A Christian Morality Tale?

“Children of Men,” by P.D. James, 1992

This book is the foundation of the 2006 film of the same name but the film is actually more left-wing and apocalyptic than the book.  The film is a great example of a dystopian story, set in 2027 Britain.  It seems like a very near reality, given it pictures mass prisons for migrants, violent internal police, an authoritarian government, constant protests or war around the world and an underground rebellion in the U.K.  I would imagine most know of the book through the movie.

Most future fiction books include one ‘event’ that changes everything, an event that is sometimes unexplained, such as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  The key apocalyptic twist in this book (and film) is that no human baby has been born in the world since the 1990s, so the human race is seemingly done. A bit similar to the fertility crisis in the earlier "The Handmaid's Tale." Both center around this calamity. Infertility in these stories might function as a reflection of other dooms that could befall humans - climate change, starvation, war or pandemics.  Though there is present evidence that testosterone levels are dropping in males.

James wrote elegant and intricate detective stories, serving as a modern Agatha Christie.  So this 1992 book is quite the exception given its social theme. The narrator of the novel, Theo, is an upper-class Oxford professor ruminating on life at the age of 50 in 2021.  He’s been a failure at everything except studying Victorian England – a lousy son, father and husband.  At the beginning he’s also something of a physical incompetent, a “Mr. Peepers.”  Theo gets drawn into a conspiracy by the self-named ‘Five Fishes,’ as he is a former advisor to the Warden of England and they want his help contacting the Warden.  The Fishes want some modest changes to the English government.  They want an end to ‘Quietus,’ which is a way groups of old people commit suicide by drowning.  They want better treatment of poor migrant ‘Sojourners’ who do much of the grunt work in the society; an end to compulsory sperm testing and better supervision of the Isle of Man, which has been turned into an island prison camp run by the most violent inmates.  Altogether quite modest goals for these five somewhat inept and isolated rebels.

In the novel religion is a constant theme and dialog.  The title itself is from multiple quotes in the Bible that see the ‘children of men’ as a lesser, sinful group. Theo is a rational agnostic while two of the Fishes are good Christians, one of whom is carrying the first baby to be born in two decades, while the other Christian is the father. The father even sacrifices himself for the mother and baby during a violent confrontation, his ‘Jesus’ move. Male infertility is the problem in the book, not female infertility as in the film, so they had wished to keep the father alive too. At the end, the baby is born and Theo puts a little blood cross on its forehead, reflecting James’ own archaic Church of England obsession.

The Fishes in the film are not as pathetic.  They are a large organized group that uses violence when necessary but are blamed for bombings that the government itself carries out.  They represent illegal immigrants and their British supporters who are trying to make ‘Britain’ a legal home for everyone, as the rest of the world has dissolved into barbarism and rebellions.  Even the French are trying to cross the Channel for refuge!  But most of the Fishes also want to keep the first baby born for their own purposes and so become ‘bad guys.’ The film’s version of Theo, a handsome, cynical, yet well-meaning cube drone, turns out to be the only reliable person to help the baby and its dark-skinned mother.  Theo in the book also becomes something more than the isolated loveless academic and instead transforms into the ‘father’ in reality for the new baby and light-skinned mother.  This is because he has finally found love.

The First Mother in the Movie

The novel has no living Jasper, the charming old hippie played by Michael Caine in the film ("Pull my finger").  No migrant detention camp at Bexhill, no Uprising nor a Human Project ship.  Instead the Five Fishes try to find a hidden rural place where Julian can have her baby out of the hands of the grasping leader of the British government, Xan.  The end up in a large woodshed in the woods near Oxford.

The British, after the counter-revolution called ‘Omega,’ have given up their democratic rights to the Warden’s Council of Five in exchange for ‘security, stability and fun.’  Rural towns are being closed as the population decreases and is moved into larger places.  The old are shuffling into the sea, sometimes even when they don’t want to.  The Isle of Man prison, which became Bexhill in the film, is a violent world where the strong crush the weak, though we only hear of it in the book.  Everyone in society has given up long-range hope due to the prospective end of humanity.  Barbarous groups of Omegas (the last-born young) and Painted Faces roam the countryside.  Other than that, life in a seemingly old-fashioned and aging England goes on, tea and crumpets-style – evidently without a labor movement or any social movements except these five rebels.  Even without an economy! P.D. James was no radical herself, so the Fishes have one power-hungry mini-leader who betrays them, proving that rebel leaders are also not to be trusted.  At the end all that is left is the new mother Julian and Theo – the Adam & Eve of the new human wave.  Or as James puts it in her conservative way, a new 'race.’

The book is written switching between 1^st and 3^rd person, between Theo and narration.  It has many good lines such as this dyspeptic one on religion.  After one new Christian replaces the cross with a sun symbol to popular acclaim, Theo says:  “Even to unbelievers like myself, the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.”

Both book and film predict a world where crisis leads society to a dystopian authoritarianism, even when sincere individuals do their small part. There are no forces strong enough or trustworthy enough to change the situation.  In other words, they are expressions of deep historical pessimism in classes or humanity, as neither has a positive view of the future.  Of course understanding that negative outcomes are possible is an improvement over the complacent Panglossian ‘best of all possible worlds’ approach.  Both are the opposite of a socialist perspective, which understands ‘pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will’ as one of its guidelines.  This book and film might be called “pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will except for a few exceptions…”  Essentially both are portrayals of heroic individualism on an historic canvas.

Prior reviews on dystopian books and films, some of which are carried at May Day.  Use blog search box, upper left: “The Testaments,” “Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Heart Goes Last” (all 3 by Atwood) “The Dispossessed” (Le Guin), “American War,” “Good News” (Abbey), “The Road (McCarthy) and “Blade Runner 2049,” “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?” (Dick), “The Golden Age of Television,” “Hunger Games,” “Planet of the Apes” (various modern sequels); “Divergent-Insurgent,” “Cloud Atlas.”

And I got it at May Day's excellent used / cutout book section!

The Cultural Marxist

January 21, 2020

More A-Political War

“1917” - film by Sam Mendes, 2019

This film makes the familiar point that ‘war is hell.’  It might be compared to Saving Private Ryan, the patriotic and riveting account of saving a brother, done by two mainstream figures, Spielberg and Hanks.  Or 1981's "Gallipoli," which featured two soldiers bringing a message.  There is also conventional heroism in 1917, as a pair of soldiers, Blake and Schofield, must warn a regiment not to attack the new German Hindenberg line and in the process, save a brother.  But World War I seems a bit more pointless than Spielberg’s – dead bodies floating in rivers and lying in bomb craters, a land riven by large trenches in an alternating hellscape of blasted farms and towns.

The Wasteland

The Germans are shown as uniformly ruthless – a pilot, after being rescued by the pair of British soldiers from a flaming plane - stabs one.  The evacuating German troops chop down cherry trees and kill all the cows.  German’s wander in the wreckage of a town in no man’s land, not surrendering but instead shooting at the British.  They leave one trip wire in their former barracks.  In contrast the English are almost uniformly polite and considerate.  One officer, Captain McKenzie, is rumored to be an officer who will sacrifice his men for glory. Yet he still stops his attack upon orders.  In that sense it is a nationalist film.

There are a number of stupid decisions and factual issues made to increase the tension – too many bullets in the rifles (a clip of 5 bullets gets you 8 shots), unnecessary trips into bunkers, needlessly going into a house to finish off a German soldier or even deciding to save the burnt German pilot.  But especially questionable is the general’s decision to send two men many miles through a former no-man’s land to stop a doomed attack instead of just flying over the regiment in a biplane, or landing behind the regiment and delivering the general’s order.

POLITICS?

My grandfather fought on the Somme with the British army and it made him a life-long socialist and Labourite.  Our family still has some of the poems he wrote from the front. In April 1917, the same month as this film is set, the Russian working class and peasants had overthrown the Czar – in great part due to Russian involvement in World War I.  Unrest in Germany, partially over this imperialist war, led to an attempt at a Socialist council republic involving ten working-class organizations in 1919.  French soldiers had huge mutinies in 1917.  So what about the British?  Kitchener lost hundred’s of thousands on the Somme, with 19,000+ dying and 57,000+ injured on the first day.  Wikipedia estimates 350,000 dead just for the British over 5 1/2 months of combat. Which is why this film is not called “1916” but instead is pictured as a tiny and personal event, while ripping the title from the more important Russian Revolution.  That decision is political.  If this film had been about the Somme it would have been a different film, a film less about friendship and more about a mass slaughter.  And we can’t have that.

British Anti-war rally in 1914 from Manchester Guardian

The British Independent Labour Party, British Socialist Party and part of the Suffragette movement led by Sylvia Pankhurst opposed this imperialist war even in the first heady days.  Bertrand Russell was fired and then imprisoned for opposing the war.  Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Labour Party, refused to support a vote for war credits, which sent his career into eclipse for a time.  In Glasgow, Scotland the “Red Clydeside” movement organized workers to strike against the war. There was a mutiny of British soldiers at the base at Etaples, France, though it might not have been about the war itself.

In the film 1917 on the other hand there are no politics. This war is just a ‘natural event.’ The film has almost no indications that everyone doesn’t love this war.  One solider in a truck, surveying the empty grass hillsides, asks why they were fighting for this useless, empty place. Yeah, they want to go home.  Of most import, Schofield mentions to Blake that he swapped his heroism medal from the Somme for a bottle of wine.  Blake can’t understand why he’s done this, as he can bring the medal back to his family as a proud reminder.  A modern viewer with some knowledge of history might think getting rid of the medal means he disliked the war.  Vietnam vets in VVAW threw thousands of medals away on the U.S. Capitol grounds in 1971 in “Operation Dewey Canyon” as part of their opposition to the American war in Vietnam.  But not in this film!   Schofield hints that he doesn’t really want to go back to his family, so the medal won’t matter.  You see it’s a personal issue.  At the end of the film we find he has a pretty wife and two cute children and yes, maybe he’s changed his mind. Ahhhh…

In the film 1917 war is ultimately just ‘sad’ – but heroism redeems it.  It is thoroughly conventional bourgeois film in that sense.

The story is based on a scrap of dialog related by Mendes’ grandfather, who fought in WWI, about a “messenger carrying a message.”  The rest is made-up.  One reviewer said it was more a technical feat - as the best part of the film is the hellscape, the trench sets, the devastation, which mirror on the land, animals and buildings what is also happening to the humans. To actually many more humans than 1917 lets on.

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “War is a Racket,” “Lord of the Rings,” “All Power to the Councils!”  “The Peaky Blinders,” “Suffragette,” “A Full Life: James Connolly the Irish Rebel.”  Also searches for “Russian Revolution” or “Easter Rising.”

The Kultur Kommissar

January 18, 2020

Another Anti-Science Antic

“The Marijuana Manifesto – How Lies, Corruption and Propaganda Kept Cannabis Illegal,” by Jesse Ventura and Jen Hobbs, 2016

The prohibition of marijuana and the story of modern U.S. capitalism are inextricably intertwined.  Ventura, former Independent Governor of Minnesota, has co-written a detailed book dragging up every scandal involving the corrupt Drug Enforcement Agency, the long and hidden history of hemp in the U.S., the roots of prohibition and the consequences of the vicious War on Drugs.  If you want to know how a ridiculous and savage policy sausage is made in the U.S., read this book.

POLITICS and ECONOMICS

It is pretty clear that the motivations to outlaw marijuana were and still are both economic and political.  Ventura shows how the initial prohibitions against hemp and weed in the 20^th Century started because newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst, an owner of a large logging company, wanted to use trees for paper instead of hemp.  His ally Andrew Mellon of Dupont wanted to make plastic from oil, not hemp and paper from trees too.  They joined together with a government bureaucrat named Henry Anslinger to demonize weed, ultimately convincing the government to ban cannabis in both its forms – all without facts.  Anslinger testified that marijuana made black people, Mexicans and Chinese murderers and rapists, while asserting jazz created addicts.  Hearst’s papers pushed this hysteria like an older version of Fox News.  This racism was an essential psychological method to enable marijuana prohibition, but in the economic interest of certain capital sectors.

In a way, this was another anti-science crusade like climate denialism or opposition to evolution. Until 2019 the Federal government couldn’t tell the difference between the male plant producing CBD and hemp and the female plant producing THC-laden buds, treating them the same.

Nixon declared the “War on Drugs” in 1972, making marijuana in any form a ‘Schedule 1’ drug like heroin.  Ventura shows every president since has enforced this drug war – especially Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and Obama.  John Ehrlichmann said in 1994 that Nixon’s real motivation was not drugs, it was to punish the counter-culture and hobble civil-rights and anti-war activists by using drug busts to break up organizations.

So what financial forces support criminalization of drugs, including weed in all its forms? It is a rather large group.  It is Big Pharma, which wants to privatize CBD and THC’s multiple health benefits under expensive and long-lasting patent protection.  It is corporations like Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, major phone companies, Starbucks, Eddie Bauer, Victoria's Secret and McDonalds who use slave-like prison labor and get tax breaks for each prisoner ‘hired.’  50% of prisoners are in prison for non-violent drug offenses, so they would lose part of their labor force. There is the private prison industry, which needs a guaranteed 90% flow of prisoners, and if they don’t get it, governments have to pay them.  It is Big Cotton, which wanted to prevent the industrial use of hemp because it has many advantages over cotton, including environmental.  It is Big Liquor, which does not want competition, as states that legalize weed see a decline in alcohol consumption. 

France the world's largest producer of hemp - U.S. the largest importer!!

GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION

It is government entities like the DEA, police departments and others who now financially benefit from the Drug War. Incidentally the U.S. government owns patent #507 on CBD, which it is selling to certain pharmaceutical companies.  So they have hypocritically patented a useful component of weed that is otherwise illegal!  Backing them are politicians, mostly Republicans but also corporate Democrats who support all these corporations.  In 2016 Hillary Clinton opposed the legalization of weed and even made the stupid statement that weed ‘needed more study.’  This is a standard line in the last 50 years to stop legalization. As Ventura notes, there have been hundreds of studies done, especially in Israel.  Marijuana is actually a very known quantity.  Historically in the late 1600’s, hemp was REQUIRED to be grown in the U.S. by farmers due to its multiple uses - or they faced large penalties.  In the 1930s New York had hundreds of hashish clubs until the government shut them down.  The U.S. government encouraged hemp growing through WWII and then the policy changed.

MEDICAL & INDUSTRIAL BENEFITS

You may ask, what is the big deal with legalizing marijuana anyway?  It’s just a bunch of ‘hippies’ getting high.  Actually the hippies are right but it goes far beyond that.  As the British Lancet noted, marijuana should not be a ‘Schedule 1’ drug.  It should not even be listed as a hazardous substance, similar to caffeine.  Alcohol is far more dangerous, as are heroin and especially meth.  As to its medical benefits, the Chinese were using it as a medicine in 2737 BC.   The reason it is so useful is that it interacts with the endocannabinoid system within the human body that affects almost every part of human functioning.  According to the various states that have legalized medical marijuana, CBD and/or THC help with:  Pain, epilepsy, PTSD, Parkinson’s, opioid and tobacco addiction, other seizures, sleep deprivation, appetite loss, cancer tumors, alcoholism, anxiety, inflammation, multiple sclerosis, the side effects of chemotherapy,  osteoporosis, glaucoma, urinary tract infections, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, etc., etc.  All with hardly any side-effects.

Hemp was legalized in the 2019 Farm Bill finally, which is why you see CBD shops now springing up everywhere.  The various parts of hemp can be used for:  fabrics, rope, natural plastic, food and fuel oils, protein nutrition, soil remediation for all kinds of pollutants including radioactive ones, animal feed, cosmetics, cleaning products, paper, insulation, an ingredient mixed with concrete and plaster, as a natural fertilizer and herbicide and an absorber of more carbon than trees.  Yet the disparity between federal and state laws does not allow legal cannabis growers and retailers to use the banking system or get a bank loan, so everything has to be done in cash, including paying taxes to the IRS!   By the way, taxes are levied on gross profits, not net, unlike other businesses, so they are even overtaxed.  The DEA has raided legal marijuana dispensaries in states like California.  Ventura cites horror stories from Oklahoma, Florida and Kansas about the idiotic federal prohibition and its relation to various retrograde state laws.

After reading the facts in this book you will understand how cannabis is actually a miracle plant.  It is not just the ‘high’ – which has never resulted in an overdose and is not physically addictive.  If you want to know how capital functions when political clout by private capital operates, then this battle over marijuana is illuminating.  The money is now sliding towards the cannabis industry, which is probably why it is finally being legalized.  Because after all under capital it is money, not science, that dominates.

Other prior reviews related to this issue, use blog search box upper left:  “The New Jim  Crow,” “Drug War Capitalism,” “Budding Prospects,” “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “Let Us Now Praise The Dead,” “The Truth About the Drug Companies,” “American Made,” “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Lost Connections,” “The Outlaws.”

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent and inexpensive used/cutout section.

Red Frog

January 14, 2020

WTF #11, “We are a nation of lawyers, not of men.”

Professional degrees in recent Democratic Party politics

Hillary Clinton P - Yale Law School

Tim Kaine VP – Columbia & Harvard Law Schools

Barack Obama P – Harvard Law School

Joe Biden VP – Syracuse University College of Law

John Kerry P – Yale University and Boston College Law School

John Edwards VP – University of North Carolina Law School

Al Gore P – Harvard College

Joe Lieberman VP -  Yale University, Yale Law School

Bill Clinton P – Georgetown University, Oxford, Yale Law School

Al Gore VP – Harvard College

Michael Dukakis P – Harvard Law School

Lloyd Bentsen VP – University of Texas Law School

Walter Mondale P – University of Minnesota Law School

Geraldine Ferraro VP – Fordham University School of Law

Jimmy Carter P – US Naval Academy

Walter Mondale VP – University of Minnesota Law School

George McGovern P – Northwestern University

Sargent Shriver VP – Yale University, Yale Law School

Hubert Humphrey P – University of Minnesota

Ed Muskie VP – Cornell Law School

John Kennedy went to Harvard University.  Before him Adlai Stevenson went to Princeton and Northwestern U Law School.  Only 4 did not go to law school.

Prospective Presidents:  (With net worth from Forbes just for fun)

Michael Bennet – Wesleyan University and Yale Law School – $15M. (business)

Joe Biden – Syracuse University College of Law - $9M. (book sales)

Michael Bloomberg – John Hopkins and Harvard (MBA) – $52.4B. (business)

Cory Booker – Stanford, Oxford, Yale Law School - $1.5M.

Pete Buttigieg – Harvard University & Oxford College - $100K.

John Delaney – Columbia University and Georgetown University Law School - $232M. (business)

Tulsi Gabbard – Hawaii Pacific University - $500K.

Amy Klobuchar – Yale and University of Chicago Law School - $1.9M.

Deval Patrick – Harvard University Law School - $1M.

Bernie Sanders – University of Chicago - $2.5M (book sales)

Tom Steyer – Yale and Stanford (MBA) - $1.6B. (business)

Elizabeth Warren – Rutgers Law School - $12M. (stocks and real estate)

Marianne Williamson – Pomona College - $1.5M. (self-help guru)

Andrew Yang – Brown and Columbia University Law School - $1M. (business)

9 of 14 are lawyers and 2 of the 5 have MBAs.  12 of 14 are millionaires.  Most went to upper-crust Ivy League schools. I’d hate to know about the Democratic Primary dropouts … Do you see patterns?

One Pattern:

Dick:  “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” (Henry The Sixth by W. Shakespeare)

This is rebel Dick’s answer to his leader Jack Cade, who envisions a quasi-communistic social revolution without money, with everyone having enough clothes and food. In the play Henry the Sixth Shakespeare actually slanders Cade as an ally of the nobleman Richard of York instead of being an independent pre-proletarian and peasant rebel.  In this Shakespeare proves himself to be an ally of one wing of the nobility, the Lancasters, covering for Henry VI, a Lancaster. 

Wikipedia:  Actually Jack Cade's Rebellion was a popular revolt in 1450 against the government of England, which took place in the southeast of the country between the months of April and July. It stemmed from local grievances regarding the corruption, maladministration, abuse of power of the king's closest advisors and local officials, and recent military losses in France during the Hundred Years' War. Leading an army of men from southeastern England, the rebellion's namesake and leader Jack Cade marched on London in order to force the government to reform the administration and remove from power the "traitors" deemed responsible for bad governance. It was the largest popular uprising to take place in England during the 15th century.

Instead of class war, what followed was “The War of the Roses,” now made famous in an accidental way by Game of Thrones. 

Ultimately we have to eliminate the bourgeois legal system set up to protect private property and all its attendant consequences.  In a capitalist society where the favored and almost only redress for all kinds of conflicts is the monetized legal system, lawyers and lawsuits proliferate like cancer cells. 

Other prior reviews on issues of the law, use blog search box upper left:  “With Liberty and Justice for Some” (Greenwald); “The Divide” (Taibbi); “99 Homes,” “Legal Logic Behind Raids,” “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “A Time to Kill” and “Gray Mountain” (both by Grisham); “The Trial Before the Trial,” “Eric Holder,” “Bad Cops, Bad Cops,” “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (Davis) “Slavery By Another Name,” “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander).

The Kulture Kommissar

January 10, 2020

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