nihil humani

[nihilhumani-blog]

The one where they raise the red flag over the Reichstag (summer mix 2017)

LINK HERE

1. Jorge Ben, “Meus Filhos, Meus Tesouro”, África Brasil (1976). A pretty simple song. Jorge Ben has this knack for investing the quotidian with a kind of profundity, and I just love it. The gist of the song is an imagined conversation with his children in which he asks them what they want to be when they grow up. The most poignant, beautifully-sung line in this song translates literally to “I want to be a soccer player!”

2. Philip Cohran, “The Minstrel”, On The Beach (1967). Massive Afrofuturist groove from ex-Sun Ra sideman. According to Allmusic, some of the people playing on this went on to gigs as diverse as the Agharta band (Pete Cosey) and Earth, Wind and Fire (Don Myrick). The thumb piano that anchors the groove is a creation of Cohran’s that he calls the frankiphone.

3. Gene McDaniels, “Tower of Strength”, Tower of Strength (1961). Great performance of a classic Bacharach and Hilliard tune. That falsetto is to die for.

4. Broadcast, “Goodbye Girls”, Tender Buttons (2005). Never got into this band when they were more popular (even though I probably should have). Those goofy antique synths are so joyously raucous, just barely in time, and Trish Keenan’s vocals are as delicately celestial as they’re cracked up to be. This flows nicely from the McDaniels tune — it falls somewhere between a Northern soul stomper and Young Marble Giants.

5. Amps for Christ, “Colors”, Circuits (1999). Glorious rendition of an ancient Scottish folksong. I have a real special spot in my heart for AfC — they got a good deal of attention in the indie rock press in the mid-oughts but, fairly unique among bands that won Pitchfork’s heart, they came not ought of the basement of some Chicagoland suburb but from the late 80s/early 90s SoCal powerviolence scene, a heterogenous outgrowth of US hardcore punk that took inspiration from British grindcore, Bay Area thrash, Sabbathian sludge and injected a much needed dose of good politics into the scene at a time when hardcore’s leading lights were sporting Fred Perry and Freikorps haircuts. Main dude Henry Barnes handled circuits for Man is the Bastard, who are simply one of the greatest bands the United States has ever produced: a heady mix of prog rock, US hardcore, the burgeoning “noise scene” (which was more-or-less in its infancy), thrash metal and god knows what else. As Barnes got older, his music got mellower in some ways, more intense in others, and remained fiercely committed to a better world (with a sardonic sense of humor to boot). It’s hard to say enough good things about them.

6. The Roches, “Runs in the Family”, The Roches (1979). Turns out that that all-women, multipart-harmony-heavy, Dustbowl-folk revival thing started not with Mountain Man’s terrific Made The Harbor (2010) but about three decades earlier with the Roches. This is a weird little record, kind of a mixed bag (and produced, bizarrely, by Robert Fripp, whose unmistakable Frippertronics fit surprisingly well). But some of the tunes are just stunningly beautiful, and this is one of them. The harmonies are heartbreaking and just unconventional enough to keep from turning into saccharine mush. Also I’m a big fan of any folk song that can organically work in a line as tearjerking but nerdy as “I can’t change the law of averages”.

7. Roscoe Holcomb, “I’m a Free Little Bird”, The High Lonesome Sound (1965). Listen, I know we’ve all had enough of that “white working class” mythology so beloved of both wings of capital, Trumpers and liberal imperialists alike. Think of this not in terms of “authenticity” or as a paean halcyon days of (white) class collaboration in America but as a virtuosic and joyous celebration of life that draws its strength from the well of the multinational US working class.

8. The Vibrators, “Whips and Furs”, Pure Mania (1977). From that corner of early punk that was self-consciously retrograde, a mud-caked revival of rock’n’roll, comes this nugget. It opens by quoting a Sly and the Family Stone classic — at that point already a decade old — and hits the heights of harmony with a line about a lothario who “drives a black Cadillac [with] whips and furs in the back”. Real fun pulp mag vibe here. Those ambitious little bass runs top off an already perfect song.

9. Godley and Creme, “Sandwiches of You”, L (1978). Restless, complex, delicate, sophisti-pop from the weirder half of 10cc. I really don’t even know what to say about this: it’s so accessible, funny and bizarre but it also sounds like Gentle Giant playing the Looney Tunes soundtrack. Amazing record. This will forever remind me of driving to rural Kernersville, NC in the middle of the night for work at the massive FedEx warehouse there.  

10. Todd Rundgren, “Long Flowing Robe”, Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren (1971). For a guy who’s done some of the weirdest records in the pop music canon, his more straightforward tracks are remarkably approachable and familiar. Although even this song is, all things considered, pretty weird: it kicks off with a clavinet (more associated with Stevie Wonder than power pop), and it includes prominent bongos and cowbell, Rundgren’s infinitely-multitracked falsettos, and a strange combination of thudding proto-metal drumming and delicate fingerpicking. But it’s also simultaneously a perfect pop song about being lonely whose chorus you can memorize before you’ve heard the full song for the first time. My dad reports that this remained a huge jam at Southeast High in Wichita in the late 70s.

11. Jefferson Airplane, “Watch Her Ride”, After Bathing at Baxter’s (1967). The sound of the Summer of Love becoming heavy metal. A paranoid but tender freakout that clearly points ahead to NWBOHM-style metal while remaining somehow heavier than metal — there’s hardly any distortion on the guitars, but they’re so resonant, their jazzy chords seeming to linger in the air forever, that they end up sounding more powerful than the filthiest drop-tune. Spencer Dryden (nephew of antifascist film star Charlie Chaplin) turns in a great drum performance.

12. Squeeze, “Hard to Find”, Cool for Cats (1979). Underrated gem from Squeeze’s second record. There’s a marvelous contrast between the white-knuckle new wave of the verse and the brief intrusion of good vibes in the chorus with handclaps, lovelorn vox, Glenn Tillbrook’s throaty cry, and bluesy arpeggios that sound like nothing so much as King Crimson (!).

13. The dBs, “Love is for Lovers”, Like This (1984). Stellar, weird powerpop (from Winston-Salem!). This is from their third record, after one half of their great songwriting duo (Chris Stamey, who pops up later on the list) had left. Still, Peter Holsapple could write a mean tune on his own. His yelp in the chorus is magnificent, so full of boyish charm — even in recent live performances, he sounds exactly the same when he sings it. True story, he came into the restaurant that I used to be a cashier at (he still lives in the Triangle, if I’m not mistaken), and I immediately said “holy shit, you’re Peter Holsapple!”, and he goes “this literally never happens”. My dad has some good stories about seeing them live when he lived in Raleigh in the 80s.

14. Orange Juice, “Holiday Hymn”, The Glasgow School (compilation 2005, originally recorded live 1981). My favorite “indie-pop” group of all time. My listening diet when I was 15 was about 80 percent grindcore, 20 percent jazz and it became about 75 percent indie pop after my dad bought me this comp. on a whim. This isn’t actually a “signature OJ” song; it was unreleased for a long time (as far as I can tell), and it’s actually a cover of a Vic Godard song (member of the class of ‘77 punk group Subway Sect before he became a noted soul revivalist). But it’s a perfect song for them to cover; that needling soul bass and the angular Byrds-playing-funk guitars work so well. “Today all the girls / will see our fire begin to glow / today all the girls / will recite Jean-Jacques Rousseau” is a very pretty, if mysterious, little line.

15. Captain Beefheart, “My Head is my Only House Unless It Rains”, Clear Spot (1972). It’s a little unfair that Don van Vliet could be one of the most influential, pioneering rock musicians of all time (Trout Mask Replica 100 percent deserves its reputation) and also have penned a Van Morrison-style soul ballad so deep it makes Van Morrison look like the Bee Gees. This sounds like a slightly offbeat, if dark and powerful, ballad, until about a minute in, and then suddenly the tension that the verse and the pre-chorus bridge build...just goes awry, in the prettiest way. The chorus turns out to be not only not-a-chorus — it only occurs once! — but one of the most subtle, propulsive riffs ever crafted.

16. Kim Fowley, “Mom and Dad”, Automatic (1974). This guy is such a Hollywood sleazebag that his Wikipedia page literally lists his occupation as “impresario”. And yet, this gorgeous fingerpicked Lou Reed-ripoff is one of the most straightforwardly-affecting records I’ve heard in my life. I barely knew who this guy was when Jonathan Woollen announced his death via Facebook and posted this track, and I swear I could barely hold back the tears after the second playback. As much as I hated Lou Reed, I deeply loved Lou Reed, and this is maybe the most Lou Reed thing ever written by someone other than Lou Reed.

17 Kyu Sakamoto, “Sukiyaki” (single, 1961). According to Wikipedia, one of the few “non-Indo-European language songs” to ever crack the Billboard top 100. Even if you don’t speak a word of Japanese — I don’t — its virtues are manifest — an effervescent tune that apparently takes the generic form of a lovelorn pop song but was composed as an anti-fascist protest of the post-WWII US-Japan alliance.

18. Sneakers, “Like a Cuban Crisis”, Racket (1992, originally recorded mid-70s?). It’s hard to imagine something that appeals to me more in descriptive terms than an angular, punchy power-pop group from NC featuring Chris Stamey (dB’s, whom we heard earlier) and Mitch Easter (Let’s Active, feature on previous mixes). And they really live up to the description, from the sparkling twin guitars of the opening riff to the perfect (non-)chorus, and bonus for the genuinely funny satire.

19. Witchfynde, “Leaving Nadir”, Give ‘Em Hell (1980). A jammer from that brief period of the NWOBHM during which a gorgeously-arpeggiated, powerpop-ish intro like the one this cut sports and a pounding, palm-muted verse could comfortably co-exist.

20. Linda Ronstadt, “Heart Like a Wheel”, Heart Like a Wheel (1974). A classic country-rock record — the country-rock record?! — that was once immensely popular, even winning a grammy, but which has so fallen by the wayside amongst the cognoscenti that I don’t feel bad about putting it on a mixtape. It’s a subtly-weird track. After a vertiginous piano opening reminiscent of a solo Bill Evans date, Ronstadt begins the song by detailing, then abruptly disavowing, a simile for the human heart. The song never quite coheres….there’s a beautiful chorus, but one that’s cut short by an extended instrumental break featuring heart-rending cello (?) — but that makes it all the more addictive — how can you hear that (much-delayed) chorus just twice?! Another record that inexplicably reminds me of North Carolina, even though Ronstadt was the scion of a wealthy manufacturing family from Arizona who had, far as I can tell, no special connection to NC.

21. DJ Screw, “Every Day, All Day [South Circle]”, Chapter 226: Million Dollar Hands (1995). A change-of-pace superficially, but that melancholy melody line forms a natural transition from the Ronstadt track in my mind. Absolutely classic, unrelentingly-bleak mid-90s chopping and screwing. The South Circle track is a merciless g-funk cut to begin with, but the Screw remix is a monolithic thing of beauty.

22. The Brides of Funkenstein, “Disco to Go”, Funk or Walk (1978). Hilarious yet deadly-serious, powerful yet loose P-Funk spinoff. This reminds me of swimming at the apartment pool when my parents divorced dad moved to the heart of downtown Kansas City to be near his work; this record was one of the few that we could all agree on as a family to put on the boombox during afternooon swims. This was back when downtown was inhabited by the kind of straight-up phreaks who stuffed hardcore guy-on-guy pornography into their neighbor’s mailboxes apparently just for the hell of it (finding this sort of thing in the mail among the form responses from fan mail I’d sent to Vinny Testaverde is one of my first memories). E-I-O-diss-CO-to-GO!

23. Trinity and U-Brown, “Nice Up the Yard”, (single, 1982). My favorite riff on the “Boxing” rhythm ever released. Something about this just crackles with youthful energy and energy. Almost totally-unknown — this is off a comp I pulled off the internet called DUB HOT DUBS several years back, and I can’t find a single thing about either of the artists, but still, totally classic.

24. Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Fight Dem Back”, Forces of Victory (1979). Militantly progressive Black British reggae. One of the funniest and, yet, most deadly-serious songs ever recorded. 

25. The Dils, “Sound of the Rain”, Made in Canada (1980). Marxist-Leninist powerpop — nuff said. Name a catchier tune whose chorus begins “I don’t listen to the cops / I wish they all were dead”.

26. Fairport Convention, “Cajun Woman”, Unhalfbricking (1969). One of the slighter — but catchier — tracks from a top-10 record for me. Fairport, at that point featuring two of my favorite artists of all time (Linda Thompson and her husband Richard), turned in a massive, spiritual brit-folk-revival LP that was also stuffed with oddities like this zydeco-jammer. Like many Fairport tunes, the rapturous boogie is cut with a surprising gravitas. That slightly discordant note in the chorus is perfect.

27. Magma, “Üdü Ẁüdü”, Üdü Ẁüdü (1976). There are some of those “underground canon” records that are fun to listen to, that tickle your brain, that are intellectually exciting. And then there are some that, even though they’re sung in a made-up language and performed by a French band 32 years before you first heard it, feel so familiar that it’s as if they were written by dear friends. That joyous background whoop at 1:51 is one of my favorite moments in recorded music. A pulsating, polyrhythmic, deliriously joyous mass of music that seems to prefigure “Brothersport” down to the details.

28. The Fans, “Giving Me That Look In Your Eyes”, Giving Me that Look In Your Eyes EP (1979). Feckless, extremely-active Bristol new-wave-cum-powerpop. This reminds me of Vampy Weekend a little bit, actually, just in terms of how dizzily sucrotic this is. Unfortunately they didn’t realize very much other stuff but most “throwaway bands” manage only one great lost single — the Fans had several. If you dig this, have a listen to the equally-great “You Don’t Live Here Anymore”.

29. Alice Coltrane, “Sivaya”, Transcendence (1977). How are hipsters not all over this? Immediately accessible, burning-with-soul, post-apocalyptic prayers to god from one of the most respected jazz musicians of all time. It’s really hard to express how simultaneously and simple and deep this is; there’s something especially beautiful about this ragged, loose beauty when you know exactly how complex and brutal her music could be.

30. DJ Screw, “It Was All a Dream [Shaq]”, Chapter 11: Headed 2 Da Classic (1996?). Mention of the original Shaq record is something of a snarky in-joke amongst people that know anything about basketball or music, but this cut — while manifestly unoriginal — is genuinely beautiful and the Screw mix accentuates the deep vibes. Shaq’s not a great rapper but there is some real solid production on this and the big-workin-class-dreams-come-true bit tugs at the heartstrings.

[nihilhumani-blog]

seriously, though, who *do* they protect?

i'm going to share this NYT piece--http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/magazine/how-police-see-us-and-how-they-train-us-to-see-them.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0&referer=https://t.co/BMYKa28HZq--as an example of what i was yammering about the other day. because essays like this, no matter what they intend to do, end up doing two things: they misdescribe and in fact mystify actual social relations; and, they convince the reader that they have in fact penetrated to the heart of things. the essayist may not intend to do this, and she or he may manage some arresting or compelling descriptions of injustice. ultimately, though, essays like this offer different and conflicting explanations than those offered by the mainstream of Black sociologists and historians and anti-racist white scholars. this is the price of not knowing the history or theory--there is no other way that you'd know that what you're getting is a vitiation, a weakened analysis. the dominant conceptual framework of a given society could not last if it didn't seem plausible, compatible with everyday events. there is no way to "intuit" the subtle excisions and omissions--it has to be learned. set aside the often compelling imagery of the essay, the harrowing descriptions of the final moments of the dead. what are the essay's central analytical claims? there aren't very many, as a matter of fact; most of the essay is sympathetic description. but here is what i think are the strongest claims about how society works. "In a vacuum, police officers shouldn’t kill the very citizens they swear to protect." "Black people are approached as though inherently violent, and so any interaction with a police officer can end violently". "But police, especially officers who commute to police communities not their own are--or act very much like--an occupying force". This last claim in particular is not just an offhand analogy and in fact, combined with the title of the piece, "how police see us", provides the central claim of the essay. the writer develops at length his concept of the mentality of an occupying force--the piece depends heavily on the idea that police generally speaking are different from an occupying force as described by Carr and that what we see in US society is nothing other than the result of the *unnatural irruption of the mindset of a foot-soldier into the psyche of a police officer*. the police in theory are a force for good and there is no reason to think otherwise; Carr very carefully instructs us to imagine an ahistorical, hypothetical police in order to prove this, rather than the obvious and logical method of detailing the actual historical origins and function of the police before proffering a theory of whether or not this kind of violence is in some way intrinsic to policing. remember, law and order and their enforcement are much older than the specific form of it that we call policing. hunter-gatherer societies have social codes which they enforce, for example, and this, unsurprisingly, looks very different than law enforcement in the historically-specific, particular kind of class society that we live in. so it will not do to simply imagine a hypothetical, ahistorical "police" because this under-specifies the very thing we want to know more about. what does the exclusive focus on the mindset of police officers highlight? it does some useful things. it highlights how different the way police think is from the way we might imagine it to be. it highlights a particular feature of racism, the dimension of individual psychological beliefs about people of darker skin color and other phenotypes that are the basis of (completely false) theories of biological race. what does it, however, exclude? it excludes the question of why police came to exist and how they came to exist. it excludes the question of what broader social relations police might be tasked with serving, *regardless* of what they might personally believe. it excludes the question of why things *didn't change at all* when police were given diversity training, sensitivity training, even meditation classes (http://kuow.org/post/can-yoga-and-meditation-save-americas-police-officers). it excludes the question of who exactly finds the police useful, what class of people finds them useful, and it excludes questions about who pays these people, who derives the most benefit from a roving band of property rights enforcers who deliberately and calmly had a senior citizen arrested for feeding the hungry (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/90-year-old-man-2-pastors-charged-with-feeding-homeless-in-florida/). mostly, it excludes the question of *why* police can't just think of Black people as less violent. and it excludes the question of why even US whites, whose misfortunes at the hands of police cannot be explained by anti-Black racism, are *still* locked up at rates two and three times higher than that of comparable European countries with better welfare states and generally more democratic, if still deeply flawed, societies. this all seems so very simple. if police are just like any other group of people, why can't they wake up tomorrow and think like good ally David Carr? people have asked them to many, many times. if they really aren't any more resistant to this idea than any other given group of people, especially in places where the ethnic composition of the department is varied and there are non-white faces in high places, why didn't this happen yesterday? why didn't cops do this for their own benefit since all this stress probably isn't very fun for them? is there possibly a broader set of social relations, class relations, that determines what the essential function of the police is? is it possible that the historical origin of the police is in fact coterminous with the takeoff of industrial capitalism, strikes, urban riots and slave revolts? is it possible that since property rights are only enforced through state violence that it may be impossible to disentangle law enforcement as it currently exists from the set of property relations that fundamentally undergird US and indeed global society? recommended: http://wearemany.org/a/2012/06/origins-of-police

[nihilhumani-blog]

the vicissitudes of blowback theory and the US funding of nearly everything evil

[this started as a reflection on the very interesting piece linked at the bottom of this post]. one thing that i think is often elided in some of the–useful and necessary–discussions of how US intervention can produce “blowback” in the form of nationalist or ethnocentrist resentment is that the US and friends are often more directly responsible for the myriad contras and regional varieties of fascism that seem to mushroom in the wake of its wars.

just to pick an easy example, i personally was socialized as a young left-liberal to think of OBL and al-Qaeda as the natural response to US intervention in the MENA. you look at the images of a scraggly OBL dressed in simple clothing and you nod in assent when people say, “see? the humble peasant is a poor, misguided anti-imperialist; a bad man, to be sure, but the natural reflex of a battered people”. this is almost undoubtedly the dominant understanding not just of aQ/OBL but of groups as myriad as ISIS, Boko Haram, Nicaraguan contras, Colombian paramilitaries, al-Nusra–really, any rightwing stormtroopers that you like. takes like these are plausible in the abstract–sometimes, immiseration and war make people into rightwing militants, no question, and surely US destabilization could in theory produce some sympathy for an authentic, homegrown reaction.

but they often efface the real relations that obtain–OBL was an extraordinarily wealth scion of a construction magnate who believes what many wealthy, right-wing people in his cohort believe. far from being an authentic, grassroots reaction to carpet bombs, he was a silverspoon brat who happily took money from the global seat of reaction until he developed creative differences–not ones of principle, of religion or politics, but petty power politics, the internecine squabbling of a courtier and king.

there’s a lot of reasons to try to recapture the real relations, the actual rather than plausible explanations, of the world. but one that becomes especially burning in these situations is that the mad scramble to prove that this wasn’t really ISIS-inspired (as an odd, circular and somewhat ineffective anti-racist argument that is far inferior to the arguments made by the Muslim victims [and also conquerors!] of ISIS themselves) so often ends up reinforcing right-wing arguments because, just as with San Bernardino, the initial insistence that this isn’t really ISIS or isn’t really right-wing terror was almost immediately disproven. it reminds me of the bizarre mockery of ISIS itself that some US liberals–in a misguided attempt to show that we really needn’t bomb anyone just yet–engage in. it might serve a left cause in the short-run but only by downplaying human suffering at the hands of rightwing terrorists.

why keep making these arguments? the evidence is in–even if we can’t say definitively that the US funds ISIS, we already know that they collaborate with their frenemies al-Nusra (http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/america-siding-with-terrorists-like-al-nusra-its-not-a-conspiracy-theory-10319370.html)–and we have an extraordinary, overwhelming list of past instances of precisely such behavior (for which the definitive source is probably Blum’s Killing Hope). the correct argument about Omar Mateen is less that he’s the victim of toxic masculinity–although it seems increasingly clear that he was struggling with his sexual identity and probably didn’t feel comfortable being openly gay–or that he wasn’t really a fan of ISIS (though the FBI has overstressed this element, it’s clear that he had a meaningful stake in their politics unless there’s a massive coverup, a type of event i deliberately don’t speculate on without evidence [this post is about incredibly well-documented and openly-admitted-to cover-ups]). the correct argument is almost certainly going to be that, like almost all people who are deeply linked to the US security state, Mateen had concomitantly-deep far-right opinions. there doesn’t need to be any false flag theory or any speculation. there is ample evidence that his family was tied up in US attempts to overthrow secular, feminist and socialist movements in Afghanistan. it makes perfect sense that a scion of that family who felt attracted to other men would have had some deep internal conflict, and that he could have simultaneously still been a far-right murderer who genuinely believed in authority, obedience and hierarchy. the world is complicated like that, but it doesn’t mean that it’s unintelligible. let’s stop treating a fascist mass murderer as the simple outcry of a conflicted soul who suffered the effects of US intervention and instead label him correctly as a comprador, a collaborator in US foreign policy, who undoubtedly would have cheered the sight of US-backed mujahideen slaughtering communist women. we don’t come an inch closer to defeating Islamophobia by ignoring the deep connection between the US and far-right terrorism that adopts various outward appearances (i refuse, unlike both Trump and Clinton, to use the mystifying term “Islamism”). we defeat it by acknowledging the mass destruction that certain people who superficially use the trappings of Islam carry out under US auspices and also acknowledging the heroic resistance of far, far more Muslims to this destruction under the aegis of left-wing parties and paramilitaries.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-americas-afghan-crusade-came-home-to-orlando-b1b9aba680ad#.hmi6mqlis

[nihilhumani-blog]

against “savviness”

this good piece of media critique has a title that makes the reader think it'll be about the bias of news media towards specific candidates or perhaps news media’s persistent problems with simply getting the facts straight, two things which are rife in the US press, but it's really about something equally important that i think i've only been able to put words to very recently. this is that news media's coverage of politics is almost always, even in the most apparently-left-leaning major press, is still basically framed by an elitist conception of what "politics" means--not as a participatory, democratic process but as a kind of exercise problem-solving, specifically the problem of how to manage an unruly mass. there are more benign solutions (raise the minimum wage for the poor, powerless, agency-free people) or crueler ones, but both render the great mass of humanity as population to be managed, a buzzing morass in need of constant tending--a foreign object. what's striking about this is that this convinces people--regular people, working class people, people who are the targets of this political management, of the dissipation of dissent--to identify with this elite epistemology (and it really deserves that term--it’s an entire worldview). in Rosen’s well-chosen, caustic words:

Take the most generic “savviness question” there is. One journalist asks another: how will this play with the voters? Listening to that, how will this play with the voters, haven’t you ever wanted to shout at your television set, “hey buddy, I’m a voter! Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room when I’m sitting right here watching you.” This is what’s so odd about savviness as a political style performed for the public. It tries to split the attentive public off from the rest of the electorate, and get us to join up with the insiders. Under its gaze, other people become objects of political technique. In this sense savviness is an attack on our solidarity with strangers who share the same political space.

this doesn't have any actual bearing on the class, race or gender position of regular people, or their actual social power, but it results in this bizarre phenomenon that i see sometimes as an organizer where, for example, low-income retirees who watch political television a lot will talk about the calculus of balancing the need to cut social security as much as possible with the fact that this is, in one particular man's words, "political suicide". this guy, at the same time, is someone who relies on social security simply to eke out an existence and who, as someone who will staunchly defend his SS check when pushed, is precisely the obstreperous, insatiable, anonymous "lazy dependent” of the bourgeois imagination. it’s genuinely odd and troubling to see people talk about themselves as quasi-human subjects to be disciplined like this.

[belatedly, i realized that this piece was written by the rather milquetoast liberal Jay Rosen, whom i have often seen saying silly things--this essay is good enough that i’m posting anyways]

Jay Rosen, “Why Political Coverage is Broken”, keynote address at New News 2011 at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. http://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/

[nihilhumani-blog]

WaPo, King Vitiator

The Washington Post is a terrible newspaper.

I’ve been saying this since I first began reading the news in earnest, ten years ago, at 14, when it made far less of an attempt to vitiate genuine social analysis. Mostly what I remember is being shocked that as open a bigot and hardy a fool as Richard Cohen had a regular column.

WaPo has since changed its tune, especially with its oft-shared (at least in my world) “Wonkblog” postings, offering a tantalizing mix of clickbait-y headlines (one currently towards the top of the Wonk frontpage has a subheader reading “this might be the weirdest food trend” and another makes ambiguously coy use of a phrase best known from spam e-mails--it might actually be worse if it’s intended to be cute) buffeted by ostensibly serious analysis.

For a paper that, as recently as 2013, was deemed so unreliable that fact-checkers at several pubs with vastly smaller circulations didn’t use it as a source (trade secrets, sorry--no links), it’s ensconced itself as a privileged font for explanations of the contradictions of US social life that plenty of smart people buy.

The thing that draws my especial bile about WaPo is that it, more than any other major paper I can think of, attempts to vitiate radical--or hell, even just social-scientific--analysis of social relations in favor of gimmick-y too-clever-by-half explanations. The Atlantic comes close, and Vox and Slate perfected the style (the latter being a pioneer of it), but the three of them are more often (correctly) identified as concern trolls.

One of its recent posts sets out almost deliberately to completely mystify and confuse people who might want to think about the way that being working-class constrains one’s life choices. Stephanie Land’s “Saying your house is messy because you play with your kids is a privilege” numbers among a veritable torrent of current pieces that make dubious use of the category of “privilege”--a term which is in in the first place an enervated and awkward locution that in no ways improves on clearer and more profound terms like “class power”, “white supremacy”, or “male domination”. These pieces attack social domination in its most externalized, superficial and tenuous terms, often making it appear as though the problem is the existence of certain goods that the rich generally have more access to than the unequal distribution of the good.

Land’s piece very precisely follows this pattern. While she starts strong, by making the common-sense and defensible point that working-class people often face more punishment for failing to keep up certain appearances of “civility” than rich people do--the double-standard mentioned in the title, for example, or the fact that poor kids with long hair can’t get hired at some kinds of jobs, while fratbros with unkempt mullets can walk into job--her piece studiously avoids actually calling for a rectification of these circumstances. The initial rhythm of the piece suggests a natural move, from the denunciation of the limitations of this privilege to bourgeois women to the call for all women to have this privilege as a right. This never comes. Land simply reaffirms her initial point, and indeed, criticizes the motivations of rich women who choose play with their children over housework as lazy and deviant. The author admits that she once eagerly affirmed the demand that women perform housework rather than spend time on things they enjoy, insisting that her fellow women pump out as much housework as is needed to satisfy bourgeois society: “Messes meant love, attention, and devotion to making memories, the thinking goes. When I first saw these memes, my immediate thought was ‘No, it just means you don’t want to clean. I’m on my own and I still find time.’” There is simply never any suggestion that perhaps the problem lies in this unequal access to resources; instead, it is the choices of rich women--who still suffer gender domination, of course--which come under fire, implied to be a kind of inauthentic bourgeois feminism.

The piece, somewhat shockingly, never actually rises to the level of criticism of these conditions; one walks away with the mistaken memory that it does, but a second and third read confirm that this inequality is never actually taken to task. Land stresses the difficulty of being a working-class householder and the different expectations that she faces, but she never actually says that these are bad things or things that ought to be changed. Indeed, by failing to offer either practical or utopian solutions to this state of affairs, or even a wish that things could be different, her piece falls into the “nobility of poverty” rhetoric propagated by many US religious traditions, that stresses the greater authenticity and decency of “salt of the earth” people’s miserable life conditions--thus implicitly providing a justification for their continued maintenance.

The reader, unsurprisingly, also fails to find acknowledgement of the fact that working-class people often buck these standards. Land herself is working-class by most definitions, but she writes with a distinctly patrician-liberal understanding of how people respond to the injuries of class: passively and obediently. The reader will note that Land never acknowledges that, despite the higher price paid by working-class people for failing to conform to unwritten social rules, some working-class people actively rebel against their subjugation by doing that. Some single moms actually do say fuck it and let the dishes pile up in order to spend more time on their children. Land’s assertion that this simply doesn’t happen--that only “middle to upper class women” actually do this--is just untenable and misrepresents the great heterogeneity of working-class lifeways. A radical analysis points out the prices paid for these divergent pathways, the awful choices that have to be made--it doesn’t insist that people never try, however futilely, to resist the choices imposed on them, which dehumanizes working-class people and robs them of their agency. In Land’s analysis we only find people who passively accept standards of cleanliness far in excess of what is actually needed to maintain healthy and hygienic living environments.

Absent, too, is any acknowledgement that non-white women, Black women especially, are structurally barred from the word that Land searches for, but never finds, to describe the “respectable working class” lifestyle that she never actually criticizes: whiteness. The author never addresses the fact that the cleanliness that she strived for, as a way of deflecting the gaze of a class-riven society, is literally written out of Blackness in a white supremacist society. By presenting cleanliness and tidiness as an authentically and culturally-conservative working-class response to class domination, Land forgets that this literally isn’t an option for many people, no matter how hard they try.

The piece serves an ideological function by casting working-class women as be-knighted, but simple women, a kind of faceless mass of suffering who don’t even know enough to want better. They need help and understanding from rich women--the audience of the piece, or else Land wouldn’t bother explaining basic facts of life that working-class people generally don’t need explained to them--but they don’t trouble their little heads with dreams of revolution, or even significant reform.

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Nelson Peery on value theory, The Future is Up To Us (Chicago: Speakers for a New America, 2015), 28-29.

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Robert Biel on eurocentric marxism in Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement

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The Dils - Sound of the Rain

anti-revisionist power-pop for a sunny Saturday

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Milt Gross

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very good piece. i think one of the things that emerges clearly in it is the way in which the ultra-leftist or, at least, anti-Leninist leftist vs. Leninist/dependista/anti-imperialist debate ended up shaping world affairs to a significant degree. 

in my view, while the narrative of SYRIZA as swindlers is appealing in the wake of their utter capitulation, i think psycho-history is generally an untenable form of explanation. it’s also more-or-less moot given that SYRIZA would have fucked it even if they were completely sincere in their beliefs, because their strategy was based on the decision to go into the Troika’s bargaining room in the first place without seriously considering other options. (some might counter that the Greek people seemed implacably opposed to Grexit, but this is precisely where SYRIZA could have and should have exercised political leadership, which they didn’t even come close to attempting).

while we could speculate on their personal motives for not taking Grexit seriously, it seems to me that intimations about Tsipras’ personal squeamishness are less interesting--indeed, rather boring in a gossip-y way--than the fact that on an explicit, ideological level, influential SYRIZA figures wrote off Grexit in part because they associated it with the hated, so-called “KKE (Exterior)” and similar groupings, whose analysis generally rests on “classical Marxist” ideas about imperialism as well as, to some extent, “Third Worldist” ideas about national liberation. 

as I noted here in a critique of an exceptionally weak, under-argued piece by SYRIZA economist John Milios, while Grexit was passed off by the “pro-EU” or at least pro-EZ left as being an indisputably bad option discredited by neutral economic science, it’s in fact a highly partisan position that has as much to do with the fact that SYRIZA is an historical legacy of left anti-Communism (which, as the piece notes, was nearly identical in Greece with pro-Europe leftism). in fact, it seems fairly clear that SYRIZA intellectuals wrote off Grexit in spite of, rather than in accordance with, what a fairly-disinterested, realistic analysis of the situation would prescribe as a matter of concrete action. (to be fair, some SYRIZA economists, like the very smart Costas Lapavitsas, favored Grexit, as did sympathetic European and US leftist economists such as Mark Weisbrot and Frédéric Lordon; even the august, staid liberal Paul Krugman, a Hillary shill of late, endorsed this position. but people like Milios and, more importantly Yanis Varoufakis, the erstwhile finance minister, held the day). 

if there’s any takeaway from this, i suppose, it’s that these issues--though rarely having any actual material effectivity in the imperial core countries--often have a profound impact on the decisions of governments in semi-peripheral or peripheral countries. it’s in this context that the demands of core country ultra-leftists that we break with any kind of left nationalism, any kind of anti-imperialism (except in the most abstract sense), anything they consider to be “vulgar Marxism” begins to ring so hollow. the beautiful souls of a dogmatic anti-nationalism--no matter the context, no matter the ultimate effect--have a lot to answer for.

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Economic fatalism and the reformation of socialism through ethics are intimately connected. It is no accident that they reappear in similar form in Bernstein, Tugan-Baranovsky and Otto Bauer [reformist socialists with whom Luxemburg quarreled about Marxian economics, although Bauer was in this regard superior to Luxemburg; Bernstein a confused dilettante; Tugan somewhere in between--ed.]. This is not merely the result of the need to seek and find a subjective substitute for the objective path to revolution that they themselves have blocked. It is the logical consequence of the vulgar-economic point of view and of methodological individualism. The ‘ethical’ reformation of socialism is the subjective side of the missing category of totality which alone can provide an overall view. For the individual, whether capitalist or proletarian, his environment, his social milieu (including Nature which is the theoretical reflection and projection of that milieu) must appear the servant of a brutal and senseless fate which is eternally alien to him. This world can only be understood by means of a theory which postulates ‘eternal laws of nature’. Such a theory endows the world with a rationality alien to man and human action can neither penetrate nor influence the world if man takes up a purely contemplative and fatalistic stance. Within such a world only two possible modes of action commend themselves and they are both apparent rather than real ways of actively changing the world. Firstly, there is the exploitation for particular human ends (as in technology, for example) of the fatalistically accepted and immutable laws which are seen in the manner we have already described. Secondly, there is action directed wholly inwards. This is the attempt to change the world at its only remaining free point, namely man himself (ethics). But as the world becomes mechanised its subject, man, necessarily becomes mechanised too and so this ethics likewise remains abstract. Confronted by the totality of man in isolation from the world it remains merely normative and fails to be truly active in its creation of objects. It is only prescriptive and imperative in character. The logical nexus between Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Critique of Practical Reason is cogent and inescapable. And every ‘Marxist’ student of socio-economic realities who abandons the method of Hegel and Marx, i.e. the study of the historical process from a total point of view and who substitutes for it a ‘critical’ method which seeks unhistorical ‘laws’ in the special sciences will be forced to return to the abstract ethical imperatives of the Kantian school as soon as the question of action becomes imminent.

Georg Lukács, “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg”, History and Class Consciousness, 1923

notes in brackets are mine

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In direct contrast to the erroneous assumptions on which [reformist socialist Jean] Jaurès’s tactics are based, the foundations of parliamentarism are better and more securely protected in proportion as our tactics are tailored not to parliament alone, but also to the direct action of the proletarian masses. The danger to universal suffrage will be lessened to the degree that we can make the ruling classes clearly aware that the real power of Social Democracy [in this case referring not to what are now called social democrats, but the older revolutionary socialist party of the same name which Luxemburg was a part of] by no means rests on the influence of its deputies in the Reichstag [German parliament], but that it lies outside, in the people themselves, ‘in the streets’, and that if the need arise Social Democracy is able and willing to mobilize the people directly for the protection of their political rights.

Rosa Luxemburg, “Social Democracy and Parliamentarism”, Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, 5-6 June 1904.

stuff in brackets = my notes

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Opportunism, incidentally, is a political game which can be lost in two ways: not only basic principles but also practical success may be forfeited. The assumption that one can achieve the greatest number of successes by making concessions rests on a complete error. Here, as in all great matters, the most cunning persons are not the most intelligent. Bismarck once told a bourgeois opposition party: ‘You will deprive yourselves of any practical influences if you always and as a matter of course say no.’ […] Indeed, a bourgeois party, that is, a party which says yes to the existing order as a whole, but which will say no to the day-to-day consequences of this order, is a hybrid, an artificial creation, which is neither fish nor flesh nor fowl. We who oppose the entire present order see things quite differently. In our no, in our intransigent attitude, lies our whole strength. It is this attitude that earns us the fear and respect of the enemy and the trust and support of the people. Precisely because we do not yield one inch from our position, we force the government and the bourgeois parties to concede to us the few immediate successes that can be gained. But if we begin to chase after what is ‘possible’ according to the principles of opportunism, unconcerned with our own principles, and by means of statesmanlike barter, then we will soon find ourselves in the same situation as the hunter who has not only failed to stay the deer but has also lost his gun in the process.

Rosa Luxemburg, "Opportunism and the Art of the Possible", Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, 30 Sept 1898

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Those who oppose cultural fascism should start with Weimar

Adorno, Minima Moralia. doesn't the Clinton camp confirm this daily? the GOP has finally, finally become truly, incontrovertibly fascist this time, whence comes the urgent need for a Popular Front behind Hillary to stave them off; not only that, but she's the only one who can reach out and work with them.

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C. Wright Mills’ eerily prescient prediction of Clinton’s moral and analytical bankruptcy from The Power Elite, 1956

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Gramsci on "laissez faire" as a form of state regulation

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trump's policies are fascist, but so are the GOP's. what's really fascist is his strategy

1. trump's policy is indeed fascist in content and intent--but then, so is most of the GOP's platform, and that kf most centre-right and onwards parties in the world. the degree of openness or severity might change, but most right-wingers, as Corey Robin has pointed out, either explicitly or implicitly support policies that result in racialized, genderized class societies. 2. trump's strategy and rhetoric, however, is probably uniquely fascist in that it's willing to risk long-term stability of a hierarchical society that already looks pretty much like a fascist dreamworld in a gambit to violently deepen those class divisions. many "more respectable" bourgeois--or rich people, to be less precise--prefer to maintain societies that favor them, while conceding some reforms in order to defuse dissent and buffer themselves from leftwing challenges. fascists, who often have contested relationships to *the current elites and their perceived weakness* while still upholding class society, usually are willing to risk it all in an attempt to radicalize it. fascism fuses longtime, true believer ideologues who really do want slavery to come back and accurately understand what they advocate, and ppl who are often caught in odd, contradictory class positions at times when class positions are shifting--here, the squeeze of the "white middle class"--and are drawn, spectacle style, towards the easy answer of scapegoating people lower than them on the social hierarchy for this. 3. what makes trump a fascist or not is not his stance on "individualism", which this piece () uses to assert that Trump may not be a fascist. individualism/collectivism are extraordinarily bad terms for thinking about society because they nearly always fail to ask "individualism for who? collectivism for who?" the left in the US is derided as collectivist, and some confused ppl even identify that way, except when they suddenly become individualists while advocating for abortion rights or the rights of religious minorities. it's not a very coherent way to look at things because it constantly has to admit exceptions. the thing is, the class dimension is missing from that binary of individualism/collectivism. right wingers want individualism for heroic elites, patriarchs, strong businessmen, and servility towards them from everyone else. the concept of "elitism", a position that says that there ought to be hierarchies in society and, on that basis, different rules for different people captures this kind of argument much better than does a claim that it's either individualistic or collectivistic (it should be borne in mind, of course, that many socialists and communists understood themselves as individualists or even egoists, as did Engels, and who saw the overthrowing of class society in favor of communal production as making people more capable of developing their personal identities thanks to the end of class domination). anyways, just throw out that way of thinking about politics in general, but especially for fascism--it's a fixed game that the right likes because it confuses people. but if you really try to apply the theory--feminists, socialists, anti-racists prioritize community over the individual, bourgeois ideologues do the opposite--you find all kinds of contradictory data, things that don't fit at all. better said, leftists see community and individuals operating in harmony, rightists don't really prioritize one over the other as much as they support class society and whatever actions--subordinating women in the name of order, letting hedge funds gut firms in the name of individuality--reinforce it.