Don't Tie Me Down, Don't Fence Me In

 “Nomadland,” the film, directed by Chloe Zhao, 2021

Based on the book of the same name written by Jessica Bruder (reviewed below) Nomadland tries to present a picture of proletarian reality.  These are the modern railroad tramps and hoboes of the U.S. 1930s, but now converted to living in vans, RVs and tents.  It is about workers who live by temporary jobs and small social security checks, no longer able to afford a fixed abode. suffering divorce and job losses.  They are mostly light-skinned people, “the unbearable whiteness of vanning,” many of whom play themselves in the film.  It functions like a slow-moving documentary. This film is unable to hide class issues … but it tries mightily.

The lead character Fern, played by Frances McDormand (who also initiated and produced the film), loses her job in a gypsum plant in Nevada.  She retrofits a beat-up old white van and travels across the country to work at an Amazon warehouse as a Xmas Workamper; a store selling rocks in Quartzite Arizona; a Park District RV lot in the Badlands; a kitchen at Wall Drug and a sugar beet harvest in Nebraska - really on the Red River in North Dakota or Minnesota.  The story never reaches any analysis of capitalism or the class-struggle level of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” because it also dwells on the romance of ‘the road.’   Only once does the cantankerous Fern get into an argument with a relative and his friend in real estate, who claim housing prices 'only go up.'  The book Nomadland was written in 2017, long after the 2008 housing crash, giving the lie to that. 

Instead it is a very slow paen to wanderlust and an elegy to nature.  Burbling books, fallen redwoods, nesting swallows, mountains, desert, roaring surf, buffalo and the dramatic rocky Badlands punctuate. “Don’t fence me in” might as well be the slogan.  Gentrification can even arrive even on this road.  The commodification of the 'lifestyle' approaches in $100K RVs, shown once during the film to the incredulous workampers.  The film will also encourage the attack of the tricked-out camper vans.  Glamping!  Conde Nast called it "a love letter to America's wide-open spaces."  Nothing about losing your housing there.  Just something about the new 'cowboys.'

Fern, the lead character, is a loner who mourns her dead husband for the whole film, no doubt suffering from depression.  It touches on some of the problems of van life – flat tires, repair costs, stealth parking, shitting in buckets and the cold - but not more serious ones like health issues, food quality, ability to vote, getting mail, severe weather, crime, poverty, rising gas prices and insurance, internet, cops and isolation from family and others. You certainly can't bring kids on this 'adventure' for long. Some eventually leave the road if they can.  Can you imagine camping for years on end? 

Its main focus is on the collective and positive lifestyle of elderly folks who have ‘rejected the system’ and not just been thrown out of it.  Even the word ‘nomad’ leans to the romantic, sort of the new gypsies.  There is hardly anyone who has not yearned to travel the byways of the U.S. and discover the country.  In a way the film transforms van life into a new and 'natural' capitalist adventure. It is a weird sequel to Kerouac's "On the Road."  It is the new 'counter-culture' or not. Yet the jobs the nomads have to do are low-paying, hard or monotonous - a profitable adventure for those businesses who use them. 

Unlike the book (reviewed below) Fern is a made-up character, filling in for the younger journalist who wrote the much more interesting book, as well as one of the older women in the film.  We meet the real Bob Wells, leader of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous and founder of CheapRVLiving, who teaches people how to survive on the road.  He is a good and kind example of mutual aid.  Unlike the book, Fern has a half-interest in a fellow nomad Dave.  He tries to get her to settle down with him after a classic Thanksgiving scene but she can’t.  For the most part the film has no narrative drive.  Fern repeats the cycle of jobs and ends up where she began, in the abandoned town of Empire, walking through the dusty remains of the USG gypsum plant and her own former house.  The ghost of dead capital inhabits them still.

This film is a mostly emotional version of the book and suffers from avoiding the elephant in the room. Its avoidance of a bigger picture assumes the viewer will fill in the blanks.  They will not always.  Poverty porn?  Perhaps, to some.  It is mostly humanitarian, showing the reality of working people handling whatever darkness capital throws at them with grace and strength, which at this point is a necessary cliche.  Whether 'endurance' is enough in this situation is a question the filmmakers fail to answer.

P.S. - For those irritated by this review:  The director has said that the film was about "compassion, memory and loss," which is even more distant than portraying it as a 'lifestyle' choice.  In a way, she chooses a humanitarian approach instead of focusing on why we have the quite modern phenomenon of mobile mass penury. She has pointed out politically that being forced to live in a van is unacceptable, but that was not the thrust of her film.  The Huffington Post says the film portrays van-life in "rich magic-hour hues."  That was the real thrust, which Hollywood loved, as the film disemboweled the book and the situation.  In a way, McDormand was slumming.

P.P.S. - In These Times chimes in with a similar criticism of the film: https://inthesetimes.com/article/nomadland-chloe-zhao-oscars-film-culture-amazon-workers

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Nomadland,” “On the Clock,” “The Precariat,” “Love Your Job?” “Minneapolis 2040,” “Postcards From the End of America,” “Sutree,” “Tales of Two Cities.”

The Cultural Marxist

February 19, 2021              

Class - the Elephant in the Womb

 “Caste – the Origins of Our Discontents,” by Isabel Wilkerson, 2020

This book is a small step forward from the simple-minded analyses of ‘race’ carried out by U.S. liberals and conservatives, the media and educational institutions to this day.  Wilkerson realizes that ‘race’ is a reactionary social construct, not a biologic fact, citing scientists like Ashley Montagu in the 1950s.  Among humans, it does not exist, as we are 99.9% the same.  Yet everyone blathers on about race in the plural, inspired by government categories derived from Jim Crow. 

Wilkerson knows there is no such thing as ‘white’ or ‘black’ people, just various shades of melanin – of brown, beige and pink skin.  She knows that skin color and certain small physical markers are products of geography and nothing else.  She makes fun of the odd qualification of ‘Caucasian.’  What does exist is the politicization of these terms.  Wilkerson understands that there is a difference between active institutional racism and personal bigotry or prejudice.  She calls the former caste.

INDIA and the U.S.

Wilkerson’s touchstone on the subject of caste is the religious caste system in India, which MLK once visited to better understand Gandhi.  At one point, MLK was introduced in India as an American ‘untouchable,’ which surprised him but then made sense.  Wilkerson herself upholds Dalit ‘untouchable’ B.R. Ambedkar as the MLK of India.  Wilkerson does not note that Gandhi, a Hindu, was a supporter of the Indian caste system in his battles with Ambedkar.  Gandhi’s father was from the Modh Baniya caste – a merchant caste – and Gandhi became a lawyer.  Indian castes themselves are buried in hundreds of years of Hindu varna hierarchies, originating out of slave and medieval economies, not capitalism.   

Wilkerson considers India, the brief existence of fascist Nazi Germany and the U.S. to be the only sources of a caste understanding.  All three examples actually come from different economic sources.  She ignores apartheid South Africa, the treatment of indigenous Americans or Palestinians and the existence of mistreated color, ethnic or religious strata all over the world.  Wilkerson is casual in her approach, relying on anecdotes and psychology, not statistics or social science.  The style is stories and journalism, not sociology. She mentions earlier works written in the 1930s:  “Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class” and “Caste and Class in a Southern Town.”  But notice their titles as opposed to hers - class is included.  One of the authors of the first treatise, Allison Davis, was probably a Marxist who criticized the black bourgeoisie in a famous 1929 essay, “The Negro Deserts His People.” A favorite of liberals and Wilkerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, is still ignored in his opposition to capitalism as the source of caste oppression.

For Marxists I do not think the concept of a color caste in the U.S. raises problems if you rename ‘race’ to ‘caste.’  It exists between the obvious flaws of simple-minded identity politics and class.  Caste has attributes of class if the concept is applied properly.  The Indian caste system denotes roles in a religious and social hierarchy and sometimes geographic origins.  It is also supposed to determine your economic job.  Given there are many castes and sub-castes and many jobs in India, the concept divides the working classes and farmers by Hindu religious boundaries. Even Indian Muslims, Jains, Sikhs and Christians are affected by it.  This archaic caste system objectively props up the virulent Indian class system, now dominated by enriched Hindutva mega-capitalists. 

Wilkerson’s concept of U.S. caste on the other hand is simple, deceptive and somewhat artificial, stretched across various ethnic identities.  She assigns Latinos and Asians to a ‘middle’ caste, while exiling indigenous native Americans from the caste system altogether.  Her conception is a mostly ‘black’ centric concept, bi-polar to ‘whites.’  This reflects a theoretical weakness in the book, a blinkered tunnel vision that continues throughout.  It is one of several crucial weaknesses in her theory.

Someone Got There First

CASTE is ECONOMIC

Wilkerson accepts caste as an economic category, as job-related.  Her examples include assumptions that all 'black' people must be waiters or clerks, or cannot be NYT reporters, as she once was. Slavery and Jim Crow legally prohibited darker skinned persons from having businesses or more skilled jobs.  Agricultural, servant and physical or ‘menial’ labor was almost all that was allowed or possible, even as people moved north to escape Jim Crow.  Wilkerson’s examples of job restrictions become fewer and fewer as she approaches the present, as most are from Jim Crow.  Dark-skinned people who succeed in a job ‘outside of their caste’ like herself she cleverly calls "miscast."  Those numbers of ‘miscasts’ are not infinitesimal or accidental anymore.

U.S. color castes are not impermeable categories, as we can easily find exceptions, including Ms. Wilkerson herself, a professor. Or the unemployed Scots-Irish miner in Appalachia suffering from black lung high on opioids.  I stereotype because it reveals the weakness of caste as an all-encompassing view.  Class is a bedrock economic reality that encompasses concepts of caste and ‘race.’  Class is sometimes permeable but it still cuts across every caste, every ethnicity, every nation, every identity, every single society.  Class is present in all capitalist societies, even when there are no castes present.  In the U.S. the permeability of class has become less and less, even in comparison to Europe.  

A visit to a typical U.S. restaurant will let you see a color caste and class system in action.  Light skinned women up front as waitresses and hostesses, Latino cooks in the kitchen, dark-skinned or Latino dishwashers and bussers in back … and an alabaster owner counting profits in the office.  The first groups are all exploited by the last, though the waitresses might get the best tips.  This is how caste and class intertwine but ultimately capital dominates.  Profit is the actual motivation, not history, meanness, stupidity or theology.

Wilkerson is aware of elites in the dominant caste and economic exploitation of those lower down through slavery and afterwards.  Yet she doesn’t consider present versions of slavery as relevant to her theory.  Right now debt slavery and non-chattel labor imprisonment are at record levels.  Imprisoned Thai shrimp fisherman locked on their boats and Mexican tomato workers in walled farms; young Indian boys staining leather for their father’s debts; body parts taken from poverty-stricken proletarians; caged children picking chocolate beans in Ivory Coast; captured miners in the Congo; imprisoned Indonesian housemaids in Saudi Arabia; Romanian girls sold to London brothels.  

It is all part of an international system of profit off of labor and bodies, an imperial ‘side gig’ that is illegal, but like the drug trade, gun smuggling, money laundering, tax evasion and crime itself, are part of the overall capitalist economy.  It is not chattel slavery - it is the modern equivalent.  Profit makes the law.  

FAMILIARITY

Much of this book is very familiar.  She locates the origins of caste in colonialism.  She outlines slavery, descriptions of lynching and miscegenation laws.  She writes about the Jim Crow ‘one drop’ and 1/64th rules and Nazi adoption of Jim Crow law applied to German Jews.  She has a chapter on the false science of eugenics, which dominated social sciences in the early 1900s.  Obama as a ‘black’ president; Charlottesville and the Confederate flag issue; personal slights; a few mentions of cop violence but not many; the Trump victory.

Where she gets into quicksand is her description of so-called "middle castes."  She notes historical attempts by Asians, Indians, native Americans or Latinos to be considered ‘white’ in the legal sense, just as Italians or Irish became ‘white.’  However that ignores the fact that Mexicans and native Americans, many Arabs, Africans and Asians are specifically oppressed.  They are not middle castes. They don’t have the long oppressive history of slavery behind them, but they do have "that skin thing."  Some middle-class Asians might be the best candidates for middle-caste, but it is because of their class standing as professionals or business people.  The poverty-stricken and proletarian Hmong in St. Paul, Minnesota or Somalis in Minneapolis are in no way middle caste.  The term reflects Wilkerson echo of the liberal fantasy term middle class for everyone who is between Bill Gates and those on welfare.

Professor Wilkerson

BLACK BOURGEOISIE

Wilkerson never uses the term capitalism and avoids the term class except in one paragraph in which she addresses it, admitting that some low-caste members can "make it" but are still subject to a caste problems.  She gives examples of wealthy or prominent African-Americans who were treated like low-level nobodies by cops or business owners, or talked down to at meetings by clueless 'whites'.   What she does not do is talk about the existing "black bourgeoisie" and explain how their existence disrupts her caste paradigm.  Nor does she deal with the vast ‘white’ proletariat, which also disrupts her view. She admits the upper caste has elites and so does the lower - but goes no further.  Here be monsters!

According to Forbes there were only 7 African-American billionaires in the U.S. in 2020, “from finance to technology to entertainment.”  In 2021, Nubia notes the top 10 ‘black’ wealthy were: Vista Equity Partners owner Robert Smith; a businessman, David Steward; Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Jay-Z, P-Diddy; another business owner, Sheila Johnson; Dr. Dre, Rihanna, and Tyler Perry.  This small number of super-wealthy concentrated in entertainment reflects a growing wealth gap between the castes, but it does not eliminate class in the ‘black’ community.  The ‘black’ upper class is estimated to be 1% of the overall population.  Making over $200K a year qualifies a person to be in the upper middle class (UMC) according to some estimates.  In 2016 Brookings reported that 7% of the UMC was African American, 9% Hispanic-American, 11% Asian-American, the rest European-American.  Asians had the smallest proportion of the overall population so Brookings notes that Asians have more members in the UMC than ‘whites.’  This further undermines Wilkerson’s version of caste.

Like many middle-class liberals, Wilkerson assumes in her text that all ‘white working class’ people are bigots or racists, relishing their higher caste standing and all endorsing Trump.   This is factual nonsense, unsupported by statistics.  Blue-collar proletarians have more in common across any caste than those who are in the upper middle class of their own caste.  Integrated workplaces, political organizations and unions show this best. 

DISAPPEARING CLASS

Ultimately the effect of Wilkerson’s book is to disappear class as part of a broad propaganda effort by the bourgeois academy, corporate media and the political system.  She has no plan to overcome caste and ignores any perspective of emancipation from class, caste or institutional racism.  Her solution is:  “an intervention of humanitarian impulses.”(!) She herself has been a top NYT reporter, a prominent journalism professor and a celebrated non-fiction writer for an earlier book on the Great Migration.  Caste itself got a pat on the back from Oprah and the NYT.  She’s a ‘somebody’ writing for nobodies.  Is she an Ambedkar?  Not even.  A hard answer to Wilkerson’s version of this theory are the efforts of Marxists, now and in the past.  Here is Black Agenda Report’s look at her book:   BAR on Caste

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar); “Slavery by Another Name,” “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “One Night in Miami,” “Arundhati Roy,” “White Tiger,” “Toward Race Reductionism,” “Mistaken Identity,” “Blood and Earth,” “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “Slave States,” “Prison Strike” “White Trash” “Chavs” or words like ‘racism,’ ‘caste’ or slavery.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

February 15, 2021

Adriatic Adventure

 “The Paper / Novine” Season 1, directed by Dalibor Matanić, written by Ivica Dikić, 2016

This Netflix series is set in a working town on the Adriatic coast in Croatia, Rijeka, just below Trieste and the Istrian Peninsula.  The shadow of the reactionary wars to breakup the Yugoslav Federation still hang over this ‘modern’ seaport.  It was written by a former journalist, Dikić, whose picture of the city, country and people is dark and revealing.  While we don’t get to Ustaše-level corruption and violence, we get hints.  This is the first Croatian series to get international exposure.  

It centers around the last ‘serious’ newspaper in Rijeka city, Novine, which attempts to do real journalism while the other papers and websites are sunk in sensationalism, sex, scandal and shallow takes on everything.  We watch as this narrative of ‘investigative’ journalism breaks down.  After several betrayals, one veteran reporter comments that integrity and journalism can no longer be mentioned in the same breath.  He knows because he’s part of it, as he's most worried about holding his job, not 'the truth.'

The main journalistic issues are two: a deadly but mysterious late-night crash that killed 3 young people, which the powers-that-be in Rijeka want to cover-up; and a wealthy fraud ring using fake invoices involving the mayor, the police chief and a top construction magnate.  Good luck getting the journalists on the ‘last serious newspaper’ to crack these stories, though they try.  For one, Novine is first bought by the construction boss, who wants to use it for fraud and to manipulate public opinion.  Then the Mayor gets his hands on the paper through surrogates.  On two occasions, to save their jobs, the ‘editors’ burn cover stories by their staff that reveal the fraud ring.  With self-censorship like this, who needs official censorship?

And sweet Jesus, all these people drink constantly.  They repeatedly meet in a drab, smoky bar hashing over journalism but mainly their own personal issues. Flirting and smoking are de riguer.  Cheap Croatian pint beers, wine, whiskey and brandy come up in every scene.  Adultery is rampant, relationships are troubled and there is a serial rapist among the local ruling class.  The rulers trade favors to prop each other up, even the Catholic Archbishop who is part of the elite and wields his religious power like any other boss.  This is when the top dogs aren’t trying to jail or intimidate each other.  

One ‘star’ journalist takes a month off, giving up on research to wallow in personal issues and somehow remains employed.  Two editors and one journalist cover their asses and kill stories.  One careerist woman does what the crooked boss tells her, pretending to be an editor.  One journalist gets fired and becomes the spokesman for the right-wing Mayor running for President of Croatia, a clone of Hungary's Orban, a predecessor to Trump.  Another journalist who is fired ends up on a cheesy news website that scandal-baits.  Scandal is the main form of politics it seems, and post-journalism its message.  The Mayor is aided by a smart and efficient former Croatian spy who has mother problems.  The lead cop spends his time gambling and consorting with various criminals while doing cover-ups.  Over it all is a rich Mama, who seems to have hidden powers over her son and others.

The first season paints a picture of a corrupt and fucked-up Croatian city even among the white collars.  It is somewhat similar to Baltimore’s The Wire but more focused on the journalism angle, and without so many 'heroic' cops.  Journalism, a former bastion of ‘truth,’ is shown to be vulnerable and obedient to power.  The writer was a journalist in Croatia, so he knows of what he speaks.  Journalists and leftists will understand this portrayal of a former workers’ state now sunk in a creepy and reactionary form of capitalist restoration, with all the personal impacts on individuals that implies.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Post,” “When Journalism Was a Thing,” “Manufacturing Consent” (Chomsky); “Turning Off NPR,” “No Longer Newsworthy,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “Yugoslavia – Peace, War and Dissolution” (Chomsky); “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “The Ghost of Stalin”(Sartre); “WR:  Mysteries of the Organism,” “Living in the End Times” (Zizek), "Comrade Detective."  

The Kulture Kommissar

February 11, 2021

Into the Bat Cave

 “Dead Epidemiologists – on the Origins of Covid-19,” by Rob Wallace, 2020

This is an excellent lyrical and Marxist take on Covid-19 by a scientist who has studied infectious diseases, especially pandemics, for years.  His contribution is to detail the links between animal and corporate and industrial agriculture for the development of pathogens that jump from animals to humans.  Most conventional scientists in the U.S. or China who study the issue compartmentalize the medical and the economic, breaking any link between the two.  Wallace does not. 

Wallace’s key insights across all these outbreaks is that industrial animal agriculture acts as a ‘petri dish’ for the development of new mutations due to overcrowding; that capital-led deforestation and new ‘development’ intrude on wild animal habitats, allowing for previously isolated diseases to jump to humans; that every single animal species is now being commodified as food, potions, trophies or in some other way.  This is all powered by the circulation of capital worldwide.  Local infections in Wuhan or Yunan forests spread to semi-urban spaces and become global due to the imperial Pangaea of air travel, shipping, trucks and trains.

The book reads as an accurate narrative of the Covid-19 pandemic from January to July 2020, unfolding in real time through notes on MROnline, interviews, Monthly Review articles, Patreon and public presentations to Regeneration Midwest.  Wallace notes that C-19s mortality rate is far above seasonal flues.  He realizes that without a vaccine, even a 1-2% death rate could result in millions dying.  He advocates that non-essential work be shut down in high-transmission areas.  Wallace links this outbreak with previous ones – H1N1 and its many variants, along with African swine flu, SARS-1, Ebola, MERS, Zika, HIV, avian influenza and others.      

Wallace looks at various methods to contain the virus.  While pin-pointing all of the Trump government’s murderous practice, he knows that ‘context is critical’ in a pandemic. ‘Toggling’ between health and the economy or herd immunity in the U.S. ignores the prior lack of a nationalized, organized health care system, which makes both methods a recipe for disaster.  He also advocates neighborhood mutual aid, free vaccines and full unemployment and health coverage for those affected, which is the working class in its various colors and nationalities.  He even pokes at Dr. Fauci.

Wallace and his cohorts lean to the short, severe but effective means used in China and try to translate what that would mean in the U.S. and countries like Italy, which was hit first in Europe.  He points out that the response in China is because it is an up-and-coming economy, compared to the decaying cannibalistic economies of Britain and the U.S.  In a question about India’s severe anti-proletarian lockdown, he says that each country’s individual response is based on preserving power, not handling the disease.

Wallace looks at how this virus traveled along food routes, ending in rural U.S. meat-packing plants where the capitalists and their government force lower color castes to work, no matter the consequences.  He parses the source of this particular virus.  He concludes based on the evidence that it did come from the wild animal trade and specifically bats and pangolins in southwestern China, not a lab accident.  The Chinese authorities, in their analysis, ignore the role of agri-business, the wild foods sector and traditional Chinese medicines.  But Wallace also looks at how capital and their governments are opening labs that experiment with viruses for profit and biowarfare, with inevitable accidents related to ‘gain of function’ experiments.  The specific lab in Wuhan was partially funded by a U.S. non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance, a joint project with the Chinese, as well as the NIH.  The problem is that an accusation of a lab-origin mixes with global power politics so that it is difficult to determine the truth.  Wallace sees these allegations as part of Sinophobic weaponization by Trump.    

Wallace introduces readers to terms like biopolitics, biosecurity and biocontrol.  He points out that the presence of the ACE2 enzyme in the body – more prevalent in males, the elderly and those with chronic conditions like high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes – makes one more susceptible to Covid-19.  

Agro-Ecology in Action

Longer Term Solutions

The first of Wallace’s long-term solutions is a return to small-holder agriculture, which has been shown to be more productive, less damaging and less expensive than large scale corporate farming.  It would result in a repopulation of rural areas. The second is the mass adoption of agro-ecologic methods – organic, diverse, intercrop, indigenous, sustainable, small-scale.  His concept of ‘small holder’ in these articles (definition unknown) seems to be mostly limited to present market methods, not cooperative farming, government aid or planned production.  These aspects are only mentioned once.  Mostly he comes off as a proponent of small farmers and pastoralists as part of a ‘disalienation’ of man and nature.  His main target is industrial farming and big capital’s support of those methods.  He details in an excellent chapter how capital is bio-forming the world, including details on the cruel and ‘scientific’ forms of industrial animalia. 

The weakest part of the book is Wallace’s opposition to what he calls ‘red’ vegetarianism/veganism, with a mouthful of hyperbole and straw mein.  His real attack is on bourgeois veganism and top-down bureaucratism, but he fails to make the distinction.  Reducing meat eating would decimate corporate animal agriculture, increase available food, decrease animal torture while providing a large reduction in global carbon production.  His own text partially explains this in the operation of animal factories.  Wallace claims not to know what small holder agro-ecologic methods would do to the volume of meat eating.  In a capitalist economy the ‘industrial’ meat industry is directly connected to an industrial-level of meat eating.

The mass consumption of animals is part of the 6^th species extinction, global warming, food insecurity via export economies and biodiversity loss, as well as providing global pathways to epidemics – all part of the commodification of nature on the practical and ideological plane.  It should have nothing to do with Tunisian camel herders, Nunavut seal hunters, nomadic Bedouins, banning animal agriculture, compulsory veganism or lab meat.  It’s as if Wallace has isolated one compartment of science from another.  It is far more significant what McDonalds, ADM and Smithfield are doing, as he knows.  Wallace’s attack on mechanistic social-democratic versions of a rural program are justified and accurate.  But I suspect “La Via Campesina” is not really a 5^th International as that term has been historically known.  Nor is his stance that China is state capitalist based on facts he presents.  But those are all far-side issues.

This book describes a pandemic acting as a function of capital gone ‘wild.’  It is excellent, unique and well-written, understandable by non-biologists.  Wallace has spoken twice at May Day Books, based on his prior book “Big Farms Make Big Flu.”  May Day carries current and back issues of Monthly Review with Rob’s articles in them, along with his first book. 

Prior blog reviews on science, use the blog search box, upper left:  “The Tragedy of American Science,” “People’s History of Science,” “Reason in Revolt,” “Ten Assumptions of Science,” “Fashionable Nonsense – Post-Modern Intellectuals’    Abuse of Science,” “A Redder Shade of Green – Intersections of Science and Socialism,”  “The Fifth Risk,” “Ubiquity,” “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” “There is Only One Race” or the phrase “Big Bang.”   Also:  “A Foodies Guide to Capitalism,” “What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?” “Grocery Activism,” “Salt Sugar Fat,” “Civilization Critical,” “Shrinking the Technosphere,” “The Sixth Extinction.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

February 7, 2021

May Day Covid hours:  1-5 P.M. except Sunday.  Knock if door locked, as it is locked due to recent robberies.

Power-Point© Change

 “Winners Take All – The Elite Charade of Changing the World” by Anand Giridharadas, 2020

This book reveals another dirty secret of U.S. capital.  The corporations and their handmaids now have to pretend to be ‘for’ some social good in order to sell products or ideas or even their whole system.  It actually reflects the present ideological bankruptcy and economic stagnation of capital.  Prior to this, they pretended the ‘market’ alone would suffice.  Now they know otherwise.

Pretty soon if you buy a Goodyear tire, they will promise to plant a rubber tree that will mature in 30 years.  For a Hardees massive burger, they will feed a starving child with a tiny version of their toxic sandwich.  Cinnabon will donate to the juvenile diabetes association.  A Wall Street exchange will tell us if we buy a penny stock, they’ll give a homeless shelter a penny.  MSNBC promises that if you watch and register, they’ll hire a black janitor.  BP will donate money to a pelican sanctuary group after a fill-up.  Newport cigarettes will send money to the American Cancer Institute. Silicon Valley will encourage you to use your car as a taxi, ‘freeing’ you at $3.43 an hour.  Oh wait, Uber already does that.  It is all called ‘social entrepreneurship.’ 

Note how many products now have some social theme attached to their purchase, like they are not profit-making outfits but charities pretending to ‘save the world.’  The work of ‘change’ has become commodified and privatized as a new frontier of commerce nationally and internationally.  It has become part of what Baran and Sweezy called 'the sales effort.'  This is what this book focuses on.  The key idea is from the novel The Leopard:  “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

Giradharadas is not an anti-capitalist.  This is a fellow who calls imperialism ‘globalism,’ who calls class war ‘civil war,’ who confuses the left with the Democrats. He believes that government and vague politics is the solution, not private, anti-democratic attempts by elites.  He does note the added alienation when one frictionless ‘click’ on a computer magically brings a product to your door, hiding all human labor.  His book is required reading for CEOs, as one of the blurbs says.  Like others, he also appeals to elites.   

Giradharadas goes inside to dissect bourgeois attempts at ‘richsplaining’ imperialism, job losses and trickle-down change and the subsequent market solutions.  He takes the ‘win-win’ feel-good micro-solutions of corporations and their spokesmen and shows how they attempt to conceal their own role in inequality, environmental degradation, toxicity and labor exploitation with a veneer of jargon, TED talks, money and ‘intellectual’ adulation.  Some of the jargon:  corporate social responsibility, change agents, sharing economy, impact investing, green bonds, social enterprise, social value investing, change management, sustainable finance, entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurs.  If you hear any of this in a capitalist context, you know the scam is on.  Run!

Giradharadas profiles various denizens of what he calls “Market World.” A guilty upper middle class girl interested in social change ends up at McKinsey & Co. as a typical corporate consultant.  An anti-sexist professor finds herself advocating a ‘power pose’ at TED talks as the solution to female intimidation.  A black entrepreneur creates a fantasy football league with some profits going to charities in Africa.  A sensitive rich techie builds a subscription app that saves paltry sums so low-paid workers don’t get caught short.  A former musicologist facilitates deals with mining companies in Mongolia and now works for Soros’ neo-liberal foundation as a way to ‘change the world.’  A poor black child from Louisiana, now head of the Ford Foundation investment program, wrestles with capitalist inequality and ends up on the board of Pepsico.  Giradharadas' interviews humanize these 'change-makers', making them more sympathetic, which is perhaps an intended sub-texual consequence. 

Giradharadas describes some fake billionaire ‘rebels’ and thought-leaders.  Libertarian tech titans and venture capitalists on elite cruises who pontificate against ‘the system,’ decrying unions, government laws and praising Uber.  The three steps of these ‘thought talks’ are:  1. focus on victims, not perpetrators.  2. personalize the political. 3. have a bite-size solution. And please, no conflict!  He dissects the McKinsey protocol of how an ignorant consultant can suss any problem in easy steps, based on increased productivity, better supply chains and technology, with smart procurement and purchasing.   Creeps like David Brooks, Elon Musk, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Pinker, Niall Ferguson and Neil deGrasse Tyson appear at ‘think lite’ conferences like Aspen Ideas, South by Southwest, and Summit At Sea for very large speaking fees.  ‘Non-profit’ foundations launder capitalist exploitation into social control through charities they can live with.  Charity / business foundations like the secretive Clinton Global Initiative unite profit and ‘doing good,’ becoming modern Andrew Carnegies.

Even if they are not socialists, more and more people see that the institutions and power centers of this country are laughable and transparently bogus.  This book exposes in detail the corporate ‘social change’ sector from the inside, ending with an interview with Bill Clinton. The possibility here is that Giridharadas, because he is not an anti-capitalist but a left liberal, is becoming one of those ‘thought leaders’ he makes so much fun of, pulling his punches so that the ruling class will listen to him.  After all, he’s now a commentator on MSNBC, used to pundit at the Aspen Institute and worked for McKinsey.  This book got positive quotes from the NYT, Washington Post, the Ford Foundation, NPR, the Financial Times and of all people, Bill Gates. His own book will ultimately hang him.   

P.S. – The funnest question of all:  Who has more privilege – Warren Buffet, Oprah Winfrey, Carlos Slim, a black farm laborer in the Mississippi Delta, a Mexican farm worker in the Rio Grande valley or an old white miner living in a trailer up a holler in West Virginia?  Now expand that idea to the class system in the U.S. as a whole and its various components.  Privilege – it’s not always what you’re told.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left:  “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers Again,” “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence,” “McMindfulness,” “Giants – the Global Power Elite,” “The Happiness Industry.” 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

We’re open 1-5 PM due to CoVid. Due to crime, knock if the door is locked.

Red Frog

February 2, 2021

Next Time You Get Stuck Having to Say Grace...

 Workers Grace

If you’re tired of religious ‘graces’ before a meal, here is one that is secular and pro-labor, starting with a simple part my Ma used to say. Why it is called a ‘grace’ is beyond me.  Anyone can adapt the idea of course.

The Workers’ Grace

For this Food which We are About to Receive, Let us be Duly Thankful …

To the farmers and farm workers who seeded the crops,

To the sun, rain and soil which grew the food,

To the farm workers who harvested it,

To the production workers who processed it,

To the truck drivers and teamsters who transported it,

To the wholesale and retail workers who organized it,

To the family members who worked to buy it,

To the family members who also grew it,

To the family members who cooked it.

 And …

To the mechanics who built the machinery and tools,

To the auto workers who built the vehicles,

To the construction workers who built the stores,

To the metal workers who built the appliances,

To the steel and ceramic workers who made the plates, knives and forks,

To the woodworkers who made the dinner table and chairs,

To the clothing workers who made our clothes,

To the nurses and doctors who keep us healthy enough to eat,

To the teachers who helped us gain knowledge,

To the construction workers who built our housing.

 And …

To the earth for providing the minerals,

To the miners who dug the soil,

To the trees which provided the table and chairs,

To the lumberjacks and mill workers who cut the wood,

To the power plant workers who keep the lights on,

To the designers, engineers and scientists who had a hand,

To the earth for providing the seeds,

To the bugs, bees, birds, bacteria and worms for fertilization,

To the air for… well, the rest.

 And …

To 'Saint' Karl. 

For, as he said in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,

Labor and Nature are the sources of all wealth.

Let’s eat!

Red Frog

January 31, 2021

Country Mouse or Hidden Dragon?

 “White Tiger,” film directed by Ramin Bahrani, 2021

This white tiger is no Slumdog Millionaire.  There are no lucky breaks on TV here.  This is a different kind of Horatio Alger story. Nor is anyone optimistically selling aging Brits on a run-down retirement home in Rajasthan.  Balram’s a broke but clever country mouse from rural India who travels to Delhi and talks his way into becoming the #2 driver for a wealthy family. Even though this same family of masters loots his village, repeatedly, taking 1/3^rd of the rupees the destitute village earns.  This “most holy of the landlords” includes a young son and his American wife.  These two aren’t as crude and backward as the father and other brother, the Mongoose, but eventually they are shown to be no different.  Ah, rich young liberals…

Driving the Nice Masters

Balram knows “not to be a poor man in a free democracy.”  Not to be a “rooster in a coop” ready to have his head chopped off.  Being a rooster is like the threats high caste masters have against poor, low caste (class) families if their employees or servants go astray.  To become less of a poor man, Balram pulls a Parasite and gets the #1 driver fired.  And what a ‘free democracy’ it is!  The central transactions in the film involve bribes paid to politicians, including ‘The Great Socialist,’ a female taking millions of rupees from the wealthy so they can avoid taxes on their profits.  She is probably a member of the Congress Party.  (This is 2007.) 

The film is narrated by Balram as a letter to Chinese Premier Jingtao, a ‘Naxalite” visiting India and Bangalore.  It is from the point of view of Balram’s newfound success and his poverty-stricken background.  He narrates his hatred for the masters and his abandonment of his stultifying family.  He knows “There is no Servant without a Master” and he’s made his choice in a society that only contains both.

The key event is like something out of Bonfire of the Vanities, the death of an innocent poor man Balram the servant is forced to take the blame for.  Like the Peaky Blinders, money, not justice, is the payment for manslaughter.  Balram takes his revenge on the master and becomes the white tiger in this social jungle.  By the way, white tigers are heavier and larger than normal Bengals.  In reality, many are cruelly locked in zoo cages – they never escape ‘the rooster coop.’

Indian Farmers, low caste and not, rebel

This is a film of caste rebellion, of class rebellion, of a virtual slave’s rebellion, but only on an individual level and eventually not even that.  It is a singular reflection of the conflict that is going on in the rest of India.  Balram joins the masters, trying to be a good one, as he knows “crime or politics” is the only way to the top.  Thinking about Premier Jintao, he says now is the time of the “brown and yellow man,” no longer the time of the white man.  Perhaps a statement of the rising Indian bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie.  The only penalty is the retribution murders of 17 in a small village in northern India, his own extended family. 

This film is based on the 2008 Booker Prize novel by Aravind Adiga, who also wrote Last Man in Tower, another political book about gentrification in Mumbai.  Adiga also wrote Between the Assassinations, a fragmented book set in Bangalore which is not as good as White Tiger.   

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: Last Man in Tower (Adiga); Walking With the Comrades, Field Notes on Democracy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Capitalism a Ghost Story (all by Roy); The God Market; Celebrate Indian Women; Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar/Roy); Arundhati Roy; Behind the Beautiful Forevers; The Story of My Assassins; Factory Days or type “India”.

The Kulture Kommissar

January 25, 2021