Molly Crabapple's "Drawing Blood": Book Review

Over a year ago, Vanity Fair published a report from the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa. Its Syrian correspondent, for fear of his life, remained anonymous. He sent photos of his city via cellphone. From these, the New York City native who goes by Molly Crabapple sketched intricate drawings, in her typical style of gracefully delineated shapes and wavering people. Out of digital images, Crabapple evoked illustrations hearkening back to a Victorian era when artists filled the news with detailed, lively depictions. Yet, Crabapple also infuses her increasingly activist art with innovation.

In Drawing Blood, she narrates, in "sentences at taut as garrotes," her first three decades. For an artist not yet thirty, a memoir may appear precocious. However, she infuses much of her coming-of-age story with fresh insights into the century, so far, from the perspective of a scrappy woman who confronts disorienting scenarios with mixed detachment and sensitivity. "It's a strange blend of disassociation, to stare into another's eyes only to make those eyes into shapes on paper." From an early age, she sketched to escape and to enlighten herself. Born to a Puerto Rican Marxist professor and a Jewish illustrator for children's books and products, she inherited her father's combativeness and her mother's talent. The child of their early divorce, Crabapple found solace in a few friends.

Of one, a Russian immigrant teenager, she recalls their brief bond. "We clung to each other, as bookish young people often do, while waiting out the years until our real life could begin." Schooled more by her self-taught reading in anarchism and the fin-de-siècle and her listening to Kurt Cobain, punk, and Trent Reznor, she soon fled abroad. She followed the route of many bohemian wanderers.

At the end of another century, she faced many restless travelers like herself, seeking meaning in a globalizing realm. In Marrakesh, "the henna looked like Cheetos dust on white girls, but on brown ones it resembled rose petals." Her own appearance, in what she defines as a tiny figure resembling Wednesday Addams, attracted men. Fending them off on the road drove her inward, to examine her fluid sexual and cultural identities. Restive with art school, she sought to make her craft matter.

Post-9/11, she got caught up in anti-war protests. "A painting didn't have to hang in a gallery, dead as a pinned butterfly. It could exist in spaces where people cared, as a mural, a stage set, a protest placard." This sparked her transformation into a noted chronicler of first the visual and later the verbal impacts of our unjust world. She disciplined herself to render these scenes by a crow's quill pen, flicking it "till the ink sped like motion and blood." Drawing Blood features her work, women as coiffured as those at the court of Versailles, wide eyes half-moons, or as louche men slouched slyly.

Tired of conventional training, she drops out of art school. She enters the sex-worker industry, as a artist's model and a burlesque performer. She endeavors, as her stint with Suicide Girls goads her, "to burn off her childhood," although that dubious enterprise "dispensed pallets of ego-crack. We were Pavlov's bitches." Molly Crabapple adopts her persona. With it, she pursues Internet promotion and procures a precarious living as a minor celebrity in the NYC demi-monde. Her lover, Fred, supports her. She indulges in freedom to roam among the company of many other women, as varied partners.

All the same, the middle section of her saga sags slightly. Her fame exudes a telling tinge of disappointment. Her loft and income are not enough. After the 2008 crash, the commissions she craves fade. She contemplates the fate of those like herself who cheered the excess on in Manhattan: "we sparklers illuminating the face of the destroyer." Chastened but not cured, she keeps feeding that beast, as her profits rebound and her reputation becomes internationally coveted. Witnessing London's anti-austerity activists at the end of 2010, she finally vows to pivot away from her status.

Therefore, "instead of taking refuge in a curlicued past," she puts her rococo pen to use. Frustrated by "painting pigs in Nero's nightclub," Crabapple leaves her insular, smug denizens in clubland behind. The radical upheaval of what she enters as the Occupy Movement intrigues her, but typically, she resists easy enchantment. Her characteristic caution, honed during her travels alone in far places, keeps her grounded. She watches how for some, a night in jail or spent in Zuccotti Park leads to book deals. Having scored her own soon after, she resolves that she will listen to those who truly suffer.

At Guantanamo Bay, she undergoes a revelation as she records the fate of a prisoner. She alternates her creation of nine immense canvases satirizing or commemorating the battle over Capital, Shell Game, with reporting for Vice, The Paris Review, and The Guardian. She squirms over her come-hither portrayal in a New York Times profile, and she cross-examines her own complicity in how she markets herself, determined to survive on her own terms in a cruel, competitive art world.

I found the earlier and later chapters of her account the most rewarding. A comfortable career tames her too much. When Molly Crabapple stares down danger and corruption, whether left to her own savvy in a remote setting, or today as she investigates the long reach of terror and greed, she succeeds best. As she sums up, she is driven "to do violence to her own clichés." She learns "to find joy where once I could only see ash." Drawing Blood illuminates the flames and the fire which warms her now.
(Amazon US 12-1-5 and PopMatters 12-18-15)

Arundhati Roy's "Capitalism: A Ghost Story": Book Review

While still best known internationally for her Booker Prize-winning 1997 novel The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has taken another path in her native India. Delaying her progress on a novel about Gandhi, she's a journalist on a crusade, fighting corruption and supporting populist protesters.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story elucidates the spectral voices haunting the shadows of India's capitalist glow. A hundred people own assets equivalent to a fourth of India's GDP. Politicians are corrupt. Dams wash away indigenous homelands. Troops massacre tribes in an anti-Maoist campaign. Many of the hundreds of millions of poor live on less than two dollars a day. Globalization accelerates poverty rather than easing it, Roy contends, and these recent essays document these unjust situations.

In another collection republished this year by Haymarket Press as Field Notes on Democracy, Roy admits the limitations in her fight for equality. In trying to get the facts right, she confesses, she may be reducing the "tragic scale" of suffering. "But for now, it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl." Roy admirably turned away from a lucrative career after earning worldwide fame as a novelist, but as a crusader, she has exposed herself to charges of being a dilettante. She castigates those more affluent, her critics charge, but is she not one of them, benefiting from their largess and patronage?

Roy acknowledges her opponents and points out the good works that come from corporate philanthropy. But she attacks the way these foundations churn money towards the increase of power. "What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world?" It's hard to argue with this.

As to Non-Government Organizations such as the World Bank, and the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations, the author documents examples of how they mold activists into participants. She notes the '60s evolution of "Black Power into Black Capitalism," as well as the shift which lured Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress into a congenial embrace of capitalist values. These are stories rarely heard. Right-wing health organizations and the Ford Foundation now tame the outcast Dalits in India, she illustrates. Roy predicts that with capitalism in crisis, the solutions that rescued it in 2008 from destruction will not last. "War and Shopping," as President Bush urged citizens post-9/11, will fail. The risk we face globally is destroying our planet, let alone our economy.

Part One of this brief collection provides two articles. The first charts impacts of India's massive dams. The second, as some of her previous journalism has done, tracks anti-Maoist crackdowns. Part Two takes the reader along to contested Kashmir amid fears of a Pakistani nuclear showdown. She opens up these areas of tension, but how they influence readers beyond these battle zones seems uncertain. Many of her essays are uneven. Roy has a knack for lively phrases, but her rhetoric can fizzle into mixed or clumsy metaphors. She mingles her distance as a reporter with snatches of personal encounters. This jumbles her tone, and her prose can drag on for far too long.

Additionally, in Field Notes, Roy updated a collection of her journalism with an introduction setting the entries in context. End notes tied each piece to its dates and origins in Indian publications, helping to enlighten a wider audience unfamiliar with the context. Capitalism lacks this editorial frame. Notes point readers to sources, but the essays themselves lack introductions, and for the most part Roy fails to set her crusade in a context that makes sense to a Western spectator.

Roy finally addresses such readers at the anthology's end with her 2011 speech at Occupy Wall Street. "We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality," concluding, "We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations." In her appeal to "cap-ists" and to "lid-ites," Arundhati Roy conjures up her own spirits to rally those who turn words into action. (Spectrum Culture 9-20-15; Amazon US 9-22-15)

Molly Crabapple's "Shell Game"

According to Kristen O'Regan, this is "A New England"; I located this with no idea what it was in a search for Occupy artwork. You can read more about street art in "Agora-phobic" at Guernica.

Animal's Marina Galperina explains that the painting I share here features "modern feminist icon Laurie Penny surrounded by protesting foxes and police hound dogs."  Animal shows all nine images of "Shell Game," conveying feminine imagery in a grand-mock Victorian Empire storybook style. It reminds me of a surprisingly tiny image I saw in London at the Tate , "The Fairy Fellow's Master-Stroke" by Richard Dadd. Not in its direct color, but in the wealth of detail filling the intricate canvas.

Dadd went mad. It is as maddening to consider how little impact the frustrations of ordinary people have against what idealistic anarchists call "impossibilism," the notion that resistance and revolt can overthrow our corrupt system keeping us in debt to bankers, cowed by lawyers, fearful of police, coddled by media and entertainment bent on distracting us, but convinced the next election=change.

I composed this after a week of legal upheaval. Obamacare upheld, Confederate battle flags taken down, and same-sex marriage approved. Argue as some may, decades of progress have paid off. Yes, many grumble at the imposition of federal power. Most, on these and other matters, reason that as with slavery and patriarchy, superstition and bigotry, we must evolve away from outmoded strictures.

Yet, how quickly will liberation happen? I sympathize with principled populism, but its long-range success seems co-opted by those elected. Ever more dependent on an unjust economic and political regime combined to make us compliant by measures at work, cameras in public, and data as tracked, how can we fight such ubiquitous power? The Net promised us empowerment twenty years ago. Now it seeks only to monetize all we do, cajoling us as shoppers and consumers, to exploit our very selves.

It's no longer fat white men in cummerbunds, like Monopoly game millionaires, pulling such strings. Women and those marginalized rush to shatter glass ceilings, but do start-ups differ from Fortune 500 firms that significantly? As the show Silicon Valley skewers, "doing good" is their cynical manifesto. 

What's intriguing about Molly Crabapple's art in the "Shell Game" series is that she incorporates female symbols and caricatures, both as villains and heroines. (If I can still deliberately employ that contested noun.) Her account of the years between 9/11 and Occupy will appear at the end of this year, Drawing Blood. Funded on Kickstarter, her work in the year after OWS continues her pen-and-ink drawings, O'Regan reports, which revel in "frenzied visual chaos and declarative allegory." Like others, the artist takes inspiration from Athens' street art and protests; I found this on the day that the banks were shut EU imposed austerity measures on this defiant/cowed Greek nation.

Is chlé-libraíoch mé

Measaim go mise a gcéanna faoi deireadh. Nuair bím ag smaoineamh faoi chúrsaí polaitíulái, ar an laghad. Thúg mé tráth na gceist an mí seo caite, mar shampla. 

Mar is féidir leat a fheichéail, is chlé-libraíoch anseo. Bhí léite agam go leor faoi ainrialachas ar feadh na blianta beaga anuas. Go hairithe os rud Occupy i 2011. 

D'fhoghlaim mé go bhfuil mé idir libraíochas agus sóisaleachas ar an iarmhéid. Roimh seo, thuig mé go bhfuil mé ar an chlé. Ach, níl me ar an thaobh na láimhe deise de réir na libraíoch, gan amhras.

Go teoiriciúil, seasamh mé i measc iad siúd nach bhfuil bhfabhar ceannairí tofa. Go fírinne, is maith liom ag staonadh ó vótáil d'iarrthóirí i dtóghcháin móra. Níl maith liom an dá phríomh-páirithe i náisiún seo.

Mar sin féin, caithfidh mé a chinneadh ag déanamh i 2016. Bíonn iarrthóir nua ó na Sóisialaithe anois--ach tá sé ag rith mar Daonlathaigh. Ní aontaim le roinnt na chuid ardán, ach aointaim le go leor de na sé. Beidh mé a feiceáil go luath má mhaireann sé an bliain seo chugainn.  

Left-libertarian me.

I judge that I myself am the same lately. When I think about political matters, at any rate. I took this
quiz last month, for example. 

As you can see, I am left-libertarian here. I had read a lot about anarchism during the past few years. Especially since Occupy in 2011. 

I learned that I am between libertarianism and socialism on the balance. Before this, I understood that I am on the left. But, I am not on the side of the right-hand regarding the libertarians, no doubt. 

In theory, I stand among those who do not favor elected leaders. Certainly, I like abstention from voting for candidates in major elections.  I do not like the two major parties in this nation. 

All the same, I must choose what to do in 2016, There is a new candidate from the Socialists now--but he is running as a Democrat. I do not agree with some of his platform, but I agree with much of it. I will see soon if he lasts the next year.

Bernie Sanders at the L.A. Sports Arena

 

Only two domestic-born movements have compelled me in my own life enough to volunteer. In this blog, I have written about my participation in Occupy LA nearly four years ago. Last night, my wife convinced me to accompany her to help out at the rally for Bernie Sanders at the L.A. Sports Arena.

I had only been there a few times. Maybe a circus when I was a kid or with a kid or two, in my meat-munching decades, before I could no longer visit either circuses or zoos.  I attended a graduation held there once for where I teach. My former colleague and I sat high in the back of the bleachers and chatted the whole time, such was the roar of the voices in the cavernous acoustic dome. It's now woebegone, bought as the Coliseum by USC but otherwise little used for much, and no pro sports, for the billionaires want their own stadia, their own branded monuments to greed a mile away.

This is what Sanders opposes. He spoke an hour on the dot to a fervent crowd. My wife and I got folks to register for the mailing list, and among the 213 volunteers who showed up on little notice at 2:30, we were happily a diverse crowd, although one you'd have seen at Occupy or any lefty rally. Still, the vast "demographics" of the SoCal region were represented, and unions, students both shaggy and preppy, frat boys and mohawked gender-benders, Latino families and black activists, people fresh from dressing up for their day job and plenty of paunchy folks in "Feel the Bern" t-shirts rushed to hear him. A genial crowd, and as the LA. Times reported, one stretching back to the Coliseum itself.

Only white t-shirts were left to sell. The organizer lacked a portable microphone and many could not hear him. We ran out of stickers to give to supporters. Only xeroxed b/w handouts in tiny squares cut by hand told the curious about where to go online to learn more or volunteer. But we were informed that all the domains had been bought up, so somehow, those so moved would find an online Bernie. 

My wife and I discussed on the way home, caught in heavy traffic due to the rally, the prospects of what she termed "an exercise in futility." Long before she could vote, she cherished the McGovern '72 jersey she still had. Apropos, I had not voted but once, in '92, for a winning President, and she had a few more notches in her belt as she supported the Democratic candidate in the past three winning elections, whereas I, after the Greens in '94 qualified for our state's ballot, grudgingly backed them.

Not that I am thrilled about everything on the blue side of the ticket. My own left-libertarian leanings clash with a very strict view on immigration legal as well as illegal, tilted if at all towards Canada and Australia's restrictions for age, occupation, and education, rather than our endless chain migration and reunification, which only to me encourages people to enter less qualified for contributing practically to our society and economy; it also meshes with my environmental views and my ZPG bent. Qualities likely to be found hardly at all in my peers. As I say, I'm the only electric car owner who did not vote for our incumbent. Still, I cannot wait for a perfect candidate, and we all compromise when voting.

Getting back to Bernie, I noted the crowd cheered loudly for the young woman speaking of her success who came here "sin papeles," and his platform naturally includes this reform. He also wants to overturn Citizens United, to another loud round of applause. I wondered how the unions who thronged to see him speak would handle that; for me I reckon they and the vexing pension issue do cloud the issue of budgets. I also speculated many of the young Latinos might have been encouraged to attend by their UTLA teachers, for extra credit in civics. If so, it'd nonetheless made a great lesson in participation and spectacle. But if he won, if that is, he'd likely take the income from the fat-cats, in democratic-socialist leaning ways, and redistribute it to make public colleges free, make campaigns publicly funded, and to eliminate overseas tax shelters and the insane military spending we accrue.

He gave his standard stump speech. It was clear, as he inserted along "my home state of Vermont" (although his accent verified his Brooklyn birth), whenever he mentioned L.A. or California. He spoke about five minutes per topic as enumerated below, and it was well-organized and accessible.

His policies raised in me no surprise. Here they are for convenience. He got a thunderous response for berating a government that locks up a kid for pot possession but lets off Wall Street bankers, and certainly this 73-year-old's populism resounded in the arena of 17,500 and 10k more outside.
 
Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, reminds readers in the same paper, after two women purporting to be from Black Lives Matter prevented him from speaking in Seattle last Sunday: "Sanders has charm, but the Jewish socialist transplant from Brooklyn has spent his political life in a state that has only 7,500 blacks. He lacks the vocabulary to appeal beyond the white left. Meanwhile, the black left, an indispensable voting bloc, has no standard-bearer in the primaries and is clearly angry about it. Clinton's most comfortable in the role of elitist technocrat, which is great for fundraising from Wall Street and wooing Beltway journalists, but it's not so useful for wooing voters in a populist environment. Thanks to her husband, she still has goodwill among African Americans. But she lacks the charisma, passion or personal story to excite either the black left or the white left. The woman who left the White House 'dead broke' makes five times the average American's annual income per speech." That is the next challenge, even if Bernie took pains as did the volunteer coordinator to avoid any mention of her or Democrat oligarchs, while castigating of course the GOP.

During a lull before the speech, I read a few pages of Raoul Vaneigem's The Book of Pleasures. This former Situationist refuses to vote in his native Belgium, "In the speaker, listen for the distant echo which declares against him." I suppose that echo last night was not only GOP or HRC, but the few who wonder, as I often do, the anarchist slogan "If voting would change anything, it'd be illegal."

Realistically it's a long shot for Sanders. Pundits keep warning he will hit a ceiling of progressive support and stall. I fear a Ron Paul parallel, from an upstart who channels and crests discontent but who fails to garner delegates; also, a party to whom a fringe contender is anathema compared to a Romney or a Bush, or, again, a Clinton. In the Huffington Post, Michael Brenner cautions an earlier prefiguration: "Sanders might be playing Gene McCarthy to Biden's Robert Kennedy in 1968. Biden is no Bobby Kennedy; but then Hillary is no LBJ." Funny as that was the first election I recall, and my parents debating Nixon and Humphrey's chances, and watching the death reports on MLK and RFK on the black and white tv in our blue-collar house. No wonder I grew up cynical about change.

I have, as I mentioned, rarely or never seen a winning candidate, in my childhood or after I came of age, whom I could trust. I recognized early on Bill Clinton's appeal. In the first Dem debate in the '92 race, I sensed this unknown (to me) would win, even as he was dwarfed among seven contenders. I never, all the same, trusted him very much. By his second campaign, I had tired of his wiliness. His wife, with her fixed stewardess mien and dead eyes (I have heard of two people who met our current president, and they both told me he smiles without his eyes going along with it), fails to fool me.

In Sanders, beneath bluster he keeps his own tempered, diplomatic caution. We were instructed as we volunteered, not to speak of, let alone ill of, the presumed Democratic winner. Bernie went on stage, as his press release verifies, "in a hoarse shout,: to proclaim that 'this country belongs to all of us and not a handful of billionaires. We need a grassroots political revolution.'” I am not sure such rhetoric will withstand the fury with which HRC and the DNC will inflict upon him soon, but for now, as she bides her time, Sanders is making himself hoarse berating those of the other party who claim to defend family values, while, like Hillary herself even if it is not spoken, being funded by plutocrats.

Follow what leader?

As I've been covering discontents with our current social, political, educational, and economic systems, I range across the spectrum when finding material to comment upon and share here. What I was thinking as I scanned hundreds of entries at LibCom last night for some reading material was how often stolid prose and stodgy statements stood in for entertaining as well as instructive texts. On a forum about recommendations for working-class literature, one comrade's dictum stood out. "the novel is anti-working-class." Perfect. At least I learned about Arundhati Roy's novel, too. Some remembered such gems as James Plunkett's depiction of the great Dublin lockout and strikes, Strumpet City, as well as the usual (not to be diminished by that) Orwellian allegories, Marge Piercy's feminist futures, Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy on Martian terraforming, Jack London (whom at least lefties still read), John Dos Passos, and even the depressing Studs Lonigan. Like JDP and James T. Farrell, Victor Serge was cited (much more) but with a proviso as to the unsanctioned ideological drift (to a right-wing or Jeffersonian populism in the American duo or an insufficiently early denial of Stalinism in the Russian instance. Every committed cadre condemns everyone else as "sheeple."

I wound up only downloading the George Woodcock pamphlet from the depths of WWII, "The Tyranny of the Clock." It is exactly what you'd expect. Like a lot of protest prose, it charts the predicament we are in, challenges the status quo, and then leaves you mulling over... what's next?

So, I opened my FB feed to find the reliable Liam O'Rourke in his Irish Republican Education Forum adding a bit of levity. "The Marxist-Leninist Theory of Humor" is credited to McLaughlin, Tom. "The Marxist-Leninist Theory of Humor," Catalyst, no. 9, 1977, pp. 99-102. I cite two paragraphs to wit:

          Socialist Seriousness.

Under Socialism there will be no classes and consequently no class conflict. Humor will cease to reflect any objective reality and will wither away. Consequently, those who engage in humor after being admonished by Party members will be clearly identifiable as saboteurs. It will be necessary to root out these weeds from the collective farm of Socialism. However, such saboteurs may prove skillful in hiding themselves. It will thus prove necessary for skilled Party members to ferret them out by engaging in humorous dialogue. If, for instance, a suspected saboteur is found to be cognizant of the answers to riddles, or if he replies to the Party member's encouragement by telling jokes, then such a person must be subject to Revolutionary Justice. It is suggested that the death sentence would be appropriate. This should be administered while the criminal is heavily dosed with helium (laughing gas), so that his "laughing death" may prove a suitable object of horror and negative reinforcement to the broad masses of workers and peasants.

Humor will of course continue to be necessary in relations between socialist and imperialist countries as the class struggle continues on the international stage.

This article spoofs the dead hand of Marxian promulgation in similar terms. It made me smile. I presume despite his familiarity with Freirean anti-authoritarian schooling in New Mexico, the director and star of Billy Jack did not write this. I like that he shares the same name, all the same.

So did a post under it directing me to "Flakes Alive!" in The Baffler. DSA member Amber Frost (a name worth a chuckle at least to me) reports on the Left Forum, which evolved from a Socialist Scholars Conference that twice, in the '60s and '80s, flamed up and flared out. Similar combustibility erupted at this NYC gathering. Apparently anyone can pay their fee and get their slot on a panel (and I thought 15-20 minute conference papers were enough). So, 400 events and 1300 speakers result. 

Frost laments the "tankers" (the pro-Man of Steel gang), the truthers (9/11 is apparently a racist hoax against Muslims--whose racial component eludes me, as any reader of Malcolm X's epiphany on his flight to Mecca might agree), and the perpetually aggrieved "marginalistas." She confesses: "there is something truly dispiriting about not being able to distinguish self-identified radicals from the parodies of us imagined by the right wing." Hearing Middlemarch on endless audiobook, I heard the phrase "self-cherishing anxiety"--this sums up the eternal grievances of a conspiratorial mind.

Studying Peter Marshall's massive Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism last year, I was struck by how prescient parts (and not other parts that were pro-feudal and quietist) of the Tao were as to those of us who can't buckle under, and how despite perhaps placid surfaces, betray restlessness at injustice, top-down imposition of inequity, and relentless push for profits, not peace.

There's a lot of reinvention of anti-statist and anti-corporate strategies. But it reminds me of start-ups competing for the venture capitalist's nod in and on Silicon Valley. Lots of young folks burning out while the older, seasoned pros sit back, often tenured and satisfied rather than D.I.Y. and hungry. New generations arrive ready for action, and as cannon fodder for the alliances and collectives, they give freely of their energy until the struggle becomes too much to continue when children arrive and insurance must be paid. This is "impossiblism" as some radicals phrase it: the idea that prefigurative ways of living cannot be sustained now, and the mentality that capitalism forces dissenters to give in.

As I have stated last week, even the Bernie Sanders campaign, I fear, will only deliver a protest vote to Hillary after he has (temporarily and cynically for her) tapped her to lean a bit left of center to swing a few states. Where else will voters for a semi-, if co-opted, democratic socialist turn anyhow? Where can those of us nagging ourselves and you for a more just, equal, society turn, if not to leaders? That is the question and answer of anarchism. In a world where fending for ourselves with reliance on the kindness of supporters rather than strangers wrangles out small niches for survival, this possibility beckons. Weighed down by bills, taxes, responsibilities, how many can embrace it?

Syriza encounters immense difficulties as academics try to run Greece; the Greens regularly march on to little notice at the back of the progressive parade, and the bipartisan fat-cat network bloats and boasts. If Occupy was crushed by Democratic Party indifference, GOP mockery, and the security state collusion which both parties insist upon, what traction does an alternative challenge sustain? Over and over, it's lessons that repeat. Their repetition must speak to our idealism, and our naivete.

"Like a fifteen-year-old who’s recently discovered punk rock, the nouveau “Social Justice Warrior” crowd frequently presumes an undue sense of ownership over incredibly basic, nearly ancient ideas." Frost here may sympathize with me. Many act as if they invented some concept, and like academics or concertgoers at "festival seating" or us on airplanes, they fight over very small expanses of space.

Her whole essay is worth the time. Certainly as my recent train of thought continues, I concur with Terry Eagleton's weariness. In a 2012 interview with the Oxonian Review after Occupy and as Greece revolted against austerity, he noted the advantage of a downturn. "Not deserting politics but trying to add a depth to it, and also, in doing so, breaking with the holy trinity of class, race, and gender. Vital topics though they are, they’ve become such tram-lines on which the cultural left has been moving."

Frost also calls for momentum. She concludes by reminding us, however, that forums may not be it, or more fringe squabbles and academic blather. "It’s quite possible the left is at a pivotal moment in political history: these days, Americans actually like the sound of socialism, and the potential for building a new base is incredibly encouraging. But as much as we should be looking to expand, so, too, must we refine our project. The marginalistas distract, disrupt and deter future comrades. So it’s high time we get a little exclusive: tankies, truthers and tofu may supply a steady stream of battle-tested conference anecdotage, but they’re not going to move us any closer to building a better world."

Is Marx right on the left?

Terry Eagleton's "Why Marx Was Right" and his monograph for Routledge, "Marx" have promoted the democratic-socialist rather than authoritarian-communist view of this thinker, more as a philosopher offering inspiration to the working classes than as an economist planning their uprising. By contrast, Jonathan Sperber's massive re-examination in "Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life"
presents a man looking back to 1789 for 1848, rather than forward, and Sperber's archival arguments contrast a thinker whose ideas were sometimes trapped in his time's mindset, or revamped by Engels.

Yesterday, I perused Chris Hedges' "Karl Marx Was Right". I suppose I am either the ideal or the worst reader for Marxian takes. I lack the economic or theoretical background or the wide exposure to him. But as my three reviews hyperlinked in the first paragraph attest, I am intrigued by Eagleton's idealism, and chastened by Sperber's realism, as to the impact of Marx today. Hedges reminds us of how prescient his thinking is. It's like taking on Jesus and trying to ignore Christianity, I find, when examining Marx's appealing message apart from those who in the founder's name have erred greatly.

At a forum about Marx's relevance a week ago, Hedges sets the context for Marx's call to arms:  "He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was 'an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.' Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic." Hedges neatly cites Marx and aligns his critique of late capitalism with our current corporate stranglehold, government "rescue" of banks and firms, the imploding (and now again inexorably rising--I do warn my fellow residents of L.A. to be careful what they wish for as 44% of recent sales have been to largely Asian, Russian, or overseas buyers in cash) housing prices.

He reminds us that it does not matter who we elect in '16. Comments on his Truthdig site under the KMWR article point out too the danger I foresee, as Bernie Sanders will likely use the few voters he can rally soon to bait and switch them to support Hillary; his attacks are much more against the GOP.

Hedges can be strident, but as I showed in his interview and treatment of Jeremy Hammond last week, he devotes attention to issues few care about. No matter his own stance on the Black Bloc during Occupy, at least he gives Hammond his own platform and voice from behind bars to speak up. The message Hammond and some who support him and those who suspect even Sanders as too cozy with party politics vs. a radicalized anarcho-communism (not the misnomer it may seem if you check out LibCom's intro, but see Wayne Price's preference for socialist-anarchist or libertarian socialist).

Hedges concludes: 

The corporations that own the media have worked overtime to sell to a bewildered public the fiction that we are enjoying a recovery. Employment figures, through a variety of gimmicks, including erasing those who are unemployed for over a year from unemployment rolls, are a lie, as is nearly every other financial indicator pumped out for public consumption. We live, rather, in the twilight stages of global capitalism, which may be surprisingly more resilient than we expect, but which is ultimately terminal. Marx knew that once the market mechanism became the sole determining factor for the fate of the nation-state, as well as the natural world, both would be demolished. No one knows when this will happen. But that it will happen, perhaps within our lifetime, seems certain.

“The old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms,” Antonio Gramsci wrote.

What comes next is up to us.

I return to this in my next post; it's a Salon interview with Hedges about the Gramscian "interregnum" before the impending "revolutionary moment" that he senses within the restive masses. 

P.S. My friend Matt Cavanaugh opined Hedges places too much faith in the masses and should put down Das Kapital and take up Brave New World for a timelier prediction. Sperber might agree. (Image credit, if from a site that strives to champion the opposite view. I know what I think...)

Down by law

Continuing my coverage of Chris Hedges' analysis of radical (or reactionary) rebellion on the simmer, Elias Isquith's interview with him in Salon expands his critique from his Wages of Rebellion: the Moral Imperative of Revolt. "We Are in A Revolutionary Moment"--Hedges opens by observing: "It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place." He avers that either radicals or reactionaries could fill this new place.

As public trust in the police, the law, and politicians ebbs, the power government and corporations conspire to hold still seems intact, but despite the coup-d'etat taken by their alliance, their facade is weakening, in Hedges' estimation. "The normal mechanisms by which we carry out incremental and piecemeal reform through liberal institutions no longer function. They have been seized by corporate power — including the press. That sets the stage for inevitable blowback, because these corporations have no internal constraints, and now they have no external constraints. So they will exploit, because, as Marx understood, that’s their nature, until exhaustion or collapse."

As an Occupy participant, Hedges recognizes the scattered nature of opposition from the left. "We who care about populist movements [on the left] are very weak, because in the name of anti-communism these movements have been destroyed; we are almost trying to rebuild them from scratch. We don’t even have the language to describe the class warfare that is being unleashed upon us by this tiny, rapacious, oligarchic elite. But we on the left are very disorganized, unfocused, and without resources." Informants, within Muslim and leftist organizations, have weakened many critics.

"Diligent Bureaucrat" at Daily Kos (image borrowed from this April 22, 2015 piece; see hyperlink at end of this blog entry), warns: "Whether its [sic] an environmentalist, anti-war activist, animal rights advocate, or occupy protester, the bureau appears to have a strict policy that any individuals or movements who criticize the government, corporations, or the nexus between the two, must be monitored, infiltrated, and if possible sent to prison." Activism and terrorism to the FBI are conflated, as informants proliferate to create actions that can be criminalized if none exist beforehand.

I wonder what this will do to confront the $2.5 billion the Clintons have supposedly amassed, or the PACs both the Dems and the GOP manipulate to sway voters in our faltering nation to keep the corporate puppets in place. As I wrote last time, I fear Bernie Sanders' entry will merely serve to rally a few on the populist left to assauge Dems who want HRC to shift their way a bit, only to have the former Socialist capitulate in a few months to deliver his supporters to Clinton, as if they had anywhere else to go. As in '12, Dr. Jill Stein will front the Greens, but as then, they will go nowhere--despite my tree-hugging wishes that they'd gain traction, by promoting birth control, population reduction, lower immigration rates, as well as their predictable NPR-soothing eco-friendly nostrums.

Discussing Hedges' article on FB with like-minded folks, they bristled at the "self-immolation" he urged; one judging him a gift to our security state. Given Hedges' penchant for end-times scenarios, this may be correct. But as in his opposition to BlackBloc at OWS, he may have stepped back from the abyss. His writing can be uneven and repetitive, but I hear in him along with Matt Taibbi and George Packer critics who analyze the populist, progressive challenges to the mainstream that cheers on Hillary and the DRC as the default setting for banker-funded "hope and change," version 2.0.

Hedges reminds those around me who shrug and whisper "Supreme Court" as they cheer on Hillary: "If we are not brutal about diagnosing what we are up against, then all of our resistance is futile. If we think that voting for Hillary Clinton … is really going to make a difference, then I would argue we don’t understand corporate power and how it works. If you read the writings of anthropologists, there are studies about how civilizations break down; and we are certainly following that pattern. Unfortunately, there’s nothing within human nature to argue that we won’t go down the ways other civilizations have gone down. The difference is now, of course, that when we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us." Marx here was correct. His own followers tarnished his idealism as they trashed their side of the earth as badly as did the capitalists everywhere else. But now that there is nowhere else, how long do we have in this century of rising heat, freakish storms, population increases of mainly many more poor, ever higher pressure to accept immigrants, less national will to uphold any environmental rulings in the name of job creation, a war machine, ideological and religious tension, tax breaks, while we laud developers and investors as titans and philanthropists?

Image credit: Daily Kos, Agent Provocateurs. Private Industry, and the FBI's Orwellian War on Leftwing Activists

Jeremy Hammond's radical morality as a hacker

Edward Snowden and Chelsea/ Bradley Manning are names we recognize. Excoriated as traitors, celebrated as patriots, these two whistleblowers from within the belly of the beast can at least be credited for the NSA's decision this week to cut back some of its phone surveillance. If not for WikiLeaks and related revelations, the Obama administration would have gone on pretending that hope and change created a less draconian governmental presence, and that all was well post-2008 with us, if not exactly post-9/11 threat.

A third name, to me, was new. Chris Hedges in a chapter from the well-titled Wages of Rebellion: the Moral Imperative of Revolt asks: "Why should we be so impoverished that so that the profits of big banks, corporations, and hedge funds can swell?" Not exactly pithy words to fit on a rebel flag or even a bumper sticker, but this issue cannot be reduced to soundbites or slogans. It is vast; it impels.

In 2013, Hedges narrates, he watched in court as Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to the full ten years his charges could earn. "Hammond, then age twenty-six, released to WikiLeaks, Rolling Stone, and other publications some 5 million emails in 2011 from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor." Like Manning, Snowden, and the MSM-reviled Julian Assange, Hammond sought to expose what the State wants to hide, in the name of supposed national security.

"The 5 million email exchanges, once made public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring, and surveillance of protesters and dissidents on behalf of corporations and the national security state. And perhaps most importantly, the information provided chilling evidence that antiterrorism laws are being routinely used by the state to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought no financial gain. He got none." Hedges explains that for hacking, this long U.S. sentence was one of the toughest ever.

"It was wildly disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point." The judge herself has ties to firms that were exposed, and her ruling seems to be compromised by her vendetta, as she appears to have used her power to abuse him.

Hedges asks, aloud, what many wonder: "Why should we respect a court system, or a governmental system, that does not respect us? Why should we abide by laws that protect only criminals like Wall Street thieves while leaving the rest of us exposed to abuse? Why should we continue to have faith in structures of power that deny us our most basic rights and civil liberties? Why should we be impoverished so that the profits of big banks, corporations, and hedge funds can swell?"

Hedges portrays Hammond as a working-class radical, with a punk-rock father who in a Western Chicago suburb had to raise twins alone after their mother abandoned them at three. Hammond picked up a talent for computers early on, and a passion for subversive, non-party politics. A different heartland machine than that which maneuvered Hillary or Obama into the White House, surely.

"Hammond, six feet tall and wiry, defined himself when we met in jail as 'an anarchist communist.' He said he had dedicated his life to destroying capitalism and the centralized power of the corporate state and that he embraced the classic tools of revolt, including mass protests, general strikes, and boycotts. And he saw hacking and leaking as critical tools of this resistance, to be used not only to reveal the truths about systems of corporate power but to “disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.”

Once the FBI's #1 most wanted cybercriminal, Hammond explained his motivation to Hedges from his imprisonment at the FCI Greenville, Illinois, facility. 'I saw what Chelsea Manning did,' he said when we spoke, seated at a metal table in a tiny room reserved for attorney-client visits. 'Through her hacking, she became a contender, a world changer. She took tremendous risks to show the ugly truth about war. I asked myself, If she could make that risk, shouldn’t I make that risk? Wasn’t it wrong to sit comfortably by, working on the websites of Food Not Bombs, while I had the skills to do something similar? I too could make a difference. It was her courage that prompted me to act.'”

Hammond told Hedges how he strove to attain “'leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.' It is essential, he said, that all of us work to cut our personal ties with capitalism and engage in resistance that includes 'mass organizing of protests, strikes, and boycotts,' as well as hacking and leaking, which are 'effective tools to reveal ugly truths of the system or to disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.'" But what if the system fights back, as it always does? Hammond knows Chicago history, as at Haymarket in 1887.

Hedges famously criticized some who wanted confrontation at Occupy Wall Street. I found it noteworthy that he allowed at length here Hammond to have his say to the contrary. "Hammond said he was not interested in a movement that 'only wanted a ‘nicer’ form of capitalism and favored legal reforms, not revolution.” He said he did not support what he called a 'dogmatic nonviolence doctrine' held by many in the Occupy movement, describing it as 'needlessly limited and divisive.' He rejected the idea of protesters carrying out acts of civil disobedience that they know will lead to arrest. 'The point,' he said, 'is to carry out acts of resistance and not get caught.' He condemned the 'peace patrols'— units formed within the Occupy movement that sought to prohibit acts of vandalism and violence by other protesters, most often members of the Black Bloc—as 'a secondary police force.'”

"Furthermore, Hammond dismissed the call by many in Occupy not to antagonize the police, whom he characterized as 'the boot boys of the one percent, paid to protect the rich and powerful.' He said such a tactic of nonconfrontation with the police ignored the long history of repression by the police in attacking popular movements, as well as the 'profiling and imprisonment of our comrades.' He went on: 'Because we were unprepared, or perhaps unwilling, to defend our occupations, police and mayors launched coordinated attacks driving us out of our own parks.'" I posted on this blog the photos of the LAPD in hazmat gear, giant trucks destroying the Occupy LA site and I am not sure, given that department's record in dealing with urban protest, if armed defense would be true defense.

Hedges had critiqued Black Bloc, while Hammond champions it. “'I fully support and have participated in Black Bloc and other forms of militant direct action,' he said. 'I do not believe that the ruling powers listen to the people’s peaceful protests. Black Bloc is an effective, fluid, and dynamic form of protest. It causes disruption outside of predictable/controllable mass demonstrations through unarrests, holding streets, barricades, and property destruction. Smashing corporate windows is not violence, especially when compared to the everyday economic violence of sweatshops and "free trade." Black Bloc seeks to hit them where it hurts, through economic damage. But more than smashing windows, they seek to break the spell of "law and order" and the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves.” This smacks to me of rhetoric, but underneath, there lurks a call to real liberty. I sympathize with this perspective, but part of me, however cowed, seems to admit its futility. There always seems, as the Irish situation reveals, a spy in the revolutionary ranks, an agent provocateur.

Facing his sentence, Hammond spoke: “The acts of civil disobedience that I am being sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and equality that have guided my life. I hacked into dozens of high-profile corporations and government institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice—and to bring the truth to light." And here, a bit freed of phrases he repeated earlier, I sense an honest, truly "direct action."


The FBI used a hacker to trap Hammond, keeping back doors open so the agency could track Hammond and watch him progress in his exposure. Hammond pled guilty, but he wonders why the corporations and entities responsible for the crimes of the State and of Capital get off free. He claims after his prison stint that nobody should be incarcerated. I think of some madmen and unhinged women behind bars, but perhaps in his anarchist vision, alternative treatment of facilities might be envisioned. For now, he encourages non-cooperation, non-capitalism, and sustained resistance.

I tried to excerpt more here from Hedges’ article. But after I pasted the penultimate paragraph above, my net went haywire. Google’s blog platform froze and then the characters went backwards. The Salon site blared a commercial embedded for State Farm Insurance. Microsoft, where I tried to copy this post so I could edit it, at first refused to allow me to transfer any more of the Hedges column.

I close this, then, prematurely, while wondering at the connivance of the system Hammond fights to fight back, somehow occluded, against even those like me who attempt to disseminate his struggle. I urge you to visit the original interview with Hammond, and to spread the good word and good fight.