Water and Water

 “Camino Ghosts” by John Grisham, 2024

This story is reminiscent of those by Carl Hiaasen about the destructive shenanigans of real estate capitalists in natural Florida, but not quite as comedic. It is haunted by one of the U.S.'s original sins, slavery. It features the usual array of middle-class heroes – a bookseller, a crusading environmental lawyer and a careerist writer. It highlights the wisdom of an old dark-skinned lady, Lovely. It has touches of black magic and violence dressed up as unexplainable natural phenomena.

Welcome to 'Dark Isle” an uninhabited barrier island on the Atlantic at the northern border of Florida. A 3x1 mile strip of heavy jungle and thin white sand beaches, now populated by poisonous snakes, panthers and deadly bacteria. It used to be home to a colony of freedmen escaped from bondage, in an area first dominated by the anti-slavery Spanish, then the pro-slavery U.S. Now it's 2020 and all are dead except that stubborn 80-year old lady, who left the island at 15 and now lives on nearby Camino Island.

Real estate investors are salivating over this uninhabited island's future, visualizing a casino, a yacht harbor, a golf course, condominiums and hotels after the vegetation is bulldozed – ruining it like every other barrier island in the state.  Yet oddly, occasional trespassers to what the developers want to call 'Panther Cay' don't survive or just disappear. It doesn't seem to always be for factual reasons but they are certainly dead. Is this the result of 'dark magic' – voodoo, juju, gris gris, Santeria revenge? Is that what it takes to fight Florida's 'growth' industry? It's a thin reed to hang onto, a measure of how bad it has gotten that writers have to inject magical curses into their stories to power their narrative.

Grisham writes leftish, happy-ending books, usually with a lawyer as a central character, usually with lawsuits over money corruption, racism or environmental destruction. Like Hiaasen he makes fun of the stable of swarmy Florida creeps, lawyers and greedy suits in the suites. This book has too much about the 'book business' as if Grisham is also riffing off his own experience writing dozens of books. The legal issues, especially Lovely's claim to own the island due to her being it's last living resident, a legal doctrine known as 'adverse possession,' take center stage. As proof she claims there is a cemetery of her relatives somewhere on the island. Will she and they win? Read it and find out.

Tremé by David Simon, S.1, 2010 (A reprise)

Another Southern story, set in New Orleans just after 2005's Hurricane Katrina. The series features a strong ensemble cast with sometimes intersecting stories which I can't recommend enough. There is a hard scrabbling trombone player, a tough Mardi Gras Indian, a lawyer looking for a jailed and missing African-American man, an angry Tulane English professor, a funny hipster DJ, a hard-working chef, two street musicians, a New York modern jazz musician and a bar owner trying to reconstruct her business and find her younger brother. NO jazz takes center stage, as second-line parades, jazz funerals, Mardi Gras, various music clubs and even the New York jazz scene are featured. Famous musicians make cameos or play in this season – Elvis Costello, Kermit Ruffins, Trombone Shorty, Allan Touissant, the Tremé Brass Band, Steve Earle, Dr. John, McCoy Tyner and others. Some of the actors are also musicians, like the two 'street' musicians Sonny and Annie. N'Orlins clubs like the Spotted Cat, Vaughans, Snug Harbor, Bullets, Donnas, Tipitinas and the Howlin' Wolf show up, along with the Blue Note in NYC.

Mardi Gras Indians

I've always felt Tremé was Simon's mea culpa for The Wire, which tried to touch many issues of corruption in Baltimore, but still centered the 'black' drug trade. Here instead of black drug dealers we get working-class people or small businessmen, some very marginal, trying to live a decent life in the wake of the incredible damage of Katrina. No mercy is shown to real lumpenism here. The show is political, attacking Democratic mayor Ray Nagin and the corrupt City Council, Republican president George Dubbya Bush, the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, the NO police, the insurance industry – the whole power structure that failed before, during and after Katrina. It was really the first large example of U.S. climate change and migration, along with being a model of racist removal. Simon at one time called himself a 'half-Marxist' – agreeing with Marx's diagnosis of capitalism, but rejected his solutions. It is reflected in this series, which features both individual, family and group struggles, but that only go so far. Adolph Reed Jr. thinks it simplified the issues, and yeah, it's not a deep dive into the hold of the New Orleans ruling class on the city.

Tremé is the historic neighborhood east of Canal Street and across Rampart from the French Quarter / Vieux Carré. It contains the former homes of many jazz musicians, Congo Square / Louis Armstrong Park and historic cemeteries, with Basin Street winding through. It reflects the proletarian French, indigenous, African and Caribbean heritage of this port city, a city that gave birth to jazz and parts of blues and rock and roll. A raised city Interstate 10 looms above part of the quarter, seen frequently in the episodes. The season romanticizes New Orleans, but that turns out better than demonizing it. If you are a music lover, have enjoyed visiting New Orleans or are aware of the dire politics and issues surrounding Katrina, this season is for you.

Prior blog reviews on these subjects, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “slavery,” “Native Tongue,” “Sick Puppy” (both by Hiaasen); “Florida,” “The Magic Kingdom” (R. Banks); “Nickel Boys,” “The Wire” (Simon); “Jazz,” “Really the Blues” (Mezzrow); “In Search of the Blues,” “Treme,” “Rising Tide,” “How to Kill a City.” “Extreme Cities,” “Shock Doctrine” (Klein).

Kultur Kommissar / June 28, 2024

Moon Struck

 “Techno-Capitalism – the Rise of the New Robber Barons and the Fight for the Common Good” by Loretta Napoleoni, 2024

This book covers recent developments in technology and finance that have already been covered by others, with a new addition – outer space, especially the issue of low Earth orbits (LEO). Napoleoni's target here are the 5 capitalist horsemen dominating technology – Amazon, Apple, Facebook/Meta, Google/Alphabet and Microsoft. She calls them the Techtitans who operate in the Present Future. These firms are part of a tech oligopoly, buying up every asset they can similar to what Google did with mapping software to create Google Maps and Google Earth. 

They were preceded by a group of Silicon Valley anarchist visionaries, the Cypherpunks, Julian Assange being one. They specialized in cryptography for privacy's sake, which subsequently became the key to internet commerce. Who'd have guessed? Napoleoni's been on CNN and the BBC, along with working for the World Bank. She's no anti-capitalist but that increasingly familiar breed – left-liberals panicking at the multi-faceted deterioration of world society – her 'pandemic of anxiety.'

Napoleoni gives a detailed description of how Bitcoin and crypto currencies are structured and how blockchains and ridiculous non-fungible tokens (NFT) work. She sometimes seems to think Bitcoin is not fiat money and claims criminals have abandoned crypto because of it's digital chain of ownership - a chain that can become incredibly convoluted. She looks at the Robinhood financial 'rebellion' against Wall Street hedge funds over Game Stop and how high-speed trading has put algorithms in charge of that self-same Wall Street. She takes a tour of the 2008 financial meltdown from a modern monetary theory (MMT) perspective, illuminating the essential trust and fiat nature of trillions in U.S. government cash that rescued the banks and economy. She lambastes the concept of infinite economic growth and the falsity of the GDP as an economic gauge. She exposes the mythology of carbon credits and carbon sequestration, along with the false image of 'low carbon' EV transport. According to her the batteries in electric cars like Teslas are more carbon intensive to make than gasoline vehicles. How the later lack of an exhaust pipe spewing carbon compensates for this initial upbump is unknown. She shows how some startups like AirBnB and Uber make use of lags and gaps in legal structures to institute exploitative software management of private renters and homeowners or thousands of misnamed 'sharing' drivers.

Napoleoni's somewhat grandiose writing style, hobby-horse terminology and 'futurist' pose is a bit of an impediment, along with an ambivalent tone and vague solutions. Her recommendations are public / private recycling ventures for a 'circular economy' to save the environment. This includes the essential recycling of large and small batteries to recover valuable minerals, batteries which are the carbon glutton of ubiquitous electric and electronic power sources. She supports the use of blockchain technology to automate many administrative tasks, something that could be useful even to socialists. She claims that crypto uses less carbon than the regular monetary system, though their sizes are not comparable. She sees crypto as an ultimate replacement for 'state issued' money, though many governments are adding it to their monetary arsenal.  And if their website exchange goes down, as it has done in the past, what happens then? She thinks human data is the most desired raw material on earth – quite a starry position. Who needs food?! She leans towards universal basic income, but has no other solution to job losses due to AI or blockchain technology. The bourgeois cliche that 'new jobs will be created' by AI is true – but there won't be near as many. Anyone working with tech knows it usually increases productivity at the expense of headcount. Even Napoleoni realizes the goal is to replace labor.

Napoleoni ventures into politics and thinks the nation-state is outdated, being overwhelmed by the internet and technology, which certainly is perceptive. In this context, she does not connect 'the State' or 'the nation' with any class or economic system, similar to most anarchists and liberals. She believes Wall Street needs 'proper regulation' – as if that has worked. She praises the sociobiology of E.O. Wilson, who said human biology is the root of production systems. This ignores class, specifically the question of 'whose' biology we are talking about. She mentions 'anti-trust' actions, but concludes they are impossible. She calls for “a new political and economic paradigm” which means almost nothing. There's not really much 'fight' here when all is said and done, which is typical of these kind of middle-class writers.

SPACE is the Place!

Space is the Place, as the great jazzman Sun Ra says. Like leftie tech podcaster Adam Something, though in more words, Napoleoni shows how long space travel is biologically and technically impossible, along with things like terraforming Mars. But she does yearn for feasible low Earth orbit (LEO) projects. Some of these are already in place by the 'Space Barons' like Musk's Space X and various governments for military, satellite and science purposes. The amount of space debris is proof! She dwells on China's ambitious plans under Xi to create a Chinese space station staffed with a new Xuntian space telescope, establish a lunar settlement, set up a space solar array to beam power back to earth and initiate more voyages to Mars and the rest of the Milky Way galaxy. She herself has no suggestions as to what LEO projects would improve 'the common good' while ignoring their costs and carbon emissions. She claims that “the industrialization of LEO is within our reach” which sounds absolutely terrible. Definitely mining for minerals on the moon is a target of many of these corporations and governments in this virtually uncontrolled area. Do we have to raise the slogan of socializing the moon now, like the 'right to the moon'? Attention David Harvey!

The issue of tone is odd because Napoleoni sounds upbeat about nearly every one of these technologies, then rains on her own parade – “on the other hand” - and points out that the Techtitans are only in it for profit and consumption, not for the good of society. For instance she's excited about a gimmicky 'metaverse' that has already tanked. She can never bring herself to realize that what she is talking about all the time, in her elliptical way, is how capitalism functions. She likes to moralistically substitute 'greed' for profiteering, commodity production and exploitation. “Techno-capitalism” isn't separate from any other kind, it's just the latest fast-changing leap. It's Big ROI, baby!

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Cypherpunks” (Assange); “Modern Monetary Theory” (Kelton); “Bit Tyrants,” “Big Short” (Lewis); “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “The Loop,” “New Dark Age,” “The Global Police State,” “R.U.R. and the Insect Play” (Capek); “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” (Bastani); “Cyber-Proletariat.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 25, 2024

Celebrate the release of Julian Assange from prison!

Who Are These Guys?

 “Against the Web – A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right” by Michael Brooks, 2020

This guy is a podcaster and YouTuber, formerly associated with the Young Turks and probably a member of DSA as he quotes the unofficial DSA journal Jacobin frequently. He describes himself as a Marxist or a “humanist socialist” – presumably unlike the inhuman ones. I've never watched his TMBS & Majority Report podcasts. This book is a pointed and somewhat humorous polemic against several gurus of the 'new' Libertarian or ultra-conservative Right that I don't give a shit about but maybe you do - Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Brett Weinstein. These five make Joe Rogan look like a grounded intellectual.

We're supposed to care because some of them influence young, white U.S. males living in this precarious, unstable, reactionary society. Peterson markets himself as a self-help guru for these lost souls while embracing 'free' market fundamentalism – the thing causing the chaos. It's a guaranteed business, like making people sick and selling them a cure. Brooks seeks to use actual history and science to refute their conservative naturalizing and myth-making. He takes you through a roll-call of these 5, pointing out in detail their extreme follies as members of the misnamed “Intellectual Dark Web.” Here's a sample:

Rubin – He actually calls him 'dumb as a rock.' A fact-free vile babbler.

Harris - “Sadly” supported dropping a nuclear bomb on some unnamed Muslim country in the context of the Bush wars and sadly supported Israel doing 'terrible' things in Gaza. 'Realist' intellectuals are always sad, but have to speak the hard truths. Harris made an ass of himself debating Chomsky.

Peterson – Shallow pop pusher of Western tradition myths and anti-Marxism. In a debate with Slavoj Zizek Peterson's only Marxist reference was the Manifesto he'd read at 18. Zizek wiped the floor with him. He confuses post-modernism with Marxism for one thing and thinks Foucault was a Marxist. He also enjoys 'enforcing monogamy.' An evidently popular blowhard.

Shapiro – Rabid cliched neo-con now pretending to be an elevated intellectual. Is fighting for 'Judeo-Christian' civilization, a 20^th century invention. Supports ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, endorses 'enemy' civilian casualties, doesn't want non-'white' babies, completely opposes abortion and likes Israeli settlements.

Weinstein – I can't keep one Weinstein or Brooks straight from another, but this one spun a 'free speech' academic scandal into heroism, speaking engagements and cash.

Brooks goes into the frauds of IQ tests and skull measurements to determine a highly variegated thing like 'intelligence,' something the social-Darwinist 'race-science' Right still endorses to justify hierarchies like color castes and class. He makes fun of Universal Basic Income plans that hearken back to the measly grain rations distributed to the formerly rural plebeians in imperial Rome. He notes limitations to the concept of 'cultural appropriation,' given the interrelations of culture around the world. He ends with pleas for international and inter-'racial' solidarity and cites the ANC / SACP's original Freedom Charter as a guide to social action. The ANC gave that up to end political apartheid, allowing 'economic apartheid' run by rich whites to continue in South Africa.

Brooks excoriates what he calls the 'ultra-woke' as the answer to the Right. Moralistic and personalist uber-identitarians that are content to shame, name-call, police or guilt-trip working-class people instead of working to unite them help no one except their own sense of moral superiority and middle-class politics. They provide a convenient target for the Right, as their micro-stupidities repel many, even those on the actual Left. Their anti-class attitudes dove-tail neatly with Democratic Party 'kente-cloth' elites, NPR and lots of non-profits and NGOs. Brooks adopts Marc Fisher's description of this group as living in a Vampires' Castle. An odd turn of phrase, but hey, maybe they do bloodsuck on real struggles.

Why Brooks uses the word 'cosmopolitan' in his sub-title is unclear – I guess its his attempt at sophisticated internationalism? Fascists hate cosmopolitans – those pointy-headed wine and cheese eaters – so perhaps there's a FU in there somewhere. “Cosmopolitan” was a code word for Jews and Marxists in fascist ideology, since 'blood and soil,' not urbanism, were their preferred parameters. Perhaps their slogan originated because of how much blood they could spill on that soil? At any rate, a long podcast or three turned into an enjoyable, breezy book centered on some of the pompous stars of the pseudo-intellectual Right.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive using these terms: “Mondragon,” (Wolff); “Zizek,” “Jacobin,” “Adolph Reed,” “Chomsky,” “CLR James,” “identity politics,” “ANC,” 'atheism.'

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 22,2024

The Fabulous Fabians

 “This Little Band of Prophets:  The British Fabians” by Anne Fremantle, 1959

Unlike the swarmy and gutless liberal 'intellectuals' of the U.S., the British Fabians actually opposed capitalism, but in their own way.  This is a reflection of the British Labour movement itself, which was always to the left of the conservative U.S. one.  This movement created its own political party, nationalized the railroads, mines and other entities, established socialized medicine and unionized a broad swath of the working-class.  None of this happened in the U.S. even in the heroic days of the 1930s – a period some U.S. leftists can't stop wetting their pants about. The U.S. Labor movement has failed so far because it has not embraced socialism in any form. What happened in the U.K. is much cheerier, at least in the past.

The most well-known Fabians, who were actually not prophets, were:  Sidney & Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Harald Laski, Clement Atlee and others not so well known.  Atlee led a Labour government that was voted in overwhelmingly against the celebrated colonialist reactionary Winston Churchill in 1945, with 41 Fabians elected to office.  The organization started in the late 1880s as a club of young, clever, socialist-minded intellectuals, first led by Shaw.  It was a left version of the arch culturalist Algonquin Club of the U.S..  Absorbing the revolutionary defeats of 1848 and 1871, along with the defeat of the English Chartists, they turned to a gradualist, middle-class style of 'socialism.' They were inspired by Owen, J.S. Mill, utilitarianism and Christian socialism.  As Fremantle puts it, they became the intellectual founders of the welfare-state U.K.  Marx called them “the capitalists' last ditch” - putting a human-face to the profiteering pig.

The Fabians made their original stand against Marxism, revolutionary socialism and British groups like the Socialist League, which Fremantle gleefully repeats.  As she put it, this allowed them entry into the halls of power, work with bourgeois liberals and much influence in the Labour Party.  This is similar to the U.S. where left-liberals enjoy prestige by not directly threatening the system.  The Fabians were nice to the anarchists, but found they could not work with them.  Nor would they agree to an early fusion of the 3 main socialist groups in the U.K., as two were Marxist or to their left.  This was their pattern from then on, as they refused to form a party but considered themselves an 'educational' institution. Their angle was practical and active ‘evolutionary’ socialist guidance within a capitalist context.  Their method - now called entryism - was to 'permeate' various organizations and Parties to get their policies enacted. They based their theory on 'rent' - like Yanis Varoufakis' 'techno-feudalism' or Michael Hudson's 'rent economy' - thinking that rents paid to property owners was the main site of capitalism, not the class struggle and the exploitation of labor through ownership of the means of production.

How has this pig prospered?  Fremantle in 1959 is giddy at the great 1945 success without knowing what was to come in British history – Margaret Thatcher, privatization of rail, mining and more; the smashing of the NUM miner's union, the middle-class and corporate deterioration of the Labour Party, the weakening of the NHS, the vast increase in inequality courtesy of the City and the ethno-nationalist poverty of Brexit.  It seems in the long game the Fabians – oddly named after a Roman general famous for delaying – are now history after a delay.  The course in the U.K. has proved that capital, which is more like the unkillable bad guy in every movie, cannot be fully humanized but instead always counter-attacks.  This should resonate with all kinds of reformers – pacifists, social-democrats, Stalinists, soft Maoists, Euro-Communists, left-liberals, cooperators, mixed economy fans, left Democrats, evolutionary socialists, Popular Frontists, clueless wonders and modern Fabians.  You cannot merely repeat the history of social-democratic successes in Europe, which are now being whittled away, as capitalism is changing.  Capital must be replaced and given the dire future, it has to be.  

William Morris, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Pytor Kropotkin, J. Ramsey McDonald and many others show up in the text. Beatrice Webb’s ‘maiden’ name was “Potter” – giving those little animals she wrote about a decidedly subversive stamp.  Fremantle names the three institutional forces that gave continued life to the Fabians over many, many years – The New Statesman, the Labour Party and the London School of Economics.  They were some of the first to call for a labor party after working with the Liberals. Some leading Fabians had positions in government offices, like the Colonial Office.  They wanted 'socialist civil servants' to populate the government using the latest scientific information.  Their position on international issues is variable.  They originally demanded home rule for Ireland but split on issues like the South African war and others.  Some leaders' 'internationalism' stopped at the British border. The book includes an incredibly detailed list of all Fabian articles, pamphlets, speeches, essays and research papers, along with an index of very short bios of everyone mentioned in the book, running to 22 pages.

This is a clever, quite British history, enjoyable to read, chatty and full of too many facts some of which might be useful or amusing to those who have not lost their sense of humor. It’s actually an intellectual history of types of British leftism and personalities.  Every member of the Fabians gets a description, even if relatively unknown, even if brief.  Fremantle fashions herself a Fabian, so this is her people.  The Fabians prided themselves on their quips, and this book is full of some catty comments and piercing observations.  Come read the story of the parlour pinks who helped conquer state power for a time, until the worm turned.

P.S. - John Oliver takes on post-Thatcher Tories in Little England and what they've done to Fabian Britain:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkAqwHiAR-g

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson, 5 reviews); “The Irish Literary Trail,” “The Peaky Blinders,” "Class Against Class," "Sherwood."  

And I bought it at May Day’s used/cutout section!

Red Frog / June 19, 2024

Ending It All

 Funerals

The older you get, the bigger your family, the wider your circle of friends, the more organizations you belong to, the more funerals you go to in the U.S.  Yeah, it’s not pretty.  Yet the ‘style’ of the U.S. funeral varies widely.  In Christian ones, especially mob or cop movies, everyone is dressed in severe black with sunglasses.  There is a casket, some Catholic Priest drones on, dirt is thrown on the casket in the hole – and there are always some FBI agents, unwanted girlfriends, prior wives and assassins lurking around.  Most funerals in films are very formal and conservative like this, reflective of their class origins.  Unless it’s the Big Lebowski blowing ashes in your eyes...and you decide to go bowling.  "And what was that shit about Vietnam, Walter?"

Mob boss?

Yet some people don’t even have a funeral of any kind.  The immediate family might gather around the ashes urn in the cemetery and say a few words.  They are probably not religious.  Sometimes one member of a family will bury an urn without even talking to other family members about what they are doing - as if they 'owned' the funeral. 

Others have the full Church reception, coffee and sweets, long ceremony, open casket and only the preacher speaking.  That is an Evangelical Lutheran ceremony, which is a church service with prepared texts and the singing of designated hymns to ‘unite’ the congregation in meandering vocalizations.  The preachers almost never know the dead intimately so they have to read a description prepared by the family.  Sometimes there is not even that. This denomination has softened up a bit to go for cremation as the years go on. 

No talk of the departed by family or friends at a small-town Presbyterian ceremony in the early 1970s either.  It was the style of the time, giving religion and the minister everything. We carried the heavy casket and body out to the waiting hearse and nearly dropped it going up the stairs.  The body was installed in a ‘freezer’ at the cemetery until spring because the ground was frozen.  No cemetery scene there.

The Congregationalists on the other hand allow family and friends to talk after the minister has said their piece.  Like most funerals, there are pictures or home movies to help the living remember the dead.  There is food to eat, songs to be sung, organs to play and sometimes favorite secular songs are included.  I went to one ‘bifurcated’ ceremony officiated over by a right-wing conservative pastor burbling over with praise for God and Jesus, but held in a non-religious ‘chapel’ at the main cemetery in Minneapolis.  The senior, liberal member of the departed presided in competition with the pastor, and gave the lead talk, as was also allowed by the Congregationalists. This one was live-streamed for those who could not make it.  Many don’t or can't go to funerals because they are far away, as families are scattered across the U.S. or world.

It is almost universal now in the U.S. that services, internments and the like do not always have to occur immediately, as there is no health risk or raw body anymore. 

Like weddings, funerals are changing.  Instead of church services, atheists and agnostics have events in bars, in people’s homes, even in a book store.  I’ve been to remembrances in packed living rooms where everyone who wants to speaks and there is no religious symbolism anywhere. Same with bars, where the drinks are hoping to lubricate Finnegan Awake again while anyone says their piece and the dead get to hear their favorite music played.  Here at May Day it's had 3 packed events for former elderly comrades who have died with no religious symbolism, just talking, stories, jokes and laughs. Because funerals – or remembrances - are really for the living.  Tears are few and that is also observed, especially when some linger into their 100s or were in very poor health.  The family might also have a church service after a ‘remembrance,’ or not, depending on their political and cultural leanings.

Another notable ceremony was organized by the friends of the departed who was a lesbian leftist activist.  These women had it again at the non-religious, ‘chapel-like’ building in Minneapolis’ biggest cemetery.  There many speakers, her favorite secular rock and pop music and a good time was had by all. I think only a few members of the family attended, because as I recall most objected to her 'lifestyle.'

Cremation has now overtaken formaldehyde. Caskets have become absurd.  Some are doing ‘natural burials’ wrapped in a rug or textiles.  Ashes end up in lakes, in rivers, in the ground, in favorite places, sometimes just on a shelf for a long time.  Words might be spoken by the family while the ashes are scattered.  In the Big Lebowski the ashes didn’t even end up in the Pacific, Donny's favorite body of water. Joss sticks are burnt in memory by others.  There are small alters on the Day of the Dead.  Sometimes the grave stone is misspelled and there is nothing buried there at all.  It’s just a marker.   And sometimes there is no marker at all, the body lost underground, buried in a packed Swiss cemetery under other caskets, 6 deep.

Funereal, yes.

P.S. - "Funeral" Scene in the Big Lebowski:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk61MeDmk2M

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Captain Fantastic,” “Unlikeable Protagonists and Ulysses,” “November” *(Galan) or the word ‘funeral.’

The Kultur Kommissar

June 16, 2024

Stop With the Memoirs!

“Socialist Realism” by Trisha Low, 2019

This book is not really about socialist realist painting. Call me fooled. It mentions several Soviet socialist realist artists, including Kazimir Malevich and Victor Koretsky, yes, but in translation it means some kind of present Utopian longing within the real world - but not really. Socialism, let alone communism, was never achieved in the USSR. Nor is it achieved in this confusing agglomeration of diary, memoir, notes, commentaries and quotes.

Anarchist Diary

Low switches her narrative between Singapore, New York, Hong Kong, London and Oakland, California at random. She's a kid, then an adult, then a teenager. It's one year, it's another earlier year, it's a later year - because time, place and age are all subjective! It's about many movies, but it's not Zizek. It's about art shows, performance art, installations and exhibitions. It's about bi-sexuality, S&M, Freud and water-boarding. It's about her family, friends and occasional lovers. It's about hurting her knee at a May Day march.

Low's always talking about 'the revolution' in 'late stage capitalism.' She rejects identity politics while repeatedly mulling over identities.

Low's an anarchist, nihilist, punk, artiste. She's a cultural rebel running away from the strictures and capitalist 'success' of Singapore. She's obsessed with herself. I counted 12 references to “I” and “me” in one short, random paragraph. There are 99 quotations in this 158 page book which she meditates on, showing her erudition or perhaps substituting for her own lack of ideas.

The movies and documentaries she comments on: Adam's Rib, Rosemary's Baby, Snow White and the Huntsman, The Talented Mr. Ripley, No Home Movie, Freaks and Geeks, Jurassic Park, Repulsion, Amour, In a Lonely Place, This is Us, Loulou, House in the Woods, United in Anger, Army of Shadows. It's not all high-brow. She wonders if she and her friends could become the ordinary anti-fascists in the French film Army of Shadows about WWII partisans in France. We shall see. Perhaps she won't have a choice.

Low is from a middle-class Chinese family. Her father was an economist and professor. She went to a boarding school and later earned a Masters at NYU. She mentions her 'boss' once in the whole book, so it's not clear how she earns a living. Certainly it is not from book sales.

Post-modernism evidently infects current declasse, hipster radicals if this book is anything to go by. For some like her it might be entertaining and enlightening. For me it was a chore even to scan, although there were good bits about Singapore and about actual socialist-realist art by Robert Bird. Trisha Low's life is not that interesting, no more than the rest of us.  So save us from public memoirs and diaries. Save it for your family members or children. Please.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms if you are actually interested in art:  "Marxist Theory of Art," "Art of the Soviets," "Adios Utopia," "Art is Dead," "Desert of Forbidden Art," "Beethoven and Shostakovich," "9.5 Thesis on Art and Class," "Ways of Seeing" (Berger), "MInneapolis Institute of Art," "La Biennale Arte de Venizia 2019," "The Tate Modern," "Wanda Gag and Elizabeth Olds."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist  / June 13, 2024 

The "Little" Things of Life

 “Not by Politics Alone – The Other Lenin” edited by Tamara Deutscher, 1973-2024

This selection of letters, remembrances and notes’ purpose is to ‘humanize’ Lenin for those who think of him as some monomaniacal robot.  Indeed he was intensely focused on the Russian and world revolution, as that was his main purpose in life.  But human beings are not just their job or their purpose.  Deutscher notes that Stalin turned Lenin into an embalmed individual hero, a practice that Lenin argued against in life.  Following the method of ‘personality cult,’ Mao and Ho also became embalmed, almost like religious idols. 

So this is Lenin’s ‘human’ side, if meant by that his attitude towards people, nature, the arts, activities and life, along with his own regrets.  Deutscher had access to new material in Lenin’s Selected Works and some of this comes out of that.  So let’s see what ‘human’ things Lenin did…

Lenin was not a tall, imposing presence.  He was shorter - 5’ 5”, weighing about 150 lbs. - with an ordinary face that would not stand out in a crowd.  While smaller he was very strong. He liked to hunt, though he was a poor shot, because he liked being in the woods.  He enjoyed singing, though his singing was sub-standard. He was an ardent hiker, once trying to climb a mountain in the dark with a friend without lights. The family chose spots to live in Europe that were close to forests or rivers if possible, in order to be close to nature.  He was a speed-reader and could fly through books without missing details. He was an avid chess player and competitive in whatever he did.  He liked to swim and bicycle too.  He was a listener and always asked questions, learning everything he could from others. He set aside days for peasants and workers to directly talk to him about their issues.   People who blab endlessly without listening to anyone else or never questioning anything might as well be the definition of stupid.  In addition, Lenin was never shrill in his speaking tone, unlike so many leftists.

Lenin’s family had worked themselves up from former serfs, his father becoming a school administrator, he becoming a lawyer.  His youth summers were spent holidaying at a rural manor near Simbirsk, where he spent his time outdoors with his family. This experience comes out in a rebuke against the radical Proletkult, which after 1917 wanted to ignore any art or writing by upper-class writers like Tolstoy or anything ‘old.’  This included enjoying a summer scene at an aristocratic dacha, redolent as it was of class or serfdom.  Lenin supported workers reading the classics as he had done, as art is not just about ‘the new.’ He liked Beethoven and music in general, which affected him deeply.  He had conservative, realist tastes in literature, enjoying Russian classics like Pushkin and Nekrasov, Victor Hugo, and of course Chernyshevsky’s great novel “What is To Be Done?” (reviewed below), which changed his life and those of his generation.  

This leads to a discussion about the socialist attitude towards art.  Lenin liked realist art styles, but was modest about his own understanding of visual art, music or literature.  He was not a culture critic, but takes a deep materialist look at both Herzen, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in this book.  He opposed Maykovsky’s ‘futurism’ and the “Oblomovism” of too many Party meetings. He understood that the state could not decree an art style, but that the Party could ask its own artistic members to produce agitational, revolutionary, progressive art, comprehensible to workers and peasants.  Bourgeois critics have stretched this to include his prescriptions for the state as a whole, which is nonsense, as he states “Everyone is free to write or say whatever he likes, without restrictions.”  His 1905 essay on this is included.  The restrictions were done by Stalin’s bureaucracy, which decreed ‘socialist realism’ as the only acceptable approach to art in society.  

Zhenotdel in Peasant Cooperatives

Lenin was a great friend of Inessa Armand, being endearing, concerned and demanding with her. She became one of his emissaries in Europe.  When she died in 1920 observers at the funeral thought he was almost a broken man.  There is no hint of a sexual relationship in the 70 letters however. He always told comrades to take vacations, a break or medical care of themselves when they became exhausted, so he was no slave driver or cruel.  In his own rigorous schedule, he always set aside time later in the day for rest, play, walks and socializing.  He was solicitous of Peter Kropotkin, the great anarchist, scientist and philosopher, who moved near Moscow after the 1917 revolution. While they disagreed on politics – Lenin marveling that Kropotkin thought co-operatives were going to lead to state power – he provided housing, doctors and help to the old man until his death in 1921. The house Kropotkin lived in became a museum until 1938 … predictably.

Lenin praised the New York Public Library to the skies in 1911, as opposed to the lack of public libraries in Russia.  He pointed out the continuing low level of literacy in 1923 in the USSR – 32% overall, when it had been 22.3% under Czarism – as literacy and education had to prepare the soil for any ‘higher’ culture.  He lived a Spartan lifestyle, giving away gifts. He rebuked Gorky for not opposing all liberal ‘god-seeking’ and makes a hearty plea for atheism against bourgeois power, as part of a number of 1919 letters to Gorky about the St. Petersburg ‘intelligentsia.’ Lenin advocated clear political writing and was against abbreviations and bureaucratize; supported monuments to various cultural and political figures and developing newsreels and later film. 

In his correspondence with Armand and Zetkin over women’s class issues, he opposed ‘free love’ while supporting ‘the emancipation of women,’ starting with the socialization of housework and legal equality.  Unlike Marx’s attitude in the 1^st International, he was against internal Party groups for women.  At the same time the Zhenotdel was a Soviet organization for women, led by the Party.  In 1921 Lenin said that the USSR was a worker’s state with bureaucratic distortions, with a majority of peasants, not workers.  In 1922 he said “Our worst internal enemy is the bureaucrat” and warned against a conflict among the ‘Old Guard.”

Tactically Lenin understood the need not just for ‘revolutionary advances’ – but for retreats, as he noted in 1917 when idiots were calling for an uprising no matter what the conditions.  It was also shown when the Soviets signed the hard Brest-Litvosk treaty with Germany ending the war, ceding much territory. The New Economic Policy was also a retreat.  His main criterion was ‘where are the masses?’  Later in life when he was sick he deeply questioned the dire state of the USSR after the bloodshed of the Civil War, economic difficulties and deepening divisions within the Politburo. He took some of the blame upon himself.  This ultimately resulted in suggestions to enlarge the Politburo, demote Stalin and his allies, fight bureaucracy (as he promised Kropotkin) and uphold the right of nations to self-determination against Russophilia and Great Russian chauvinism.  

This is a good book about the ‘small things’ of politics that are overlooked by some, as exemplified by how Lenin thought about them. 

Prior blog reviews of this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Lenin’s Last Struggle,” “The Struggle for Power,” “October – the Story of the Russian Revolution” (Mieville); “Art of the Soviets,” “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “A People’s History of the Russian Revolution,” “Three Essays of Alexandra Kollontai," "Red Valkyries," "Radek" or the word “Soviet.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 9, 2024

Artificial Intelligence Didn't Write This

 “The Loop – How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back” by Jacob Ward, 2022

This book is about AI.  Ward is a mainstream reporter for NBC News, and his beat is technology.  This is a series of interviews and experiences about disparate applications of AI, trying to warn us about its dangers or uses in many fields. The value of the book is in his description of the breadth of AI’s present impact, not his theoretical slant.  He posits 3 ‘loops’ of behavior radiating outward, riffing off of ‘dual process’ theory – 1, basic, unconscious and automatic instincts; 2, rational and slow deliberations and 3, machine imitations of both. He contends we are entering the ‘third loop’ – computer algorithms taking over from independent human thought, feelings and action.  Is this Skylink?  He doesn’t quite go that far.  He does prove we cannot leave this planet to inhabit Mars, as the Muskites claim, or other exoplanets, so this is our only ‘space ship.’ 

Whether you think a reporter firmly entrenched in a large corporate newsroom is some kind of guide to ‘fighting back’ is another matter.  While very conscious of the role capitalist profiteering is playing in substituting AI for humans, Ward predictably advocates some nebulous kind of ‘regulation.’  Prior regulation has improved life for the working-class but it is also an endless battle between activists and the forces of capital.  It implicitly allows backsliding as  wealth power periodically overwhelms or stymies ‘reformist’ power for years and years.  In Ward’s specific case his solutions are sub-reformist. Even the EU has better ideas.

Ward is somewhat clueless about certain things, like understanding credit scores, the dashboard light on his car, his use of music playlists or how not to use a GPS.  Everything’s a black box to him.  He at one time thought that the poor were there for lack of character.  He seems to think most or all people are easily fooled because of their base instincts, laziness or gullibility, which is opening the door to the convenience and guidance of AI.  He says we guess, we use stereotypes, we are bad at estimating probability and actual risk.  All true.  So addiction to these technologies is real and growing, extending to children. He makes the astonishing point that our decisions are not all logical! So this conditions his text, which reads like no one knows what is going on, emotions are always in the driver’s seat and we just got out of a cave. 

AI Applications

AI has been around since 1956.  It is combinations of machine learning - supervised, unsupervised and reinforced.  He, like many, discounts the 'General omniscient' version of AI, GAI.  Where is AI being applied? There is communication software for divorced couples that coaches them on how to better relate to each other in dealing with themselves and their children.  There are programs that look at the people behind job resumes, car and mortgage loan requests, rental applications, public benefits, federal grants, bail bonds and insurance policies.  Ad placement on the internet is now done by AI. AI drives game and gaming platforms to find those who can be addicted.  Psychotherapy is being administered by AI.  Publishing on-line is using AI to discover and guide readers to what they already like. Every digital platform – TikTok, FaceBook, X, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, etc. - uses AI to addict and ‘engage’ users.  Disease spread, like CoVid, is being predicted and monitored by AI.  Decisions about whether to cover a company through health insurance is done by AI. There are programs that create visual art, create music, create screenplays, create reviews by borrowing from prior human work. Employees are surveilled by corporate software.  Education will be next.  All of this is based on billions of points of data fed into pattern recognition software.   

And that is just the civil side.  The military uses software in planes and ships to recognize missile threats in a split second and respond.  The Israeli “Iron Dome” is an example of a land-based system.  Autonomous military and police drones powered by AI now play a key role in warfare and surveillance, along with patrols. Soldier robots are in the testing stage, but limitations on their physical intelligence is holding things up.  Cyberwarfare is just another level of conflict now. Some police departments use software to target ostensibly crime-prone blocks or neighborhoods for patrol.  Camera surveillance software, like facial recognition technology, is used to try to identify criminals, and TSA programs supposedly detect ‘nervousness’ in airports. Immigrants might be the next target, not just from border drones.  Every dictatorship, theocracy and police state is also using or acquiring these technologies now.  Every political campaign is trying to harness them.

Do all these AI programs work well?  No, as they are biased, reductive, repetitive and sometimes just plain stupid.  Ward details their limitations or problems, especially around color caste and class, as the AI mimics past prejudices. You can feed the exact same question into two AI chatbots and get two different answers.  Input a request for a review of a book or play and you will get a basic, descriptive vanilla sandwich.  You can input a prompt in a music program and get bizarre results or really good ones.  He notes that AI advertising software is avoiding actual news stories about serious issues because of ‘brand unsafe’ negative words in the news text – war, genocide, disaster, fire, starvation, failed states, etc. 

Not Quite the Sistine Chapel

Yet some programs do work as intended, like the automatic missile response and divorce communication software. He advocates using AI to detect problems in criminal prosecutions, incarceration and crime, not just for who should be charged, but who freed or left alone. And there’s the rub. Anything that reduces labor will be preferred by a firm or government entity, especially as the world gets more complex. Complexity and acceleration are built into the framework of modern capitalism and AI is part of this. But if there is no obvious money or savings in it, then it will languish.

Details, Details

Ward’s exact solutions?  He ignores the profit motive and social control, as that would undermine the whole rationale of capital.  His suggestions are wonky and sub-reformist though he nods to the need for ‘ethics’ and a vague ‘regulatory framework’ and realizes that these systems are not self-correcting.  

He advocates:  1) Separate courts for ‘necessary’ tech innovations to exempt companies from damages, like autonomous car accidents; 2) Legislation to solve highly emotional dangers, like a rear camera on vehicles to avoid backing over a child; 3) Using 30 inputs to decide on home insurance coverage which suggest improvements for homeowners, instead of just a few broad facts; 4) using a cost-benefit analysis to estimate future and inevitable legal harm from AI; 5) Make the courts see that monetizing engagement is a form of theft;  6) Use AI to help NGOs, social-service agencies and city governments predict future needs or problems. 7) There needs to be a transparency for algorithms, not a mysterious black box.

If you are interested in the topic, this will introduce you to where AI is already in place.  As to his theorizing, there are 9 kinds of intelligence, and many of these transit his ‘loops,’ so his theory is a clunky visualization of what is really going on. For instance one reason robots are helpless at many physical tasks is because they don’t have physical (body-kinesthetic) intelligence as humans do.  His ‘loop’ theory replicates a Marxist ‘base-superstructure’ model but only in the psychological / emotional / intellectual realm, and resorts to circularity.  It ignores the actual material basis of society and AI, so he’s missing a 'ground' in his social psychology. A symptom of that is his complete ignoring of job losses due to AI and the huge electric energy used by AI.   

For all you anti-Tech lefties, pay attention.  Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, even Mao and the Luddites were not against technology, only against its misuse by capital.  AI is just the latest – something that techno-Marxists have said could be useful in economic planning nationally and worldwide.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Psychology and Capitalism,” “The Happiness Industry,” “Lost Connections” (Hari); “McMindfulness,” “New Dark Age,” “The Global Police State,” “R.U.R. and the Insect Play” (Capek); “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” (Bastani); “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Bit Tyrants,” ‘People’s Republic of Wal-Mart,” “Democracy, Planning, Big Data.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 6, 2024 – Remember D-Day 80 years ago!

Old Fart Takes on 'Guvmint Alone

 “Fire on the Mountain” by Edward Abbey, 2012

This is a coming-of-age story about a 12 year old boy entranced with 'the West' – the desert, the mountains, the fauna, the animals and most of all his 70-year-old stubborn grandfather.  As a kid Abbey grew up idolizing Tom Mix and tough cowboys, so this is his origin story too.  Abbey later became an anarchist environmentalist, most famous for penning “The Monkey Wrench Gang” about sabotage, but it's here that the foundation is laid. 

The preface makes this out to be some kind of libertarian manifesto about an old and heroic cow rancher who refuses to leave his property because 'the Guvmint' wants it.  In this case it is to absorb it into the huge New Mexico White Sands Proving Grounds and Missile Range. So it’s implicitly anti-military but the book doesn't slant that way.  It’s the 1960s and in his opposition to losing his ranch – or being told to leave it for a time - this Grandpa never mentions dangerous nuclear tests, shelling ruining the environment, being against the cold war or disliking the military.  Here it is the various forces of the U.S. state - Marshals, lawyers, Air Force military police - trying to seize his property through a form of eminent domain; property his family robbed from the Apache, as Abbey makes clear. He could be Amon or Clive Bundy, millionaire cattle ranchers in east Oregon, for all the difference. The Bundy’s graze their European cattle on federal land and reject any role for the federal government too, including paying miniscule grazing fees.  Abbey got an M.A. in philosophy before becoming a park ranger and writer but the distinction between different kinds of 'sage brush rebels' seems to have escaped him, at least in this book.

Women are depicted as cooks, relatives and protective, generally marginal people alongside the men and boys. Grandpa has a Mexican housekeeper and one Mexican range hand, so he’s got employees and is clearly a small businessman.  He's against modern conveniences like the telephone; but he sure as hell does have a gasoline truck along with his horses and cattle.  Does the reader sympathize with the old man?  Given the only objection is 'my property, my property' that he's lived on all my life, it's threadbare and iffy – especially when he threatens to shoot or kill anyone who comes close to his ranch house.  No one would welcome the military seizing their home, certainly.  His best friend realizes he alone can’t defeat the government forces and continually tries to talk him out of his ‘last stand’ mentality.  We're all familiar with stubborn old coots who live in the past as it’s almost an emotional disease for some old people.  The preface called this book a paean to Western 'individualism.' Yet the old man is at the emotional level of a 12 year old boy, as his kid nephew backs him in his ‘last stand’ too. It seems that individualism fails again, even as resistance. 

The best part of the book are the depictions of the New Mexico desert and mountains around Alamogordo, New Mexico just north of El Paso – cougars, yucca cactus, dry washes, water springs, mountain vistas, horse travelling and the indomitable heat. If you are fascinated by the ‘West’ and desert areas, this book will inspire a visit.  It anticipates Abbey's environmentalist take in future books about the Grand Canyon area, Arizona and southern Utah where he honed his message by joining with others and opposing corporate ruination too.

Note: The title is the same as Terry Bisson's excellent left-wing book "Fire on the Mountain" about the success of the John Brown raid, published in 1988.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Good News,” “Hayduke Lives” and “The Monkey Wrench Gang” (all 3 by Abbey); “This Land” (Ketcham); “Red State Rebels” and “Born Under a Bad Sky,” (both by J. St. Clair); “The Worst Hard Time,” “Mad Max,” “All the Pretty Horses” (C. McCarthy).

And I got it at May Day’s used section!

The Cultural Marxist / June 3, 2024