – few were forgiven. New loans – 'restructuring' – was granted to cover old loans. In some cases agencies were set up to control the debt country's spending, having control over their economy, including selling infrastructure. Egypt actually sold its shares in the Suez Canal to the British government to meet their payments. To pay debts, some corrupt leaders greatly increased taxes on the population, like Tunisia. Examples of countries that tried to industrialize, build state industries and develop without loans like Egypt or Mexico were stopped by the dominant powers, usually though military intervention, and put in the debt trap. Negotiations between world powers led to a partitioning of places like Africa into spheres of influence. This happened openly in the case of Tunisia and Egypt. Tunisia itself was invaded by France to satisfy creditors – a debt situation that continued into modernity under successive corrupt rulers. Toussaint uses the phrase 'odious debt' to describe this kind of cruel debt system, a phrase first developed by an economics lawyer, Alexander Sack. Marx called 'public debt' one of the original sources of primitive accumulation of capital.

Toussaint cites many legal arguments to support national bankruptcy, cancellation of debts or the rejection of old debts by new political forces, such as in a revolution, coup or civil war, especially if the debts are “against the interests of the nation” contracted by a possibly 'despotic regime' and “hostile creditors' as Sack put it. Toussaint widens this definition to include normal governments with no need for a ruling by an international court and which would include debts under structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and with international credit agencies. Countries that do not observe social rights would also be liable for cancellation, even if 'democratically' elected. The purpose of loans should be to benefit the population, pure and simple, and not for any other purpose like enriching local capitalists according to Toussaint. Here he seems to be endorsing interest-bearing govt. bonds that are useful and not exploitative.

Toussaint has a whole chapter on debt repudiations from the 1830s to 2008 by countries all over the world as proof debt is not ironclad, some of which included the U.S. Another chapter is devoted to the Bolshevik repudiation of Czarist debts in 1918, especially the war debts. Debt repudiation was first raised by the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet in a financial manifesto in December, after which all their members were arrested, including Trotsky. The 1918 cancellation was denounced by all the capitalist powers. In 1926 the USSR began getting loans from European banks. After 1991 Yeltsin agreed to reimburse holders of Russian bonds at a very low rate.

MODERNITY

Toussaint thinks the debt system has changed over the years. The BRICs, especially China, are using loans to bring in interest, though perhaps not at the previous rates or conditions as the 'western' banks, World Bank or IMF. Troubled Venezuela and Argentina are both in debt to China. Toussaint cites Japan as one country which developed without subordinating their economy to the debt system by relying on internal development. Besides the aforementioned spread of ownership across the globe, another modern change is that exports from 'emerging economies' were half of world production in 2000 and this has gotten larger since then. These are the same areas where productivity and working-class jobs have increased too, so debt dynamics as to export/import considerations would be different. Toussaint does not mention the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as a cause of crises, as that is not his subject.

Altogether a specialty book on debt that is of most benefit to people interested in the countries specially looked into, confirming in detail the role of debt in imperial exploitation. It confirms a socialist view on national debts that contrasts with the capitalist view, which is that payment of debts is nearly sacrosanct, no matter what conditions prevail.  Socialists support socially-owned banks, not private entities, that might loan money, but at low interest that is plowed into maintenance, not profiteering, or at no interest at all.  They also oppose the deceitful concept of 'free trade' in the present unequal context.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Debt – the First 500 Years” (Graeber); “Debt & Capital,” “The Debt Trap – How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe,” “J is for Junk Economics” (Hudson); “Modern DeFacto Slavery,” “The Deficit Myth” (Kelton); “The Law of Worldwide Value” (Amin); “How Will Capitalism End?” “Blood and Earth,”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 15, 2023

A Liberal Take on Nuclear Destruction

 “Oppenheimer” film directed by Christopher Nolan, 2023

This is the story of the tortured ambivalence of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father’ of the Atom Bomb.  They said he couldn’t run a popsicle stand, as he was a theorist.  But he ran the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, Chicago and Oak Ridge, Tennessee to a ‘successful’ conclusion, providing the U.S. government with a bomb that was first to be used against Germany, but then was later used against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Oppenheimer was a committed anti-fascist and his first rationale was the war in Europe.  But he eventually endorsed the nuking of Japan.

The Trinity Test in the New Mexico desert

This film hides many things.  There is no mention of radiation poisoning at the test sites in the U.S. and the Pacific.  There is only one mention that the Japanese were negotiating for peace, with only one demand – to keep the emperor.  Afterwards, they were allowed to keep their emperor by the U.S. occupation forces, so the U.S. objection to this clause was a stall.  The actual devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is only hinted at.  There is no mention of the role of the USSR, which had entered the war against Japan and was threatening to seize their small northern islands, then Korea and then move south.  There is no mention of Truman’s actual speech after Hiroshima, which claimed the city was a ‘military base’ and cited the bombing as revenge for Pearl Harbor. There was nothing about ‘saving GIs lives.”  There is no mention that both Curtis LeMay and McNamara both agreed that if they lost the war, they would be tried as war criminals for dropping it.  There is no mention that Eisenhower and Leahy of the Joint Chiefs both opposed using the bomb. There is no mention of the bombs being used as ‘demonstrations’ to the Soviets, as well as forestalling any Soviet movement into Japanese territory.  In the end, the Japanese would have surrendered without dropping it.

So it’s not a full-blooded history, but a sanitized version centering on the personal struggles of one man, Oppenheimer.  In that sense, this is Hollywood's typical style. There is an enormous amount of time spent on the McCarthyite witch-hunt against Oppenheimer, who finally lost his clearance and ability to work on further projects.  He, like Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, along with others on the Manhattan project, later became opponents of nuclear proliferation and argued for treaties with the Soviets. In that sense, the film is a study of the contradictions within a person.

Oppenheimer is investigated by far-right types backed by Hoover’s FBI for having friends and lovers in the Communist Party, for opposing the H-Bomb being developed by Edward Teller and for supporting the idea that the technology should be shared with the Soviets as a gesture of friendship.  His donations to the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War were also problematic for the FBI.  One of his supposed allies in the program was actually undermining him.  As it was, it was not Oppenheimer that shared nuclear secrets with the USSR, but others in the program.  Many project scientists opposed the bomb, though that opposition is only shown once in the film.

The most startling point that many will miss is that, in a U.S. war council discussion, the question of how many the A-bomb would kill came up.  They figured that due to conventional leveling and bombing of so many other Japanese cities, the death toll would be roughly equivalent. So it was a go.  This reveals that mass bombing – in Europe, in Japan, later in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Iraq – are the actual base tactics.  Mass ‘conventional’ bombing of cities full of civilians is a war crime, so this was nothing new to them… just a technical twist.

Oppenheimer is played as an assertive but troubled person, acted by Cillian Murphy, who played Tommy Shelby in the great Peaky Blinders streaming series. He’ll probably get an Oscar nomination. In the film Truman calls Oppenheimer a ‘cry baby’ for regretting the nuclear holocaust unleashed on Japan… showing Truman to be the vicious hick from Missouri that he was. An indicative scene is the Trinity test itself, sort of like a 'duck and cover' ad about avoiding radiation.  Los Alamos scientists and families wearing dark glasses are shown, hunched behind wooden barriers or lying prone not that far from the blast site. 

So if you want a real history of this event, it will only provide tangential evidence.  The biggest focus is on the personal story of one man, as is typical of U.S cinema.  A large part of this is the red scare, which Hollywood has addressed in the past about themselves. Famous people hover around the edges, while many facts are ignored.  Christopher Nolan makes blockbuster crowd-pleasers like many Batman movies and Dunkirk – though he did start his career with Memento. So the limitations of this movie are no surprise.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Black Rain,” “Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Obvious War Crimes,” “The Peaky Blinders” or the words ‘Hiroshima,’ ‘McCarthyism,’ ‘McCarthyite,” ‘red scare,’ ‘bombing.’ 

And:  Barbie Review:  "Mass market girl-boss feminism."

The Kultur Kommissar

August 12, 2023

Gay Revenge

 “Razorblade Tears”by S. A. Cosby, 2021

This is a revenge / hate fantasy mixed up with political fiction. I read it because I heard the author interviewed on NPR about his new semi-political book “All the Sinners Bleed,” which I couldn't find in the library yet. Cosby is a dark-skinned liberal living in Virginia and happy with the South. Why I don't know, given his stories. This book is centered on the murders of two gay men who were married with a child. A white-supremacist, homophobic motorcycle gang is the prime suspect. This criminal gang, the Rare Breed, is over-the-top homicidal, with a blonde, brutal 'Viking' running the crew on his ape-hanger Harley. Yeah, stereotypical.

The story is set in Red Hill, a rural town/area 30 miles south of Richmond, Virginia. It's two lead characters are both ex-cons – one, Ike, who has secretly killed 7 people and is now 'going straight.' He's running a lawn-care business with 14 employees and still visualizes the joint. On top of that, he's dark-skinned, so he's a rare recidivism success story. Very rare. The other part of this ebony and ivory picture is Buddy Lee, a humorous 'red-neck' living in a trailer park who you might as well call Bobby Lee for all the Confederate glory that will give you. These two form a “Lethal Weapon” pair who, incidentally, are the fathers of these two dead boys. The formerly homophobic fathers are trying to make things right after treating their sons like crap. Buddy also gets lessons in his bigot talk from Ike.

The police are useless per usual and have suspended the case with no leads, so Ike and Buddy Lee take it upon themselves to do a Liam Niesen. They want to find out whodunit, no matter what … which kinda turns into a suicide run. There is a trans-sexual girl involved – so hip – and a “has-to-run-with-the-kid-to-a-hidden-location” kind of wife. There's a wealthy local gun-runner and dealer in the mix and a hidden protagonist who engages in murder-for-hire. Some young 'blue Anarchists' are also possible authors of the crime, a liberal take that is unbelievable and stupid. It's a pretty obvious whodunit, so the real story is how the killers will be brought to vigilante justice given all the forces arrayed against them. Ike and Buddy Lee are experienced and clever, so it is at times a battle of old versus young and dumb.

The political heart of the book is the issue of gayness. Of most insight is how so many African-Americans in Virginia look down on gay people - their own neighbors, sons, daughters and relations. A scene in a barbershop brings this out. Ike and Buddy Lee's regrets about how they treated their sons take up much soapy time.  It speaks to the years of machismo and sexism, religious conservatism, rural economics and right-wing politics that soak the South on both sides of the color line. Like any revenge fantasy that substitutes for reality, the best part of the book is seeing the shit-bags get it. In real life, they usually don't, which is why the placebo 'hero' revenge genre is so huge.

Most of the book engages in various conventions. There is nothing surprising about that, as conventions are what motor all the crime genres. In most hands, the crime narrative is basically a conservative morality tale about Evil with a capital E. So this is a bit refreshing, even though doled out at the hands of two former lumpen ex-cons, not the Pink Pistols or the sons' gay friends. You can call it a 'male savior' story.

Murders of gay people have risen in the last few years due to the rise of fascistic groups and politics. In Virginia there have been shootings at gay bars. Virginia also passed a law against using the 'gay panic' defense used to justify violence against gays and lesbians. Yet the defense was successful in Virginia in 2022 in one murder according to the Advocate. In 2020 a gay Latino was murdered by 3 thugs. The rising stats are given in the book by a gay rights organization in Richmond.

An exciting, cinematic book that treads familiar ground, but throws a charge at anti-gay ideas and violence.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “California Upholds Ban on Gay Marriage,” “Russia, Snowden, Stoli and the Gay Movement,” “Pride,” “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Freedom Socialist,” “A Bright Room Called Day” (Kushner).

And I got it at a local library. School libraries are being closed in the Houston School District by the Republican-led state apparatus. Reading is a sin! Certainly this book will be 'black-listed' before that.

Red Frog

August 8, 2023

People's Science

“Oneness vs. The 1% - Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom” by Vandana Shiva, 2018

Vandana Shiva is a world-class agrarian scientist from India, which is on the front-lines of the agriculture wars between corporate agriculture and agroecology. This book has chapters on inequality, finance capital and finance capital's control of agribusiness conglomerates that are attempting to control the world's food supply. However its key impact is detailing the failures and dangers of seed patents, GMO frankenfoods, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, superbugs, superweeds, bio-piracy, gene editing, oil inputs, high ag prices and oligopoly control of our food supply.  30% of the world's food supply is under their direct control according to her.  She contends this is primarily brought to us by the new Rockefeller robber-baron – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).

Shiva points out the vast control Berkshire Hathaway and Gates have in ownership of various companies. Along with Vanguard Funds - which had $3T in assets in 2016 - many are in the agro sector. As of 2018 70% of the world's bio-tech/ag-chem was controlled by 6 conglomerates – BASF, Bayer, Dupont, DOW, Monsanto and Syngenta – which will soon be down to 3 corporations after mergers. Two Chinese companies are also involved – ChemChina and SinoChem. She notes that the very first corporation was the East India Company in 1600, so this process of corporatization is nothing new. This 'Toxic Cartel' tries to ride on the back of Borlaug's “Green Revolution,” which Shiva contends was successful due to improved irrigation, weather and more land put under cultivation, not bio-technology.

IG Farben's Zyklon-B, used in the gas chambers of the Holocaust, was first developed in the U.S. as a pesticide. The same corporate lineage later created Agent Orange, used as a deadly defoliant in Vietnam, and Monsanto's Round-Up, a cancer-causing pesticide common in the U.S. Shiva claims 3 million Indian farmers, especially in cotton-growing Maharashtra, have committed suicide due to high ag input prices, bankruptcy and toxic damage to their bodies. The Cartel acts in opposition to many treaties, laws and conventions protecting bio-diversity but its political and economic power give them an 'in' in India. Cornell University and Iowa State are two schools where Gates develops various innocent-sounding projects to take-over indigenous seeds and plants like rice, bananas, cotton, beans and chickpeas. Others like Harvard participate in his geoengineering schemes.

People's Science vs. Profit Science

Of particular interest is the scientific rationale against GMOs – plant gene engineering promoted by the billionaires. According to Shiva GMOs are a political and economic project, not a beneficial one. She advocates epigenics, a practice which accounts for the whole living organism and its interaction with the environment, not manipulating one isolated 'dead' gene, as Richard Lewontin puts it, preferred by bio-tech firms. Shiva calls the corporate practice 'genetic reductionism' and promotes a people's science based on thousands of years of peasant farming knowledge. Epigenics has proved to outperform GMOs according to her. She cites the failures in India of GMO Bt cotton, Golden Rice, Bt brinjal rice and GMO bananas. Shiva contends that industrial agriculture has world-wide damaged or destroyed 75% of water systems; 75% of soil quality; a 93% bio-diversity loss; a 40% contribution to climate change and endangered pollinators. Gate's organizations are also engaged in bio-piracy, stealing peasant knowledge and plant development in order to patent and privatize them.

The bad sequel to GMOs is plant or animal gene editing via 'CRISPR,' which also has multiple problems. It is inexact and 'off target,' leading to many unintended mutations. It's basic theory is that one gene produces one known outcome – 1=1. However that is not how genes work as their functions are more complex, mediated by the age of the organism, its environment, the presence of other genes and even chance. CRISPR is almost quite literally a Frankenstein project, a product of 'crude' science. Gates is heavily involved in CRISPR firms. A bigger threat are 'gene drives' – i.e. attempts to wipe out a certain weed through a gene-edited killer. In this case its a 'pigweed' in the southern U.S. called amaranth. However amaranth is cultivated as a highly nutritious plant in India, China, Latin America and Mexico...containing massive amounts of iron, protein, complex carbohydrates, calcium and a key amino acid. Releasing this deadly anti-pigweed 'gene drive' into nature would eventually travel across the world and ruin food crops.

Along with Gates, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and other billionaires are behind efforts to introduce high tech data, surveillance and 'advice' into farming, with Monsanto in a tech deal with Meta and John Deere. Climate and soil data companies have been absorbed, as well as crop insurance firms. How useful this is remains to be seen, but their involvement does not bode well. Shiva repeatedly mentions the quality of empty, processed and toxic junk food put out by corporations but never goes into this issue in any depth. She does prefer “fresh, local and artisanal food, without chemical additives and industrial processing.”

Solutions to Gatesism

Shiva contends that Gates is...or was ... the most powerful person in history given his economic and political power through Microsoft, his Foundation and investments. The BMGF has manipulative and profitable projects in education, agriculture, geo-engineering, finance, computerization and health. Some of Gates' organizations were behind the 2016 de-monetarization disaster in India for digital cash, which is being followed by a compulsory digital tax software roll-out in India – a country still overwhelmingly based on cash and paper. His foundation has investments in oil, mining, pharmaceuticals, biotech, coal, consumer products and firms like Caterpillar and McDonalds. His approach is as a technocratic authoritarian with a friendly veneer.

In the end Shiva embraces Gandhi's 3 principles: self-organization; self-reliance and localism; and civil disobedience as solutions. As examples she cites various struggles in India: In 1991 farmers organized to keep seeds in farmers hands; in 1993 farmers protested GATT/WTO. In Kerala there were protests against Coca-Cola stealing water, while other struggles occurred against water privatization in Delhi and industrial aquaculture in 3 Indian states. In 1998 they defeated a rule against indigenous cold-pressed edible oils which had been instituted to help the dumping of GMO soya oil in India. Imported palm oil leads to deforestation of rain forests while imported soya oil is processed at high temperatures using a toxic solvent. Shiva says a High Court in Uttarakhand has ruled that Himalayan nature – rivers, streams, jungles, the air, forest, glaciers, grasslands and springs – are legal entities with rights, similar to what happened in New Zealand.

The book is saturated with a large amount of 'oneness' jargon, similar to the mystical position of Gaia. Her term for Marxist alienation is separation, which she thunders against. Shiva uses inaccurate stats like 'the 1% versus the 99%' without acknowledging that even in India 9% are making out like bandits in their support of the 1%. She repeatedly uses the term 'mechanical mind' to designate non-diverse, isolated thinking. This is a deep ecology term – something her book hints is her fallback position. Even agroecology uses simple and sometimes complex machines or tools, as machines are extensions of human labor. She denounces industrialism and denounces capitalist agriculture, but without calling it capitalism. Capitalism is not in her repertoire as a name, she prefers euphemisms - colonialism, the term 'industrial' or Big Money.

This book is an excellent look at agricultural science, while being somewhat repetitive as to financialization, inequality and the reality of the 1% or the .1% or the .01%. If you are doing research on Gates, it would be informative in that area.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Celebrate Indian Women,” “The Vanishing Face of Gaia” (Lovelock); “Arundhati Roy,” “India,” “agro-ecology” or “agroecology,” “Monsanto,” “Bill Gates.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 4, 2023