Watching the Detectives

 “Trapped” and Detective Series in General…

If you watch enough detective series – or are encouraged to watch them by your partner – you will see certain patterns, almost like a long ‘pick and choose’ list of conventions tacked to the wall in a writers’ conference room come to life.  Trapped is a series set in Iceland with two seasons on Amazon Prime.   While generally believable, the characters likable – especially the lead bear-like detective Andri – the setting exotic for most, the artifice wears thin.

Andri and Hinrika in "Trapped."

One of the leading staples of the genre is the angry, stupid or obnoxious teen-aged daughter.  Season Two has this is spades. Andri's daughter Thorhildur seems to have a grudge about nothing. And, per usual, the kids soon learn the rules of reality as they are put in jeopardy. Another staple is that the lead detective has a bad home-life or better yet, is divorced.  He’s got a job to do!  In this case Andri is divorced and even lives at his ex-wife’s parent’s house for awhile, like some sad, temporarily homeless man.

Then there is the exotic location, which provides a vicarious tourist jolt for those who go nowhere.  Who wants to have a murder happen in your boring back yard? Usually it is in a small town or city where in reality, no murders would ever happen.  But in Nordic detective series and others, killings are routine in these places - even if the motives seem especially weak, as it does here.  The small fishing port in Trapped, Siglufjörður, is in the far north of Iceland, nestled in a fjord with mountains, sheep farms, rattle-trap fishing boats and snow.  The weather is also malevolent, as a storm isolates the town in the first season.  The town becomes the murder capital of Iceland, much to the consternation of the fictional residents.

Another thing that happens time and time again is that everyone who talks to a cop on these shows lies or hides something.  And it is always obvious to the audience.  Witnesses are many times of no help, busy themselves doing something else as if the cops aren't there.  In Trapped, there are so many secrets, lies and cover-ups, it seems only the police are straight-forward.  Mis or non-communication is standard as well.  The lead detective usually has a somewhat troubled relationship with liquor, his temper or some horrible past event, but he’s always a genius.  Yup.  Andri figures nearly everything out quickly, pays attention to facts, psychology and detail and rarely fucks up.  But he’s running from some failure in Reykjavik, which is why he is the police chief in tiny Siglufjörður for the first season.

In these shows the crime has to be especially gruesome, or the body has to be found in the woods or sea, decomposing or somehow unrecognizable.  Here it is a headless and armless torso.  And in too many shows, it is a woman.  The ‘dead woman’ thing never ends, which is both a reflection of reality and perhaps a suggestion.  Yet these series never deal with male chauvinism or 'femicide.'  The murders in Trapped are especially horrid.  It seems burning to death is a thing that many Icelander’s fear the most. Can’t you just shoot someone?

There are always several red herrings dragged in front of the audience. Most are obvious and eventually the ‘bad guy’ appears at the end, sometimes dropped from the sky to be taken down. But throwing suspicion on as many people as possible is consistent, as everyone seems guilty or stupid in some way.  In this series the perpetrators are neatly caught after 10 episodes, with so many plot twists that the writers themselves have to be laughing in their conference room.  The more convoluted the plot, the more the police seem like geniuses for following through to the end.  Another convention is that people in deadly peril never act like it.  They remain pathetically oblivious and complacent until the criminal shows up with his gun.  And he always does.  “Your life is in danger!”  “Duh... whaaaat?”

Evidently people got tired of murders in the tropics

 Politicians uniformly seem suspicious, as do rich people.  The head cop is many times a bureaucratic obstructionist.  Environmental or political themes play a role if the show is trying to reflect reality. In both Icelandic series I’ve seen (The Cliff is the other...) the environmental issue of building in rural areas was key.  In the first season of Trapped, human smuggling (yes, even in this micro-dot town which somehow has a ferry from Denmark every week) and arson for profit play a role.  In the second season, rural Thor-like fascists, a gay relationship, imported workers and environmental pollution are all involved.  So the shows always have a bit of politics, but the shows never take a position.  The only permanent position is the decency of the police and ‘the law.'

The flood of detective stories and police procedurals from country after country seems to reflect anxiety about the real role of policing in the world.  In reality, many crimes are not solved, though ‘murder’ has one of the best resolution rates in the States according to statistics.  If that is true, other countries might be even better.  Yet every day we watch on TV or the internet police attacking or killing protesters all over the world, or police crimes (especially in the U.S.) being exposed.  But on streaming series they are the most decent and smartest people on the planet. Perhaps in Iceland and other Nordics the police truly are this overly competent - though they didn't solve the murder of Olaf Palme, the biggest murder in recent Swedish history.  Given they have less unequal societies, less violence and less rapacious capitalism, that could be true.  But for those of us in the U.S., these shows are a clear ideological prop to the state.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows” “Bad Cops,” “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “Defund, Disband or Abolish the Police?” “Notes From Minneapolis,” “Who Killed Olaf Palme?” “Detroit,” “Fear of a Black Rebellion,” “It Was Only a Matter of Time,” “The Wire,” “Ferguson Facts,”  or “Viking Economics,” “Independent People,” “The Vikings,” “The Cliff,” “Redbreast,” “Bordertown.”  

The Cultural Marxist

March 14, 2021   

College Library Browsing #3

 “Class – the New Critical Idiom,”by Gary Day, 2001

(This is the third in a series of 4 looking at purely academic books, as I’ve run out of books by public intellectuals or left authors.)

The title is somewhat of a joke, as the concept of ‘class’ is several hundred years old.  It refers to the ignoring of class by bourgeois politics and post-modern and corporate academe.  In this book Day does an historical analysis of the development of modern classes in England, bolstered by the literature of the time.  His focus on England starts with the medieval chivalric period, continuing through the English Renaissance using Shakespeare, then to the English Revolution and “Paradise Lost;” the rudimentary capitalism of the 1700s shown by way of Fielding, Defoe, Johnson, Pope and Adam Smith; the Industrial Revolution and Scott and Dickens; to capitalist modernity in its various forms - and then post-modernity.  The latter has been defined as being ‘incredulous over meta-narratives,' which means it doesn't like systemic thinking.  Too bad. 

Day uses the concepts of status, ‘station’ and culture to make more subtle distinctions within class, while highlighting literature as a double-edged sword regarding various stages of English society. It is double-edged in the sense of being both conformist and/or subversive.  In the process of identifying class, he doesn’t use the concepts of "class in itself" and "class for itself," thus making class more invisible in certain periods.  So there is a bit of a wobble in his thinking, especially when he discusses the English Revolution, which set royalty against the rising bourgeoisie, and later in the 1700s when the market began to take hold in England.  He thinks that if the working class is not a majority, then class does not exist – something that E.P. Thompson disagreed with.

While many academic Marxists concentrate on culture, this book uses culture as a background to describe material class in detail.  Under capital the two main classes are those who sell their labor and those who profit from it; those who create surplus value and those who bank or invest it; those who have to work for a living and those who can live off their inheritance, investments or rents.  As Day notes, even in early capitalist times, there were many gradations within each class - different statuses, compensation and skills - with a middle class / petit-bourgeoisie of various ‘stations’ as well.  This has not changed.  Class complexity is actually one of the key sociological difficulties in labor organizing.

DYADS

What are Day’s unique contributions? He sets up similar dyads in the transition from feudal relations to capitalism.  Basic divisions of plebeian and patrician; ‘ploughman’ and nobility; ‘commoner and ‘gentleman;’ debtor and creditor; upper and lower class and labor and capital - like a picture slowly coming into focus.  For language, it is either verbose and rhetorical or plain; words are real or deceptive; there are appearances and then there is reality; there is a separate mind and a separate body.  He links these splits to the growth of the money economy and the division of labor, both which introduced alienation into society and a metabolic split with nature. His examples in literature show the writers grappling with how the money/exchange economy was intruding into the old society of ironclad ‘natural’ roles.  Everything becomes a material transaction.  This was in the transition from land wealth to money wealth, the latter creating the modern concept of individualism.

Day explains how in the 1700s poetic heroic couplets were limited hierarchical forms of poetry imposed even on plebian writers, while the picaresque novel was an expansive and plain look at the wide impact of capital in society, though the earliest portrayals of proletarians was limited to servants. (Upstairs, Downstairs; Downton Abbey!)  The novel is considered the literary form of the bourgeoisie, usually focused on personal /individual /family issues.  This developed into the mainstream bourgeois novel we know today, though film seems to be supplanting it at this point. Day deals with the omnipresent literary topic of chastity, births out of wedlock and illicit love affairs as dire issues related to the retention of property and inheritance - a topic still plumbed.  See the series "Bridgerton" for this.

THE PROLETARIAN CLASS APPEARS IN FORCE

In the 1800s class becomes prominent as the aristocracy and the capitalist class joined hands in various ways.  Engels writes of the English proletariat and Tom Paine manifestos for them, while others – Walter Scott or the Romantics – dream of a long-lost medieval English isle or a time before machines. This reactionary yearning for medievalism or deep ecology is with us even today. The reverberations of the French Revolution in the 1790s in England increased English government and business oppression but also class cohesion and understanding.  Chartist proletarian writers attempted to propel working-class political rights like voting, but they still accepted capitalism. Attempts by writers like Dickens to emphasize the humanity of both rich and poor ignored the economic and unequal nature of their actual relation.  As if both were stranded on a desert isle with no hope of escape! This is part of the ongoing failure of humanism as an ideology.  The beginning leisure industry promoted crude and conformist music hall fare among workers while the aesthetic movement promoted pleasure for the upper classes.  As Marx pointed out the commodity form must be obscured, so Day thinks these examples show there is an inherent bias in capitalism against clear representation. Diversion, misrepresentation, misdirection and invisibility are those tools.

MODERNISM

Day sees the advent of modernism in the 1900s to be mostly about raising form over content; separating itself from ‘the masses’ as ‘high’ culture, and concentrating on the individual, all steps away from the naturalistic/realist model of writing and more proletarian ways of thinking.  He cites T.S. Eliot, Virginia Wolff and E.M. Forster as evidence.  This is part of how the abstract money and exchange economy intruded into literature, reflecting the capitalist division between mental and physical labor, promoting a dynamic away from a class understanding by writers who more and more identified as purely 'mental.'

Day reviews some English proletarian writing and films in the 20^th Century, citing Robert Tressell’s “Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” and a few proletarian novels and films of the 1930s – though none challenged the class structure.  On the other hand Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” explained the passivity of the working class due to its conditions of life.  In the ‘50s and ‘60s the middle class grew, blue collar jobs declined and new industries emerged.  Instead of class solidarity, the focus for culture and politics became working class culture and its unique consumerism.

Like many British leftists, Day’s idea of the working class is limited to blue collar work, not white or 'pink' collar or retail workers.  Day undermines the myth that British workers were becoming middle class as statistically untrue; and illustrates how the made-up Thatcherite term of "underclass" was intentionally deceptive.  The culture industry emerges fully during this period as a pacification program, but Day points out that workers, especially young ones, don’t kowtow to this hegemony automatically, even making end-runs around it.  Day ends with a discussion of anti-class methods like post-structuralism and "micro-struggles" and micro-aggressions.

This book is an excellent example of how class influences culture, especially writing, but also delves into the vagaries of class stratification.  It could be valuable for writers, historians and Marxist sociologists, but with limited use to anyone else.

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left:  “Citizen Tom Paine,” “The Young Karl Marx,” “Factory Days,” "Chavs" or words like “Engels” or phrases like ‘proletarian literature,’ ‘proletarian fiction’ or ‘working class literature.’

And I got it at the University of Georgia Library!

The Kulture Kommissar

March 10, 2021            

College Library Browsing #2

 “Marxist Criticism of the Bible,” by Roland Boer, 2003

(This is the second in a series of 4 looking at purely academic books, as I’ve run out of books by public intellectuals or left authors.) 

This book is not so much an atheist take-down as a historical materialist analysis of the real roots of the Bible.  Boer focuses on ‘mode of production,’ which is key in understanding the Bible and how and why it was written.  He also uses the methods of a number of more modern Marxist thinkers – Althusser, Gramsci, Eagleton, Lefebrvre, Lukacs, Bloch, Adorno, Jameson and Benjamin – to penetrate various ‘books’ of the Bible. 

This is a book for specialists or those deeply knowledgeable of the Bible itself. I am only concerned with one ‘book’ – “The Book of Daniel” – otherwise known as Revelations.  It ends the ‘new’ Testament, a part of the Bible seen by liberal regligionists as less cruel, less misogynist, less bloodthirsty, less weird and less backward than the ‘old’ Testament. Yet it is what you might call the bloodiest book of all.  I’d call it a pretty incredible revenge fantasy.  Holy shit!

Revelations concerns the apocalypse or ‘Armaged’don’, which in Greek, (apokálypsis) is the ‘unveiling,’ ‘uncovering’ or revelation of what is to come when Christ returns.  This apocalypse is supposed to be a positive thing.  But it involves the ‘whore of Babylon,’ the 4 Horsemen – power, war, famine and death; a Beast, dragons, locusts, the Mark of the Devil – 666, stars falling to earth, the moon turning blood red, poisoned waters and islands flying away.  Then there are the 7 plagues – 1. sores on human bodies, 2. the death of everything in the sea, 3. river waters all turning into blood, 4. a scorching sun, 5. endless darkness, 6. a drying-up of the Euphrates 7. a massive earthquake and hailstones.  Then there is “blood as high as a horse’s bridle,” a third of mankind dead and Christ and angels with sickles hacking humans down.  This evidently leaves 144, 000 chosen ones from the ‘tribes of Israel’, which is where the Armageddon cult Jehovah's Witnesses get their heavenly limitation.

Boer looks at this creepy fever-dream through the lens of Walter Benjamin, an atheist who thought that Biblical language is some kind of ‘basic’ return to the roots of language, to the original ‘naming’ of things in the misty past.  Boer doesn’t think so.  He understands Revelations to be a ‘closed system’ of allegorical thought, dominated by the sacred Yahweh (God).  Revelations itself combines myth and historical names without any real ability to parse one from another.  In it a religious apocalypse is supposed to ‘end time.’  Revelations says “I am the First and the Last … the Alpha and Omega.” Marxists understand that, like Fukuyama’s failed ‘end of history,’ history and time actually never stop.    

Hieronymous Bosch?  The Bible's hell on 'earth'

Material Roots

Who is the all-encompassing Yahweh in this historical world?  Boer likens him to the ruling despot of Marx’s ‘Asiatic mode of production,’ dominating an empire through cruel military force, with ‘the sacred’ as the overwhelming cultural power binding his empire together.  The ‘Asiatic’ form of production involved tribute paid by vassal states, and tribute (somewhat like taxes…) paid by peasants and a few traders to those vassals in exchange for some protection.  When an empire got too large, smaller kingdoms would revolt and break off, which accounts for the many conflicts mentioned in the Bible. Boer thinks Revelations might be written as ‘code’ by possible insurrectionists or rebels against an oppressive king or kingdom, using symbols and metaphors instead of naming names.  Their anger is wrought large in a violent and fantastic revenge parable of eventual triumph.  Sound familiar?

Mode of production is key to any understanding of society and even literary texts like the Bible, wrapped in Yahweh as it is.  It relates to how humans survived at that time in history – how they obtained food, clothing, shelter, protection, solidarity, children and family, etc.  Boer himself practices a text-dense look at the Bible and notes a huge gap – the frequently missing role of women and childbirth, which makes sense in a patriarchal society. 

Boer goes over other Marxists’ various versions of Marx and Engel’s “Asiatic” mode of production in the Bible and Palestine at the time.  Some think production was a combination of the ancient (slave) and Asiatic forms of production; some a patron/client system; others see early Palestine as a more collective ‘communitarian’ economy among ‘tributary’ states; others see it as Neolithic and ‘kinship’ based.  Obviously some have objections to the name, which is old-fashioned.  Boer himself looks at each ‘mode of production’ and sees smaller ‘regimes of production’ within it – derived from what academics weirdly call ‘regulation theory.”  Regulation theory involves “regimes of allocation or distribution” within a mode of production.  In the case of Biblical time the allocation or distribution is of male sons, of land, of tribute, of the war machine and lastly, corvee labor given to the rulers.  According to Boer these were the various bases for the Biblical economy, all dominated by Yahweh, by ‘the sacred’ as the dominant ideology.  After all, the temples also housed treasure.  They were the ‘banks’ for the ruling theocratic elite.

This is another academic book with limited use except to specialists, but which shows the breadth and depth of applying the historical materialist method to any text, even the Bible, in order to demystify and reveal.

 P.S. - The 'death' count in the Bible decreed by God was counted by Steve Wells.  He counted 2.82 million verified dead and estimated 24.99M estimated dead.  Bloodiest work of fiction ever!

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Da Vinci Code’ (Brown); “God is Not Great” (Hitchens); “The Dark Side of Christian History,” “The Rise of the Nones,” “To Serve God and Wal-Mart,”  “Religulous” (Maher); “Go Tell it on the Mountain” (Baldwin); “The Jesus Comics,” “Jude the Obscure” (Hardy).

And I got it at the University of Georgia Library

The Cultural Marxist

March 6, 2021                   

College Library Browsing #1

 “The Emotional Logic of Capitalism,” by Martijn Konings, 2015

(This is the first in a series of 4 looking at purely academic books, as I’ve run out of books by public intellectuals or left authors.) 

Quite an intriguing title.  But it should have been called “The Iconic Logic of Money” – as book titles are not always what they seem.  The first two-thirds of this overly academic book is a semiotic quote-party that argues against a ‘progressive’ yet elite approach to money by liberals, left-liberals and especially left economist Karl Polyani. Yet it wishes to not just be critical, but to go beyond criticism. It does not.  Konings essential point is that ‘money’ has two faces: one, the practical; two, the ‘iconic’ - emotional, religious and moralistic.    

The last third attempts to discuss the real world; and hopefully ‘show’ the other side of money.  His point is that you cannot just ‘denounce’ money, you have to understand its socio-political implications, as money is unavoidable.  Neo-liberalism celebrates money.  ‘Progressivism’ instead has an external, technocratic and paternalistic approach to money according to Konings.  He insists this was expressed in the New Deal – without noting that nearly all of the New Deal came from below, from social movements.  It was not just a technocratic capitalist fix.  Nor did it eventually succeed until the command economy of World War II.  Konings points to ‘revolving credit’ as the new lifeline thrown to workers by the banking industry in the 1950s, enabled by Keynesian progressives.  (What ‘progressive’ even means at this point is debatable – a word now stolen by the worst right-wing Democrats.)

"MONEY, MONEY, THAT'S WHAT I WANT"

Neo-liberalism (and capitalism) celebrates money.  While Koenigs does not say it clearly I imagine he’s talking about it’s ‘emotional value’ consisting of proof of strong character, of morality in paying your debts and close to a religion in the Protestant prosperity doctrine.  He's not talking about it as objectively necessary in a capitalist economy.  Konings, in his discussion of the individualist ‘self-help’ and ‘boot-strap’ movement, does a timid Zizek by mentioning Oprah and Dr. Phil as gurus of self-help.  He also mentions the Tea Party and monetarism, trying to juice up his point. 

Konings never succeeds.  He, like so many, orients to other academics, unlike public intellectuals who seek to have a more direct effect on society.  Except for one or two lines, he does not show how money has become more than just cash - which certainly would have been valuable.  Konings’ analysis of the Tea Party (and Trumpism by extension…) is that money is “redemptive” and relating to it and pursuing it shows “moral strength” and results in “spiritual salvation.” He comes out in support of a certain kind of ‘anti-economist’ Marxism as the solution to Polyani, (I love that dodge about ‘economism’…) but never illustrates it sociologically or shows how to combat a moralistic attitude towards making money.

Prosperity Gospel - "Good" moral people have money.

MONEY and the CLASS STRUGGLE

Marx saw money as an embodiment of labor, a commodity of a unique kind, a consequence of labor power (and natural) productivity, vitalizing the law of value.  Under capital money is mainly a medium of circulation, realizing prices in sales and purchases, in which use value turns into exchange value.  But it also becomes ‘fictitious’ when ‘money makes money+’ on stock markets due to financialization - leaving labor far behind. It has other roles too.

How much money there is left for laboring persons (wages, salaries) is the result of the class struggle between labor and capital in the settings of production.  The rub here is that ‘hard work’ or ‘smarts’ do not define the possession of money.  One look at the millionaires, billionaires, inheritances, bourgeois law and a capitalist government shows that. Small businessmen are at the heart of the Tea Party/ Republican Party/ Trumpist right and they wish to ALSO join the rich man’s club.  They dream of being the heroic entrepreneur who eventually can sit around his/her pool all day while his/her workers’ work - that is the real ‘American dream.’  But the overwhelming majority never establish a successful business – some 85% after 1.75 years fail according to the IRS.  ‘They’ are a target for Marxism and a programmatic strategy oriented towards the difficulties of small farmers and business people with the large capitalists.  But that would be something more than Konigs can offer.  Certainly the fascists are working that group right now from their own anti-communist perspective.   

SOCIOLOGY PLEASE?

Konings considers money to be ‘both’ utilitarian and iconic.  However its ‘iconic’ status, loaded with emotional meaning, would not exist without its utilitarian role.  If money became less and less important providing the essentials of life in a socialized society – health care, education, transport, housing, food, clothing, etc. – its emotional impact would also decrease.  This is just basic materialism.  A sociological look at money’s role in the workers’ states in the past or in current Cuba, Vietnam or the social-democratic Nordics might shed light on this issue.  I know in pre-1989 Hungary few had much money, so many worked more jobs.  But at the same time ‘class envy’ had almost disappeared, inequality was low and the pace of labor had become more relaxed. 

The problem for Marxists is that most people at present will not voluntarily disrupt their ‘money’ in order to overthrow the existing capitalist order. Workers and proletarians without much wealth can feel this way unless a somewhat solid alternative is beckoning.  This is the ‘secret’ ingredient of stasis, very incremental change and resistance to transitional, major changes.  Pragmatists, unlike revolutionaries, won’t abandon a boat unless it is sinking and there is a real boat coming into view.  Well, the first boat is slowly taking on water.  This understanding of a sinking boat has become generalized knowledge.  Major transitional change and even revolutionary change are not such 'silly' ideas anymore.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Debt”(Graeber); “The Deficit Myth,” “How to Rob an Armored Car,” “Debt & Capital,” “House of Cards,” “The Big Short,” “Liar’s Poker” (all 3 by Lewis); “The Wolf of Wall Street”(Scorsese), “The Great Crash” (Galbraith).

And I got it at the University of Georgia library!

Red Frog

March 3, 2021

Waiting for the Vaccine Connection

 CoVideo Nation - II

“The Assistant,” – The best film on working as an executive assistant I’ve seen. (After all, how many are there? One?)  A young college grad gets a high-stress entry-level position at a film production firm in New York.  The film, covering one long day, goes into the many details of how she is ignored and dissed.  She works almost as a personal servant for the rest of the staff and her especially terrifying boss. I’ve done many of these things, so I know how true they are.

This is a reflection of the Harvey Weinstein sex abuse story, so the best scene is the stomach-churning visit to HR.  HR is not your friend, now a cliché for white collar workers but might be news to some. The lead actress also appeared in Ozark as Ruth.

“I Care A Lot,” – The best film on the corruption of the ‘guardianship’ business I’ve seen. (There are no others...)  Guardianship is a business in the U.S. While the film is over the top, it depicts a ruthless guardian intent on soaking her vulnerable elderly wards, then going toe-to-toe with a ruthless gangster who wants his mother back.  Ordinary people in a complex legal situation like guardianship will many times be snowed or not aware of what is really going on. This film works as a wake-up call or warning.   

Small scale capital and crime, hand in hand.  All it takes is a corrupt doctor, a money-grubbing guardian, a creepy nursing home and a compliant and clueless judge.  Not to mention bad law.  Sort of a modern version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Cloud Atlas. It also takes a hard poke at neo-liberal GLBT / feminist ‘woman-power’ capitalism.

“Leah Remini:  Scientology and the Aftermath” – the best series on the Scientology cult...  Remini, an actress and former Scientologist, works with another former Scientologist, Mike Rinder.  They take the cult apart, episode by episode.  Full of tear-jerking personal stories about child and personal abuse, mind control, bizarre building programs, weird archives and very weird ideas, soaking members for money, locking miscreants up in their private prisons and legal abuse, it is an eye-opener – especially the episode about Scientology’s work with the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan and one about the Armageddon cult Jehovah's Witnesses.

Worst of all is the seeming impunity of Scientology from the FBI, the IRS, local judges or police and sometimes the media.  They are either intimidated by Scientology's vicious legal and harassment approach or couldn’t care less.  The example of Clearwater, FL says it all, as Scientology took over the city's downtown. It is similar to recent documentaries on the Oregon Rajneeshis, the Bikram “Hot Yoga” guru or the film "Orthodox" about an ex-Hassidic woman.

“John Oliver – Meatpacking,” – Research like this by Oliver’s crew is one reason he stands head and shoulders above neo-liberal libertarian comics like Bill Maher.  In it he goes into great detail on the treatment of poultry, pork and cattle workers in slaughter-houses.  He discusses how the big producers like Tyson ignored CoVid, so thousands were infected and dozens died.  He looks into the weakening of OSHA standards by the industry; the ridiculous small fines levied by the government; the hiding of injuries at the plants; the vicious line speeds.

Most of these workers are immigrants, former prisoners and vulnerable minorities unable to protest – without unions or decent pay.  Like a modern day Jungle, this story has been done before, where humans and animals are both meat. It seems with the recent approval of the nasty corporatist Tom Vilsack as Ag Secretary, nothing changes.  No wonder rural areas are in such a mess, dominated by corrupt corporations hand in hand with both parties.

“United States vs. Billie Holiday” – a story of the harassment of Billie Holiday by the FBI and Frank Anslinger, the originator of the U.S. drug war.  The FBI wanted to stop her singing the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” and so decided to harass and jail her for heroin use.  Anslinger originally pitched the drug war as a racist and later political project and this film shows how that worked out in her case.

The wandering, overly-long film looks at Holiday’s history of physical abuse, drug use, tours and concerts with musicians like Lester Young and individual fights against racism in the context of a fake romance with an FBI agent(!)  The loss of her cabaret performer’s license, prompted by the FBI, led to a long decline and her death from alcoholism and heart disease. The FBI attempted to arrest her even on her death bed.   

“Judas and the Black Messiah” – I haven’t watched it.  Both Louis Proyect at Counterpunch and Akin Ollah at the Guardian point to different significant flaws in the film, even while it pinions the FBI and Hoover as murderers.  (Why is it that it always takes 50+ years to recognize some crime by the state or a corporation while at the time the truth is suppressed yet obvious?) The FBI have always been a 'political police' and they still are.  Hampton, like many before him, is being sanitized by the controllers of culture.  One point made in the reviews is the weakness of the Panthers’ adventurism and distance from organized workers; and two, it leaves out their tough anti-capitalist Maoist politics.  The sanitation squad is at work still.

Counterpunch on J&tBM  Guardian on J&tBM

Epilog:  Have you noticed how many movies about slavery, Jim Crow and now black radicalism have popped up in the last few years?  Unfortunately most of the films have a 'liberal' slant that guts them, fitting them neatly into a liberal schema.  Also, why are so many lead 'black' actors in these films Afro-Caribbean or British?  Fred Hampton?  MLK?  We know the answer.  Then we might wonder why Latino people are still invisible in Hollywood.  And don't get me started about invisible working class people, Nomadland notwithstanding.

Prior blog reviews on these subjects, use blog search box, upper left:  White Knight, Mean Girl, The Handmaid’s Tale, Bullshit Jobs, Ideation, Missoula, The Jungle, Manny’s Steakhouse, Vegan Freak, Archaic Thanksgiving, The Emotional Lives of Animals, Black Panther, FBI Secrets, Lost Connections or words like Malcolm X, MLK, Kennedy.

The Cultural Marxist

February 26, 2021

 

Treading a Fine Line

 “History and Class Consciousness – Studies in Marxist Dialectics” by Georg Lukács. (1971 English translation with a 1967 preface by the author.)

This is a ‘non-review.’  Sometimes you come across a book that is partly or mostly impenetrable.  One great thing about Marxism is that it brings ‘philosophy’ down to earth, demolishing various intellectual ‘castles in the air’ constructed of words and not much else.  Lukács, especially in a long, central essay here called “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” shows his mastery of bourgeois philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Spinoza, etc.  For the life of me I can barely follow this essay.  I do not have a deep background in Kant or Hegel because I never thought it useful.  I've forgotten what I knew about their terminology.  I am unworthy!  Others I’ve talked to in the Marxist Discussion Group on FB have had much the same experience. 

These essays were written between 1918 and 1922. Lukacs was the People’s Commissar for Culture and Education in the Hungarian Council Republic of 1919.  After the Horthyite counter-revolution succeeded, he fled to Vienna.  In the 1930s while visiting the USSR for a second time, he was sent into internal exile by Stalin.  Bela Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Council Republic, was executed for ‘Trotskyism,’ along with many other Hungarian émigrés.  Kun was a follower of Zinoviev according to Lukács.  He had differences with Kun which is perhaps why he survived.

Soviet troops occupied Budapest in 1945 after crushing the Nazis and Arrow Cross and Lukács returned to Hungary.  In 1955 he was appointed head of the Hungarian Writers Union and in 1956 he became a minister in Imre Nagy’s socialist but anti-USSR government.  When that was overthrown by Warsaw bloc tanks he was deported to Romania by the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party. He later returned to Budapest and became a somewhat loyal member of the Party until his death in 1971.  At the same time, he knew Stalin was ‘not a Marxist.’ “The bureaucracy generated by Stalinism is a tremendous evil” he said. Yet he adopted some of the language of that strata, perhaps to stay unmolested or perhaps because he believed it.  I've been told the Party could not get rid of him because he knew more Marxism than they did.  Lukács actual record vacillates with the pressure of events as he walked a fine line. 

Lukács was one of the most prominent intellectuals in Hungary and a leading philosophy professor.  His apartment and extensive archive in an apartment block on the banks of the Danube was closed by the Viktor Orban government and the manuscripts ‘taken.’  Orban was one of the student leaders of the Hungarian counter-revolution in ‘89, shouting about ‘freedom.’  Since his election Orban has imposed an authoritarian capitalist regime in Hungary - virulently anti-communist, nationalist, Catholic and money-grubbing.

Republic of Councils in Hungary - 1919

The book has a long 1967 preface written by Lukács which makes self-critical apologies while also illuminating his relations with various other Marxists.  Lukács apologizes for ‘messianic utopianism;’ an ‘abstract and idealist conception of praxis;’ ‘overriding the priority of economics’ and says that ‘those parts of the book that I regard as theoretically false…have been most influential.” This was not his first self-criticism by the way.  He says the essays are “his road to Marx,” as prior to this he was a neo-Kantian and then an existentialist.

This explains why the book is mostly a Marxist argument against idealist philosophy, as well as against reformism.  Parts of his works were criticized by Lenin and Zinoviev in the 1920s.  As a literary theorist, his later work supported Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Walter Scott and ‘realist’ bourgeois literature against modernism like Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, etc. This led to his support of socialist realism – that and pressure from the Party, that is.

Here are my gleanings of relevant points made in the book:

1.     Marxism and the proletariat take up society as a totality, while bourgeois thought cannot and will not do that.

2.     Facts are important, but processes / tendencies are key.  Until facts synthesize into a pattern, they remain isolated.

3.     Labor is a decisive economic force, so when labor is ready to take power, it is unnecessary to wait for the ‘development of the productive forces’ as claimed by what Lukács calls ‘vulgar Marxists.’

4.     Violence is inevitable in the change from capital to socialization, just as it was in the change from feudal relations to capital relations.  I.E. ‘the state’ is not something to take over, but to overcome.

5.     ‘Reification’ is his word for alienation.  He was one of the first to concentrate on alienation.

6.     He argues against both the ‘romanticism of illegality’ and the ‘cretinism of legality.’

7.     He supports and criticizes various positions by Luxemburg.  He was against her very odd support for a Russian “Constituent Assembly’ over and against soviets.  He also polemicizes against her opposition to the role of a party or ‘organization.’ At the same time he praises her for her analysis of imperialism and the limitations of capital accumulation. 

8.     The ‘peasant question’ bedeviled the first Hungarian Council Republic and also Luxemburg – both basically didn’t know how to handle the revolution in the countryside.

9.     Orthodox Marxism is a method, not a ‘belief.’ Defeats are preludes to victory.

10.  “In pre-capitalist societies of castes and estates … economic elements are inextricably joined to political and religious factors.”

11.   “Status consciousness … masks class consciousness.”

12.   “One of the elementary rules of class warfare was to advance beyond what was immediately given.”

13.   “Every proletarian revolution has created workers’ councils.”

14.   “The factory…contained in concentrated form the whole structure of capitalist society.”

15.   He even makes fun of journalists’ ‘lack of convictions.’

16.  Unsold overstock hides in every store and is an example of overproduction. (Check the stores you visit.)

17. “Organization is the mediation between theory and practice.”

18.   He indicates that loose opportunist organizations with hardened leadership groups will downgrade theory because they tail the masses.  On the other hand, he thinks sectarianism arises when the views of even the most backward workers are not taken into account.

Lukács discusses dialectics and historical materialism, Luxemburg and Leninism, philosophy and party organization in these essays.  Much of it is a familiar polemic against enemies of revolution and Bolshevism, and as such a bit dated.  He makes almost no open comment on the events of the Hungarian Council Republic, which is quite odd given his experience and theoretical grasp.  He opposed the concept of ‘human nature,’ unlike Marx and Engels, seeing human nature as purely a social product.  His focus on alienation and culture became important for later ‘western’ Marxists. 

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “All Power to the Councils,” “The Marxist Theory of Art,” “The Structural Crisis of Capital”(Meszaros); “Marx and Human Nature,” “The Ghost of Stalin”(Sartre) or the word “Hungary.” 

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

Red Frog

February 24, 2021