The Techno-Cornucopia Vanishes

“Civilization Critical – Energy, Food, Nature and the Future,” by Darrin Qualman, 2019

This is a systems’ analysis of how the natural world works and how present capitalist civilization is breaking every logical natural link, leading to disaster.  Without a theory any understanding is limited and flawed and Qualman has a theory.  Qualman’s background as a farmer in Alberta, Canada gives him a real-world understanding of how nature functions.  He also delves into the past to understand how pre-industrial society existed.  Qualman has massive data backing up his ideas and pounds them into the readers head.  Basically, Qualman makes the familiar point that a closed circular system like earth cannot afford open-ended and unending linear growth. 

Politically, Qualman is not a socialist and carefully couches solutions in vague reformist political terms, as his real focus is on natural laws.  He doesn’t brand capitalism as the enemy but instead calls it ‘eCivilization.’  Because of this he seems to be a technological determinist, divorcing technology from economics, but denies that.  He does not mention global warming’s ‘Great Acceleration’ right after World War II around 1946, as he identifies human interference in nature with the beginnings of the industrial age, citing 1850 as a crucial year.  In the process his tiny chart lines muddy the dates.  The book ‘seems’ to come off as deep nature ecology, harking back to a romantic time before machines, before coal, railroads, steam engines, shafts and tractors.  At the end he does not recommend returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle at all.  The book’s understanding of soil is incomplete, not mentioning agroecology or soil fertility except in passing.  He cites Marxists Fred Magdoff and J.B. Foster in his Acknowledgements, but also uses the term ‘communist dictators’ like some cold-war scribe.

Biological Systems Analysis:

I’m going bullet-point some of his excellent insights, as they can be of great value in constructing an actually sustainable socialism.

1.            The natural world is a circular system, not a linear one.  eCivilization runs as a linear system.  Everything that comes in and goes out must also return in a biogeochemical cyclic system.  In other words recycling is not just a ‘nice thing to do’ but essential to natural functioning.  Human shit (as Marx noted) and all natural products have to find their way back into nature, while things that cannot be recycled or only pretend to be recycled (plastics, cell phones, etc.) break the cycle.  Putting things in landfills short-circuits recycling. 

2.           eCivilization actually ‘decycles’ not recycles. 

3.           The world runs on sunlight.  Photosynthesis is the basis for nearly all processes, primarily food production but also gas, oil and coal. 

4.            An extensive carbon-energy eCivilization ruins the future and reaches into the far past to literally fuel the present. 

5.           Externalities are ignored and un-priced in a linear system.  They are ‘free’ - out of sight, out of mind, until no longer able to be ignored.

6.            Artificial fertilizers deplete the soil and ruin water, creating dead zones, ocean acidification and toxic tides, releasing global warming nitrogen, while made using natural gas and emitting methane. 

7.            eCivilization speeds up time in one direction, while the biosphere operates at a certain slow pace.

8.           Species destruction is a direct result of habitat destruction.  Habitats are being destroyed on a daily basis in the interests of growth.

9.           GDP is a false way of understanding progress.  It combines desirable and undesirable / useless economic inputs while ignoring externalities.  Yet capitalist governments and markets all worship GDP and growth.

10.       Negative feedback loops that balance functioning have been removed and only positive feedback loops are preferred, leading to non-stop acceleration.

11.       Unelected capitalists and bureaucrats are actually in charge of nature, not ‘democratic governance.’

12.        Any economy is a subset of the biosphere.

13.        Social and economic complexity requires more energy.

14.        Most biologic processes are local and many solutions can be local.

15.        Human capital ultimately over-exploits natural capital, as trawler fishing in the Atlantic depleted the cod stock.

16.       The building blocks of any society are bio-chemical – nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, sulfur and water. 

17.        eCivilization is structurally unsustainable, no matter its advertising.  It is also structurally unjust.

18.       Consumerism is unsustainable.

19.       Modern efficiency actually leads to more consumption. (The Jevons paradox.)

20.        In eCivilization simplifying natural webs results in natures’ poverty, aka monocultures, while technologic complexity increases at the same time.

21.       Energy flows through but materials recycle.

Some quotes: 

“Industrial agriculture is a black box to convert fossil fuel energy into edible fuel energy.”  Alternatively the process is: “fossil fuel calories into fertilizer into food calories.”

“8 units of grain production are required to make 1 unit of pork production.”

“In its current form, mass production depends almost as much on the garbage truck as on the assembly line.”

Unending growth and sustainability together are “merely nonsense on stilts.”

“Today machines do 99% of the work and humans do perhaps 1%.”

“To save minutes, we consume eons.”

“Progress, our secular quasi-religion, encourages magical thinking that licenses non-rational activities.” 

“The rising tide that has lifted our boats now threatens to submerge our cities.” 

Solutions:

Qualman’s vague solutions are to ‘limit growth,’ ‘limit sprawl,’ ‘limit extractions and emissions,’ ‘limit interventions into natural cycles’ and instead manage ‘biosphere and business.’ He quite rightly wants any society to function along the lines of science.  His eco-solutions are found in immediate sun-based technologies – solar and wind – wind being created by sun-based heat differences.  Energy-conscious and health conscious agriculture and diets are part of his solution, though he is also vague on this.

On the issue of theory, Qualman ignores the fact that seemingly stable ‘circular’ flows actually change over time too, so circularity is only an approximation.  Dialectical flow is more accurate, combining different values of circular and linear in opposition to each other.

Qualman paints a dire and apocalyptic portrait of the present and the future.  The disconnect between his solutions and his analysis is somewhat ridiculous and represents a huge failure of political understanding.  This may reflect Qualman’s time as a small businessman and independent farmer, which allows him to coddle the profit motive. What is required is quite literally a revolution in society – in theory, in technology, in power and class relations, in economics, in our grasp of nature.  It will not come by half-means, quarter-means or compromise.

Other prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left:  “This Changes Everything” (Klein); “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?,” “Marx and the Earth” and “Ecological Revolution” (both by J.B. Foster); “The Sixth Extinction,” “Ecology & Marxism,” “History of the World in 7 Cheap Things,” “A Redder Shade of Green,” “Stop Tar Sands Oil,” “Tar Sands,” “Climate Emergency,” “Planning Green Growth,” “The Collapse of Western Civilization,” “The Vanishing Face of Gaia,” “The Party’s Over.” 

And I bought it at May Day Books, which has a huge selection of discounted books on the environment from a left-wing point of view. 
Red Frog

January 7, 2020

Stories of Nigeria

“Girls at War and Other Stories,” by Chinua Achebe, 1973

Achebe is in a group of older African novelists well known in the ‘West’ – Amos Tutuola, Ousmane Sembane, Nadine Gordimer, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.  Achebe is probably the most celebrated for his novel Things Fall Apart which details the effects of colonialism on Nigerians and traditional Ibo culture.  The stories in this collection were written over a period of time, some when he was only in secondary school. They show the conflict between ‘modern’ ways of doing things and the cultural reality of most Nigerians.  A few of the stories, including the title one, reflect the Biafran war for independence, where Achebe was Minister of Culture. 

 

For the modern urban reader, these somewhat dated stories smack of many prior and negative African stereotypes.  As such they are a bit sad to read but then they mirror events even in advanced capitalist societies.  These are stories of village and market town life, not of the big Nigerian cities.  People live in huts.  For the rich there are multiple wives.  Palm wine is the local intoxicant.  Two corrupt parties with almost identical acronyms vie for power. Buying votes is de riguer, as no one believes anything much anymore.  White Christian missionaries force their ideas on the locals and some locals take them up. Naked madmen walk the dirt roads.  Those who marry those their family do not like are outcast.  Herbalists, or ‘medicine men’ provide health care, including dumping patients in ‘the bad bush.’  Superstition, magic and terror reign in multiple ways, such as sleeping with ghosts.  One story involves an addiction to a rare substance - sugar.  Schooling is only for the rich.  The village priest is not to be crossed. 

The best stories are the war ones.  One is about a man who luckily gets his bicycle back and is able to make a living after the war.  He is assaulted by thieves who steal a stipend paid by the government, yet carries on because money is not everything.  Another is the title story about a young Biafran woman who joins the armed rebellion, then after a few years ends up as a consort to a rich powerful man just to survive.  It involves another government official who tries to take her under his wing, but also to steal her from the other man.  All ends tragically. 

Prior reviews on African literature and issues below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Famished Road,” “Black Panther,” “Searching for Sugar Man,” “Mandela, Obama, Castro & Kennedy,” “FGM,” “Monsters of the Market,” “American Exceptionalism,” “The Dream of the Celt,” “The Race for What’s Left,” “Last Train to Zona Verde.”

And I bought it a May Day’s excellent used and cut-out section!

The Cultural Marxist

January 3, 2020

The Cranky Yankee Returns

A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump’s Court

Listen up, you dour Minnesotans.  If you ever got out of the state to head south – except to Disney World in Florida – you’d have an idea how different the U.S. South is from the North, and especially from the cold North in Minnesota. A North which is not the 'Midwest,' in spite of our geographically-challenged media.  You can’t discover the world just by looking at documentaries or movies.

Some reflections while driving:

Stone Mountain, GA.  On one side a nice walk up a hill.  On the other...

One thing you start to notice is all the junk on southern freeways – plastic bags, shredded tires, dead animals, dead cars.  It’s no wonder Lady Bird had that “Keep America Beautiful’ program.  She was from Texas.  Those mournful cars, stickered or not, forlorn, left behind in some kind of poverty rapture. There must be stats on broken car to road ratios which closely correlate with low wages and poverty.  In Kentucky they don’t pick up the dead animals, which are shredded beyond recognition over time.  In the North we have groups that volunteer to pick up the garbage – adopt a highway.  Not so much in the South.  I guess they figure their jail gangs will do all the cleaning up for them. If you’ve read Bowling Alone you know the South has fewer social groups beyond family and church.  And it shows.  I did see one courageous young man blue bagging piles of garbage along a Tennessee freeway about every 100 yards.   Lots of bags and that was it.

The majority of the South was built yesterday.  Before the 1960s and the advent of air conditioning, most people didn’t want to boil to death and so the “Sun Belt” stayed sunny and empty except for the people that hadn’t escaped.  Then it changed and they had to build mini-malls, one story chain stores, fast-food joints, parking lots and roads everywhere.  The ranch houses in the woods followed.  They brag about all the northern ‘snow birds’ who come south for the winter.  Well, there are also ‘heat birds’ who go North for the summer.  They don’t talk about them.  It’s not hot in the summer, it’s not!.  (This year was one of the hottest and wettest years in Southern history for Southern cities.)

Subject to hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, killing heat and heavy rains, the South is like a punch drunk Christian Hero if you watch enough of the Weather Channel.  Especially that Dixie alley sky river coming out of the boiling Gulf, stretching across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky.  You can only tell the Weather Channel reporter that “The only important thing is that we're alive” and “Thank God!” once while looking at your decimated home and crushed or flooded pickup.  But twice?!  After that you have to start to wonder.  Granular change … very granular…

Then there is ‘revenge’ driving, a little cousin of road rage.  This usually involves people playing games on freeways by getting in front of you and then driving really slowly.  Repeatedly.  Usually in beat-up cars, because taking your anger out on other people on the freeway beats standing up to the local capitalist.  Did I say that?  I did.  Not to mention the clowns in their jacked-up Silverado’s with airplane light packages on the front of their pickups, blinding everyone, their version of a Monster Truck rodeo.  I suspect the beds of those trucks have never seen a scratch.

You might know of all the factories that have moved or have located in the South.  I’ll just mention auto plants.  In one drive through Alabama I counted 3 plants just off the freeways – Mercedes-Benz, Honda and Hyundai.  VW is in Chattanooga, Tennessee ("We Sign Off..." ad).  Toyota has ones in Kentucky, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, Nissan has them in Tennessee and Mississippi, Kia has one in Georgia, Mazda in Alabama, Volvo and BMW in South Carolina and BMW in Alabama. The foreign capitalists know where the cheap labor can be found! But they are not alone. GM has them in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas.  Ford has them in Missouri and Kentucky.  Fiat-Chrysler is the only one that does not have plants in the South. If you want to know where Detroit went, it mostly went south.

There are no unions in these plants.  2 large recent votes also ‘went south’ for the UAW.  It was not just the opposition of the full range of southern Republican politicians – the modern neo-Confederate factory plantation aristocracy – it was also a split between the more passive and servile workers and the less passive and servile workers.  And I suspect this split is based on gender and color lines.  If you’ve been around middle-aged 'white' male southern workers, they are more servile than in the North, in Minnesota.  A Minnesota worker has some tradition, some dignity, some knowledge that he’s not just a clown or a ‘hand’ or a brown-nose.  Not in the South. Looking up to your betters is big stuff here.  That is because the class and color-caste systems are stronger.

However proletarianization brings forth … proletarians.  Atlanta is home to many large corporations and so attracts labor from the North too. At a bar on North Avenue, the Northside Tavern attracts northern transplants to listen to party blues.  A beautiful blonde in a short dress came down and sat next to me at the bar and we got to talking.  Naturally.  I was wearing a dress jacket and jeans, as I’d come to pick up some friends.  I was not dressed in a NASCAR T-shirt.  At one point she leaned over and said, “Ahm’ pretta sic o’ rednecks…” I had to leave but that little comment tells the tale.  There are granular changes going on, even here.

Spelling Problems.  Jesus is an American Patriot!

This is an area where a Georgia politician can compare Trump to Jesus and the Democrats to Pontius Pilot.  Which tells you that reading more than the Bible might be necessary.  I listened to an hour-long broadcast of Richard Wolff on his Alternative Radio show in southern Illinois around Champagne-Urbana talking about Marxism.  Then I got into Kentucky and the Jesus and anti-abortion billboards, Trump love and monuments to Jefferson Davis accumulated.  An official state park in Fairview, KY celebrates Davis’ birth.  So a note to Joe Biden:  Winning Democratic primaries in most of these states will not help in a general election.  Democrats at their convention might as well ignore them.

Military bases are all over the place.  Most of the bases in the U.S. are located in the South.  I drove by Fort Campbell in Kentucky, Arnold AFB in Tennessee and Dobbins Air Base in Georgia.  Georgia alone has 13 bases. The most notorious is the “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia, home to torture training for Latin American thugs. These federal bases provide a large economic stimulus to the communities they are in, dominated by politicians who want to ‘shrink’ federal dollars to anyone but themselves.  And we wonder why the South provides such political support (and personnel) to endless wars.

I go into a Burger King in Tennessee looking for the vegetarian “Impossible Whopper.”  Sorry, but road food is pretty awful and you have to get your breaks when you can.  The store is run by young people spilling food on the floor, not paying attention to anyone waiting to order, basically horsing around.  In Minnesota you do not see that level of chaos in fast food joints.  It is the little things… I left.
P.S. - Another fun southern statistic - Mostly Southern cities lead the country in eviction rates.  Memphis, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas, Richmond, Charleston - we're looking at you.

Other acerbic takes on the South below, use blog search box upper left:  “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Florida Will Sink,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “May Day in the Southern U.S.,” “The North is Not ‘The Midwest,’” “Monroe, Alabama & To Kill a Mockingjay,” “Go Set a Watchman,” “Selma,” “Meridian.”

The Cranky Yankee

Athens, Georgia

December 31, 2019

Bigger Than Big

“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” by Richard Wright, 1940

This is an obscure lecture on a work of proletarian literature written by Wright, a former Communist Party member.  It is about his most famous book Native Son and its chief protagonist Bigger Thomas.  Native Son was recently redone and modernized as a Netflix film, though the film lacks the power of the original book and also changes the original text.  Native Son is the story of a dark-skinned 20-year old on Chicago’s Southside in the 1930s.  It was one of the first books to lay out the effects of urban racism and poverty and their consequences on darker-skinned people, especially boys.

This lecture starts by explaining it will not deal with the psychological input the author might have had on the book.  Wright says he modeled Bigger after four different kinds of kids he met in the south – all misfits or rebels of one kind or another.  1., a bully, 2., a scammer who hated white people, 3.,a thug and eventual criminal and 4., an unemployed man who hated Jim Crow and was eventually institutionalized.  As Wright thought about it and worked with lighter-skinned writers, he realized that the ‘Bigger’ type was not just limited to African-Americans but included some European-Americans, Russians and even Lenin.  All suffered from a certain kind of extreme alienation from the societies they lived in and who felt apart from them.

Wright’s chief fear was that his honest but negative portrayal of what institutional racism does to young men might further confirm the ideas of the racists.  Why not create an ‘uplifted Negro,’ the middle-class ‘blacks’ asked, the same question even his Communist Party comrades asked.  Wright later left the CP after their attempts to control his writing and failure to work against racism during WWII.  (This story is revealed in a later book American Hunger where he is accused of Trotskyism by the CP.  Among other things, like breaking with 'socialist realism' as the only way to write he had become friends with C.L.R. James of the SWP.)  As he humorously remarks, he had written an earlier book called Uncle Tom’s Children that “even banker’s daughters could weep over and feel good about.”  He wasn’t going to do that again, so he created Bigger, an anti-hero of sorts.

Wright reveals that a rape case in Chicago described in the Chicago Tribune formed a template for much of the Bigger story. Rape in those days was an excuse for the cops to round-up any vulnerable dark-skinned kid and rope him into the crime, according to Wright. The ‘Biggers’ were their target. Unlike the South, Chicago was a monstrous town that accelerated any rebellion like kindling on a low fire.  Native Son is set in urban Chicago in all its crowded, crooked, classist glory, not in the South.

Richard Wright in plaid

Wright calls writing ‘significant living’ – a form of consciousness combining politics, science, experience, memory and imagination.  The first draft was done in 4 months, running above 500 pages, starting with the second scene, as Wright dumped the first.  He used stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, a dream state, then matter-of-fact depictions in his text.  Wright thinks that all serious fiction is “character-destiny” so Native Son became Bigger’s story alone.  Unlike some of his contemporaries, Wright considered the story of African-Americans to be horrible enough to fuel any amount of literature.  Wright ends by saying “If Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror.  Horror would invent him.”  And that horror is racist capitalism.

The speech is published in Early Works, a compendium which includes Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, along with an excellent chronology of Wright’s difficult life.  Wright grew up in a sharecropper family just east of Natchez, MS and moved frequently in the South, then to Chicago and New York  He lived with relatives and worked at every dirty or odd job imaginable, eventually getting hired at the post office for awhile.  In the process he discovered the New Masses, the CP's literature journal, after which he slowly became a full-time writer.

Other prior reviews on anti-racism, Chicago or proletarian literature, use blog search box upper left: “Black Radical,” “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Are Prison’s Obsolete?” “Prison Strike,” “The New Jim Crow,” “Slavery by Another Name,” and “The  Bomb,” “The Rise and Fall of the Dill Pickle Club,” and “Polar Star,” ‘Red Baker,” “Factory Days,” “American Rust,” “Post Office,” “The Football Factory.”

Thanks and a tip of the black beret to Barry L.!

Red Frog

December 26, 2019

Class Struggle Continues...

“China’s New Red Guards – The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong,” by Jude Blanchette, 2019

This is no real return to the Cultural Revolution.  Instead this book details the decades’ long vacillating fight between left, center and right in China after the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’ in the late 1970s and how it has evolved into a battle over Mao Zedong’s legacy.  What passes for the Chinese left has lost every battle since 1978 – over privatization, over peasant land rights and land leasing, over planning, over capitalist membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), over WTO membership, over the spread of private enterprise and banking.  Yet class struggle never dies if a proletariat exists – it is automatically generated by the contradiction. 

 

There are now over 100 billionaires in positions within the CCP and state apparatus.  This ‘reform’ in 2001 by Jiang Zemin was one of the impetuses for the development of a new left that opposed neo-liberalism and class collaborationism.   

Blanchette is a member of a ‘strategic advisory firm’ in Arlington Virginia, so probably peddles his research to everyone.  He gives an historic account of the fight between the dominant neo-liberal wing of the CCP hierarchy and the ‘left’ – which is variously described as New Left, ‘conservative’ Old Left, nationalist or neo-Maoist.  Most of this left is centered in universities, among some Party intellectuals and economists, in small lecture halls and bookstores and on various sites on the internet like Utopia and Maoflag.  The web-sites are widely read, starting when they first accused some Chinese policies and figures of being neo-liberal.  From this reading, these groups have few real ties with the proletariat, except perhaps in the recent Jasic factory struggle. 

Blanchette understands that praising Mao in a political debate in China is a way to get some protection from censorship, jailing, job losses or worse, as Mao and Marxism still have credence in the country’s history and ideology.  So the handling of the various forms of the neo-Maoist left by the top bureaucracy and PLA is nuanced – sometimes involving repression and sometimes promotion.  The centrists actually use the left to give themselves a role as a balance. Xi Jinping uses them to promote the CCP and national greatness.  Others are jailed. Marxists openly advocating Chinese Trotskyist perspectives on the other hand would be immediately arrested and perhaps shot.

Blanchette points out that there is now a split in the neo-Maoist left between those who support the CCP and Xi and those who want to form a new party to fight capital.  All of this is still framed as disputes over Mao ZeDong’s legacy.  It involves debates about the validity of the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.  The neo-Maoists find zero problems in Mao’s actions and policies, while Chinese pro-Western market liberals condemn them completely. These are the only two simple views permitted.  Nuanced views that the Great Leap Forward was an example of a justified but adventurist and voluntarist attempt at industrialization or a view that the GPCR was an ultra-left and bureaucratic version of political revolution are off the map. 

Utopia Chinese Website

Blanchette covers in detail the various developments in this ideological struggle, from 1979 criticisms about the ‘feudal idolatry’ of keeping Mao embalmed to China’s attack on Vietnam.  He covers Deng Ziaoping’s early 1992 southern tour to Guangdong cementing ‘Reform and Opening’; the dismantling of a large part of the state sector in 1996 leading to millions of layoffs; the founding of Utopia as a leftist site critical of this vast opening to capital in 2003;  left bureaucrat Bo Xilai’s rise and fall in the CCP in 2012; the split in the new-Maoist movement between Utopia’s support of Xi and the founding of an underground China Maoist Alliance in 2015, and finally the Jasic strike in 2018.

THE NEW COLD WAR

Blanchette calls the Chinese ‘paranoid’ when they worry that the U.S. is trying to undermine China and the CCP.  He ignores the clear U.S. trade war goals in dismantling parts of Chinese planning and what remains of the state-led economy, along with the new U.S. military policy of anti-Chinese military encirclement.  This includes bans on software like HuaWei and now hysteria over something called TikTok. The “New Silk Road Initiative” also worries the U.S., as they see it as competition for U.S. corporations. While China is taking defensive actions in response to the U.S., there is also a large factor of the New Silk Road / Belt and Road Initiative that reflects the need for Chinese capital to expand beyond the borders of China. This is another warning bell for Marxists.

Blanchette considers China to be ‘state capitalist’ without proving his contention. He uses the term ‘conservative’ to describe the Chinese who do not want to open society to privatization and capital, a different meaning than in the U.S. where it has the exact reverse meaning.  The term ‘reform,’ which used to mean progressive, now means the reverse in both countries.  This is a worthwhile book to understand the politics and paradoxes of China, home to the largest proletariat in the world.  A place not to be ignored.

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Jasic Factory Struggle,” (Ma) “China on Strike,” “Striking to Survive,” “Two Sea Changes in World Political Economy,” (Halabi) “Is the East Still Red?” (Blank) “From Commune to Capitalism,” (Hu)“The End of the Revolution,” (Hui) “The Rise of China,”(Li) “The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism,”(Amin) “The Fall of Bo Xilai,” (Zhao) “Maoism and the Chinese Revolution.” (Liu)       

And I bought them at May Day Books, which has the cheapest new book prices in the city and many books on China from a left perspective, along with writings by Mao Zedong.

Red Frog

December 24, 2019

Music, Music, Music

“Echo in the Canyon,” documentary by Jakob Dylan, 2019 (Netflix)

In his interview Stephen Stills babbles a bit. Ringo Starr poses before his grey high-end sports car.  Regina Spektor seems uncomfortable.  Beck pontificates.  Jakob Dylan does most of the leads befitting the host.  Brian Wilson is still overweight and Michelle Phillips is still cute.  The difficult David Crosby whips his white pony-tail over the LA back country.  Graham Nash comes off like Hugh Grant. Roger McQuinn never takes off his hat.  Tom Petty looks older and wiser.  Jackson Browne seems to be sitting in front of an old Laurel Canyon stone house.  Cat Power is just happy to be there.  Jade, Fiona Apple and Norah Jones get to sing appropriate leads.  John Sebastian, Eric Clapton and Lou Adler get straight interviews.  Neil Young is captured rocking out in a studio, but never talking to the camera.

Jammin' in the Canyon

Yeah, this is a documentary about the folk rock that came out of Laurel Canyon in the 1960s.  It is also a concert film, showing clips of modern artists doing B-sides from the Laurel Canyon folk-rock scene at an event hosted by Dylan.  If you’ve been to the legendary Laurel Canyon Country Store half-way up canyon boulevard, you know the vibe is still there.  Young ‘freak folk’ groups still live in the neighborhood. The Byrds, the Beach Boys, the Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, even The Association – all get some of their tunes and memories played.  There is no CSN or Joni Mitchell, which is odd - must have been a legal dispute. (C’mon, “Our House”…)  There are no songs by Frank Zappa, who lived in Laurel Canyon too (as did Canned Heat) and recited the lyrics to “We are the Brain Police” to Stills in the middle of the street.  Cool!  But Zappa was not a folkie…

The film makes the point that ‘place’ and time matter in culture, as does cross-pollination.  Ringo reveals that the Beatles were inspired by the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds to do Sergeant Pepper.  One musician hopes the melody inspired by another’s song isn’t theft, and it isn’t.  In a way the film shows how the idea of cultural appropriation is many times bogus, as music, literature, film and art bleed into each other world-wide. Artists are always inspired by other artists.

Mamas and Papas and the new breed

An enjoyable documentary, especially if you lived through this time and informative, especially if you did not.

Other prior reviews on music, use the blog search box upper left:  “Laurel Canyon – the Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Historic Neighborhood,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Let Us Now Praise the Dead,” “In Search of the Blues,” “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “Zappa Plays Zappa,” “Life – the Biography of Keith Richards,” “Daydream Sunset,” “Marie and Rosetta,” “Treme,” “Rising Tide.”

Check out May Day's selection of books on music!
The Cultural Marxist  

December 20, 2019

Happy Solstice!  

WTF Series #10 - A Little Civil War?

Impeachapalooza or the Criminality of the Whole System

Are you carefully following the long testimonies and talking heads on CNN, NPR or MSNBC about impeachment, day after day, hour after hour, week after week? The legal ins and outs? Didn’t think so.  Has anything else happened in the world other than disasters and crimes?  Doesn’t seem so.  What is funny is that Trump withheld military equipment like Stinger missiles that even Obama didn’t want to sell to Ukraine.  So…Trump interfered with U.S. military aid, which was keeping the war against Russia in eastern Ukraine alive. The U.S. is against a diplomatic solution, as they already torpedoed one between Europe, Ukraine and Russia years ago.

This Leader?  Or...

Hunter Biden sitting on a board of directors of the key Ukrainian energy company is just business as usual – seeking influence with U.S. politicians by hiring their kids.  Especially in the context of U.S. demands (Trump included) for Europe to use U.S. gas, not Russian gas.

Is this really a ‘high’ crime?  This quid pro quo is more factual than the ridiculous attempt to impeach Clinton in the 1990s for lying about an affair.  As it is, this is political Kabuki, as the Senate will not vote for impeachment.

What else is going on in the world?  What else could Trump be impeached for recently – for real high crimes?  This impeachment is like accusing Al Capone of tax evasion.  I’ll give just a few:

     1.     688,000 U.S. citizens are going to be thrown off food stamps due to new work rules instituted by the USDA and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue recently.   Seasonal holiday workers, workers in Northern Michigan’s tourism industry, and workers with unreliable hours like waiters and waitresses are the kinds of workers hurt by this proposal.

     2.     The Washington Post just dropped a monstrous story on government lying about the 18 year war in Afghanistan in the midst of the impeachment hullabaloo.  After a 3 year lawsuit they gained access to internal military documents similar to the Pentagon Papers that revealed the Pentagon and White House continually made stupid and rosy predictions without any basis, while not even knowing who the enemy was.  This extended over 3 administrations – Bush, Obama and Trump.  So the real default – which any leftist already knew – is that the U.S. government lies on a continual basis.  As Rumsfield said in 2003: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq.”   The U.S. has spent nearly $1T on the war, while 2,000+ U.S. soldiers have died and 20,000+ have been injured.  Remember, Obama called Afghanistan ‘the smart war.’ (!)  That must be what they teach Rhodes scholars.

3.     Democrats and Republicans, in a bipartisan love fest, just voted for an additional $88B in military funds.

4.     Democrats and Republicans, in another bipartisan love fest, are preparing to endorse the new corporate-slanted NAFTA, the USMCA. 

5.     Denying climate change and actually accelerating it by enabling the oil and gas industries  This might be Trump’s most bloody crime.

6.     Stacking his administration with department heads whose real purpose is to destroy their departments and instead privatize society. Which has been going on for years.

7.     Attempting to overthrow governments that displease the U.S., which is business as usual.

8.     Opening the door to white nationalism and fascist organizations.  His unique contribution.

9.     Supporting the NSA, which is business as usual.

10.  Enabling the rich and corporations, etc. etc.  Business as usual.
11.  Violating the emoluments clause big-time.  Another unique contribution.

FASCISM?
Impressionistic left-liberals like Chris Hedges, Henry Giroux, Paul Street and others think Trump is already a fascist.  By doing this they seem to have little understanding of U.S. or European history or the concepts of the state or class.  What Trump is doing is no different from what many U.S. presidents and U.S. laws did in the past  - remember Asian internment, Latino bracero programs, Jim Crow, the KKK, the Tulsa pogrom, gay discrimination, women not being able to vote, strikes and abortion being illegal, unions forbidden, Marxists in jail etc.?  They are not calling the U.S. fascist over the whole of the 20^th Century are they?!  This is just normal bourgeois functioning in a class society.   

What is different is that Trump has disturbed the bourgeois positivist idea that things are always going to get better. Dialectics and class struggle determine history, not abstract tendencies toward 'the good.'

...this Leader?  (Francisco Franco)

The classical Marxist analysis of fascism is that capital will use fascism when it has no other way to rule.  This impeachment, like the Clinton impeachment, represents a procedural faction fight within the ruling class.  So the ruling class is not united behind actual fascism, behind one policy as yet.  They can still rule through the charade of voting for one of their two parties – the ‘two party system.’  Note this terminology is not really about democracy.  Nor is there any real massive left, as in Germany, Italy or Spain that needs to be crushed.

What is more accurate to say is that the Republicans are trying to control the legal and military system.  They are stacking the courts and judges with Federalist and ‘Constitutionalist’ plants all the way up to the Supreme Court.  Trump has just forced out the head of the Navy in order to tolerate Navy Seals involved in war crimes.  Fascists are already recruiting in the police and now are trying to infiltrate the U.S. military – which is why the ‘sign throwing’ at the Army-Navy football game was indicative.  The military recently dropped screening for 'white nationalists,' which certainly sends a signal.  If Trump can get lackeys of his into positions of leadership in the military, then what is laying out here is more a 'little civil war' than fascism, more Franco than Mussolini.  If Trump loses the election – and at this point he is likely to – this may trigger armed rightists into violence.  So be prepared...

Which is why the Democrats are in such a love fest with military generals, the FBI, the NSA and the CIA now – a love fest that will not turn out well.

In this context, the ‘bi-partisanship’ of Democratic candidates like Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Klobuchar should really be called collaborationism.  The word 'bi-partisan' itself reveals that politicians from both Parties are actually on the same page over and over again, ultimately part of the same class project.  Even though the Republicans will have nothing to do with ‘bipartisanship’ (!!) unless it benefits them and the corporations they represent.  Only Democrats actually talk about bipartisanship, which is indicative. The national Democratic Party has even endorsed 3 former Republicans for Senate according to The Intercept.  What threatens this bipartisanship is any threat from the left, even from a moderate social-democratic left.  It has to be destroyed as the present corporate press ban on Sanders shows.  The corporate press will turn to constant vitriol if Sanders gets closer to the nomination.

Impeachment, like Russia-gate, is another failed Democratic Party leadership tactic run by lawyers.  In a way it is their pretense of actually being an opposition party. Instead of looking at the system, they look at moronic actions by Trump. The Democratic leadership prefers scandal over politics, because politics also implicates them.

P.S. - Ralph Nader in Alternet details how the Democratic Party leadership, in a bipartisan agreement, continued to 'fund' the U.S. government days ago.  How?  By giving Trump $1.4B for the wall, weakening the ACA, giving $22B more for the military.  Nader-Alternet-Budget Deal

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box upper left with these terms: "Giroux," "Russia-Gate," "Trumpolini," "fascism," "Afghanistan."

Red Frog

December 17, 2019