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francesbeau · 3 years ago

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Oppression & Liberty - Simone Weil

INTRESTING CONCEPTS

‘The long-foreseen moment has arrived when capitalism is on the point of seeing its development arrested by impassable barriers.’ / ‘In whatever way we interpret the phenomenon of accumulation, it is clear that capitalism stands essentially for economic expansion and that capitalist expansion has now nearly reached the point where it will be halted by the actual limits of the earth’s surface. And yet never have there been fewer premonitory signs of the advent of socialism.’

‘Political sovereignty is nothing without economic sovereignty; which is why fascism tends to approach the Russian régime on the economic plane also, by concentrating all power, economic as well as political, in the hands of the Head of the State.’

‘The American technocrats have drawn an enchanting picture of a society in which, with the abolition of the market, technicians would find themselves all-powerful, and would use their power in such a way as to give to all the maximum leisure and comfort possible. This idea reminds us, by its utopianism, of that of enlightened despotism which our forefathers cherished. All exclusive, uncontrolled power becomes oppressive in the hands of those who have the monopoly of it. And we can already see very clearly how, within the capitalist system itself, the oppressive action of this new social stratum is taking shape.’

REFLECTIONS CONCERNING TECHNOCRACY, NATIONAL-SOCIALISM, THE U.S.S.R. AND CERTAIN OTHER MATTERS

‘Whoever accepts Lenin’s formula, “Without a revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement”, is compelled to accept also the fact that there is practically no revolutionary movement at the present time.’

CRITIQUE OF MARXISM

‘The whole of this doctrine, on which the Marxist conception of revolution entirely rests, is absolutely devoid of any scientific basis. In order to understand it, we must remember the Hegelian origins of Marxist thought. Hegel believed in a hidden mind at work in the universe, and that the history of the world is simply the history of this world mind, which, as in the case of everything spiritual, tends indefinitely towards perfection. Marx claimed to “put back on its feet” the Hegelian dialectic.’

ANALYSIS OF OPPRESSION

‘All religions make man into a mere instrument of Providence, and socialism, too, puts men at the service of historical progress, that is to say of productive progress. Marx, it is true, never had any other motive except a generous yearning after liberty and equality; but this yearning, once separated from the materialistic religion with which it was merged in his mind, no longer belongs to anything except what Marx contemptuously called utopian socialism. If Marx’s writings contained nothing more valuable than this, they might without loss be forgotten, at any rate except for his economic analyses.’

'Marx omits to explain why oppression is invincible as long as it is useful, why the oppressed in revolt have never succeeded in founding a non-oppressive society, whether on the basis of the productive forces of their time, or even at the cost of an economic regression which could hardly increase their misery; and, lastly, he leaves completely in the dark the general principles of the mechanism by which a given form of oppression is replaced by another What is more, not only have Marxists not solved a single one of these problems, but they have not even thought it their duty to formulate them. It has seemed to them that they had sufficiently accounted for social oppression by assuming that it corresponds to a function in the struggle against nature.’

‘From time to time the oppressed manage to drive out one team of oppressors and to replace it by another, and sometimes even to change the form of oppression; but as for abolishing oppression itself that would first mean abolishing the sources of it, abolishing all the monopolies, the magical and technical secrets that give a hold over nature, armaments, money, co-ordination of labour. Even if the oppressed were sufficiently conscious to make up their minds to do so, they could not succeed. It would be condemning themselves to immediate enslavement by the social groupings that had not carried out the same change; and even were this danger to be miraculously averted, it would be condemning themselves to death, for, once men have forgotten the methods of primitive production and have transformed the natural environment into which these fitted, they cannot recover immediate contact with nature.’

SKETCH OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL LIFE

‘The present social system provides no means of action other than machines for crushing humanity; whatever may be the intentions of those who use them, these machines crush and will continue to crush as long as they exist. With the industrial convict prisons constituted by the big factories, one can only produce slaves and not free workers, still less workers who would form a dominant class.’

‘Each time that the oppressed have tried to set up groups able to exercise a real influence, such groups, whether they went by the name of parties or unions, have reproduced in full within themselves all the vices of the system which they claimed to reform or abolish.’

‘The only possibility of salvation would lie in a methodical cooperation between all, strong and weak, with a view to accomplishing a progressive decentralization of social life; but the absurdity of such an idea strikes one immediately. Such a form of co-operation is impossible to imagine, even in dreams, in a civilization that is based on competition, on struggle, on war.’

FRAGMENTS

‘The bourgeoisie was only able to free itself of this religious, ecclesiastical and feudal ideology in proportion as feudal society fell into decadence. But it only purified the representation of God of the dross that had accumulated around it since the time when there had been a natural economy; it fashioned for itself a sublimated God who was no longer anything but a transcendent Reason, preceding all events and determining the direction they were to take.’

‘In Hegel’s philosophy, God still appears, under the name of “world spirit”, as mover of history and lawgiver of nature. It was not until after accomplishing its revolution that the bourgeoisie recognized in this God a creation of man himself, and that history is man’s own work.’

ON THE CONTRADICTIONS OF MARXISM

‘There is a contradiction, an obvious, glaring contradiction, between Marx’s analytic method and his conclusions / The “State machine” is oppressive by its very nature, its mechanism cannot function without crushing the citizens; the best will in the world cannot turn it into an instrument for the public good; the only way to stop it from being oppressive is to smash it. Moreover—and in this matter Marx’s analysis is less rigorous—the oppression exercised by the State machine is identical with that exercised by big industry; this machine is automatically at the service of the principal social force, namely, capital, or in other words the equipment of industrial undertakings. Those who are sacrificed to the development of industrial equipment, that is to say the proletariat, are also those who are exposed to the full brutality of the State, and the State keeps them by force in the position of slaves of the undertakings.’

‘Nothing of all this can be abolished by means of a revolution; on the contrary, all this must have disappeared before a revolution can take place; or if it does take place beforehand, it will only be an apparent revolution which will leave oppression intact or even increase it. Yet Marx reached precisely the opposite conclusion; he concluded that society was ripe for a revolution of liberation. Do not let us forget that nearly a hundred years ago he already thought such a revolution to be imminent.’

‘Manual labor, in the majority of cases, is still farther removed from the work of a craftsman, still more divested of intelligence and skill; machines are still more oppressive. The arms race calls still more imperiously for the sacrifice of the people as a whole to industrial production. The State machine develops day by day in a more monstrous fashion, becomes day by day farther and farther removed from the mass of the population, blinder, more inhuman.’

#political theory #simone weil

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papermoonloveslucy · 4 years ago

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THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER

March 27, 1950

"The Man Who Came To Dinner” was a presentation of Lux Radio Theatre, broadcast on CBS Radio on March 27, 1950.

The Man Who Came to Dinner is a comedy in three by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. It debuted on October 16, 1939, at the Music Box Theatre in New York City, where it ran until 1941, closing after 739 performances. It then enjoyed a number of New York and London revivals.

The play was adapted for a 1942 feature film, scripted by Philip G. Epstein and Julius J. Epstein and directed by William Keighley. The film featured Monty Woolley, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Billie Burke, Jimmy Durante, Mary Wickes and Richard Travis.

“The Man Who Came to Dinner” was previously presented on radio by Philip Morris Playhouse on July 10, 1942. Monty Woolley, who played the leading role in the film version, starred in the adaptation. It was broadcast again by Theatre Guild on the Air on ABC Radio November 17, 1946 starring Fred Allen. In 1949, “The Man Who Came to Dinner” was produced on “The Hotpoint Holiday Hour” starring Charles Boyer, Jack Benny, Gene Kelly, Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Rosalind Russell.

On October 13, 1954, a 60-minute adaptation was aired on the CBS Television series “The Best of Broadway.” A “Hallmark Hall of Fame” production was broadcast n November 29, 1972 starring Orson Welles, Lee Remick (Maggie Cutler), Joan Collins (Lorraine Sheldon), Don Knotts (Dr. Bradley), and Marty Feldman (Banjo). The 2000 Broadway revival was broadcast by PBS on October 7, 2000, three days after the New York production closed, and was also released on DVD.

Synopsis ~ The story is set in the small town of Mesalia, Ohio in the weeks leading to Christmas in the late 1930s. The outlandish radio wit Sheridan Whiteside is invited to dine at the house of the well-to-do factory owner Ernest Stanley and his family. But before Whiteside can enter the house, he slips on a patch of ice outside the Stanleys' front door and injures his hip. Confined to the Stanleys' home in a wheelchair, Whiteside and his retinue of show business friends turn the Stanley home upside down! But is he really injured?

This adaptation was written by S.H. Barnett. The characters eliminated for this adaptation include Richard Stanley, John, Mrs. Dexter, and Mrs. McCutcheon.

The show is hosted by William Keighley, who directed the 1942 film adaptation.

Lux Radio Theatre (1935-55) was a radio anthology series that adapted Broadway plays during its first two seasons before it began adapting films (”Lux Presents Hollywood”). These hour-long radio programs were performed live before studio audiences in Los Angeles. The series became the most popular dramatic anthology series on radio, broadcast for more than 20 years and continued on television as the Lux Video Theatre through most of the 1950s. The primary sponsor of the show was Unilever through its Lux Soap brand.

CAST

Lucille Ball (Maggie Cutler) was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. “My Favorite Husband” eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon.

Clifton Webb (Sheridan Whiteside) had appeared with Lucille Ball in the 1946 film The Dark Corner. He was nominated for three Oscars. Webb had played the role of Sheridan Whiteside on stage for two years.

Eleanor Audley (Mrs. Stanley) appeared in several episodes of Lucille Ball’s “My Favorite Husband” as mother-in-law Letitia Cooper. Audley was first seen with Lucille Ball as Mrs. Spaulding, the first owner of the Ricardo’s Westport home in “Lucy Wants to Move to the Country” (ILL S6;E15). She returned to play one of the garden club judges in “Lucy Raises Tulips” (ILL S6;E26). Audley appeared one last time with Lucille Ball in a “Lucy Saves Milton Berle” (TLS S4;E13) in 1965.

Ruth Perrott (Sarah) played Katie the maid on Lucille Ball’s radio show “My Favorite Husband.” On “I Love Lucy” she played Mrs. Pomerantz in “Pioneer Women�� (ILL S1;E25), was one of the member of the Wednesday Afternoon Fine Arts League in “Lucy and Ethel Buy the Same Dress” (ILL S3;E3), and played a nurse when “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” (ILL S2;E16).

Betty Lou Gerson is best remembered as the voice of Cruella De Ville in the original Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961).

Stephen Dunn had appeared with Lucille Ball in Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949).

John Milton Kennedy (Announcer)

‘DINNER’ TRIVIA

The same date as this radio adaptation (March 27, 1950), original star Monty Wooley arrived in Vancouver to perform in the play.

This broadcast aired the day after the “My Favorite Husband” episode “Liz’s Radio Script” also starring Lucille and Ruth Perrott.

Lucille Ball’s good friend and frequent co-star Mary Wickes was typecast as a nurse due to her breakthrough role as Nurse Preen in the Broadway, film, and television versions of The Man Who Came To Dinner.’ She does not play Nurse Preen in this adaptation. The character is given the first name Geraldine.

Lucille Ball previously appeared on “Lux Radio Theatre” for a November 10, 1947 adaptation of her film The Dark Corner (1946).

The first commercial talks about how Lux soap is gentle on stockings, like those worn by Betty Grable in Wabash Avenue.

The second commercial (between acts two and three) interviews actress Joan Miller, talking about the Warners picture Stage Fright, and how Lux helped keep the costumes looking great.

In the post show interviews, Clifton Webb promotes his next film Cheaper By The Dozen.

The final Lux commercial talks about how movie star Hedy Lamarr uses Lux.

The program presents a special address from president of the Red Cross, General George C. Marshall. The American Red Cross was mentioned on “My Favorite Husband” and Red Cross posters were frequently scene decorating the sets on “I Love Lucy.”

The ending of radio’s “My Favorite Husband” episode “Mother-in-Law” (November 4, 1949) starring Lucille Ball is identical to the ending of The Man Who Came To Dinner.

In “Lucy and Viv Reminisce” (TLS S6;E16) on January 1, 1968, while nursing Lucy, who has a broken leg, Viv slips and also breaks her leg. She says she feels just like a female version of The Man Who Came To Dinner.

“Vivian Sues Lucy” (TLS S1;E10) on December 3, 1962 also has a plot that resembles The Man Who Came To Dinner. Viv injures herself due to Lucy’s careless housekeeping, and is bedridden. Lucy goes out of her way to cater to her every whim, so that she won’t sue!

Although the play is fictional, it draws on real life figures and events for its inspiration.

Sheridan Whiteside was modeled on Alexander Woollcott.

Beverly Carlton was modeled on Noël Coward.

Banjo was modeled on Harpo Marx, and there is a dialogue reference to his brothers Groucho and Chico. When Sheridan Whiteside talks to Banjo on the phone, he asks him, "How are Wackko and Sloppo?"

Professor Metz was based on Dr. Gustav Eckstein of Cincinnati (with cockroaches substituted for canaries), and Lorraine Sheldon was modeled after Gertrude Lawrence.

The character of Harriet Sedley, the alias of Harriet Stanley, is an homage to Lizzie Borden. The popular jump-rope rhyme immortalizing Borden is parodied in the play.

Radio critic Dick Diespecker was not exactly enthusiastic about this adaptation.

The announcer reminds viewers that next week “Lux Radio Theatre” will present “Come To the Stable” starring Loretta Young and Hugh Marlowe

The announcer promotes Lucille Ball’s new picture Fancy Pants starring Bob Hope.

#Lucille Ball #The Man Who Came To Dinner #Clifton Webb #Eleanor Audley #My Favorite Husband #Ruth Perrott #Red Cross #Betty Lou Gerson #Hedy Lamarr #Betty Grable #Kaufman and Hart #Fancy Pants #Lux Radio Theatre #Lux #William Keighley

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the-marx-brothers-will-live-on · 5 years ago

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Herbert Manfred "Zeppo" Marx (February 25, 1901 – November 30, 1979) was an American actor, comedian, theatrical agent, and engineer. He was the youngest of the five Marx Brothers and also the last to die. He appeared in the first five Marx Brothers feature films, from 1929 to 1933, but then left the act to start his second career as an engineer and theatrical agent.

Zeppo was born in Manhattan, New York City, on February 25, 1901. His parents were Sam Marx (called "Frenchie" throughout his life), and his wife, Minnie Schönberg Marx. Minnie's brother was Al Shean, who later gained fame as half of the vaudeville team Gallagher and Shean. Marx's family was Jewish. His mother was from East Frisia in Germany; and his father was a native of France, and worked as a tailor.

As with all of the Marx Brothers, different theories exist as to where Zeppo got his stage name: Groucho said in his Carnegie Hall concert in 1972 that the name was derived from the Zeppelin airship. Zeppo's ex-wife Barbara Sinatra repeated this in her 2011 book, Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank. His brother Harpo offered a different account in his 1961 autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, claiming (p. 130) that there was a popular trained chimpanzee named Mr. Zippo, and that "Herbie" was tagged with the name "Zippo" because he liked to do chinups and acrobatics, as the chimp did in its act. The youngest brother objected to this nickname, and it was altered to "Zeppo". Another version of this story was that his name was changed to "Zeppo" in honor of the then popular "Zepplin". In a much later TV interview, Zeppo said that Zep is Italian-American slang for baby and as Zeppo was the youngest or baby Marx Brother, he was called Zeppo (BBC Archives).

Zeppo replaced brother Gummo in the Marx Brothers' stage act when the latter joined the army in 1918. Zeppo remained with the team and appeared in their successes in vaudeville, on Broadway, and the first five Marx Brothers films, as a straight man and romantic lead, before leaving the team. He also made a solo appearance in the Adolphe Menjou comedy A Kiss in the Dark, as Herbert Marx. It was described in newspaper reviews as a minor role.

In Lady Blue Eyes, Barbara Sinatra, Zeppo's second wife, reported that Zeppo was considered too young to perform with his brothers, and when Gummo joined the Army, Zeppo was asked to join the act as a last-minute stand-in at a show in Texas. Zeppo was supposed to go out that night with a Jewish friend of his. They were supposed to take out two Irish girls, but Zeppo had to cancel to board the train to Texas. His friend went ahead and went on the date, and was shot a few hours later when he was attacked by an Irish gang that disapproved of a Jew dating an Irish girl.

As the youngest and having grown up watching his brothers, Zeppo could fill in for and imitate any of the others when illness kept them from performing. Groucho suffered from appendicitis during the Broadway run of Animal Crackers and Zeppo filled in for him as Captain Spaulding.

"He was so good as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers that I would have let him play the part indefinitely, if they had allowed me to smoke in the audience", Groucho recalled. However, a comic persona of his own that could stand up against those of his brothers did not emerge. As critic Percy Hammond wrote, sympathetically, in 1928:

One of the handicaps to the thorough enjoyment of the Marx Brothers in their merry escapades is the plight of poor Zeppo Marx. While Groucho, Harpo, and Chico are hogging the show, as the phrase has it, their brother hides in an insignificant role, peeping out now and then to listen to plaudits in which he has no share.

Though Zeppo continued to play it straight in the Brothers' movies for Paramount Pictures, he occasionally got to be part of classic comedy moments in them—in particular, his role in the famous dictation scene with Groucho in Animal Crackers (1930). He also played a pivotal role as the love interest of Ruth Hall's character in Monkey Business (1931) and of Thelma Todd's in Horse Feathers (1932).

The popular assumption that Zeppo's character was superfluous was fueled in part by Groucho. According to Groucho's own story, when the group became the Three Marx Brothers, the studio wanted to trim their collective salary, and Groucho replied, "We're twice as funny without Zeppo!"

Zeppo had great mechanical skills and was largely responsible for keeping the Marx family car running. He later owned a company that machined parts for the war effort during World War II, Marman Products Co. of Inglewood, California, later acquired by the Aeroquip Company. This company produced a motorcycle, called the Marman Twin, and the Marman clamps used to hold the "Fat Man" atomic bomb inside the B-29 bomber Bockscar.[citation needed] He invented and obtained several patents for a wristwatch that monitored the pulse rate of cardiac patients and gave off an alarm if the heartbeat became irregular, and a therapeutic pad for delivering moist heat to a patient.

He also founded a large theatrical agency with his brother Gummo. During his time as a theatrical agent, Zeppo and Gummo, primarily Gummo, represented their brothers, among many others.

On April 12, 1927, Zeppo married Marion Bimberg Benda.[15] The couple adopted two children, Timothy and Thomas, in 1944 and 1945, and later divorced on May 12, 1954. On September 18, 1959, Marx married Barbara Blakeley, whose son, Bobby Oliver, he wanted to adopt and give his surname, but Bobby's father would not allow it. Bobby simply started using the last name "Marx".

Blakeley wrote in her book, Lady Blue Eyes, that Zeppo never made her convert to Judaism. Blakeley was of Methodist faith and said that Zeppo told her she became Jewish by "injection".

Blakeley also wrote in her book that Zeppo wanted to keep her son out of the picture, adding a room for him onto his estate, which was more of a guest house, as it was separated from the main residence. It was also decided that Blakeley's son would go to military school, which according to Blakeley, pleased Zeppo.

Zeppo owned a house on Halper Lake Drive in Rancho Mirage, California, which was built off the fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club. The Tamarisk Club had been set up by the Jewish community, which rivaled the gentile club called The Thunderbird. His neighbor happened to be Frank Sinatra. Zeppo later attended the Hillcrest Country Club with friends such as Sinatra, George Burns, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar, and Milton Berle.

Blakeley became involved with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and had arranged to show Spartacus (featuring Kirk Douglas) for charity, selling tickets, and organizing a postscreening ball. At the last minute, Blakeley was told she could not have the film, so Zeppo went to the country club and spoke to Sinatra, who agreed to let him have an early release of a film he had just finished named Come Blow Your Horn. Sinatra also flew everyone involved to Palm Springs for the event.

Zeppo was a very jealous and possessive husband, and hated for Blakeley to talk to other men. Blakeley claimed that Zeppo grabbed Victor Rothschild by the throat at a country club because she was talking to him. Blakeley had caught Zeppo on many occasions with other women; the biggest incident was a party Zeppo had thrown on his yacht. After the incident, Zeppo took Blakeley to Europe, and accepted more invitations to parties when they arrived back in the States. Some of these parties were at Sinatra's compound; he often invited Blakeley and Zeppo to his house two or three times a week. Sinatra would also send champagne or wine to their home, as a nice gesture.

Blakeley and Sinatra began a love affair, unbeknownst to Zeppo. The press eventually got wind of the affair, snapping photos of Blakely and Sinatra together, or asking Blakeley questions whenever they spotted her. Both Sinatra and she denied the affair.

Zeppo and Blakeley divorced in 1973. Zeppo let Blakeley keep the 1969 Jaguar he had bought her, and agreed to pay her $1,500 (equivalent to $8,600 in 2019) per month for 10 years. Sinatra upgraded Blakeley's Jaguar to the latest model. Sinatra also gave her a house to live in. The house had belonged to Eden Hartford, Groucho Marx's third wife. Blakeley and Sinatra continued to date, and were constantly hounded by the press until the divorce between Zeppo and Blakeley became final. Blakeley and Sinatra were married in 1976.

Zeppo became ill with cancer in 1978. He sold his home, and moved to a house on the fairway off Frank Sinatra Drive. The doctors thought the cancer had gone into remission, but it returned. Zeppo called Blakeley, who accompanied him to doctor's appointments. Zeppo spent his last days with Blakeley's family.

The last surviving Marx Brother, Zeppo died of lung cancer at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage on November 30, 1979, at the age of 78. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean.

In his will, Zeppo left Bobby Marx a few possessions and enough money to finish law school. Both Sinatra and Blakeley attended his funeral.

#zeppo marx #marx brothers #classic hollywood #classic comedy

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canchewread · 5 years ago

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Editor's note: while I've certainly been away from Can't You Read for quite a while, anyone who follows my work at ninaillingworth.com or my Patreon blog already knows that I've been writing (and podcasting) again. You can check out some of my latest essays here, here and here; to listen to the podcast I co-host with Nick Galea (No Fugazi) just click here.

Today however I'm back on my bookworm bullsh*t with another curiously dated review of left wing literature from my extensive library of pinko pontification. In today's review, we're going to be taking a look at “The Chapo Guide to Revolution: a Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason” written by five members of the popular left wing podcast “Chapo Trap House” - specifically, Felix Beiderman, Matt Christman, Brendan James, Will Menaker and Virgil Texas.

Baby Steps up the Ramparts

It is I will theorize, utterly impossible to write a review about the Chapo Trap House book without engaging in the extremely online, three-sided culture war that has sprung up around both “the Chapos” themselves and the enormously popular podcast they host. In light of the fact that seemingly everyone on the internet who detests the show regard the Chapos as slovenly crackpot losers born on third base and podcasting from mom's basement, it really is alarming how much digital ink has been spilled about the various types of “threat” to all that is good and holy this simple irony-infused podcast supposedly represents. While I intend to largely sidestep that discussion by focusing entirely on the book and not the podcast (which I don't listen to regularly, to be honest with you), I accept that virtually nobody reading this is going to be happy unless I do something to address the elephant in the room, so here goes:

Neera Tanden and her winged neoliberal monkeys can eat sh*t, but extremely online leftists have a point that the Chapos themselves occasionally skirt the line between mockingly ironic reactionary thought and just plain old reactionary thought; although this is not particularly alarming to me because they're Americans and America itself is a breeding ground for reactionary ideas – decolonizing your mind is a process and I'm pretty sure it's one I myself am also engaging in still every single day of my life at this point. Importantly, in my opinion this failing does not make them cryptofascists so much as the product of American affluence; I'm having a hard time understanding how teaching Marx and Zinn to Twitter reply guys serves the fascist agenda in any meaningful way. While I obviously can't pretend to know another person's heart, in my opinion the Chapo boys are definitely leftists but they're obviously not labor class and yes it's a little hard to explain away the group's loose affiliation with the (objectively strasserist) Red Scare podcast through co-host Amber A'Lee Frost - but I'm not going to waste a couple thousand words trying to untangle Brooklyn independent media drama from half a country away and besides, Amber didn’t write this book. Despite these critiques however, I think it's important to note that under no circumstances am I prepared to accept the argument that with fascists to the right of me, and lanyards, um also to the right, the real problem here is... Chapo Trap House.

Ok, with that out of the way let's dive right in and talk about the question I think most folks who've written about The Chapo Guide to Revolution have largely failed to grasp – namely, what kind of book is it precisely? Combining elements of comedy, playful online trolling, historical analysis, political theory and good old-fashioned cross platform promotional marketing, the book has often lead critics to compare it to catch-all comedic efforts like Joe Stewart's “America” or even humorous men’s lifestyle advice texts like “Max Headroom's Guide to Life.” This is I think an essential misreading of the fundamentally earnest and direct tone the book actually takes in its efforts to reach a fledgling audience growing more receptive to left wing ideas. The Chapo Guide to Revolution is, as the cover says, a manifesto; but rather than serving as the mission statement for a particular formed political ideology, the Chapos have written an extremely effective, entry-level argument for why labor-class millennials should be leftists – and, of course, why they should listen to Chapo Trap House; this is still a cross-promotional work after all.

Naturally as befits a book about a comedy podcast, albeit a very political one, the Chapo Guide to Revolution is an extremely funny book that does a remarkable job translating the type of caustic online humor previously only found in left wing Twitter circles, onto the written page. While its certainly true that this quirky style of comedy can be a little difficult to grasp for the uninitiated, and typically a cross-promotional work of this type will get bogged down in self-referential humor and inside jokes, the book mostly avoids this trap by sticking with the basics and assuming that the reader has literally never heard an episode of Chapo Trap House, which in turn makes the humor fairly universal and extremely accessible – at least for anyone under the age of fifty. This endeavor is greatly aided by the dark and dystopian, yet hilariously eviscerating art of Eli Valley; a man who himself has since become one of the leading left wing critics of establishment power online through his extremely provocative sketches and ink work.

The truth however is that if the Chapo Guide to Revolution was merely just a funny book, I wouldn't be reviewing it here today. No, the reason this book is worth writing about at all lies in the fact that underneath all the jokes, taunts and “half-baked Marxism” lies an objectively brilliant work of historical analysis, cultural critique and left wing political theory – albeit an unfocused theory that borrows heavily from half a dozen functionally incompatible left wing thinkers and literary giants, but a fundamentally serious work of political philosophy nonetheless.

Yes, that's correct; I said brilliant. Where think-tank minions and neoliberal swine in the corporate media see a petulant pinko tantrum, and online leftist academics see privileged dudebros appropriating Marx (poorly), I see a brilliant and yet stealthy synthesis of political theories, historical analysis and organizational ideas originally presented by writers like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Thomas Frank. Drawing on historical theories from Marx, Gramsci and Rocker, the Chapos have cobbled together a rudimentary political philosophy that represents a crude and yet promising welding of anarchist concepts about labor, Marxist concepts about economics and democratic socialist concepts about politics, collected together under the generic banner of “socialism.”

At this point some of you are undoubtedly snickering, but please bear with me for a moment here because what the Chapos (or their ghostwriter) have done in this book is truly a marvelous thing to behold precisely because you can't see it unless you're paying close attention. By positioning The Chapo Guide to Revolution as both a comedic work and an introductory level text, the authors have created a sort of unique crash course in left wing history, geopolitics, philosophy and political theory for a newly awakened generation of Americans who find themselves increasingly politicized whether they like it or not.

Underneath the acerbic millennial humor, “extremely online” diction and unrelenting waves of sarcasm, The Chapo Guide to Revolution is also a surprisingly accurate “CliffsNotes” style textbook presentation of multiple broad-based social science subjects – here are just a few examples:

In “Chapter One: World” the book presents a rudimentary and yet deliciously insightful history of post-World War II American empire that draws on authors like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, with a touch of contemporary writers like Greg Grandin and Naomi Klein. In particular the attention devoted to condensing the target audience's formative experiences with empire like the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, into a short and coherent narrative that can be easily shared with other novice political observers makes this book an invaluable resource for budding millennial leftists Additionally, while it certainly might have been an accident, the Chapos' choice to wrap this “Pig Empire geopolitics for newbs” lesson in a protracted joke about America as an extremely ruthless corporate startup at least touches on ideas presented by writers like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Sheldon Wollin (or Chris Hedges repeating Sheldon Wolin), Joel Bakan, Rosa Luxemburg and others.

In Chapters Two and Three, entitled “Libs” and “Cons” respectively, the authors conduct a remarkably thorough political science lesson on the two major mainstream political “ideologies” in American culture, including both a rough outline of their history and their modern calcification inside the Democratic and Republican parties. Of course both of these sections rely heavily on the personal experiences of the authors growing up in a politicized America, but these discussions also dip into the works of Thomas Frank and Cory Robin to explore and critique the liberal and conservative political mindset respectively; in particular the Chapos summary of Robin's work on the conservative worship of hierarchies is an inspired distillation. More importantly however, the Chapos also expose the way in which these two ideologies represent a false dichotomy within the greater confines of a larger capitalist socioeconomic order; which is of course a (still absolutely correct) idea straight out of the works of Karl Marx.

In Chapter Six, appropriately entitled “work” the authors engaged in a disarmingly earnest discussion about wage slavery, the false promises of the protestant work ethic and the history of terrible jobs available to the labor class under various iterations of the capitalist project. This is followed by a humorous, but dystopian review of what future jobs might look like if the neoliberal socioeconomic order continues on as it has so far, and an extremely brief but sincerely argued pitch for completely transforming the role of work in society through some from of technologically assisted anarcho-communism. This last idea is admittedly a little half-baked but you have to admire their balls when the Chapo boys flatly call for a three hour workday; a position that will undoubtedly be popular with the labor class who're currently engaged in all those sh*tty jobs the book describes earlier in the chapter. Once again this synthesis of left wing ideas about work does represent a new and unique formulation, but despite the humorous and original content you can also clearly see the influence of anarchist writers like Kropotkin, Rocker and Goldman in this chapter, as well as contemporary authors like David Graeber and Mark Blyth.

Unfortunately, if there is a downside to writing a brilliantly subversive comedy book that functions as a “my little lefty politics primer” for politically awakening millennials, it's that you simply don't have the space for an intellectually rigorous examination of all the ideas you're sharing – there is after all a big difference between reading the Cliff Notes version of Zinn, Chomsky or Marx, and reading the original theories in their full form. Furthermore, the individual life experiences, idiosyncrasies and humor styles of the authors do at times bleed into the text in a way that I personally suspect was detrimental to the overall analysis. Here's a short list of “sour notes” I found in this otherwise remarkable book:

From what I have listened to of the Chapo Trap House podcast, it has always been my impression that the Chapos were particularly effective critics of American corporate media, so I was a little disappointed that the chapter on media in The Chapo Guide to Revolution was a fairly tepid and narrow discussion about (admittedly vapid) bloggers turned celebrated pundits. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure power dunking on the likes of Matty Yglesias, Meagan McArdell and Andrew Sullivan was viscerally satisfying for the book's target audience, but there's really not much of a broader critique of the media's ideological role in American capitalism and culture here like one would find in Herman & Chomsky's “Manufacturing Consent”, Matt Taibbi's “Hate Inc” or Michael Parenti's “Inventing Reality.” This absence I fear has the tragic side effect of reinforcing the idea the American corporate media sucks because egg-shaped moron bougie pundits are bad at their job and not because of the inherent failings of the for-profit media model and the institution's true role as an ideological shepherd keeping the masses aligned with the goals of elite capital and the ruling classes – almost exclusively against the bests interests of the labor class.

The introduction is written in what I can only assume is a sarcastic imitation of right-leaning self improvement books with a touch of Tyler Durden's Fight Club ethos thrown in; this might have been a better choice in a completely different book but it's largely out of place with the rest of this book. At this point I should also say that the best part about the Kidzone intermission is that it was only two pages long. Needless to say, neither one of these sections did anything for me whatsoever.

While it's entirely possible that at forty-three years of age, I'm simply too old to really get the “millenialness” of the chapter on Culture, the simple truth is that I found most of it to be a fairly useless examination of pop culture influences the Chapos hold in reasonably high esteem. As someone who isn't particularly engaged in watching lengthy television series or regularly playing video games, I really couldn't dig into most of the material presented and the less said about the art jokes and the bizarre absurdist discussion of elevator brands, the better. There is however one rather notable exception here in the brief essay on The Sorkin Mindset, which is an objectively brilliant evisceration of the liberal obsession with the West Wing and the tragic effect that obsession has had on Democratic Party politics – this really could have gone in the chapter on “Libs” because it's that valuable of a tool for understanding and critiquing the modern liberal lanyard worldview. Finally I guess I should note that while the Chapo boys' insightful critique of the vapid “prestige TV” phenomenon is both interesting and correct, it really only “matters” if you're a consumer of these types of series – and I'm not.

While I certainly understand the authors' decision to use their notes section to preemptively debunk bullsh*t complaints about the more outrageous accusations they level against the American establishment, I would have liked to see a “recommended reading” section. It is very clear that the Chapos have a reasonably strong background in imperial history, political science and labor theory and I feel like pointing readers towards writers who expand on the theories they summarize in The Chapo Guide to Revolution might have been a better use of space than printing links to old internet articles bad faith actors will never type into a search engine anyway.

Although it might seem like there was more about the book I didn't like, than I did, this is a little misleading – the first three chapters of The Chapo Guide to Revolution are pure fire and comprise over half of the volume. If you throw in the brilliant chapter about work and labor theory, the overall package is far more substance than style, despite the fact that it remains humorous and a little bit edgy throughout the book. While it's certainly fair to say that an introductory primer on why you should be a leftist for newly-politicized millennials isn't a must-read for everyone, the simple truth is that the vast majority of online leftists I know could learn a thing or two from this rudimentary synthesis of various left wing ideas into the seeds of a working, modern political ideology compatible with a uniquely Americanized, millennial left.

While no three hundred page comedy book written by five podcasters from Brooklyn is going to teach you everything there is to know about socialism and left wing ideology, there's something to be said for offering an accessible, entry-level alternative tailor-made for a target demographic already being heavily recruited by the fascists. As a starting point for exploring left wing political thought, you could do a lot worse than The Chapo Guide to Revolution and for a generation of kids who've mostly been encouraged to be passive accomplices to their own subjugation while blaming their misery on anyone even more powerless than they are, there is perhaps nothing more valuable than a condensed narrative that explores how to even think about another way to live.

Remarkably, this book finds a way to deliver on that monumental task while simultaneously failing to grasp one single relevant thing about the cherished American novel Moby Dick. Despite this infuriating literary myopia and insolence, this still might literally be the best book ever written for young American leftists who simply aren't going to spend ten years reading academic literature written by dead white guys from Germany and Russia. - nina illingworth Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online! You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud. Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

#chapo trap house #book review #The Chapo Guide to Revolution #left wing politics #geopolitics #humor #leftism #introduction to leftism #Noam Chomsky #Howard Zinn #Thomas Frank #Cory Robin #culture war #politics #news #media #bloggers #savage burns

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archiefm · 5 years ago

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... claws my way up from hell once more and vomits onto the dash.... hello. its nora. i used to write rory bergstrom, but if u were here before that u might remember me as greta or alma putnam or..... som1 else.... an endless carousel of trash children..... this is finn, who i actually wrote for an early version of this rp abt 5yrs back now...... grits teeth..... so forgive me if im rusty i havent written him in a long time but seein honey boy gave me a lotta finn muse n im keen to get Back On The Horse yeehaww...

DYLAN O’BRIEN / CIS-MALE — don’t look now, but is that finn o’callaghan i see? the 25 year old criminology and forensic studies student is in their graduate year of study year and he is a rochester alum. i hear they can be judicious, adroit, morose and cynical, so maybe keep that in mind. i bet he will make a name for themselves living off-campus. ( nora. 24. gmt. she/her )

shakes my tin can a humble pinterest, ma’am....

finn has a bio pasted at the bottom (n written in like.... 2015.... gross) but it’s long so if u don’t wanna read it here’s the sparknotes summary..... anyway this was written years ago n a lot of it seems really cliche and lame now but..... we accept the trash we think we deserve

grumpy, ugly sweater wearing, tech-savvy grandpa

very dry sense of humour and embraces nihilism.

if ron swanson and april ludgate had a baby it would be finn

he was raised in derry, just south of dublin.

from a big family. elder sister called sinead. he also has a younger sister (aoife), a younger brother (colm), and a collie named lassie because his father lovs cliches (finn hates cliches but loves his dog).

his father was a pub landlord and his mother worked at the market sellin fruit n veg when they met but got a job as a medical receptionist when she had kids cos it meant she cld be there with them in the day and work nights.

his parents met when they were p young and fiesty and rushed into marriage cos they were catholic n just wanted to have sex. his family were literally dirt-poor, but they had a lot of love i guess

hmmmmm his relationship w his father wasn’t the best cos i can’t write character who have healthy relationships w their parents throws up a peace sign. yh, had a pretty emotionally distant, alcoholic violent father n so gets a lot of his bad habits i.e. drinking as a coping mechanism and poor anger management from him BUT anyway

as a kid he was never very motivated in class, he always had a nervous itch to be off somewhere doing something else. struggled under government austerity bcso there just wasn’t the resources to support low income families where the kids had learning difficulties n needed support. fuck the tories am i right

his mum suggested he try sports to help w his restless energy but he was never any good at football so he took up boxing and tap dance instead. he took to tap dancing like a fish to fuckin water. as adhd n found this as a really good way to use his excess energy in a creative way

had a few run ins with the police in his early teens for spray painting and graffiti, but he straightened himself out n now actually considering becoming a detective inspector??? cops are pigs.

he had a youtube channel where he posted videos of him tapdancing and breakdancing as a kid, basically would be a tiktok boy nowadays, n had like... a small fanbase in his early teens. attended several open auditions unsuccessfully, until he was finally cast in billy eliot when he was fifteen.

during billy eliot he began dating an italian dancer called nina. they became dance partners soon after and toured across the republic with various different shows (inc riverdance lol the classic irish stereotype). their relationship was p toxic tbh, they were both very hot tempered people and just used to argue and fight all the time.

he went semi-pro at tap dancing, and nina couldn’t stand being second best so she moved back to italy with her family. ignored his texts, phone calls, etc, eventually he was driven to the point where he used his savings to buy a plane ticket, showed up at her house and she was like wtf?? freaked out and filed a restraining order accusing him of stalking.

he was fined for harassment and then returned home to derry, but after the incident with nina he quit dancing for good and finished his leaving cert before heading to university in the US to get as far away from nina and his past life as poss. and basically since he quit dancing to study forensics (death kink. finn cant get enough of that morgue. just walks around sayin beat u) he’s become a massive grump and jsut doesn’t see the good in people any more.

u’ll find finn in an old man bar drinking whiskey bc he is in fact an old man at heart or sat on his roof smoking a joint, drawing wolves and lions and skeletons and shit, playing call of duty or getting blazed or at the corner of the room in a house party ignoring everyone and scrolling through twitter. is a massive e-boy. always up-to-date on memes and internet slang. has reddit as an app on his phone

not very good at communication. rather than solve his issues by talking, he’d prefer to just solve them through fighting or running away from his problems hence why he has come halfway across the world to get away from an issue which probs cld have been solved w a few apology emails.

takes a lot to phase him, but when his beserk button gets pressed he can become a bit pugnacious like an angry lil rottweiler. in his undergrad he was in a few fist fights but doesn’t really do tht any more as he doesn’t condone violence.

in the previous version of this rp he was hospitalised like 5 times. pls, give my son a break. stop tryin to kill him. he literaly got a bottle smashed over his head and bled out all over his favourite angora rug that was the only light of his life

works at the campus coffee shop n always whines about how he’s a slave to capitalism. always smells of coffee

lives off campus with an elderly woman named Marianne, and basically gets reduced rent bcos he makes her dinner / keeps her company. they have a great bond

fan of karl marx. v big on socialism

insomniac with chronic nosebleeds

cynical about everything. too much of a fight club character 4 his own good n has his head up tyler durden’s sphincter

always confused or annoyed

statistics

basic information

full name: finnegan seamus o'callaghan nickname(s): finn age: 25 astrological sign: aries hometown: derry, ireland occupation: phd student / former street entertainer fatal flaw: cynicism positives: self-reliant, street smart, relaxed, intelligent, spontaneous, brave, independent, reliable, trustworthy, loyal. negatives: hostile, impulsive, stubborn, brooding, pugnacious, untrusting, cynical, enigmatic, reserved.

physical

colouring: medium hair colour: dark brown, almost black eye colour: brown height: 5’9” weight: 69kg build: tall, athletic voice: subtle irish accent, low, smooth. dominant hand: left scar(s): one on the left side of his ribs from a knife wound that he doesn’t remember getting cos he was drunk distinguishing marks: freckles, tattoo of a wolf howling at a moon allergies: pollen and the full spectrum of human emotion alcohol tolerance: high drunken behaviour: he becomes friendlier, far more conversational than when sober, flirtier, and generally more self-confident.

psychological

dreams/goals: self-fulfilment, travel the globe, experience life in its most alive and technicoloured version, make documentary films, help the vulnerable in society, grow as a human being.

skills: jack-of-all-trades, very fast runner, good at thieving things, talented tap dancer, good in crisis situations, dab-hand at mechanics, musically-intelligent, can throw a mean right hook and very capable of defending himself, can roll a cigarette, memorises quotes and passages of literature with ease, can light a match with his teeth.

likes: the smell of the earth after rain, poetry, cigarettes, shakespeare, whiskey, tattoos, travelling, ac/dc, deep conversations, leather jackets, open spaces, the smell of petrol, early noughties ‘emo phase’ anthems.

dislikes: the government, parties, rules, donald trump, children, apple products, weddings, people in general, small talk, dependency, loneliness, pop music, public transport, justin timberlake, uncertainty.fears: fear itself, drowning alignment: true neutral mbti: istp – “while their mechanical tendencies can make them appear simple at a glance, istps are actually quite enigmatic. friendly but very private, calm but suddenly spontaneous, extremely curious but unable to stay focused on formal studies, istp personalities can be a challenge to predict, even by their friends and loved ones. istps can seem very loyal and steady for a while, but they tend to build up a store of impulsive energy that explodes without warning, taking their interests in bold new directions.” (via 16personalities.com)

full bio (lame as fuck written years ago..... pleathe...)

tw homophobia

born in quigley’s pub on the backstreets of sunny dublin, young finnegan o'callaghan was thrown kicking and screaming into the rowdy suburbs of irish drinking culture. the son of a landlord and a fishwife, he never had much in the way of earnings, but there was never a dull moment in his lively estate, where asbo’s thrived, but community spirit conquered. at school, finn was pegged as lazy and unmotivated, though truly his dyslexia made it hard for the boy to learn in the same environment of his peers and only made him more closed-off in class. struggling with anger management, finn moved from school to school, unable to fit the cookie-cutter mould that school enforced on him, though whilst academic studies were of little interest to the boy, he soon found his true passions lay in recreational activities. immersed into the joys of sport from as young as four, finn was an ardent munster fan and anticipated nothing more than the day he could finally fit into his brother’s old pair of rugby boots.

his calling finally came unexpectedly, not in the form of rugger, but through dance. to learn to express himself in a non-academic way, he began tap dancing, finding therapy in the beat of his soles against the cracked kitchen tiles (much to his mother’s disgrace). it wasn’t a conscious choice, finn just realised one day that dance was something that made him feel. a king of the streets, finn made his fortune on those cobbled pavements – dancing and drawing to earn his keep. by default, finn became a street artist, each penny he earned from his chalk drawings saved in a jam jar towards buying his first pair of tap shoes. though many of his less-than-amiable neighbours called him a nancy and a gaybo, finn refused to quit at his somewhat ‘unconventional’ hobby, for the young scrapper found energy, life, and released anger through the rhythm of tap. soon he branched out into street dance, hip hop, break dancing, lyrical, his days spent smacking his scuffed feet against the broken patio into the night.

when he was thirteen he took up boxing, and as expected, his newfound ‘macho’ pastime conflicted with his dancing. the boxers called him ‘soft’; the dancers called him ‘inelegant’. he felt like two different people; having to choose between interests was like being handed a knife and asked to which half of himself he wished to cut away. he couldn’t afford professional training in dance, with most schools based in england and limited scholarships available. instead, he made the street his studio, racking up a small fanbase on youtube. when he was fifteen he made his debut in billy eliot at the olympia theatre in dublin. enter nina de souza, talented, beautiful and italian; ballet dancer, operatic singer, genius whiz kid, and spoiled brat. she was selfish, conceited, hell bent on getting her own way, and every director’s nightmare. finn fell for her like a house of cards. he’d always had a soft spot for girls who meant trouble. and so their hellish courtship began.

by the time they were seventeen, the two young swans had danced in every playhouse across the republic. they were known in theatres across the country for their tempestuous personalities, their raging arguments with one another, their tendency to drop out of shows altogether without any notice, yet the money kept rolling in and the audiences continued to grow. for three years, their families continued to put up with their hysterical fights followed by passionate reconciliations. he was too possessive, and she was too wild. their carcrash of a relationship finally came to a catastrophic halt when nina broke off the whole affair and returned to italy with her family. for months finn tried to contact her, yet his phone calls, texts, facebook messages were always ignored, until finally he was driven to drastic measures and used his savings to get a plane to her home town. when finn turned up uninvited at nina’s house she freaked out – and rightly so – she contacted her agent, accused him of stalking her, and had a restraining order placed against him. finn was arrested, held in a station overnight, and charged with harassment before he was allowed to return to dublin.

after the incident with nina, finn lost the fight in his eyes. he became far more hostile, far less likely to retaliate with his own fists, and picked fights not for the thrill of feeling his own fists pummel another into a wall, but for the sensation of his own brittle bones cracking. he dropped his tap shoes in a dumpster, stopped talking to his friends, followed his father’s advice and went back to school to complete his leaving certificate. a few short months later, and finn was packing his bags, saying his bittersweet goodbyes, and travelling half-way across the globe to be as far away as possible from his past self, his mess of a life, and most of all nina. it seemed somehow ironic that the boy who had been cautioned by the garda so much during his youth for spray painting, busking without a liscence, and raucous parties would become the grumpy, aloof overseas student studying a degree in criminology; that his once reckless spirit could be crushed so easily.

of all things that finn could be called, straightforward would never be one of them. ever since his first days in atticus, the boy was pegged as hostile, hot-headed, cynical, rude. he seemed to spend more time in his thoughts than engaging in conversation. like a ticking time-bomb, finn’s anger was of the calm kind, liable to explode without a moment’s noticed. his unpredictable personality make him something of an enigma to those who aren’t amiable with the lad, though hostile as he may appear, he harvests a good heart. loyalty lies at the centre of his affections, and whilst his friends are few in number, he makes a lifelong partner. somewhere within finn, there’s still some fight left, but mostly he has recognised that his hedonistic lifestyle did little to leave him fulfilled – mostly, it just emptied him out – and over his three years at university has resigned himself to a nihilistic predicament.

if u wanna plot with me pls pls pls im me or like this post!! i am always game for plots i love em so excited to write with you all here r some ideas

study buddies. finn is now a phd student so has to start takin shit seriously. he gon be in the library every day doing that independent study. if he had ppl who were also regular library goers n they get each other coffees to save time.... tht wld be sweet

ppl who love techno dj sets and going super hard on the weekends!!! fuck yea

friends with benefits. exes on bad terms. ppl he tried to date but couldnt because he’s always emotionally hung up on someone else. spicy hook up plots

ppl he met touring?? maybe ppl who were also in the entertainment industry..... anyone got a character who is ex circus hit me up

does anyone else study criminology / forensics / criminal psych / law? phd students sometimes lecture so he cld be an assistant lecturer / tutor if ur character is in a younger year

gamers !!! social recluses !!! hermits !!

finn goes to the skatepark and all the young boys there think he’s a gradnpa which he is!

#huntingtonintro #is tht the tag....... idk..... msg me xo

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jimhenson-themuppetmaster · 7 years ago

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Sherry Amott Creative Supervisor on The Dark Crystal.

Sherry Amott lent her theater design and production expertise to the Henson Company throughout the 70s and 80s. She was among the many Muppet designers for The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie, and worked at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop on various characters for The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and Dreamchild. She was Head of Fabrication of Audrey II for the Frank Oz film Little Shop of Horrors.

Amott worked on Sesame Street as well, creating Linda’s pet dog Barkley and designing the outfits for the cover of the famous Sesame Street Fever LP, among other feats.

After “Little Shop of Horrors” Amott married British filmmaker, director and editor John Tippey. Their son Jake was born in London in 1986. Post-Henson she worked briefly as a children’s and young adult librarian before moving to Cincinnati to work for Horizon Productions as a producer, and later, Creative Director. Her freelance work included character and costume design and fabrication for theatre, video and interactive projects. She co-produced and designed an interactive CD-ROM and website for artist January Marx Knoop. In 2007 Sherry Amott Tippey became Creative Director at Curtis, Incorporated, a Visual Communications firm in Cincinnati where she enjoys writing, producing, project management, multimedia production and web design.

Sherry sings with the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra Chorale, BACHorale, October Festival Choir, and Voices of Freedom.

Jake is lead guitar, singer and songwriter for The Frankl Project. Recent photos of The Frankl Project opening Riotfest at the House of Blues in Chicago are posted here.

CREDITS Designer The Muppet Show: The Germ, others Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas The Muppet Movie Sesame Street: Barkley Sesame Street Fever: Muppet disco attire The Dark Crystal: Creative supervisor; Creature design and fabrication (Mystics, Pod People, and Slaves) Dreamchild: Mechanical design assistant designer Labyrinth: Senior animatronic designer; Creature workshop teams: The Chilly Downs, Junk Lady, The Wiseman Performer Labyrinth: Firey 3 (assistant)

#the dark crystal #sherry amott #jim henson #builder #rare pics #information #workshop #our scan

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theculturedmarxist · 7 years ago

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The same old stupid game

I’ve recently had the misfortune to come across a few articles, one by Inez Feltscher Stepman of The Federalist and David Satter, “senior fellow” at the so-called Hudson Institute. Naturally, as reactionary commentators for reactionary propaganda outlets, their tripe is full of lies, half-truths, and glaring omissions meant to serve their biases. It’s the normal bourgeois playbook for libeling Communism.

I’m not a tremendous fan of the Soviet Union, or the manner of “actually existing Socialism” that developed there, but I feel compelled to refute this nonsense not only because it’s dishonest, or that it’s a perversion of the actual history, but at least because the Soviet Union is the dead horse reactionaries love to beat when Socialism as a subject is discussed.

I came across Stepman’s tripe after seeing someone post the following cap from her twitter:

galaxymind.jpg

I try not to go by screen caps alone. A favorite of /pol/’s tactics is taking things out of context to craft their own narrative around events, which often have little or any basis in reality. Given the... content of this tweet, the meaning seems pretty obvious, but I try to err on the side of caution, so I ran her name through my sophisticated crime computer and was immediately directed to her posts at The Federalist. The results weren’t particularly impressive, but something did jump out to me: “The Biggest Legacy Of International Women’s Day Is Communism.”

I had a feeling it was going to be painful given the title, and I wasn’t wrong.

As a Communist, I have a soft spot for International Working Women’s day, as the event was originally known. Women have played a special role in the history of labor organization and revolutionary activity, and today Capitalism derives much of its profit from the relentless, merciless exploitation of the female gender in its various forms.

How progressive.

Even in the so-called First World, I’ve seen my female friends and co-workers mistreated and immiserated by the Capitalist system in ways unique to their kind. I celebrate IWWD because in its ideal form, it is an opportunity not only for women to build solidarity between one another (which is often sorely lacking) but for men to show their support, and build solidarity with the other gender (and vice versa on International Working Men’s Day). It’s an opportunity to remember the work of women past, the progress we’ve been able to achieve together, and lay the ground work for a better future for us all. The purpose of the day is to pay special attention to the circumstances of our working sisters, but at its heart it’s a day to reaffirm our dedication to the cause of true egalitarianism, and not the false mirage offered by bourgeois “feminists” that demand more female CEOs while ignoring the Mexican nannies they underpay to raise their children for them, or pushing expensive shirts for “charity,” assembled in stifling and dangerous sweat shops by the thousands of women they actually should be fighting for.

Naturally, Stepman starts off strong.

Leon Trotsky, of icepick fame, wrote afterwards: “We did not imagine that this ‘Women’s Day’ would inaugurate the revolution. Revolutionary actions were foreseen but without date. But in morning, despite the orders to the contrary, textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for support of the strike … which led to mass strike … all went out into the streets.”

What a splendid introduction. I wonder if she characterizes so “Abraham Lincoln, of getting-shot-in-the-back-of-the-head fame.” She links to a Fortune article, which in turn links to an apparently defunct World March for Women site. Usually, not linking directly to the source material (when possible) is a strong indicator of chicanery, to say the least. After a bit of searching, I was able to track it down to Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, where the actual quote goes like so:

THE 23rd of February was International Woman’s Day. The social-democratic circles had intended to mark this day in a general manner: by meetings, speeches, leaflets. It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution. Not a single organisation called for strikes on that day. What is more, even a Bolshevik organisation, and a most militant one – the Vyborg borough committee, all workers – was opposing strikes. The temper of the masses, according to Kayurov, one of the leaders in the workers’ district, was very tense; any strike would threaten to turn into an open fight. But since the committee thought the time unripe for militant action – the party not strong enough and the workers having too few contacts with the soldiers – they decided not to call for strikes but to prepare for revolutionary action at some indefinite time in the future. Such was the course followed by the committee on the eve of the 23rd of February, and everyone seemed to accept it. On the following morning, however, in spite of all directives, the women textile workers in several factories went on strike, and sent delegates to the metalworkers with an appeal for support. “With reluctance,” writes Kayurov, “the Bolsheviks agreed to this, and they were followed by the workers–Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. But once there is a mass strike, one must call everybody into the streets and take the lead.” Such was Kayurov’s decision, and the Vyborg committee had to agree to it. “The idea of going into the streets had long been ripening among the workers; only at that moment nobody imagined where it would lead.” Let us keep in mind this testimony of a participant, important for understanding the mechanics of the events.

Certainly lends a different perspective to the “quote,” I think, but we can’t show that the Bolsheviks weren’t power-mad, bloodthirsty tyrants now, can we? Of course, progressing through the article we find the same ridiculous libels that we usually find.

That revolution, which caused Russia to exit WWI and brought Vladimir Lenin to power, started the chain of events that eventually lead to the slaughter of as many as 100 million people under the banner of Communism.

To say that the revolution “caused Russia to exit WWI” is a half-truth at best. Russia was suffering severely from the deprivations caused by the titanic struggle with Germany, for which Russia was horribly unprepared. All the nonsense that reactionaries like this try to pin on the Soviets--not enough rifles or ammunition for their troops, mass human wave tactics, shooting ‘cowards’ retreating without orders, etc--was committed by Tsarist Russia. By the end of the war, due to incompetence among the aristocracy and general staff, unpreparedness either militarily or economically, intervention by the Tsar himself in military affairs on the Eastern Front, and the terrific conditions the Russian soldiers and peasantry were exposed to, Russia would see more than four-million of its people dead. Russia was incapable of continued involvement in the war. The Bolsheviks end up signing away a vast expanse of Russia to buy peace, which is exactly what the people wanted, and what the parliamentary government refused to give them.

The “100 Million Dead” is the usual smear, but I’ll return to that shortly.

Obviously, few people celebrating International Women’s Day in 2018 intend to glorify Communism’s dark history. But the day still retains the essence of its Marxist roots by encouraging women to think of themselves as a homogenous [sic] class with discrete common interests, in opposition to men’s.

Here the brainlet further exposes herself for the pseudo-intellectual that she is. There’s a lot to be said about Marxism and its history with “Feminism.” This sort of characterization reveals how little of either Stepman understands of either.

In Marxist terms, men and women don’t constitute separate classes within society. In short, one’s social class is determined by one’s relationship to the means of production, i.e., do you have to work for a living, or do you live from others working necessary resources to which you control by monopoly? There are numerous divisions possible based on how you want to slice it, but generally you can say that there are the bourgeois, those that own the things people need to live, and the proletariat, those that earn a wage working for the bourgeois. From the Marxist perspective, men and women inhabit the same class based on their material relations, but nowhere are their assumed to be “homogenous,” or that they have universal or even necessarily opposed interests. As workers, they have a united interest in overthrowing the capitalist system of bourgeois ownership that keeps them in bondage, but to treat people as a homogeneous mass with all the same needs and goals runs directly counter to the materialist analysis on which Marx bases his thought.

It’s well understood by the actual Left that until we’re all free, men and women, etc, then none of us are free, and even a cursory glance at the history of people’s revolutions reveals that without the united effort of women and men, they’ll both languish in bondage. One half of the proletariat trying to get a leg up on the other isn’t just nonsensical, it’s counter revolutionary, detrimental to the well being of both.

The rest of her rubbish-bin of an article is just more smears and ignorance (to be charitable, rather than to assume she’s knowingly lying).

David Satter’s brain rot was ladled out during November of last year, the centennial of the Russian revolution, and he plays the same old tired tunes, inflating the supposed atrocities of “Communism.” That’s always the way, isn’t it? Anyone that dies in a “Communist” country is a victim of Communism, but the swollen mountain of stinking corpses that are still being piled up in the name of Capitalism, well, sorry! that just don’t count.

From the megamind himself:

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist-Leninist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

Another brainlet misrepresentation. Marxism is a materialist philosophy. It’s concerned with the objective and the real. There was nothing “spiritual” about the Bolshevik’s desire to abolish Tsarism, educate the peasants, feed them, house them, clothe them, and modernize the country. I fully doubt that Lenin et al made claims of “infallibility,” and as usual this dipshit completely ignores the reactionary, pro-Tsarist character of the Orthodox church and its role in supporting the aristocracy at the expense of the common people. To say that an “atheist state” is incompatible with Western civilization is utterly idiotic. What is he a “senior fellow” of, exactly? Poopy?

The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

This is a bald faced lie. David Satter is either embarrassingly incompetent as a historian, or he’s an out-and-out liar. He blithely ignores that, previous to the Bolsheviks, the Tsar had no compunction about executing political dissidents, siccing his Cossacks on unarmed civilians, sending ordinary Russians to die by the thousands in wars his country could ill afford, much less equipped to fight, and a devoted proponent of autocracy.

There is no one or two ways about it: the Great War was a Capitalist war, fought for access to markets and resources. There was no noble aim, just destruction and mayhem to secure the fortunes of the wealthy. By the war’s end, Russia alone would lose more than four-million of its people. In total, nearly 25 million people would end up victims of a conflict that resulted ultimately only in ruin and misery for all involved. Pricks like Haig and Ludendorff would “lead” their armies from comfortable, opulent settings, ordering men to march into machine gun fire by the tens-and-hundreds-of-thousands. Even more would die in World War II, approximately 85 million people--110 million people in all, dead in ten years of warfare, and that isn’t even counting all the other conflicts and deaths resulting from the normal operation of Capitalism. Even if the “100 million killed by Communism” was true, it would be absolutely dwarfed by the casualties incurred by Capitalism.

But that’s a stupid game that I don’t like to play, reducing human deaths to some sort of barometer of “rightness.” It ignores the historical context of these events and smacks of bourgeois moralism masquerading as concern for humanity. More than that, it’s an insipid tu quoque parroted by idiots to convince other idiots.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.

I don’t know what this brainlet is trying to say by this. Communism is completely in line with Western values of fairness and democracy. The United States was one of the most militant countries in the world at the time, and for good reason. It was the Communists that won workers the 8-hour work day, sick leave, overtime pay, and so on and so on. The implication here is that this “political confusion” is the result of the plebeians standing up to their social betters. It’s clear that by David Satter’s idea of “Western Values,” he means social domination by an aristocracy of blood or wealth. Ah, yes, but it was the Bolsheviks and their mad desire for social equality that undermined human value.

He cherry picks some more quotes, plucking them from any explanatory context because they sound apparently vicious (violence is the prerogative of the wealthy, apparently). To be fair, I’m not entirely familiar with those sources. They very well could be as sinister as they sound, and if this piece wasn’t already stretching beyond the point of readability I’d investigate further, but for now that might have to wait for another day.

If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.

This is a swell little piece of sleight-of-hand. The Bolsheviks now aren’t only responsible for every dead person in Russia, they now have to take responsibility for every dead person ever in every ostensibly Socialist country. Of course, this little weasel doesn’t provide any sources, no links or citations, but I’m sure we can just take him at his word.

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

The effect of murder on this scale was to create a “new man” supposedly influenced by nothing but the good of the Soviet cause. The meaning of this was demonstrated during the battle of Stalingrad, when Red Army blocking units shot thousands of their fellow soldiers who tried to flee. Soviet forces also shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side, children who filled German water bottles in the Volga, and civilians forced at gunpoint to recover the bodies of German soldiers. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad, justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.”

Every subsequent paragraph proves that David Sater is naught but a dishonest shill. Does he shed the same crocodile tears for all the innocent men, women, and children killed in Dresden? Tokyo? Nagasaki? No, I don’t expect so, not from this towering intellect working for the “Hudson Institute.” Just who was Hudson, anyway?

In 1961, Kahn, Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen founded the Hudson Institute.

Oh, well that doesn’t sound so ba

Unlike most strategists, he was entirely willing to posit the form a post-nuclear world might assume. Fallout, for example, would simply be another one of life's many unpleasantnesses and inconveniences, while the "much-ballyhooed" rise in birth defects would not doom mankind to extinction because a majority of survivors would remain unaffected by them. Contaminated food could be designated for consumption by the elderly, who would presumably die before the delayed onset of cancers caused by radioactivity.

Ah, well, so much for moral principles, I suppose. I’ve stopped being surprised by the complete hypocrisy of the reactionary right. They’ll twist and turn every event, word, and statistic, go to any lengths to secure the moral high ground, and with the blase recalcitrance of a sociopath. Many of the deaths to which Satter is attributing to “Communism” are the result of specific circumstance prevalent at the time. He tries to paint the famine in the Ukraine as entirely the fault of the “draconian grain requisition undertaken to finance Soviet industrialization.” Nevermind the intentional destruction of wheat stores on the part of the “kulaks,” or the fact that the country was still devastated by World War I and the subsequent Civil War. No, it’s stupid, brute, evil Communism to blame. Why? Because.

The famine in China, too, occurred in unique circumstances, after more-or-less a full century of internecine warfare, civil war, invasion and destruction at the hands of the Japanese (to say nothing the predations of the Europeans, such as Britain flooding the country with opium). Governmental incompetence and mismanagement factored significantly, but to pretend that it was the exclusive result of some quality special to and inherent in Communism is nothing short of deceitful. These mitigating factors don’t absolve them of responsibility for what happened, but they certainly account for the severity of some of the aforementioned crises.

This is only a partial rebuttal to all the wrong in these tools’ empty-headed scribblings. All of this sort of bullshit is repeated tiresomely often by brainlets and the shills sent to influence them. I’m not certain if Inez and David are stupid, dishonest, or both. They’re certainly hack historians at the least. They ignore critical context, surreptitiously edit text to fit their narrative, and display nothing but the most stolid ignorance. It’s really no surprise considering the outlets of their “work,” but they’re still contributing to perpetuating the sort of stupid myths used exclusively to malign Communism.

Unfortunately, as the contradictions of Capitalism continue to compound, increasing the misery of the working class, I fear that this sort of inane garbage is only going to become more prevalent.

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thoucriticaldisaster-blog · 7 years ago

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The Modern Pursuit of Happiness

Living in the present, something various self-entitled life-guru’s recommend, is a luxury we might not be able to afford nor something we should desire. Focusing on the ‘right now’ is a soothing mechanism to avoid confrontations we might see ahead. Worries about those confrontations, conflicts or obstacles however are not phenomenons emerging out of a void - they are our instinct for survival, deciphering possible outcomes of our agency. Though most worries will turn out to be a so called ‘false alarm’, it would be foolish to discard them mindlessly without exploring their origins. The ignoring of reality to find a farce of happiness is exactly something elites within power-structures admire for their consumers: as long as they are occupied with reaching a state of shallow happiness which can be bought, consumers will never entirely feel fulfilled and will keep longing for the emotion ‘pleasure’ while turning a blind eye to everything which can ruin that aspired happiness by consuming more and more products that promise happiness. An important note is that the goods that consumers buy are not solely material goods like fancy clothes or expensive cars. They buy a happy lifestyle, which is much more than solely ‘stuff’. It is organic food. It is therapy. It is yoga. It is religion. It is safety from the unknown where we descend into a state where we seem meaningless. I am particularly interested in organisations that sell happiness not as a pretty sweater, but those whom sell the promise of happiness through something they call philosophy. This is, in my opinion, a rather offensive and cruel practice, built upon foundations which are merely illusions.

There are certain institutions whom provide a system in which they are held accountable for their acts. A university, for example, is accredited to transfer knowledge. It is not simply a business focussed on profits (at least, it should not be), but it is focussed on transferring a broad body of critical knowledge to its students through its professors. These professors cannot simply teach whatever they aspire, although they are free to have their opinions. But whatever their opinion is, they are obliged to transfer facts. Their programs are tested by other professors and there are inspections to the quality of the knowledge of the students through exams and papers, which have to be kept in archive at least a few years for further inspections by the organ of the university who guarantees quality of knowledge and simply to prove their accreditation to transfer knowledge is just.

Of course, mistakes are being made for the university is (wo)man-made. Everywhere were humans operate, there will be flaws. And from every flaw we can learn something. The most important thing to keep in mind though is the axiom of the university: it transfers knowledge. Not only useful knowledge suiting the current political climate, but also critical knowledge - upon the system and even upon itself. A university needs fee-paying students to survive, but its core motive is not the making of profits, its core motive is transferring knowledge while surviving. The better the transferring of knowledge is, the better the university will be ranked, the more students will apply and the greater its chance of its survival will be.

There are flaws in this system (which facts do we choose to present? How can we rate someones qualities by a single number or letter?). And yet its flaws are nothing compared to a new trend which seems to be emerging world-wide. This is the selling of knowledge, instead of transferring it, by companies instead of institutions, who seek profit instead of survival. Profits are not something we make when thinking critically, actually, it might even question your idea of making profit at all, which will seem rather uninteresting after you read Kant, Foucault, Sartre or any other ‘great’ name.

And yet these companies present itself as bodies of knowledge, just like a university. Especially philosophy can be turned into a brand instead of a science, when you present its long history as a legitimate pillar for its wisdom. When something is old, it should be wise, shouldn’t it? The first problem is generalisation: there is no such thing as a consequent line of philosophy through time which leads to enlightenment. Although one another might learn from a deceased thinker by reading its texts, philosophy is like a tree instead of a chronological line: a lot of its branches simply disappear in thin air. Some of its leaves fall down and become forgotten soil. And some other of its branches put the most tragic events of history into motion by fuelling one thing most people do not associate by philosophy: pure hate. Philosophers are generally not people looking for happiness. If you read Nietzsche’s full texts instead of some inspiring quotes pulled out of its context, you will be shocked by his antisemitism. Aristoteles thought that women are insignificant - they are just there to give birth. Kant thought that being happy is something foolish - you might encounter it when you do your given duty, but if you do not, there is not much of a difference (he has a point there, though).

Of course, it is important to put these thinkers in the contexts of their time. Maybe, in 200 years, the great thinkers of our time will be held accountable by someone like me because they ate meat - which by then will be regarded as a barbaric practice. It will not simply discard their ideas about the universe as invalid. But it is important to understand that there is a context. Ideas which were shaped in a different context than ours, are difficult to apply at our present context, simply because our context is different. Foucault wonderfully wrote about this in Les Mots et Les Choses, where he describes the struggle of understanding the past: an old painting in our time is only to be understood when we know how people thought in the day and age when it was created. The history of thinking, therefore, is something different than we might think.

Yet, philosophy used as a brand by profit seeking companies offer you the safety of sacred old wisdom without truly critical thoughts. Right now, there are institutions emerging which make you pay to follow classes. They will promise you things like: ‘how to deal with perfectionism’, ‘how to deal with love’ - and start their introduction with a quote of someone who has died 2000 years ago. Philosophy is offered as a cure for your individual sadness.

The problem is that philosophy as a science is the creator of the individual, but not as a goal en sich. Certain philosophers helped establish the idea of ‘I’ - I am a moving object through time and space, I am a subject in a world full of objects - I am a thing. The philosophers whom are offered as a remedy to our feeling of meaninglessness (the source of sadness) by institutions based on financial gain however, did not have this notion of the individual. Their context was so vastly different, their one-liners simply do not make sense as an applicable bandage upon our wounds. They are a farce in our world, when used as the property of a brand. They would be furious if they knew how they are used by certain institutions.

It is not strange that philosophy seems to be able to fill in gaps of meaning. We have become atheistic, non-believers, living one lifetime and then returning to dust for ever. Just as Stephen Hawking put it, that might seem horrific to many of us: “I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark.” That darkness, that void of seemingly meaninglessness, is something that seems hard to co-op with. Especially in times where the dogma of a dominant religion which gives one an explanation for everything (fate above coincidence) has become invalid, or in a time where its follow up - nationalism - seems to have entered its last phase before dying (the young, globalised generation of this world understands that there is no intrinsic difference between humans from other countries and themselves). Yet these systems of illusions, whereupon one can trust blindly, offered safety. There needs to be a new web of safety, in which one can trust, whatever may or might happen.

If your heart gets broken, there needs to be a just explanation. If your mother dies, there most be something to do about your sadness. These things are true - yet philosophy might not be the road one may take, at least, when it is presented as a brand. Real, non-profitable, scientific philosophy, never meant to be a self-help guide for the lack of meaning of the ego, will sooth you, but in a different way you can imagine. It will simply open up your world with more doubts, which are wonderful and horrible at the same time. It make you think of the idea of horrible and wonderful - are they platonic axioms or subjective constructs? It will simply change your focus from your pursuit of happiness to something else: the acquiring of knowledge which has nothing to do with you as an individual.

Nietzsche stopped speaking at a certain point. Kant’s character seemed rather cold. Heidegger was a Nazi. Marx was used (and still is) to justify mass-murder. Foucault lived a hedonistic life-style in which he hurt many individuals mentally. De Beauvoir practised intercourse with her students while her husband ranted against anti-communists. Though some of their ideas are outstanding and horrifying, philosophers are not to be generalised as inspiring creatures whom have written manifests to help you, as fairy-godmothers knowing nothing less than pure truth. They were humans, with flaws - sometimes these flaws generated world wars. When we study philosophers, we should be sharp and critical: they mainly guide you to a scenario which we do not aspire, instead of the other way around. When someone offers you to consume them to understand yourself, you should be sceptical, especially when there is money involved. Be aware for doctrines which offer you a closed system of meaning - there is no such thing. There is no guide to happiness. To end with some self-help: True happiness is not to be found or to be reached - it might even not exist. That is not discouraging, it is a gift, because it gives meaning to events in our lives which otherwise would be dull. The void is your friend, not your foe.

#philosophy happiness theschooloflife plato kant nietzsche individualism

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encephalonfatigue · 4 years ago

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capital and the plantationocene: faith or defeat

a review of Anna Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World”

Since my late undergraduate years, Donna Haraway has been a continuous figure of fascination for me. I always found her to be a very fashionable writer, maybe because I had a very unfashionable taste for 90’s postmodernism during my politically formative years. Around the time I started toying around with vegetable gardening in my backyard I began getting fairly interested in Haraway’s work on companion species and how species are mutually constituted by each other. Species (including humans) of course do not exist in a vacuum, but exist in relation to other species, and have been formed by the history of these other species with whom they have been interacting over vast periods of time, genetically and behaviourally adapting to what Haraway calls ‘kin’ — family. (Also Haraway references in Orphan Black only added fuel to this smouldering interest.)

More recently, Haraway’s Marxism has been more often foregrounded in discussions. I suppose this is simply a result of the political mood that has been surfacing over the past few years. But I listened to a podcast interview Haraway did with Jacobin on why using the term ‘anthropocene’ was inadequate for trying to understand the nature of the anthropogenic climate catastrophe currently underway. Many leftists use the (rather clumsy) term ‘capitalocene’ to signal that it is the specific political economy of capitalism and specifically the actions of the capitalist class — the wealthy few — that are driving this climate catastrophe. Haraway mentions she finds that term useful but more often refers to a term that her colleague Anna Tsing uses which is ‘plantationocene’, which signals the type of socio-ecological and political-economic organization that came to exist under colonialism that became the basis of capitalist production today — and how that was the driving force behind the ongoing climate catastrophe. This is how I first encountered Anna Tsing.

It is interesting how certain liberal science writers like Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction go out of their way to try and frame ecological destruction as an intrinsically human thing. Almost as if it is inevitable that humans as a species would cause mass extinctions either way — with or without capitalism. Ironically, this is a rather fascist idea behind a lot of eco-fascist calls for genocide. Haraway sometimes gets accused of this because she emphasizes population control as an important ecological tactic (with slogans like “Make kin, not babies”), even though she has been extremely critical of these sorts of fascist impulses in movements like deep ecology. Haraway’s emphasis on population control is inverted from the typical liberal one that carries deep anxieties over ballooning third world populations. Haraway claims that having a child in the highly consumptive environment of a Western ‘middle-class’ life is far more worrying than having a child as a third world family. I ultimately don’t really agree with Haraway’s emphasis on population as a primary mechanism of dealing with this climate catastrophe, but certainly I think it’s worth admitting that our planet can only sustain a certain number of human beings.

I want to point out though how radically different indigenous anthropologies are from the sort of picture Kolbert paints in The Sixth Extinction. For example, Leanne Simpson talks about how human abandonment is not the solution to environmental destruction but human care and responsibility:

“So when I think of the land as my mother or if I think of it as a familial relationship, I don’t hate my mother because she’s sick, or because she’s been abused. I don’t stop visiting her because she’s been in an abusive relationship and she has scars and bruises. If anything, you need to intensify that relationship because it’s a relationship of nurturing and caring.”

The botanist Robin Wall-Kimmerer also talks about finding this common notion among her ecology students that humans are not beneficial to ecosystems:

“One otherwise unremarkable morning I gave the students in my General Ecology class a survey. Among other things, they were asked to rate their understanding of the negative interactions between humans and the environment. Nearly every one of the two hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a bad mix. These were third-year students who had selected a career in environmental protection, so the response was, in a way, not very surprising. They were well schooled in the mechanics of climate change, toxins in the land and water, and the crisis of habitat loss. Later in the survey, they were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land. The median response was “none.”

I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? …When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can’t imagine the generosity of geese? These students were not raised on the story of Skywoman.”

I think what people like Haraway and Tsing offer is a framing beyond nature as something radically distinct from humans, as if humans are not part of nature or ecosystems. Their critique of rendering nature as something static or pure is also at the same time a critique of anthropocentrism. To recognize humans as a species formed in parallel together with all other species on this planet, and that we as a species affect other species just as other species affect us, and affect each other also. What we cannot lose sight of is the hegemonic influence the humans species (more specifically an elite subset of the human species) has had on all other species on this planet. We cannot divorce anthropocentrism and certain destructive humanisms from a proper class analysis.

Tsing actually works through a number of Marxist concepts throughout the book. She explores labour (wage labour and precarious gig labour), capital, privatization, alienation, and commodification. I think many on the left are quite impatient of postmodern sermonizing (maybe rightly so), yet Tsing is working in the tradition of Marx and has many worthwhile things to say. Some of Marx’s earliest articles as a journalist and editor of the German paper Rheinische Zitung was on the wooded commons. He wrote a series of articles on the ‘theft’ of firewood from German forests in the autumn of 1842, which many consider formative to his further politicization.

One of Tsing’s observations I found most useful was her exploration of capitalist co-optation which she terms the ‘salvage economy’ writing:

“In this “salvage” capitalism, supply chains organize the translation process in which wildly diverse forms of work and nature are made commensurate—for capital.”

Tsing elaborates:

“In capitalist farms, living things made within ecological processes are coopted for the concentration of wealth. This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control. Many capitalist raw materials (consider coal and oil) came into existence long before capitalism. Capitalists also cannot produce human life, the prerequisite of labor. “Salvage accumulation” is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. ”

Tsing then turns to two very interesting literary examples of capitalist co-optation of indigenous knowledge by colonizers to generate capitalist wealth:

“Consider the nineteenth-century ivory supply chain connecting central Africa and Europe as told in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. The story turns around the narrator’s discovery that the European trader he much admired has turned to savagery to procure his ivory. The savagery is a surprise because everyone expects the European presence in Africa to be a force for civilization and progress. Instead, civilization and progress turn out to be cover-ups and translation mechanisms for getting access to value procured through violence: classic salvage.

For a brighter view of supply-chain translation, consider Herman Melville’s account of the nineteenth-century procurement of whale oil for Yankee investors. Moby-Dick tells of a ship of whalers whose rowdy cosmopolitanism contrasts sharply with our stereotypes of factory discipline; yet the oil they obtain from killing whales around the world enters a U.S.-based capitalist supply chain. Strangely, all the harpooners on the Pequod are unassimilated indigenous people from Asia, Africa, America, and the Pacific. The ship is unable to kill a single whale without the expertise of people who are completely untrained in U.S. industrial discipline. But the products of this work must eventually be translated into capitalist value forms; the ship sails only because of capitalist financing. The conversion of indigenous knowledge into capitalist returns is salvage accumulation. So too is the conversion of whale life into investments.”

I cannot help but recall Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest crying out:

“...I loved thee

And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle,

The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:

Cursed be I that did so! All the charms

Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!

For I am all the subjects that you have,

Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me

In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

The rest o' the island.”

After the extraction of indigenous knowledge for capitalist gain comes the inevitable violent process of enclosure and privatization that dispossesses the colonized from their land.

Tsing is a Southeast Asianist and I think her writings on Southeast Asia are some of the strongest aspects of the book. The influence of Japanese capital for example in Indonesia was fascinating, and how the reinvigoration of Japanese capital after WW2 was largely a function of anti-communist foreign policy.

“American occupiers arranged for the rehabilitation of once-disgraced nationalists and rebuilt the Japanese economy as a bulwark against communism. It was in this climate that associations of banks, industrial enterprises, and specialists in trade formed again, although less formally, as keiretsu “enterprise groups.” At the heart of most enterprise groups was a general trading company in partnership with a bank. The bank transferred money to the trading company, which, in turn, made smaller loans to its associated enterprises… Trading companies advanced loans—or equipment, technical advice, or special marketing agreements—to their supply chain partners overseas. The trading company’s job was to translate goods procured in varied cultural and economic arrangements into inventory. It is hard not to see in this arrangement the roots of the current hegemony of global supply chains, with their associated form of salvage accumulation.”

Tsing also tells the story of Nike which started as a U.S. outpost distributing Japanese sneakers, and eventually moved to this model of heavily subcontracting every stage of production to the extent that one of its Vice Presidents remarked: “We don’t know the first thing about manufacturing. We are marketers and designers,”

It is then interesting to see Tsing write about her first encounter with commodity chains as a Southeast Asianist was to observe how Japanese capital functioned in Indonesia by way of subcontracting not unlike the way Nike did:

“I first learned about supply chains in studying logging in Indonesia, and this is a place to see how the Japanese supply-chain model works. During Japan’s building boom in the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese imported Indonesian trees to make plywood construction molds. But no Japanese cut down Indonesian trees. Japanese general trading companies offered loans, technical assistance, and trade agreements to firms from other countries, which cut logs to Japanese specifications. This arrangement had many advantages for Japanese traders. First, it avoided political risk. Japanese businessmen were aware of the political difficulties of Chinese Indonesians who, resented for their wealth and willingness to cooperate with the more ruthless policies of the Indonesian government, were targets in periodic riots. Japanese businessmen evaded such difficulties for themselves by advancing money to Chinese Indonesians, who made the deals with Indonesian generals and took the risks. Second, the arrangement facilitated transnational mobility. Japanese traders had already deforested the Philippines and much of Malaysian Borneo by the time they got to Indonesia. Rather than adapting to a new country, the traders could merely bring in agents willing to work with them in each location. Indeed, Filipino and Malaysian loggers, financed by Japanese traders, were ready and able to go to work in cutting down Indonesian trees.

Third, supply-chain arrangements facilitated Japanese trade standards while ignoring environmental consequences. Environmentalists looking for targets could find only a grab bag of varied companies, many Indonesian; no Japanese were in the forests. Fourth, supply-chain arrangements accommodated illegal logging as a layer of subcontracting, which harvested trees protected by environmental regulations. Illegal loggers sold their logs to the larger contractors, who passed them on to Japan. No one need be responsible. And—even after Indonesia started its own plywood businesses, in a supply-chain hierarchy modeled on Japanese trade—the wood was so cheap! The cost could be calculated without regard to the lives and livelihoods of loggers, trees, or forest residents. Japanese trading companies made the logging of Southeast Asia possible. They were equally busy with other commodities and in other parts of the world.”

This habit of disarticulating production is the common experience of capitalist alienation. Ching Kwan Lee, who has done some remarkably important studies on Chinese investment in Africa made some very interesting remarks on subcontracting:

“The worldwide trend has been to use subcontractors who in turn offer minimal training to short-term contract workers. The use of casual and contract workers was equally prevalent in construction.”

She observed many mining companies backed by global private capital (e.g. traded on the London stock exchange) were far more likely than Chinese state-owned mining companies to engage in widespread subcontracting in their mining projects:

“CM was particularly notorious and ruthless in using competition among subcontractors to drive down costs, to the extent that there was an internal discourse among its own managers about the “tyranny of finance.””

Lee argues in one of her lectures on her book “The Specter of Global China” that subcontracting and the casualization of labour often significantly reduces the chance that workers will engage in strikes together, and consequently their bargaining power. She says:

“The more subcontracts you have, they fight more over things like equipment — it’s harder to manage. But on the books, you’re cutting costs by subcontracting… Why do I mention this as a very important feature? Because it has extremely important consequences for labour power — the capacity for labour to force the hand of management. Because if you only have one subcontractor, your workers are unified, because they just have one employer. But if you have many many subcontractors, your workforce is totally divided, and that’s why more strikes happen in the Chinese state mine, and they have to make more concessions to their workers because they care so much about.. smooth production.”

Lee’s point is that Chinese mining is less concerned about maximizing profits by selling minerals on a global market, than actually directly using those minerals for state infrastructure projects. This is the classical distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’ (mentioned in both Adam Smith and Marx). But Lee emphasizes that this is only in the case of mining. Subcontracting is still very common in Chinese construction and the bargaining power of labour power in Chinese construction in Africa is sometimes even worse than construction undertaken by global private capital. So it cuts both ways.

I work at a small firm engaged in distributing and ‘integrating’ power engineering products and am intimately confronted by the bizarre world of a subcontracting and sub-subcontracting that happens in almost every dimension of the field. It’s remarkable how many middle people are involved in small value-adding steps and plastering their ‘brand names’ on goods simply manufactured in third world countries where labour is much cheaper.

Anyway, with these issues of mining and landscapes ravaged by capitalism, I think Tsing raises an obvious but important point that humans are not the only species that radically transform landscapes. She writes:

“Making worlds is not limited to humans. We know that beavers reshape streams as they make dams, canals, and lodges; in fact, all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. Without the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world. Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples suggest, world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species. Humans, too, have always been involved in multispecies world making. Fire was a tool for early humans not just to cook but also to burn the landscape, encouraging edible bulbs and grasses that attracted animals for hunting. Humans shape multispecies worlds when our living arrangements make room for other species. This is not just a matter of crops, livestock, and pets. Pines, with their associated fungal partners, often flourish in landscapes burned by humans; pines and fungi work together to take advantage of bright open spaces and exposed mineral soils. Humans, pines, and fungi make living arrangements simultaneously for themselves and for others: multispecies worlds.”

Tsing also mentions how

“Pines have made alliances with animals as well as fungi. Some pines are completely dependent on birds to spread their seeds—just as some birds are completely dependent on pine seeds for their food.”

Yet this interdependency is not isolated from ‘destructive’ human practices. Tsing points out that human deforestation also benefits pine trees in certain circumstances:

“Humans spread pines in two different ways: by planting them, and by creating the kinds of disturbances in which they take hold. The latter generally occurs without any conscious intent; pines like some of the kinds of messes humans make without trying. Pines colonize abandoned fields and eroded hillsides. When humans cut down the other trees, pines move in. Sometimes planting and disturbance go together. People plant pines to remediate the disturbances they have created. Alternatively, they may keep things radically disturbed to advantage pine. This last alternative has been the strategy of industrial growers, whether they plant or merely manage self-seeded pine: clear-cutting and soil breaking are justified as strategies to promote pine.”

I have mixed feelings about the emphasizing of this framing by postmodernists like Tsing and Haraway. On the one hand there is something dialectical to this sort of analysis. Yet also this reiteration of slippage and blurring of boundaries can obscure the real dominant power dynamics at play, and the clarity of the task before us.

Catherine Liu did a really interesting interview with Jacobin criticizing postmodernism from a Marxist perspective. She mentions that most textbooks locate the pivotal turn to postmodernism as the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe (a social housing project in St Louis that ‘devolved’ into a hotbed of ‘gang violence’). This narrative framing was also the case of for me in a first year international development course, where this landmark moment in architectural history had resounding consequences in art more generally and philosophical and political currents. Liu claims that the postmodernist disdain for large-scale ‘alienating’ and ‘dehumanizing’ mass-produced social-housing projects and efficiently designed rooms like the Frankfurt Kitchen designed by the communist architect Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky dovetailed well with reactionary initiatives to dismantle social housing, which were largely used by poor working-class people of colour. Liu sees this as a defeatist impulse in postmodernist ideology. That grand projects to provide housing for all and not leaving poor racialized communities behind is seen as an impossibly utopic vision bound for failure. The failure of Pruitt-Igoe housing projects is not properly located within the active efforts of the rich white business class to stop public funding of social housing and providing adequate maintenance for it, but as the fault of modernism’s large ambitions and excessively managed ‘imposition’ of egalitarian ideas on normal people that cannot relate to these idealistic elites, and are too violent and ‘uneducated’ to take care of and maintain these unworkable projects of modernist monstrosity.

Each of these critiques Liu puts forward, I can see within the texture of Tsing’s book here. When I first picked up this book, roaming about a big box store book retailer (one I recently learned from a member of the United Jewish People’s Order is often subject to BDS boycotts because of its funding of the HESEG Foundation), I encountered Tsing’s mention of the anarchist pamphlet Desert, which basically asserts that stopping a climate catastrophe is impossible as is any effort to put an end to the global capitalist order, and that radicals should simply focus on how to better live in radical communities of mutual aid under the ruins of capitalist power.

In many ways Tsing’s book is about how life has thrived despite the circumstances of capitalist destruction, and found ways to survive outside the orbit of typical capitalist modes of production. I tend to agree with Liu more that such defeatism is dangerous. Yet it should not be ignored wholesale. Questions of how to survive under capitalism are important. But being a person of faith, I do believe another world is possible and worth fighting for. Tsing talks about how ‘scalable’ operations of colonial plantations (e.g. those involved in the production of sugar cane) became templates of capitalist production today, yet also recognizes that scalability is not intrinsically good or bad, it just has certain consequences that one must properly consider.

I think I’ve have spent many years believing in a vision that E.F. Schumacher put forward in Small is Beautiful, along with these critiques of technology and industry put forward by Ivan Illich (a Catholic anarchist of sorts) embraced by certain Latin American leftists. The Marxist historian of Southeast Asia, Michael Vickery in his 1999 introduction to his seminal text on Cambodia, fascinatingly mentioned a connection one of his acquaintances made between the ideology of the ‘Pol Pot regime’ and Ivan Illich, though Vickery thought Illich did not intend to be taken so literally or seriously. But this utopic agrarian idea of collectivization without the imposition of Western technology on peasants (as modernization is often framed as) is something that Vickery sees as part of the tragic ideology infused within Cambodian revolutionary society, even if they likely did not read Illich at all, but shared certain ideological impulses with him.

As migrants and refugees from Laos and Cambodia, as well as some Hmong immigrants constitute many of the matsutake pickers that Tsing spends time with and interviews, I found Vickery’s insights on Cambodian revolutionary ideology (which he does not really characterize as communist or Marxist) rather relevant to these issues of scale, modernization and progress that Tsing so strongly criticizes. I too had a certain disdain for notions of ‘progress’, but am coming to think I have been mistaken about them. The eschewing of ‘progress’ in many ways is defeatist as Liu suggests.

I think these are all very complex issues. What Tsing’s book did provide and one of my favourite parts of it involved these fascinating elaborations on pine and oak trees that for some reason provide a sense of hope. Some sense that out of destruction, life can still persist. In that sense it is not sheer defeatism. Tsing puts forward fascinating facts like “felled oaks (unlike pines) tend not to die; they sprout back from roots and stumps to form new trees.” The Asian history Tsing tells about pine forests is also fascinating:

“Long before they came to central Japan, Dr. Ogawa related, Koreans had cut down their forests to build temples and fuel iron forging. They had developed in their homeland the human-disturbed open pine forests in which matsutake grow long before such forests emerged in Japan. When Koreans expanded to Japan in the eighth century, they cut down forests. Pine forests sprung up from such deforestation, and with them matsutake.”

I think about the enormous white pine forests that covered the landscape of Mississauga once, and were wiped out in what Anishinaabeg ethnobotanist and Dalhousie professor Jonathan Ferrier referred to as a “genocide by sawmills”. Yet I recall Leanne Simpson speaking of Mother Earth recovering, and I think about the resilience of pine to thrive in the wake of human or more specifically capitalist destruction. Despite all the ruins of capitalism, beautiful things can still persist. That does not mean we should be resigned to the terms of capital. We must fight with everything inside us, and draw strength from the pockets of resilience that survive the destruction such an economy has sown. We need not feel embarrassed about the lines we draw in the sand, while still recognizing that ultimately we do things out of solidarity and love. We love our oppressors by speaking truth to them about their oppressive ways and moving them towards helping in the abolition of such relations of domination. Ecosystems are inevitably full of suffering and pain, certain species gaining from the downfall of another. Yet they are also full of examples of immense interdependence, mutuality, and cooperation. As Arundhati Roy has said:

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.“

The question is how she will look like when she arrives.

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phroyd · 7 years ago

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The response was swift and brutal.

“Mobilizing all the powers of capital, the owners, representing twenty-four railroads with combined capital of $818,000,00, fought back with the courts and the armed forces of the Federal government behind them,” Barbara W. Tuchman writes in “The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914.” “Three thousand police in the Chicago area were mobilized against the strikers, five thousand professional strikebreakers were sworn in as Federal deputy marshals and given firearms; ultimately six thousand Federal and State troops were brought in, less for the protection of property and the public than to break the strike and crush the union.”

Attorney General Richard Olney, who as Tuchman writes “had been a lawyer for railroads before entering the Cabinet and was still a director of several lines involved in the strike,” issued an injunction rendering the strike illegal. The conflict, as Debs would write, was a battle between “the producing classes and the money power of the country.”

Debs and the union leaders defied the injunction. They were arrested, denied bail and sent to jail for six months. The strike was broken. Thirty workers had been killed. Sixty had been injured. Over 700 had been arrested. The Pullman Co. hired new workers under “yellow dog contracts,” agreements that forbade them to unionize.

When he was in jail, Debs read the works of socialist writers Edward Bellamy and Karl Kautsky as well as Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” The books, especially Marx’s three volumes, set the “wires humming in my system.”

“I was to be baptized in Socialism in the roar of the conflict. … [I]n the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed,” he writes. “This was my first practical lesson in Socialism.”

Debs came to the conclusion that no strike or labor movement could ultimately be successful as long as the government was controlled by the capitalist class. Any advances made by an organized working class would be reversed once the capitalists regained absolute power, often by temporarily mollifying workers with a few reforms. Working men and women had to achieve political power, a goal of Britain’s Labour Party for workers at the time, or they would forever be at the mercy of the bosses.

Debs feared the rise of the monolithic corporate state. He foresaw that corporations, unchecked, would expand to “continental proportions and swallow up the national resources and the means of production and distribution.” If that happened, he warned, the long “night of capitalism will be dark.”

This was a period in U.S. history when many American Christians were socialists. Walter Rauschenbusch, a Christian theologian, Baptist minister and leader of the Social Gospel movement, thundered against capitalism. He defined the six pillars of the “kingdom of evil” as “religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit (being ‘the social group gone mad’) and mob action, militarism[,] and class contempt.”

Debs turned to the Bible as often to Marx, arguing “Cain was the author of the competitive theory” and the “cross of Jesus stands as its eternal denial.” Debs’ fiery speeches, replete with words like “sin” and “redemption,” were often thinly disguised sermons. He equated the crucified Christ with the abolitionist John Brown. He insisted that Jesus came “to destroy class rule and set up the common people as the sole and rightful inheritors of the earth.” “What is Socialism?” he once asked. “Merely Christianity in action.”

Phroyd

#eugene debs #unions

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festivalists · 8 years ago

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Through the olive trees

This is not the first time we turn our gaze to the cinema of Iran, yet it is the first time we actually had our own envoy in Tehran – we give you the 35th edition of Fajr International Film Festival as seen and instagrammed by Irina Trocan!

Starting with Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOME? / KHANE-YE DOUST KODJAST? (1987) and leading up to Asghar Farhadi’s THE SALESMAN / FORUSHANDE (2016), Iranian cinema has enjoyed great visibility abroad. Since there are strong similarities between many of these films, it even comes across as a unitary style, a national school, with Kiarostami as a mentor and Jafar Panahi as one of the most prominent representatives working today. These films are dramaturgically subtle (and supple), intended to give a sense of the bigger picture of Iranian society, as well as custom, self-reflexive, and with obvious framing devices (observing adult behavior from a child’s perspective, driving through the city with different passengers, summing up a marriage in front of a judge – to refer to just a few high-profile Iranian films from the past decades).

However, as it is the case with many new waves and cinemas, the fragment of yearly production that is visible abroad is a small and misleadingly homogenous one, while the view from within the borders of Iran is radically different. Reza Mirkarimi, Director of Fajr International Film Festival, claims that there were 60 Iranian film submissions for this edition of FIFF, while the total number of films made within a year is even higher – reportedly, 90-100 features every year, with over 130 made between March 2016 and March 2017. The overall production (you guessed it) is trying to do many different things beside emulating Kiarostami and Panahi.

But I would like to properly begin by making a specification about the Fajr festival – the source for a potential confusion that took me the first two days of the festival to clear up completely. A couple of months ahead of the international festival, there is the national event where a larger number of Iranian films is being shown, some of which are only programmed during FIFF as market screenings in order not to affect their chances to have an international-festival premiere somewhere else. What is added with FIFF is, well, the “international” bit of the programming, a line-up of recent festival darlings from around the world. According to the festival regulations, the team is on the lookout for films “that seek justice, defend the oppressed and underline humane and moral values.” Since several of the titles in the selection are by now well-known, I believe it is useful to give an overall impression: Cristian Mungiu’s GRADUATION / BACALAUREAT (2016), Agnieszka Holland's SPOOR / POKOT (2017), Andrzej Wajda's AFTERIMAGE / POWIDOKI (2016), the Dardenne brothers' THE UNKNOWN GIRL / LA FILLE INCONNUE (2016), François Ozon's FRANTZ (2016). The listed films are all tempered social critiques, with most of them taking no sides, although I will say that SPOOR is – due to its ending, which I will not spoil – radically ecologist.

Some of the international films might have worked well as double bills, especially Kim Ki-duk’s THE NET / GEUMUL (2016) and Bulgarian filmmakers Kristina Grozeva & Petar Valchanov’s GLORY / SLAVA (2016). The former – appropriately named for its tightly knit narrative construction – follows a North-Korean fisherman, Nam Chul-woo (Ryoo Seung-bum), whose boat engine malfunctions and, before he knows it, he drifts to the coast of South Korea. Held in awe as the author’s one-off political film, it might after all be about something rather philosophical, like the blight of power and/or the hopelessness of an individual who is unlucky enough to get caught between the wheels of the social machinery. It is hardly more socio-economically precise than, say, Park Chan-wook’s OLDBOY / OLDEUBOI (2003).

In a concrete sense, the fisherman suffers from the strictness of the South Korean intelligence service – he is suspected of being a spy until he is proven innocent and falls into the hands of an agent who does not shy away from using torture to get confessions. Back in North Korea, after having endured a lot, the protagonist is suspected of having been seduced by capitalism with his brief glimpse of a better life, and this time he is a suspect to his own government. Bottom line is: do not get on the wrong side of people who can ruin your life in the name of higher order. Although the protagonist is a larger-than-life honest citizen (and would hardly be believable were it not for the actor’s restrained ferocity in facing his oppressors), several allegorical scenes in the film are pretty effective: Nam Chul-woo is left alone on a Seoul street and desperately tries to keep his eyes closed, to resist taking in images of capitalism and a different way of life than the one he made for himself. The souvenir he takes home from South Korea is so innocent that it only becomes ridiculous when authorities of his homeland classify it as “evidence.” In short, Kim Ki-duk convincingly constructs a negative world view, and there is definitely a lot of craft to how the misery keeps on coming, but it helps to be a pessimist from the start to get on his wavelength.

In GLORY, a stuttered railway worker finds a pile of money on the train tracks and decides to hand it over to the authorities, and his honesty similarly does him in. Before he knows it, he is stuck between, on one side, the Ministry of Transport (they hold a public ceremony in his praise but otherwise neglect to pay him the previous months’ salaries and “award” him by giving him a watch while losing the better one he had already) and, on the other side, the press. The protagonist finds sympathy with a journalist for the way he has been mistreated by the Ministry, but is soon abandoned again and further abused by the Ministry for being a snitch. Again, the story, inspired by actual events and co-authored with screenwriter Decho Taralezhkov, strikes a chord for viewers who are cynical about social order in Eastern Europe – a temptation that is truly hard to resist, especially with the majority of us who work for neither the government, nor the press, and are forced to passively observe as everything goes awry. There are several fine touches in GLORY – for example, Stefan Denolyubov handles his character’s speech impediment as just one element of his life-long aloofness. He never thought to claim his rights before, and when he finally dared to do it, he discovered he does not have the necessary skills. The ceremony in his honor makes for a well-scripted scene: it is mostly a PR show of Ministry insiders, directing an extra to make the Minister look good on stage.

Since I had heard of what Iranian films are not allowed to show (kisses, nudity, women’s uncovered heads, physical contact between male and female performers who are not married in real life) I must admit I was curious as to how these restrictions applied to foreign films, since they did not need to respect them from script development onwards. By themselves, THE NET and GLORY, which I had not seen before FIFF, gave me an introduction to what censorship looked like. A woman wearing (what seemed to be) a sexy red dress in THE NET had her silhouette completely blurred out. Another woman, this time in GLORY, quietly sitting in the background and showing somewhat of a cleavage, had an extra patch of blurred pixels added on top of her blouse. Naked women’s legs (but not men’s legs!) were also hidden. To me, paradoxically, these edits rather had the effect of drawing attention to details that would not have seemed erotic in an unmodified shot. Festival films are less regulated to conform with morality than those aimed at a larger audience, and earnestness could not have been unflinchingly observed as the programmers selected Werner Herzog’s SALT AND FIRE (2016), but it seems to still be hard to find films that do not need edits.

The most moving film I have seen was Rithy Panh’s EXILE / EXIL (2016), which continues the endeavor of his THE MISSING PICTURE / L'IMAGE MANQUANTE (2013) of retelling recent history, for which no official image archive exists. A poetic reenactment of human suffering in late 1970s Cambodia (then known as Democratic Kampuchea), it takes place entirely inside a hut (or, more precisely, a theatrical set resembling it) and has a sole character – a nameless, quiet young male, whom one might suspect of being the filmmaker’s alter ego. The space is versatile enough to gain cosmic dimensions – a cardboard cut-out of the moon and a flock of menacing seagulls appear on occasion, hovering over the protagonist’s head, the floor magically morphs into a field or a patch of grass.

One scene is a leveled-surface reenactment of a Sisyphean task: as the man rolls a boulder from one wall of the room to the other, another boulder appears (through a cross-fade) where the first one had been. There are biographical allusions in the film, including a picture of a woman we assume to be Rithy Panh’s mother – but it all builds up to an essay film of life in poverty and isolation rather than anything more narratively precise. Close-ups of the protagonist eating an insect, or a chicken that does not come in ready-made crispy nuggets, remind viewers that basic survival is historically not a timeless, universal human right. The soundtrack is made up on meditations on exile that are no less devastating for being abstract – from thinkers and artists (Karl Marx, René Clair) to political leaders (Ho Chi Minh) – and their rapport to the image is always loose, engaging spectators in a poetic guessing-game.

Turning to even more recent history, Fajr IFF had a section of (mostly Iranian) films and documentaries, grouped in the section Broken Olive Trees. Among them was THE DARK WIND / REŞEBA (2016), an Iraqi-German-Qatari coproduction, directed by Hussein Hassan, about a Yazidi woman who escapes after being captured by the Islamic State but upon returning to Kurdistan is rejected by the family of her fiancé for losing her honor. Majed Neisi’s THE BLACK FLAG / PARCHAM E SIAAH (2015) documents the frontline of an Iraqi offensive against ISIS. I have unfortunately missed them due to conflicting scheduling, but I am still hoping to catch up with them somewhere else – they have been previously screened in the Stockholm International Film Festival and Busan, and Visions du Réel, respectively.

Going back full-circle to the Iranian films, let me state again that I was surprised by the diversity of their influences, though I would not necessarily say that all of them bring the influences to a cohesive whole. Fereydoun Jayrani's ASPHYXIA / KHAFEGI (2017) is a bleak film about a nun which might have gotten tricks on how to light somber interiors from Paweł Pawlikowski's IDA (2013). The nun, also facing dilemmas about her future, takes care of a sick woman gone mute who seems to be repressing something about her marriage, so there is a hint of Bergman's PERSONA (1966) in it, too, or is it George Cukor's GASLIGHT (1944)? Sadly, the narrative seems to switch to something else every time a certain element becomes interesting. Rambod Javan’s NEGAR (2017) entangles an investigation, fast-paced chases, the main female character’s rich-girl fascination, and several where-did-this-come-from dream sequences is frustrating in a similar way.

The purest genre film I saw (admittedly missing many, including the top-prize winner, Asghar Yousefinejad's 2017 directorial debut THE HOME / EV) is Alireza Davoodnejad’s FERRARI (2017) – it is mostly a city-traffic road movie featuring a girl whose interests are definitely less than spiritual (jewelry and expensive things in general, plus the eponymous rarity on wheels) and a driver who sees her defencelessly wandering around and has the chivalry to help. Moralizing overtones are hard to miss, but both characters are lively and their obstacle course is sufficiently engaging, although the end goal is by anyone’s perspective rather frivolous (the girl wants to find the Ferrari and take a photo with it to spite a friend), there is enough going on to maintain the suspense.

Certainly, there is a lot more to discover than I could have possibly absorbed in a week – especially since, being in Tehran, it was hard to resist the temptation to wander away from the cinema. Despite the Abbas Kiarostami poster exhibition, commissioned by the festival in his memory and lining the hallway of the Charsou cinema, a large part of recent Iranian production was less familiar than I had expected. I left the festival with the commitment to watch out for films that might otherwise fly under my radar – aside from the promise to fly back to Iran to visit Shiraz, and the Instagram handles of several of the Iranians I have met.

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jordannamatlon · 8 years ago

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by Sindre Bangstad

My first ever introduction to the work of Stuart Hall (1932-2014) came in the form of an enthusiastic invitation to watch a video of one of his lectures after Sunday dinner with my friend Aslam Fataar at his home in Cape Town in the late 1990s. The exigencies and attention required by my immersion in ethnographic fieldwork on Muslims in Cape Town at the time meant I paid scant attention to it, and that my real discovery of Hall’s work came years later in Norway. Yet, the circumstances of my initiation to Hall do not strike me as particularly surprising. Hall had many readers in various post-colonies, and the attraction of his thought and legacy, and not the least the appeal of his particular mode of engagement with the world in and outside of academia to intellectuals who share his formative experiences with both creolization and colonial and late-colonial subjugation, has long been apparent.

Three years on from Hall’s death in 2014, there is a virtual cottage industry of publications of and about his work. This is not the least due to the commitment of Duke University Press’ editor Ken Wissoker to bringing Hall’s publications to the attention of new and old readers in a reasonably priced series. From the preface to Hall’s own Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, an intellectual autobiography based on Bill Schwarz 30 years of conversations with him, we learn that Hall wanted to publish with this particular press in the U.S., due to its long-standing record of publishing the work of some of the most outstanding Caribbean-born modern intellectuals, such as Marcus Garvey and C.L.R. James. As a reader, two of the chief merits of Hall’s and Schwarz’s Familiar Stranger and the Jamaican-born anthropologist and political theorist David C. Scott’s Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimitations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity is that they bring us much closer to an understanding of the role that Hall’s formative years in colonial Jamaica played in his life and thought than what one could often intuit from his own work.

Scott is a former student of Talal Asad at the New School For Social Research in New York, now a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. He is a long-standing editor of Small Axe, that supremely interesting Duke journal dedicated to Caribbean arts and letters, as well as the author of a number of important monographs on the past and present of the Caribbean. He is therefore more qualified than most scholars to write about Hall.

We learn from Familiar Stranger and Stuart Hall’s Voice that Scott, though born in Jamaica, is of a much younger generation than Hall. Hall notes that his own “conditions of existence” were those of the “closing days of the old colonial world,” and that though only six years old at the time, the epochal event which formed his political generation was the “events of 1938” in Jamaica. He also notes that Scott, “two generations younger,” formed part of a “radicalized cohort of the 1970s” in Jamaica. Hall also drily comments on the fact that though many continued to consider him a proverbial “post-colonial,” and as a product of 1968, he was really a child of colonialism and of 1956. Of privileged stable and Christian middle-class brown rather than black background, Hall’s escape from Jamaica and to Oxford in 1951 was also an escape from the conditions of his upbringing in a society shaped by the multiple and perennial shadows of colonialism and slavery, which prevented him from an all-too-open identification with the racially and economically marginalized majority of black Jamaicans. Here are some of Hall and Schwarz’s memorable formulations about what it meant to “think the Caribbean”:

I came to understand that, as a colonized subject, I was inserted into history (or in this case, History) by negation, backwards and upside down – like all Caribbean peoples, dispossessed and disinherited from a past which was never properly ours.

For the young Hall, racialization was close and personal: his elder sister Pat, five years his senior, suffered a life-long mental breakdown as a result of Hall’s racially obsessed mother putting a stop to her romantic involvement with a black student from another Caribbean island whilst studying medicine. The story has of course been told before in John Akomfrah’s elegant and elegiac documentary tribute to Stuart Hall, The Stuart Hall Project, but Hall’s rendering of the personal tragedy here adds texture and nuance. This is the peculiar and internalized madness which will be familiar to many citizens of post-colonial societies to this day, and not the least to South Africans forced to imbibe the bitter poisons of racialized thinking and classification under Apartheid and their long afterlife among the dispossessed in post-Apartheid South Africa. What these experiences meant in Hall’s intellectual thought is fleshed out well in Scott’s book.

For a radical thinker like Hall, unlike say Ernesto Laclau, the questions relating to identity were not simply intellectual abstractions, but lived and embodied experiences. “The distinctions between my life and ideas really have no hold,” Hall remarks in Familiar Stranger. Hall’s co-authored book is an intellectual autobiography written in the style of the late Edward Said’s poignant memoir Out of Place or the late Chinua Achebe’s thrilling The Education Of A British-Protected Child, and we therefore learn relatively little about Hall’s formidable wife, the distinguished British historian Catherine Hall. But we get a glimpse of Stuart and Catherine Hall’s problems with the social world of racial and class exclusion his parents inhabited when learning that Catherine on her first ever visit to Kingston in 1965 had an altercation with his mother, brought on by the latter treating a black Jamaican housemaid as if she did not exist and talking about “the servant problem” in front of her maid. Hall was acutely aware of the structures of possibility and impossibility which marked his early life and his mother’s obsessions with graduations of color and status.

“It is important for me to acknowledge, personally, that the pathologies which accompanied my upbringing weren’t peculiarly mine, and need to be located in their larger history,” Hall writes. Hall himself was more dark-skinned than either one of his parents and siblings, and so it comes as no surprise to hear him self-describe, like Edward Said did, as a proverbial “black sheep” of his family.

It would perhaps be more apt to characterize Scott as more of a political theorist than an anthropologist – but then again, the policing of disciplinary boundaries by virtue of an insistence in ethnographic fieldwork here or there being the sine qua non of anthropological virtue and integrity is, and remains, one of the more problematic aspects of modern anthropology. Much like Hall, Scott is a disciplinary hybrid of sorts, well-read not only in political theory and anthropology, but also in philosophy, letters and arts. It is not that Hall and Scott are in consent about how to understand and analyze the post-colonial present. In his introductory apologia, Scott alerts the reader to the fact that he wasn’t and isn’t drawn to Hall as an intellectual friend due to his sharing either Hall’s theoretical idiom, conceptual language, or his substantive views. Instead, Scott conceives of Hall as “an exemplary intellectual” that is “productive to think with” and “to think through.”

Scott’s small and eminently readable book is written as a series of epistolary letters to his late friend and mentor. Scott’s choice of genre gives a sometimes eerie impression of a one-way dialogue with a dead intellectual. When the book merits our attention, it is in its keen attention and responsiveness to central themes in Halls oeuvre, and Hall’s mode of thinking and engaging as a public intellectual. For Scott calls attention to Hall’s using his particular and characteristic voice as a public intellectual as a mode of thinking itself; and speaking and listening a way of clarification.

Hall was of course a pivotal figure of the so-called New Left, which emerged in its nascent form at Oxford University in the mid-1950s, and a founding father of Cultural Studies. His autobiography – regretfully to my mind – stops before his move to Birmingham to take up the chair in Cultural Studies, one that would make him a household name for academics across the world. He spent a great deal of time and energy trading barbs with classical Marxists with whom I often disagreed vehemently about matters relating to the analysis of ideology, contingency, identity and the role of determination in human history. And so Scott is right to assert that his “post-Marxism grows out of a never-ending – and never-endingly agonistic – engagement with Marx and Marxism.”

Returning to Hall’s work in the years after his death, I have like many others been struck by his prescient views of the neoliberal revolution ushered in by Thatcherism in Britain and by extension Reaganism in the U.S., in works such as The Great Moving Right Show. For though the very term neoliberalism, as Scott is right to note, came relatively late to Hall’s work, Hall saw much more clearly than any Marxist at the time the extent to which this was also a cultural revolution of a kind whose aftermath would inflict systematic and long-term damages on the lives we all live, and fundamentally alter the political terrain so as to make it increasingly difficult to oppose it and to mobilize against it. We now live in a present in which the term “identity politics” has become a monumental straw man for all that ails our societies North or South, and when bending backwards to accommodate a resurgent “white identity politics,” of course never named as such in the past or present (“identity” supposedly being the preserve of “minorities,” though Western history tells us all about the sheer absurdity of a such a proposition) the order of the day for politicians left, right and center. It is therefore salutary of Scott to bring renewed attention to Hall’s seminal work on identities, and the way in which Hall’s work on this stands removed from a certain form of “postmodernist celebration of migrancy as an inventive self-fashioning gesture”:

For the migrant (or anyway the black colonial migrant) is always obliged to respond to an interrogation that precisely objects and constructs her or him in a constricted place of identity- that demands an answer in the policing jargon of identity: Who are you? Why are you here? Where are your papers? When are you going back to where you came from? Identity here is inflicted; it is not a luxury. Therefore, identity for the migrant is not always-already a question; this question is always inscribed in a relation to dominant, sometimes in fact, repressive state power.

Hall was, by his own admission, not the most systematic of thinkers: his preferred form was the academic essay, and his public interventions addressed present contingencies in the manner which one imagines being preferred by a Gramscian organic intellectual of sorts. There wasn’t from Hall’s side any intention of presenting “the final word” on anything, and little to be had in terms of grand theorizing – all aspects that one imagines contributed to the annoyance which Hall met from classical academic Marxists of his time. Scott is exceptionally good in bringing out this aspect, which he proposes stems from Hall’s dialogical orientation or his “thinking aloud,” in Hall’s intellectual production. I particularly relished Scott’s subtle and impressive take down of the utterly condescending and unexamined white Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton’s supposed “critique” of Hall in the London Review of Books in 1996 (“hip, neat, cool, right-on… Hall has never authored a monograph”) in the first chapter of Stuart Hall’s Voice.

Scott’s epistolary letters, which emerge out of a series of invited lectures he gave at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa in 2013, are also of great value for their bringing the scholarship of intellectuals to which Hall paid relatively limited attention himself to bear on the analysis of his work.

If you think you know enough about the importance of Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, Baldwin and Althusser for Hall, here is as good a chance that you will get to see it from a fresh and original yet attentive and closely-read angle. There has never been a better time, in the context of the re-emergence of racialized modes of thinking, racism and discrimination across vast swathes of the Western world, to read and re-read Hall.

We owe it to both Schwarz and Scott for once more bringing the relevance of the late and great Hall’s work to our attention.

#stuart hall #postcolonial theory #postcolonial literature #postcolonialism #bill schwarz #race and racism #Sindre Bangstad #David C. Scott

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uni-tierra-califas · 8 years ago

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[Unitierracalifas] UT Califas fierce care ateneo, 3-25-17, 2.00-5.00 p.m.

Compañerxs,

The Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Fierce Care Ateneo will gather on Saturday, March 25, from 2.00 - 5.00 p.m. at Miss Ollie's / Swans Market (901 Washington Street, Oakland, a few blocks from the 12th Street BART station) to continue our regular, open reflection and action space to explore questions and struggles related to the emerging politics of fierce care as well as some of the questions below.

Friday, March 10 ended Native Nations Rise, a four day convergence of Indigenous peoples and allies who gathered in Washington D.C. to continue the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline as well as the several other pipelines under construction, including the Keystone XL, Trans-Pecos, Bayou Ridge, and Dakota Access. The fight, according to Kandi Mossett, is more than against one pipeline, it's about embracing a whole new way of life —one that is sustainable and is not about taking from the earth, but giving back. It is an on-going struggle. For Mossett and others it is the continuation of a five hundred year struggle against forces that take and destroy for a lifestyle that is no longer tenable. The four days of mobilization in D.C. not only confronted the destruction of shale deposits and the pipelines that the oil industry wants to use to maintain a toxic lifestyle, but also advanced a recognition that we must reclaim and invent a new, sustainable way of living. (see, Jaffe, "Next Steps in the Battle Against the Dakota Access and Keystone Pipelines")

More and more we are reminded that Indigenous communities are on the front lines of struggle. They are often the first line of defense against the rapacious and destructive extractive industries. It is this battle line that also signals that the U.S. is a settler colonial nation and as such has been and remains committed to erasing Indigenous people. The most recent persecution against the Standing Rock Sioux and others at the DAPL has made sacred site water protectors into targets of the most advanced militarized police repression, deploying sophisticated weaponry, infiltration, and surveillance while also criminalizing sacred-site water protectors in the mainstream media. The assault on Indigenous nations underscores the most critical element of settler colonialism, that is, according to Patrick Wolfe, it is "a structure, not an event." (see, Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native") J. Kehaulani Kauanui takes up Wolfe's argument to point to an "enduring indigeneity" that operates dialectically as Indigenous peoples resist all elimination efforts, and at the same time as the settler colonial structure continues into the present to "hold out" against indigeneity. (See, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, "A Structure, Not an Event.") For both Wolfe and Kauanui, Palestine is the most recent site of a violent settler colonialism advanced by a U.S. backed Zionism. To this we would add Indian-occupied Kashmir, of which Omar Bashir recently noted, "India only wants Kashmir, not its people," thus naming the settler colonial logic with its concomitant operations of elimination and containment. (see, Bashir, "India Only Wants Kashmir, Not Its People")

More recently, Lorenzo Veracini has taken up Wolfe's intervention and also asserted that both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous are now being treated roughly the same —that is as disposable people. "The working poor are growing in number almost everywhere," warns Veracini. "Like Indigenous peoples facing a settler colonial onslaught, the 'expelled' are marked as worthless. The 'systemic transformation' produces modalities of domination that look like setter colonialism." In other words, more and more people are treated as disposable and the system would prefer to eliminate them rather than convert them into exploitable labor. (see, Veracini, "Settler Colonialism's Return")

From the Zapatistas to the several battle lines against pipelines across the U.S. and other battle fronts occupied by Indigenous communities across the globe, they are at the fore front of disrupting capitalism. But, it's not the capital(ism) we originally battled against. Or, at least, our understanding of capitalism has shifted, because capitalism has reached its final crisis. There are two clear areas of analysis that more recently have exposed its limits. First, capitalism no longer has access to an inexhaustible or "cheap nature." According to Jason Moore "capitalism is historically coherent —if 'vast but weak'— from the long sixteenth century; co-produced by a 'law of value' that is a 'law' of Cheap Nature. At the core of this law is the ongoing, radically expansive, and relentlessly innovative quest to turn work/energy of the biosphere into capital (value-in-motion)." (Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p. 14)

Robert Kurz, and the wertkritik school that has been built around his work, is the second line of thought that recognizes capitalism is not just in yet another cyclical crisis but is nearing the limits of its internal contradiction. Kurz has taken to task the different approaches to Marx for their inability to extend Marx's critique of political economy and account for both the excesses and limits of commodity society. "Kurz, on the basis of a thoroughgoing reading of Marx," asserts Anselm Jappe, "maintained that the basic categories of the capitalist mode of production are currently losing their dynamism and have reached their 'historical limit': mankind no longer produces enough 'value.'" (see, Jappe, "Kurz: A Journey into Capitalism's Heart of Darkness," p. 397) The crucial point made by Kurz and elaborated by Jappe is that capitalism is not eternal, nor are the specific elements of capitalism, i.e., abstract labor, value, commodity, and money, timeless. "The structural mass of unemployment (other typical phenomena are dumping-wages, social welfare, people living in dumps, and related forms of destitution) indicates that the compensating historical expansionary movement of capital has come to a standstill." (see, Kurz, "Against Labour, Against Capital: Marx 2000") Kurz admonishes against mis-using Marx's categories and falling into a positivistic trap. A more complete reading and extension of Marx's insights reveal that commodity, value, and labor are not ontological, "transhistorical conditions of human existence." As much as they are neither eternal or timeless, they likewise have a history. "The appearance of labor as the substance of value is real and objective, but it is real and objective only within the modern commodity-producing system." Jappe explains,"Kurz always asserted that capitalism was disappearing along with its old adversaries, notably the workers' movement and its intellectuals who completely internalised labour and value and never looked beyond the 'integration' of workers —followed by other 'lesser' groups— into commodity society,"

Both Moore and Kurz invite us to interrogate the myth of capitalism as a never-ending system and to recognize that it has reached its limit. It can not overcome its internal contradictions given that it can no longer exploit cheap nature. But, if capitalism is gasping its last what does this mean for race and racial formations that were long believed to be essential to managing capitalism's most exploitative functions, i.e. producing surplus value via tightly controlled labor made more malleable through a brutal racial hierarchy of violent control? Does the end of capitalism signal an abandonment of the several intersecting racial regimes that helped insure its reproduction? "Race," Wolfe insists, "is colonialism speaking, in idioms whose diversity reflects the variety of unequal relationships into which Europeans have co-opted conquered populations." For Wolfe,"different racialising practices seek to maintain population-specific modes of colonial domination through time," (see, Wolfe, "Introduction," Traces of History, p. 5; 10) If settler colonialism endures as a structure that attempts to produce populations as disposable, how are we to understand this in relation to labor and race in the current moment?

Is disposability a condition of capital in its final stage or a new racial regime? "Disposability manifests," Martha Biondi reminds us, "in our larger society's apparent acceptance of high rates of premature death of young African Americans and Latinos." It is not only the school to prison pipeline, structural unemployment, and "high rates of shooting deaths" that produce disposability. (quoted in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation, p. 16) It is also the way we think about water, health, and collective ways of being.

Indigenous struggles and the Black and Brown working class are and have been refusing disposability. This can be heard in the adamant battle cry proclaiming, Black lives matter! and also in the stands taken across the globe by Indigenous people and their supporters to protect the earth. Disposibility as a technology and extractivism as an operation are imbricated and proceed in violent unison as capital enters a new phase. Disposibility is marked by settler colonialism's "drive to elimination...[a] system of winner-take-all;" extractivism follows its own mandate of total depletion of all resources, also a system of grabbing everything. (Kauanui and Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism Then and Now")

Raul Zibechi analyzes the extractivist model as a new form of neoliberalism: "extractivism creates a dramatic situation —you might call it a campo without campesinos— because one part of the population is rendered useless by no longer being involved in production, by no longer being necessary to produce commodities." For Zibechi, "the extractivist model tends to generate a society without subjects. This is because there cannot be subjects within a scorched-earth model such as extractivism. There can only be objects." (see, Zibechi, "Extractivism creates a society without subjects") What does care look like at the end of capitalism? When we are longer bound by the relations of a commodity society?

South and North Bay Crew

NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgibin/mailman/listinfo/unitierraca lifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous ateneo announcements and summaries please check out UT Califas web page. Additional information on the ateneo in general can be found at: <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org /ateneo>. Find us on tumblr at <https://uni-tierra-califas.tumblr.com>. Also follow us on twitter: @UTCalifas. Please note we will be shifting our schedule so that the Democracy Ateneo (San Jose) will convene on the fourth Saturday of every even month. The opposite, or odd month, will be reserved for the Fierce Care Ateneo (Oakland). In this way, we are making every effort to maintain an open, consistent space of insurgent learning and convivial research that covers both sides of the Bay. -- Center for Convivial Research at Autonomy

http://ggg.vostan.net/ccra/#1

#Universidad de la Tierra Califas #Fierce Care Ateneo #Oakland #settler colonialism #Lorenzo Veracini #J. Kehaulani Kauanui #Patrick Wolfe #UniTierra Califas #UTC

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