Classy Stuff

 “Class, Crisis & the State” by Erik Olin Wright, 1976-1978-1979 (Part 1)

Wright was a Marxist sociologist who specialized in identifying class structures in states like the U.S.  Here he analyzes Nicos Poulantzas’ extremely sectarian view of class.  Poulantzas’ formulation of a ‘new petit bourgeoisie’ included all white collar workers, state workers and service workers, among others. To Poulantzas the only proletarians are blue-collar workers performing ‘manual’ labor building physical ‘things.’ In his definition of class he uses suspect social and political estimates of class, while disowning the economic role as primary.  The upshot is that with Poulantzas’ figures, about 20% of the U.S. population is in the ‘proletariat’ while 70% is in the ‘petit-bourgeoisie.’  The bourgeoisie even gets bigger according to him. Wright takes him apart.

Wright has a dialectical, flexible and nuanced view of class, though both of them drag behind the present as would be expected. The lack of a modern, grounded subtly is irritating, but it is perhaps because of the time period it was written in.  The growth in ‘precariat’ and ‘gig’ labor is missing, along with the professional strata.  Concepts like intellectual property as a commodity or service labor as a commodity are only hinted at. Poulantzas, who seems not to have worked a day in his life in a factory, warehouse, truck, cube or in a service role, especially hides behind rigid, abstract categories.  Wright introduces the concept of “contradictory locations within class relations” to explain the subtle combinations of class aspects in some jobs, which breaks from dualistic either/or thinking.  He introduces ‘shades of grey’ to complex class environments.

The Arguments

Wright’s main angle is that class struggle demands understanding who might side with you. He shows how the state and economy are all affected by class struggle.  Wright maintains there are 3 views of what constitutes the working class – 1) everyone who earns a salary or wage; 2) white collar workers are included in the proletariat, along with others; 3) only those who do manual labor.  Poulantzas holds to the latter; Wright comes out somewhere in #2, because of course there are more strata of labor than just cube dwellers.  For instance Wright includes most housewives in the working class, especially if their husbands are of that class, doing mostly unpaid reproductive labor. 

Poulantzas uses the distinction between productive and unproductive labor to help settle class boundaries.  I.e. producing use values is productive.  Everything else is ‘petit-bourgeois.’  Now this would mean nurses and teachers, or anyone who sells their labor to maintain the working class, is ‘unproductive.’ Yet without both of these relatively low-paid categories a working class would be stupid and dead.  Poulantzas insists all commodities are physical and ‘material’ – ignoring contributory labor like this or the very real capitalist commodities of ‘services’ and intellectual property.  Both which lead in exports from the U.S. by the way, and seemingly unknown to Trump.  This ‘factory fetishism’ – and I say this as a former factory worker - is absurd.  Even truckers, the largest group of workers in the U.S., produce no ‘thing,’ yet Poulantzas includes them in the working-class as transporters of things.  What about the techie who maintains a purchased download to ‘move’ software into a local computer?  

Wright points out that so-called ‘unproductive’ workers still have the same class interests as the ‘productive.’ Grocery clerks move products to shelves, but they also check out customers, which could be called ‘unproductive.’ This creates a dual role.  That they are ‘petit-bourgeois’ according to Poulantzas will be news to all the grocery store unions and nearly all of these workers. 

Poulantzas next idea is ‘technical’ and ‘social’ divisions of labor.  This addresses the issue of technical ‘supervisors,’ which bedevils a good part of this argument.  What kind of ‘supervision’ are we talking about?  Union ‘lead’ men who direct a crew?  A supervisor who sits in an office and knows nothing about the work, but is an arm of HR?  A foreman who has no power outside directing work? A corporate manager who can hire and fire? There are various strata of ‘supervisors,’ including some that do their own work outside HR mandates, like lawyers, a professional strata.  Wright does not fixate on the social ability to ‘hire and fire’ but he concludes that supervision is an example of a ‘contradictory location.’  Poulantzas says they are all bourgeois or petit-bourgeois just from their job role.

Another duality discussed is ‘possession of the means of production’ versus economic ownership of those means.  Poulantzas says that because managers ‘control’ the production process, they are part of the bourgeoisie, not even the petit-bourgeoisie.  How much they actually ‘control’ is dubious and, as you can see here, economic ownership is not his loadstone for the identification of the bourgeoisie. Another false dichotomy used by him is the ‘mental versus manual” one, when anyone who works a job knows every manual job requires mental labor of varying degrees, and every ‘mental’ one also demands manual skills of varying degrees.  Even software requires hardware.

Where are you in the pyramid?

Wright’s Arguments Against Poulantzas

Wright creates various diagrams that show the interaction of the various categories, class layers and class antagonisms.  These are not very helpful or thorough, but perhaps a sociology student will be thrilled. He does nail Poulantzas use of political and ideological criteria in his class identifications over economic.  In a way he identifies the creep of identity politics in his thought.  As he points out even ‘unproductive’ capital – i.e. bankrupt or zombie corporations – are still linked to the bourgeoisie.  Engineers and technicians are ruled out of the working-class by Poulantzas, but as anyone knows, there are various strata within these occupations.  Some engineers are indeed in the petit-bourgeoisie by virtue of their salaries, role in production and outside real estate or market holdings, like all professionals.  Some will even own a side business and become part of the petit-bourgeoisie that way.  But others, like some tech coder, computer repair technician or highly-skilled HVAC labor?  Wright again employs his category of ‘contradictory location’ to some.

As has already been seen, Wright pillories Poulantzas’ structural critique as virtually eliminating the modern working class. It ignores the neo-liberal move in the center capitalist countries towards service labor, intellectual property, reproductive and maintenance labor.  In 2025 this issue is even more obvious.  In the 1970s, 15% of women and 23% of men were working-class according to him.  How this minority will overthrow capital is beyond me. 

Wright illustrates how the ‘old petit-bourgeoisie’ (which he does not identify as small capitalists too…even though that is the exact French translation) is threatened by big capital.  In contradiction, the so-called ‘new petit-bourgeoisie’ actually owes monopoly corporations their existence.  So how are these both part of the same class, as insisted by Poulantzas, when they have different direct enemies and different possible solutions?  One wants a ‘free market’ for the little shark, while the others, if they are revolutionary, would call for the nationalization and workers control of their corporation. 

Wright replaces Poulantzas definitions with his own, using the ‘contradictory class position’ logic, discussing professors, researchers, line leaders, clerks and secretaries and so on. He estimates that 18-23% are in ‘contradictory positions’ while 41-54% are in the working class, which he defines as “’non-supervisory and non-autonomous.”  Combined they add up to between 60-70% of the population, which I still consider low. 

He considers students to be marked by their ‘class trajectory.’  Retirees, house wives and house husbands, permanent welfare recipients and (though he does not mention them) criminals are to be analyzed for “their immediate and their class interests.”  In other words, the relevance of reforms and revolution to each. Housewives and husbands are directly related to the class position of the wage earner.  Retirees (pensioners to Europeans) are also marked by their ‘class trajectory.’  He cannot identify the class position of permanent welfare recipients, although it seems obvious that, barring severe damage, most would benefit from economic reforms.  

Wright treats the last group as those employed by the political and ideological apparatus – equating professors with police, prison guards, bureaucrats, politicians and preachers.  An odd combination which some might choose to oppose, as many profs are untenured and paid poorly.  It is clear this group's role in how they prop up capital is key.  Does every professor do that?  I would add big entertainers and ‘public intellectuals’ as part of this cohort.    

Wright dwells for a long time on the concept of ‘loss of control of the work process’ as a marker for proletarianization.  However, every worker has a certain amount of ‘control’ of how they do their job, rising with certain jobs to the point that some bosses don’t know how or what they do except in the vaguest terms.  Again, it’s not an either/or proposition.  Capitalist ownership and direct capitalist control have devolved through stock ownership and managerial compensation schemes, as these are no longer small companies.  Yet in this apparent contradiction big stockholders still own and run things, while CEO managers can come and go.  Shades of grey.

Wright lastly focuses on the role of class struggle in modifying every class, every class structure and every state apparatus, as it is obvious each is the product of this historical battle on both small and large scales.  Every single nation and geography is marked by how this struggle went or is going.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “new petit-bourgeois,’ Erik Olin Wright, “Poulantzas,” “class.”

And I bought the book at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 8, 2025

Time-Wasting Sci Fi

 “Mickey 17”film by Bong Joon Ho, 2025

This is a dystopian space 'comedy' about a disposable worker stuck on an ice planet in 2054.  With the advent of human cloning through a digital meat printer injecting everything from vegetables to shit into the mold, it can re-create dead people.  And Mickey is 'it.' His memories are kept in a database and inserted each time he dies.  Mickey is up to his seventeenth life on the planet.  Ho was the director of Parasite and the class issue is fairly obvious here.  Most real workers are actually also disposable, so Mickey’s no fluke.

Mickey has no skills and is escaping from a poverty-strewn Earth run by corporations and deadly loan sharks, which isn’t far off the mark. He’s a bit of a half-wit and signs up to be a disposable. The meat printer was designed by a psychopath, but that doesn't stop the program.  The space ship to the planet, and the colony once it gets there, is owned and run by a blowhard Tech bro, which should ring some bells. Mark Ruffalo gets to ham it up as this obnoxious Overlord. 

After dying a bunch of times in Nazi-like experiments as a 'team player,' Mickey is reported missing in a crevasse, and so a multiple clone, Mickey 18, has been created.  This Mickey 18 is at first somewhat cruel and bloodthirsty, so something went wrong with the cloning.  Multiples of one person are illegal in this world and against ‘god’s plan’ or some such drivel.  This is the complication which leads to Mickey 17s life being put in final jeopardy. 

In his wanderings through the snow fields, Mickey 17 met sentient ‘creepers’ who save his life from the crevasse.  They are sort of like wiggly armadillos with rasping suction mouths, but in the end they become allies against the Tech Bros, the loan sharks, the stupid co-workers, the cruel ‘expendable’ program and its cloning machine. The colony lives happily ever after in the final battle.

The actors are Euro-Americans, not South Koreans, so this film is aimed at the U.S. market more than the Asian.  To me, other than the ‘thin satire’ and obvious social pokes at Silicon Valley ‘transhumanism’ and creatures like Elon Musk who are in love with space, the film seems to be an exercise in gruesome and trivial fantasy, a wasted pastiche of twists and turns.  Why?  As David Foster Wallace might have remarked in Infinite Jest, post-modern entertainment has become a catatonic diversion from life.

Don’t waste your time unless you are a die-hard sci-fi fan. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “science fiction,” “Parasite,” ‘satire.’ 

The Cultural Marxist / June 4, 2025

Safe As Milk

 “Half-Blood Blues” by Esi Edugyan, 2011

This is a story so familiar it seems predetermined.  It is about some jazz-men in the 1930s-1940s in Berlin and Paris who are of mixed ethnicity, dark-skinned and mostly ‘Americans.’  So you gotta know that Nazis, anti-Semitism, WWII and racism are involved.  These are safe topics for liberal readers, who this book is obviously pitched at. It includes Louis Armstrong in Paris, wetting the appetite of every Ken Burns fan.  The genius music ‘star’ is a skinny young man born in Germany to African-German parents, Hieronymous, who is known as ‘the Kid.’  Is he like Kid Ory?  He’s a brilliant sax player if the adulation is to be believed.  The whole point is to cut a record called “Half-Blood Blues” in Paris, riffing off the Nazi anthem “Horst Wessel,” but turning it upside down.

So we have a femme fatale singer named Lilah who is a mix of Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker.  Narrating is the somewhat stupid and angry bass player Sidney; his long-time buddy, sharp-witted drummer Chip; a German producer, a Jewish piano player, a big fat trumpet man and so on. Part of this group cuts a ‘legendary’ record that draws the 1992 Berlin jazz crowd to a documentary about the group, who are now in their ‘80s. The supposition is that Hiero was nabbed by ‘the Boots’ in Paris, sent to a camp and died there, so only Sidney and Chip are left to attend the 1992 screening. 

The best scenes are those of the evacuation of Paris, as panicked crowds attempt to board trains at the Gare d’Austerlitz or stream down the Boulevard St. Michel south before the arrival of the German army in June 1940.  The most chilling is a visit to a zoo in Hamburg, which houses not just animals but Africans, Eskimos and Polynesians in open air cages.  The rest is catty dialog between the band members and a bad love affair involving Sidney and Lilah. Looming over it all is, yes, scary Nazis and the band's political stupidity in the face of events, all for their love of the music.

Since no one can tell a linear story anymore, this one jumps back and forth between modern and old Berlin, modern and old Baltimore, modern and old Paris and points in- between.  Poland even figures in. It actually weakens the story and seems more of an irritant than anything else.  There is no goddamn aesthetic reason why it was done.  Of course, getting an MFA, which she did, requires one to toss timelines. 

The main criticism of this very popular WWII genre – look at Netflix, Britbox and others and count the WWII films – is that it is safe, too safe.  The ‘good war,’ the obvious baddies, the obvious ‘goodies,’ the cultural sophistication of jazz, the lovable half-black men, the talented genius – it is all too easy. This is why you see almost nothing anymore about the Vietnam War except books by Viet Thanh Nguyen. And Iraq?  And Gaza?  Nada. 

A recent film by a young African-American director Ryan Coogler, Sinners, is also a big success because Coogler discovered ‘the blues.’ Like jazz, the blues is another respectable genre which has also been around for ages.  Much as I love the blues, it’s too safe nowadays too.  To top it off, Sinners is set in Jim Crow times in Mississippi, featuring juke joints and yes, vampires. These are all, at this point, deep cultural and political clichés. 

Writers and directors have to write about the present.  Some have, attempting to bring the fight against fascism, racism or capitalism into our modern reality, or as close to it as they can get. There are even attempts to pick up on current culture. But police brutality, poverty, war, imperialism, police states or exposes of some fascist group in the U.S. are tricky, as they involve politics.  As we know, politics hurts box office or positions on ‘best seller lists.’ They are not ‘safe as milk.’  Much as I personally like jazz or Paris or hating on old-time Nazis, it’s too easy.  Time to redirect our guns, if not for anything else, to escape the cultural predictability of easy boredom.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Nazi,” “jazz,” “World War II,” "blues."  

And I got this at May Day’s excellent used/cutout section!

Red Frog / May 31, 2025

Viejo Gringo Reports #5: Peruvian Creativity

 Jose Carlos Mariategui Casa & Museo - Lima Peru

This was the final home of Mariategui, one of the most creative Marxists in Latin America.  It was preserved and then turned into an official museum by the City of Lima in 1994.  Mariategui is one of the first modern Marxists to consciously incorporate indigenous people into the revolutionary movement.  He influenced the origins of Liberation Theology by realizing the role of ‘myth’ and belief within the socialist movement, as socialism can also be messianic.  He analyzed the role of colonialism and imperialism in economic and political detail in Peru, and by extension, all of Latin America.  He was also fluent in cultural matters.

On organizational issues, Mariategui opposed the left-nationalism of APRA, which was based on the ‘anti-imperialist’ wing of the Peruvian capitalist class and later won elections as a bourgeois-nationalist formation.  APRA’s founder, Haya de la Torre, was influenced by the Mexican Revolution, not the Soviet one.  Not surprisingly APRA, like the bloody Kuomintang, was inducted into the Comintern by Stalin. Instead Mariategui rejected instantly forming a Communist Party without roots in the proletariat, campesinos and peasants.

A Peruvian Socialist Party was finally formed in 1928, but without mentioning ‘democratic-centralism’ – a concept which was being transformed into bureaucratic centralism by the Comintern.  Mariategui preferred a class-based ‘front’ that would challenge capital across the board, and hoped the PSP would help form that front. All these approaches set Mariategui apart from the slavish CPers who aped everything from Moscow.  He was denounced by their mouthpieces for various deviations in a Latin American conference

Amauta and his various interests.

My Spanish is rudimentary, so I could not work with the guide in this free, gratis, museum, though I was able to read some of the texts.  They would not even take a donation – very socialist.  Mariategui visited Europe once in 1919 with comrades, meeting Togliatti, Barbusse and Zinoviev, and embraced Marxism during that trip. This was in the period of the Spartacist uprising in Germany, the Italian factory occupations and the formation of the Italian CP – tumultuous times. 

Mariategui had 4 children and was crippled by a joint injury in his left leg as a child, which later led to amputation and a wheelchair.  He founded the journal Amauta (Quechua for ‘wise’ or ‘teacher’) in 1926, was imprisoned in 1927 and in 1928 broke with APRA.  He was one of the founders of both the PSP in 1928 and in 1929, the General Confederation of Workers of Peru.  He died in 1930, buried after a massive funeral procession.  He lived a short but productive life.

A communist breaks with bourgeois nationalism.

Today a statue of him is in a city plaza not far from the museum.  Here are some more pictures from the museum: 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Peru,” Mariategui.”

The Cultural Marxist / May 26, 2025    

Like the colonialists, we must carry death.

Funeral at top.

Viejo Gringo Reports #4: Old Mountain, Old Reality

 A Wonder of the World

A visit to Machu Picchu is an event, a trip to one of the ‘7 Wonders of the World.’  However it is also mass tourism. Many tickets are required. Hordes wait on the train platforms.  Lines can be long. Timing is all important, and you only spend about 3 hours at the site, most with voluble guides.  The air is thin and some steps tricky.  Since we have all seen multiple pictures of the little city on the mountain, backed by its rounded, pointed peak, it seems unreal.  Am I really here?  Was I there?  Is this happening?  It is a bit disconcerting.  Tourists are snapping selfies and pictures of themselves endlessly, as if to prove the fact.  I would rather sit in one place for a time and absorb the thing. Do it if you go.

Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu

What is funny is that these tourists are from all over Latin America and the world.  Many have some kind of religion other than that of the Quechua Inca. Some have none.  Yet it is a pilgrimage to an important pagan religious site.  The architecture, agronomy, sun temples, holy rocks and mountains all play a role in that story. People flock to Notre Dame and the Siena basilica, the mosques in Casablanca and Mecca, the shores of the Ganges in India or temples in Ankor Wat.  Machu Picchu represents grounded paganism, though even paganism has its ridiculous side too.  Nevertheless I’ll quote a funny Facebook meme of a native American replying to a European priest and explorer in the 1700s:  “But dude, the sun is real!”

In the little mountain town there are dug-out places for offerings to Pacha Mama – Mother Earth. Llamas and alpacas were sacrificed to her. There is a stone condor, perhaps as a nod to the air and gods in the sky.  There is a semi-circular Temple of the Sun, designed like Stonehenge to catch the rays of sunrise on the summer solstice. There are terraced fields to grow food and also test varieties at height as a science experiment.  Quinoa, potatoes, chilis and corn were some of the foods.  There is a grassy central plaza where ceremonies, flute music and ball games took place.  It is the terminus of the walkable Inca Trail from Cusco, so it was tightly connected to that city. About 500 lived there other than the royal family.  What is somewhat tragic is that when the conquistadors and Pizzaro arrived they were still building structures.  So Machu Picchu, like life, went unfinished.

PAGANISM & HISTORY

And now for something different, but not quite.  It is also well known that Marx, in the “Gotha Programme” pointed out that labor ‘and nature’ create all wealth. There are also many quotes from Marx about the link between human biology and history.  Here is one I easily found by Engels:  "Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst..."

This is not biological ‘essentialism’ or crude empiricism.  This is a crucial fact, as we are very conscious and hard-working animals.  Marx studied ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ because they are the foundation of human life.  He determined that the capitalists would figure out the lowest amount they could pay for workers to survive, gain knowledge and reproduce more workers and consumers.  It was and still is an essential calculation for many capitalists.  In other words, how much can we get away with?

These processes are the root of history since hunter-gatherer times. We are born into history, yes, but with a human body that still has ‘needs.’  Do a thought experiment about a ‘being’ that doesn’t need to eat, never gets hot or cold, never dies, is not bothered by rain, snow, sleet and the like, and can create others like him with the snap of a ‘finger.’  That would be a science fiction or religious ‘thing’ – it would not be human. It would be a product of Silicon Valley corporate ‘transhumanism.’  

And where would literature or film be without the gravitas of mortality?  Creativity, work, striving, building are all aspects of this 'human condition.'

Agricultural terraces at Machu Picchu

The ‘sacred valley’ of Peru leading to Machu Picchu provides clues as to this notion of human needs.  Why was the valley ‘sacred’ to the Inka?  Because of its agricultural productivity.  Terraces on the mountain sides, agricultural bottom-lands and a consistent rainy season made it a fertile place, along with rivers like the Urubamba and snow caps above. What pagan entities did the Inka worship?  The sun, moon, water and “Pacha Mama” – or mother earth.  Why?  It seems obvious.  This was their grounded, material “Trinity” unlike the ridiculous and idealist Christian / Catholic one – Father, Son and Holy Ghost - which has no connection to nature.

Machu Picchu provided a summer refuge from Cusco for the royal family.  Note, every royal family has a ‘summer palace.’ Now the question arises, who got the surplus that funded the building of Machu Picchu as a center of learning, astronomy, shamanism, botany, stonemasonry, textiles, architecture and agronomy? The Inkan ruling class were the beneficiaries, along with their experts and shamans, while the peasant farmers and building laborers provided the labor, and the soldiers, protection. Which might remind one of the Egyptian pharaoh’s and their skilled layers too. Yet this grew out of the human drive to survive entailing food, clothing, shelter and community.  All these things are only made possible by the latter, community, which is key.  And the lords controlled the community, though egalitarian peasant communes called allyus existed far from the empire's control. 

There is a centuries-long tradition of textiles in Peru, which needs no explanation. The conquistadores burned indigenous textiles in their destructive religious frenzy, along with melting all the gold and silver into ingots and shipping them to Spain.  The Inca did not use gold and silver for money, only in ceremonies to decorate their upper classes.  Pre-Incan societies had many artifacts for fertility and those depicting sex, which figures.  Why did they need children to know anything, as they had a very large school in that little mountain town erroneously called Machu Picchu?  Why did they need children, period?  That answer too is obvious.  It's a note to post-modernist liberals.

This is how pre-colonial human ‘history’ functioned at this point, an archaic society rooted in the highly-conscious and hard-working human animal’s life-needs and life-force, which eventually produced a surplus for their holy ruling class.  Then Pizzaro’s colonialist diseases, cavalry and troops arrived and killed or destroyed what they could.  Another system began to grow in Peru – extractive colonialism which turned the Inca into virtual slaves. The Incan allyu of collective farming also began to fall victim. This was a defining moment in Peru’s history from my contact with the guides here.  

History is determined by systems of production and reproduction, initially based on survival, that flower into class struggle over the surplus and issues of exploitation.  With better development in tools, technology and machinery based on surplus accumulation, along with waves of class struggle, capital has moved away from relative scarcity in some cases to plenty, much as Marx predicted.  But only with a social revolution would this be possible to spread world-wide.  This would bring shortened labor hours and a happier life.  The means of production and reproduction would become social property and valued, not private property for the enrichment of an upper class.  Simple stuff really, though perhaps too simple for the academic philosopher, estranged intellectual or reformist Marxist.  Sorry!

A link to a Blogspot book review about how ‘human nature’ was fundamental to Marx and Engels approach to social life – “Marx and Human Nature – Refutation of a Legend” by Norman Geras:  https://maydaybookstore.blogspot.com/search?q=geras  

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to search our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Peru,” “human nature,” “paganism,” “Geras,” "tourism." 

The Cultural Marxist / May 23, 2025

Viejo Gringo Reports #3: Endurance Contest

 Traffic in Peru

Traffic in Peru could be called orderly chaos.  I have seen no accidents, no pedestrian injuries, no arguments or road rage. Everyone tries to cooperate, yet also intimidate each other. A passive driver will not last long. Vehicles operate by inches. Stop signs are ignored.  Any parking restrictions are ignored. Speed limits are ignored.  Tuk Tuk’s and bicycles are edged off the roads.  Vehicles will pass coming up to a blind corner on a road.  Traffic lights are rare so intersections are traffic snarls.  Community dogs wander the streets in smaller towns, along with children and domestic animals like turkeys and bulls. Cars, trucks, buses, taxis, tuk tuks, scooters and motorcycles have the right of way over pedestrians.  For a pedestrian to cross a street in city traffic, they must use a vehicle as a shield.  Gringos on foot who expect to be ‘respected’ learn quickly.  You better run. 

Lima Peru traffic on a big road

Yet as the saying goes, live by the car, die by the car. The roads and streets are full of potholes so vehicles rock and roll, especially the frequent and brutal ‘speed bumps’ designed to slow traffic. These bumps are everywhere on the highway system. In smaller Inka towns, cobblestones still exist.  Tires, brakes, transmissions and shocks are in constant use, and will be the first to give out. Many city streets are packed with lines of stalled vehicles that you could pass walking.  The smart ones are buying motorcycles and scooters to slide by urban traffic on the side, weaving in and out of the stopped. Yet I saw only one electric bicycle, as electric cars, trucks, scooters and bikes have zero infrastructure, parts or repair knowledge so far. Diesel and gas fumes and emissions are the norm.  Only Lima seems to have some standing electric scooters.

The global south has fully adopted the car culture of parts of the north, even though the mostly narrow streets of their cities don’t permit it. Gridlock is sometimes the cost. Many have been turned into one-ways to compensate and that has not improved things, as cars are parked everywhere. In Arequipa and Cusco there are no street car lines, so the public bus systems have to carry the load, or the numerous taxies. Small private micro-bus lines serve rural areas and towns because there is no rail system either, partly due to the mountain ranges. Better-off commuters fly from city to city. At least rural areas have micro-buses, unlike the U.S.   

Like Hanoi or Phnom Penh, it’s a ‘zen process’ to get around.  In Peru it is a social activity where head-light flashes mean one thing, horn beeps another, head nods a third, hand gestures a fourth, vehicle positioning crucial and a precise physical understanding of speed, size and movement essential.  People will back up sometimes to let others through, but if you are there first, you usually rule.  It’s a game of inches.

The heroes in this situation are the drivers navigating big trucks and gigantic tourist buses that must maneuver in tiny streets, dirt roads and monstrous traffic.  Urban garbage truck drivers have a method whereby they enter a block and blare a tune like some ice-cream vendor in the States.  They try to find the one parking area they can fit their truck into along the block.  Then everyone from every business hears the music and comes running down the street with black bags of garbage and roller carts to deposit behind the truck while the sanitation workers sort and load it. A somewhat genius idea, but it shows how there is no room for spatial error.

In Arequipa city I only saw one lone youth on a bicycle and one man riding a tricycle. That was it.  In more rural towns bicycles were more common, along with tuk-tuks built in China that do a good job of replacing fat urban taxis.  They are far smaller, a motorcycle tricycle with covered seating area for two in back.  Some narrow truck beds are also attached to large motorized-tricycles, which are far easier to get through traffic. In a tiny village on the side of a mountain in the Sacred Valley I saw a young mountain biker blaring music shooting down a 45 degree dirt road full of rocks, following a trotting donkey.  I don’t know how he could get back up the mountain on that track. The merging of old and new.

Every Centro district has pedestrian and semi-pedestrian areas, Lima also, which is a relief.  Lima was built later, so it has some wide boulevards and traffic lights, many with protected bike lanes, which also exist on some other streets.  I saw many more e-scooters in the city, along with bicycles.

On the peaks of the Andean range the snow caps and glaciers are shrinking and snow hides in crevices away from the most sunlight.  Tourism and mining have replaced a rural agricultural economy and tourism needs transport.  They are building an airport near the so-called ‘Sacred Valley” on the way to the pagan shrine of Machu Picchu, as even the Sacred Valley has traffic jams.  It is over-tourism with a vengeance, as monied visitors are coming from all over the world. 

The crowded freeways of Houston, LA, Atlanta and Chicago have been replicated in their own way in the urban areas of the ‘global South’ – an inheritance of capitalist development.  The Peruvian rail system is spotty at best, not interconnected and built for freight needs, extending into 3 surrounding countries.  According to Wiki: “Regular passenger traffic now operates over only a small proportion of the mileage.”  The short Perurail© line running from Ollantaytambo to Aquas Calientes / Machu Picchu Puebla is always late, with chaotic platforms full of tourists.  Lima has a one-line Metro system, given its giant and sprawling over-size, so that helps.  Cusco's 'train station' is really a bus station, as they run Perurail buses to 'make connections.'

The upshot is that moving about in Peru is arduous.  Be it the local mini-airport, the pot-holed roads, the buses losing their shocks, the grinding of gears, the tiny roads and streets, the twisting highways, the few trains, the speed bumps – you will be exhausted.  Driving your own car or motorcycle will be an endurance contest. Most of the motorcyclists are fully geared up, to protect from dust and accidents.  This is a legacy of poverty, colonial and imperial extraction and geography at this point. 

P.S. - Later in Lima I saw two small accidents.  

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Traffic,”  “Peru,” "tourism."

The Cultural Marxist / May 20, 2025  

Viejo Gringo Reports #2: The Left Writes

 Casa Museo Mario Vargas-Llhosa - Arequipa, Peru

Mario Vargas-Llhosa is a contradictory figure.  His early life led him to the bohemian world of Paris, meeting leftists like Sartre, Picasso and others, posing at Marx’s grave in Highgate, meeting Trotskyist campesino leader Hugo Blanco.  The Cuban arrest of a poet in 1971 pushed him to the right, while prior to that he had been supportive of the Cuban revolution. At that time he made a public denunciation of Castro’s methods. At the museum, he is later depicted meeting vile representatives of the political class like Kissinger, Thatcher and others. He once ran for Peruvian president on a center-right ‘liberal’ ticket against Fujimori and lost big-time, giving up direct politics after that. 

Vargas-Llosa broke over the repression in Cuba of a poet, Padilla, and repression in other so-called state ‘socialist’ countries because, as a writer like him, freedom of the press was his central political concern. This follows a familiar pattern where bureaucratic repression pushes former leftists rightward or towards liberalism, not towards political revolution and revolutionary Marxism.  He went further to the right as he aged, endorsing people like Bolsonaro in Brazil and wailing about why leftist dictators weren’t being arrested along with Pinochet.  His hidden wealth came up in both the Pandora and Panama papers. 

My take on this is that his middle-class male up-bringing led him to finally embrace the comfortable life and accolades of the ruling class, along with its cash.  Yet as he once said, “I am a better writer than a politician.”  Yes he was.  The Nobel Committee gave him the award because of: "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."  Most of his famous writing was completely oppositional and deeply embedded in leftish social reality, not magical reality. It did not conform to his later politics.

This is a magnificent museum, even if you don’t speak much Spanish.  It is his former home in Arequipa, a 3 story work of mahogany, hallways and rooms. At the back a theater was built, with a viewpoint of the volcanoes that surround the city. He was born in Arequipa, then moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia with his mother where he grew up. Then he was moved to Lima where he enrolled in military school at 14, at the suggestion of his father.  He graduated and went to the National University of San Marcos in Lima where he became a member of a communist organization to the left of the popular left-nationalist APRA. As a student he studied communism deeply.  After graduation he worked as a reporter, then moved to Paris where he began writing books. 

Vargas-Llosa’s first major work was “A Time for a Hero,” about the repressive nature of the Peruvian military, probably from his time as a cadet - and was banned by the government.  The second was “Casa Verde.”  It was made into a film about a brothel which is attacked by angry Catholic women led by a priest.  In the film clip I saw the ‘green’ house is burned down, a woman prostitute beaten to death, a baby nearly incinerated.  It is a depiction of religious intolerance. This novel started his career with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others as part of the Latin American writing ‘boom.’  

The first display in the museum is of Vargas-Llosa’s ‘escritorio’ – his study with books, a radio and his desk, where his ghostly presence welcomes the visitor.  The museum itself is full of a film or two in each display room.  One depicts the sounds of his birth in his bedroom.  Others are a train car that depicts his romances, a nightclub, a street in Barcelona where he lived and wrote for a time, a Parisian café where he hob-nobbed with the literati, a military barracks, a newspaper office, a bar, a movie set and finally, his acceptance of the Nobel in 2010.  It suddenly dawned on me that some of his books were turned into pulpy movies, so a Latin America public would see him not just as a writer or failed politician, but like leftie B. Traven’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” a movie person.  3 families with children were on the tour with me and that might have been part of the draw.    

Vargas-Llosa’s third major novel, “Conversations in the Cathedral” is about a Peruvian dictatorship.  “War at the End of the World” is about an massive anarchist insurrection in northern Brazil, one of his best.  Another is “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,” about an insurrection in Peru. “Death in the Andes” followed about a slaughter of journalists in the mountains; “Feast of the Goat” about the Dominican dictatorship of Trujillo; “Dream of the Celt” about colonialism in Brazil and the Congo and “Harsh Times” about the  Guatemalan coup against Arbenz.

The museum popularizes Vargas-Llosa for a general public.  He wrote between 60-75 stories, critiques, non-fiction works, plays and books overall by my crude count of those in the museum’s final glass case.  Some of them were pulpy or humorous, like the Peruvian army hiring prostitutes for its soldiers in “Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.”  The films and ‘sets’ make the museum alive, along with the guide, not just plaques, text and pictures stuck to walls - although there are plenty of those too in the last segment.  The museum makes clear he was inspired by writers like Faulkner, Proust, Hemingway, Joyce, Flaubert and Borges.  In one poster, he is announced as giving a lecture on Joyce, so his life extended into the academy as a working writer.

Vargas-Llosa died only a month ago, April 13, 2025, at the age of 89.   

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Llosa,” “Peru,” “Harsh Times,” “Dream of the Celt.”

Kultur Kommissar / May 17, 2025

Viejo Gringo Reports #1: Grisly Museum

 Andean Sanctuaries Museum (Museo Santuarios Andinos) – Arequipa, Peru

This odd museum at the center of Arequipa, Peru near the Plaza de Armas is run by the Catholic Church.  It is odd because it focuses on the archeological remains of a 12-14 year old girl – now kept in a cooled glass case - sacrificed by the Incas to appease their gods.  The girls’ creepy mummified body is in the final room of the museum. Other rooms contain other mummies of sacrificed children as young as 6. Why would the Catholic Church do this?

She's smiling!

The Catholics admit what they cannot hide, that they built a cathedral or church over Incan religious sites or destroyed them, especially around Arequipa and Cuzco, in their conquest of Peru.  This was their attempt to destroy or replace local paganism.  Yet they have also practiced a form of ‘syncretism’ for years – adapting to local religious or pagan customs by trying to incorporate them into Catholicism.  How does human sacrifice fit in? 

Droughts, floods, failing harvests, lost battles – all had to be atoned for or warded off by sacrifices carried out by Incan priests.  This one took place, along with two other children, on the high, frozen slopes of the Ampato Volcano. It is the only one located anywhere in Peru by archeologists. In their religion, the mountains were gods and the higher you went, the holier the ground became.  For hundreds of years the body lay frozen until the volcano began to erupt.  The name this girl was given was “Juanita’ – perhaps a reference to one of the archeologists who dug her up, Juan in Spanish.  She was a high-born girl, perhaps connected to royalty, buried with exquisite pottery, high-end textiles and clothing, metal artifacts and dressed in an elaborate headdress, clothing and jewelry.  It’s a bit like the burial of an Egyptian pharaoh.   

There are reasons why the Catholic University of Santa Maria latched onto this.  One, it shows their pure interest in the science of archeology.  Catholicism has always tried to incorporate scientific ideas they could live with, like the false Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.  They even made nods to versions of evolution.  This gives their wholly imaginative religion some scientific props, hiding its archaic theoretical nature.  

Two.  This event both denigrates and incorporates the idea of human sacrifice by the Quechua Incans.  Most visitors will be appalled by the idea of human sacrifice as a really primitive form of magical thinking.  Yet the video shown before the tour celebrates and justifies this sacrifice to the Incan gods as a form of holy commitment by this young girl.  It was an honor we are to believe.  By the way, the audience for this one was a group of young college-age women.  

The Incan religion is exposed as partly barbaric in this museum.  Yet Catholicism has a replacement for this holy example – Jesus.  Jesus also ‘sacrificed’ himself as a martyr for the good of humanity, not just the Incas.  This time instead of an Incan priest drugging a ‘holy’ girl with fermented corn liquor – chicha – then bashing her skull in with a club, we have a young man being crucified on a cross by a Roman judge.  Christ purportedly didn’t want to be killed, but martyrdom is a goal of religious types and even non-religious ones, as we know.

The Catholic love of ‘relics’ – bits of saints' bones and spatterings of blood, the cross symbol as a form of holy torture, is here transformed into a similar format – a mummy with all the relics buried with her in her volcanic tomb, which was a hole in the ground. What this museum does is both sanctify and abjure her death, then replace her with Jesus for the Peruvians.  Though that second part you are not supposed to guess.  Syncretism, you see.  It's kind of like Incan paganism and Christian Catholic thinking share something key in common.  

Prior blogspot posts on this subject, use blog search box,  upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Religion,” “Peru.”

Kultur Kommissar / May 14, 2025 - Please celebrate and read books by B. Traven, a German Marxist who wrote about class struggle in Mexico.  He IS the viejo gringo.