Can’t Get You Out of My Head (Curtis, 2021)

Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is a six-part series that explores how modern society has arrived to the strange place it is today. The series traverses themes of love, power, money, corruption, the ghosts of empire, the history of China, opium and opioids, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, and the history of Artificial Intelligence and surveillance. The series deals with the rise of individualism and populism throughout history, and the failures of a wide range of resistance movements throughout time and various countries, pointing to how revolution has been subsumed in various ways by spectacle and culture, because of the way power has been forgotten or given away. Adam Curtis, 2021

David Graeber (1961-2020)

David Graeber’s Collected Writings Linked Below

Hope in Common, 2009:

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction — even of “progressives” — is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

‘Anti-Semitism among American Labor’: a study by the refugee scholars of the Frankfurt School of Sociology at the end of World War II

by Catherine Collomp

Labor History Vol. 52, No. 4, November 2011, 417–439

This article analyzes the unpublished 1400-page report ‘Anti-Semitism among American Labor’, produced in 1944–1945 by the German scholars of the Frankfurt School of Sociology during their exile in the United States. Overlooked so far by labor historians and by historians of Jewish and World War II history, this report is analyzed here with specific attention to its contents as well as to the historical circumstances of its production during World War II. The article explains the larger strategy of the Jewish Labor Committee which commissioned it. It also situates this study in the production of the German sociologists who realized it. Finally, the article argues that, in the context of the war production effort, the alleged anti-semitism of the American working class was a fluctuant and paradigmatic sign of tension and frustration which eventually gave way to other forms of literal or imaginary conflicts.  [READ PDF]

See also:

• The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism by Lars Rensmann
• Patterns within prejudice: antisemitism in the United States in the 1940s by Eva-Maria Ziege
• Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory’s Analysis of Anti-Semitism by Martin Jay

One Nation, One Reich, One Peace

by Wolfgang Pohrt 1981 (Telos/ Die Zeit )

If the atom bombs are set off, we’ll be dead, but we have to live with the opponents of increased armaments and the neutron bomb. Once the bomb has fallen no one suffers any more. We suffer from its anticipated political consequences — for in the nuclear age the consequences of war precede it. After a nuclear war there will supposedly be cockroaches with five heads and legs four meters long. The mutations that interest us, however, take place beforehand, and they look quite different: one wanted to start a peace movement and it turned out to be a German national revival movement.

The Center Has Fallen and There’s No Going Back

PHIL NEEL in conversation with Paul Mattick

This month brings the publication of Phil Neel’s Hinterland, the first in the Field Notes series of books published by Reaktion Books in association with the Brooklyn Rail, to provide in-depth analyses of today’s global turmoil as it unfolds. I could not think of a better book to begin with than Neel’s insider’s analysis of the U.S. working class outside the big-city centers to which most media attention is paid. I’ve taken advantage of this occasion to ask Phil Neel to discuss some of the fundamental ideas of his book.

Paul Mattick (Rail): Near the end of the book, you make the fundamental observation, that “the character of production sculpts the character of class” in any historical period. How is the current form of production reshaping class relations, and why does understanding this require a focus on what you call the “hinterland”?

Phil Neel: This is a good place to start, because I want to be unambiguous that this question is really what the book is about, in the end. It’s a book of communist geography. There’s this new generation of thinkers who are trying to apply a rigorous Marxist method in ways that are neither frustratingly esoteric nor mind-numbingly dumb, and even while we all have our obvious disagreements, I think it’s a great thing. And the reason it’s possible is because so many of these questions that maybe thirty years ago were of purely academic interest are again becoming a lived experience. This itself is evidence of the basic thesis you mention above: the book represents a class position, not the product of some personal ingenuity. It’s something that I’ve articulated in a first-person narrative, but the basic ideas are wrought from collective experience. I think it should be read as a kind of collaborative text, formulated out of a whole horde of experiences and stories, of which my own are only a part. Stories don’t come out of nowhere, though, and when you trace things back, there is this basic scaffolding that shapes the really important things in life, and that scaffolding is economic.

The Devil in America

illustrated by Richie Pope; edited by Ann VanderMeer

by Kai Ashante Wilson (2014)

for my father

1955

Emmett Till, sure, I remember. Your great grandfather, sitting at the table with the paper spread out, looked up and said something to Grandma. She looked over my way and made me leave the room: Emmett Till. In high school I had a friend everybody called Underdog. One afternoon—1967?—Underdog was standing on some corner and the police came round and beat him with nightsticks. No reason. Underdog thought he might get some respect if he joined up for Vietnam, but a sergeant in basic training was calling him everything but his name—nigger this, nigger that—and Underdog went and complained. Got thrown in the brig, so he ended up going to Vietnam with just a couple weeks’ training. Soon after he came home in a body bag. In Miami a bunch of white cops beat to death a man named Arthur McDuffie with heavy flashlights. You were six or seven: so, 1979. The cops banged up his motorcycle trying to make killing him look like a crash. Acquitted, of course. Then Amadou Diallo, 1999; Sean Bell, 2006. You must know more about all the New York murders than I do. Trayvon, this year. Every year it’s one we hear about and God knows how many just the family mourns.

—Dad

The Paradox of Social Democracy: The American Case

by Robert Brenner (1985)

Part I

I A New Social Democracy?

A very long time ago — in the Palaeolithic days of the new left of the later 1960s — few red-blooded radicals would have been caught dead inside the Democratic Party. This was the era of the student and anti-imperialist movements, of SDS; of the militant Black movements, of SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; and of the nascent rank and file movements among industrial and public service workers. In those days, it was strictly the politics of the streets and of mass direct action. ‘Power to the people’ definitely did not mean ‘part of the way with RFK.’ The Democratic Party was recognized as firmly wedded to American imperialism, as expressed in LBJ’s Vietnam War, not to mention Harry Truman’s A-Bomb over Hiroshima or his Cold War or Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs. Moreover, despite the fact that workers, Blacks, and the poor did vote, in their majority, for the Democratic Party, that Party was viewed as clearly pro-capitalist, anti-working class, and anti-Black. Neither workers nor Blacks controlled, nor even much participated in the Democratic Party. So, it was hardly surprising to the 60s radicals that the Party never tried to repeal the viciously anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, that it refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at its 1964 convention in place of the arch-segregationist official delegation, and that the Kennedy presidency failed to achieve a single significant piece of social legislation.

Antifa, a documentary

 

Since the election of Donald Trump, acts of racist violence have proliferated across the United States. Racists and misogynists feel emboldened to express and act on their views. White nationalist groups and resurgent traditional white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan have used Trumps victory to gain new recruits. All that stands in their way are the groups of anarchists and anti-state communists who have taken it upon themselves to prevent fascism from becoming a powerful political force in the United States. This film tells the story of what “Antifa” is and why people are using these tactics to confront racism and fascism in the US today.

Who are the anti-fascists? What motivates them to risk their lives to fight the far right? What is the history of militant anti-fascism and why is it relevant again today? How is anti-fascism connected to a larger political vision that can stop the rise of fascism and offer us visions of a future worth fighting for? Through interviews with anti-fascist organizers, historians, and political theorists in the US and Germany, we explore the broader meaning of this political moment while taking the viewer to the scene of street battles from Washington to Berkeley and Charlottesville.

by Global Uprisings

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Adam Shatz reviews:  Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman (2017)

One of the great paradoxes of the Obama era is that it encouraged so many liberals, both black and white, to see the black experience in America not as a slow, arduous struggle for freedom culminating in the election of a black president – Obama’s version, not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man of unerring self-discipline and caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as president. This most eloquent champion of ‘post-racialism’ may have been the most powerful man in the world, yet he remained a prisoner of his race, of his ‘black body,’ as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in Between the World and Me.[1] In the face of repeated police shootings of young black men or atrocities such as the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama did little more than deliver one of his formidable speeches. And – as he did in Charleston – sing ‘Amazing Grace’, as if only a higher power could cure America of its original sin, and end the nightmare.

The United States of Work

BY MIYA TOKUMITSU (April 2017)

Employers exercise vast control over our lives, even when we’re not on the job. How did our bosses gain power that the government itself doesn’t hold?

Work no longer works. “You need to acquire more skills,” we tell young job seekers whose résumés at 22 are already longer than their parents’ were at 32. “Work will give you meaning,” we encourage people to tell themselves, so that they put in 60 hours or more per week on the job, removing them from other sources of meaning, such as daydreaming or social life. “Work will give you satisfaction,” we insist, even though it requires abiding by employers’ rules, and the unwritten rules of the market, for most of our waking hours. At the very least, work is supposed to be a means to earning an income. But if it’s possible to work full time and still live in poverty, what’s the point?

Even before the global financial crisis of 2008, it had become clear that if waged work is supposed to provide a measure of well-being and social structure, it has failed on its own terms. Real household wages in the United States have remained stagnant since the 1970s, even as the costs of university degrees and other credentials rise. Young people find an employment landscape defined by unpaid internships, temporary work, and low pay. The glut of degree-holding young workers has pushed many of them into the semi- or unskilled labor force, making prospects even narrower for non–degree holders. Entry-level wages for high school graduates have in fact fallen. According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, these lost earnings will depress this generation’s wages for their entire working lives. Meanwhile, those at the very top—many of whom derive their wealth not from work, but from returns on capital—vacuum up an ever-greater share of prosperity.

LA ’92: The context of a proletarian uprising

by Aufheben (1992)

Distorted by the bourgeois press, reduced to a mere ‘race riot’ by many on the left, the L.A. rebellion was the most serious urban uprising this century. This article seeks to grasp the full significance of these events by relating them to their context of class re-composition and capitalist restructuring.

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April 29th, 1992, Los Angeles exploded in the most serious urban uprising in America this century. It took the federal army, the national guard and police from throughout the country five days to restore order, by which time residents of L.A. had appropriated millions of dollars worth of goods and destroyed a billion dollars of capitalist property. Most readers will be familiar with many of the details of the rebellion. This article will attempt to make sense of the uprising by putting the events into the context of the present state of class relations in Los Angeles and America in order to see where this new militancy in the class struggle may lead.

Before the rebellion, there were two basic attitudes on the state of class struggle in America. The pessimistic view is that the American working class has been decisively defeated. This view has held that the U.S. is – in terms of the topography of the global class struggle – little more than a desert. The more optimistic view held, that despite the weakness of the traditional working class against the massive cuts in wages, what we see in the domination of the American left by single issue campaigns and “Politically Correct” discourse is actually evidence of the vitality of the autonomous struggles of sections of the working class. The explosion of class struggle in L.A. shows the need to go beyond these one-sided views.

Trump and America’s Populist Turn

Logos Journal 2017: Vol. 16, nos. 1-2

Thus rather than conceiving of authoritarianism as a social pathology arising as a reaction to the irrational disequilibrium between the system and the lifeworld that can be remedied by advocating and instituting a democratic equilibrium on normative grounds, such an understanding of the critical theory of society held that authoritarianism was inherent to the irrational objective and subjective dynamics of capitalist society as such. Consequently, this notion of Critical Theory not only tried to cultivate autonomy as a bulwark against the rise of authoritarianism, but also endeavored to understand, demystify and negate the antagonistic, dominating and regressive society that brought forth authoritarianism. – Chris O’Kane

Judith Stein: Wall Street versus Main Street

Dan Krier: Behemoth Revisited

James Block: Beyond the Collapse

Harriet Fraad: Women, Class, Gender and the Trump Agenda

Chip Berlet: The Alt-Right: A Primer on the Online Brownshirts

Jefferson Decker: The Ends of Reform

Mark Worrell: The Twilight of Liberal American Imperialism

Stephen Eric Bronner: Trump’s Counter-Revolution
 

The Frankfurt School and the New Right

Chris O’Kane: “A Hostile World”: Critical Theory in the Time of Trump

Werner Bonefeld: Authoritarian Liberalism, Class and Rackets

John Abromeit: Right Wing Populism and the Limits of Normative Critical Theory

Samir Gandesha: The Neoliberal Personality 

Darren Barany: Explaining “Cult 45”

Review Essays

Kim Scipes: Black Subjugation in America: Review of Theodore W. Allen, Edward E. Baptist, and Sven Beckert

George Lundskow: White Like Them: Review of Arlie Russell Hochschild, Nancy Isenberg, and J. D. Vance

Book Reviews

Andy Blunden, The Origins of Collective Decision Making
Reviewed by Geoffrey Kurtz

Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
    Reviewed by Aidan Beatty

Martin Jay, Reason after its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory
Reviewed by Brian Caterino

Henry Giroux, America at War with Itself
    Reviewed by Matthew H. Bowker

Vince Czyz, Adrift in a Vanishing City
    Reviewed by Nate Liederbach

Ain’t No Grave

There ain’t no grave that can hold my body down.
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down.

When I hear that trumpet sound I’m gonna rise right outta the ground
aint’ no grave that can hold my body down.

Well look way down the river and what do you think I see?
I see a band of angels and they’re coming after me.

There ain’t no grave that can hold my body down.
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down.

Well look down yonder Gabriel put your feet on the land and sea.
But Gabriel don’t you blow your trumpet ’til you hear from me.

There ain’t no grave that can hold my body down
ain’t no grave can hold my body down.

Well meet me Jesus meet me meet me in the middle of the air
and if these wings don’t fail me, I will meet you anywhere.

There ain’t no grave that can hold my body down.
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down.

Well meet me mother and father meet me down a river road
and mama you know that I’ll be there when I check in my load.

There ain’t no grave that can hold my body down
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down

There ain’t no grave can hold my body down

4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

by Dale Beran

Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him.

An Italian newspaper, reporting on Donald Trump retweeting himself depicted as Pepe the Frog in September of 2016.

1. Born from Something Awful

Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque. Counter intuitively, you had to hit “reply” to read a thread. Moreover, the content was bizarre nonsense.

The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful”, at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.

4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “m00t”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly.

These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. The week before that neo-Nazi Richard Spencer pointed to his 4chan inspired Pepe the Frog pin, about to explain the significance when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) it had fabricated the so called Trump “Kompromat”. And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country.

How did we get here? What is 4chan exactly? And how did a website about anime become the avant garde of the far right? Mixed up with fascist movements, international intrigue, and Trump iconography? How do we interpret it all?

Social Justice Warriors

Terminal Showdown

by Joshua Clover

An airport is a funny thing, one that gives you access to other places but is not much of a place itself. But its underlying character has changed dramatically in the last few decades. If the glamour and hope of flying off for a visit or a new life still cling to the terminals, the airport has become a hub for the workaday circulation of goods at a global level.

This has been peculiarly true since the global downturn of manufacturing in the seventies. In April 1973, Federal Express delivered its first package; four decades later, FedEx has the fourth-largest fleet in existence. By freight it is the biggest airline in the world. At Oakland International, my local airport, the FedEx hangar and logistics hub crouches independent of the two modest passenger terminals, a behemoth with the gravity of a planet. It’s their world; we’re just living in it.

This transformation has happened behind the back of consciousness, and largely beyond our descriptions of the political situation. It would be hard to say it played a role in the protests of Saturday night. The narrative drama of airports — from Tom Hanks vehicle The Terminal to the flight of Edward Snowden — is about those who can’t leave or can’t arrive, and so end up trapped in this metaplace, separated out from life. It is funny or strange or exciting. Except of course behind all of these it is surely terrifying being seized by uniformed thugs, thrown in a room, at the mercy not of fate but arbitrary laws and state power.

Anti-identity

White Purity

Asad Haider     January 6, 2017

Among other things, whiteness is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, whites consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity…[read more]

The Safety Pin and the Swastika

Shuja Haider     January 4, 2017

If you had read in early 2016 about a National Policy Institute conference on the theme of “Identity Politics,” you might have assumed it was an innocent gathering of progressives. If you had attended, you would have been in for an unpleasant surprise. The National Policy Institute is an organization of white nationalists, overseen by neo-Nazi media darling Richard Spencer…[read more]

Trumped

 

Insurgent Notes #14: Nov 2016, Special Post-Election Issue:

Editorial: We’re Tempted to Say We Told You So, But We Won’t

Anyone But by David Ranney

Dispatch From West Virginia by Michael Hough

Some Facts and Figures, and a Bit of Commentary to Go With It by RS

The Heavy Lifting of Class Struggle by S S and Michael Stauch

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Internationalist Perspective:

 This is What Democracy Looks Like

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It’s Not About NAFTA by Aaron Benanav

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Not Us, Me by Jodi Dean

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Why Do White Working-Class People Vote Against Their Interests? They Don’t. by Kirk Noden

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“Global Trumpism” And The Revolt Against The Creditor Class by Mark Blyth

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The Dangers of Anti-Trumpism by Cinzia Arruzza

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Listening to Trump by Christian Parenti

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Not a Revolution – Yet  by Mike Davis

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What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class by Joan C. Williams

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A Trump Boom?  by Michael Roberts

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Fairfax County, USA by Matt Karp

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A Time for Treason by The New Inquiry

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How Trump Took Middle America by Gary Young

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How America Got It So Wrong by Matt Taibbi

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The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt By Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr

Insurgent Notes #13 (Oct 2016)

Insurgent Notes No. 13 presents an array of articles reflecting the rising curve of revolt and political turmoil in the United States and abroad. We begin with our editorial “President Trump?” on the current, fast-evolving situation of the strangest political year in the United States since 1968. We follow with Michael Hough’s historically rich article on the evolution of labor racketeering trials in the United States, culminating in the little-noticed conviction and sentencing of a Philadelphia Ironworkers’ president in 2015. John Garvey’s “Notes on a Future Politics (Part One)” offers a detailed account of the forces, over several decades, which have converged in the Trump phenomenon. Jarrod Shanahan recounts the recent revolt in the commissary at the notorious Riker’s Island prison in New York City this past summer. Following on this, and presenting a larger historical perspective, culminating in the organizing for a nationwide prison strike, Amiri Barksdale traces a history of little-known prison revolts in recent years, as well as those by immigrant detainees. For an international perspective, our Southeast Asian correspondent Art Meen’s “Strike Wave and Worker Victories in Cambodia” offers a concise overview of a militant working class in motion in struggles largely off the radar in the west. For historical perspective, Mitch Abidor writes up his recent interviews with 40-odd veterans, from across the political spectrum, of the May―June general strike in France in 1968, followed by two critical comments. Last but not least, Jason Rhodes discusses Ashwin Desai’s remarkable book Reading for Revolution.

Editorial: President Trump?

Twenty-First Century Trade Union Conspiracy Trial

Michael Hough

Notes on a Future Politics—Part 1

John Garvey

Checking Out

Jarrod Shanahan

Convict and Immigrant Detainee Struggles Converge in Strike Wave

Amiri Barksdale

Strike Wave and Worker Victories in Cambodia

Art Meen

May ’68 Revisited (and Two Replies)

Mitch Abidor

Review: Ashwin Desai, Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island

Jason Rhodes

The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad

by Kathryn Schulz

The crate arrived, via overland express, one spring evening in 1849. Three feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet deep, it had been packed the previous morning in Richmond, Virginia, then carried by horse cart to the local office of the Adams Express Company. From there, it was taken to the railroad depot, loaded onto a train, and, on reaching the Potomac, transferred to a steamer, where, despite its label—this side up with care—it was placed upside down until a tired passenger tipped it over and used it as a seat. After arriving in the nation’s capital, it was loaded onto a wagon, dumped out at the train station, loaded onto a luggage car, sent on to Philadelphia, unloaded onto another wagon, and, finally, delivered to 31 North Fifth Street. The person to whom the box had been shipped, James Miller McKim, was waiting there to receive it. When he opened it, out scrambled a man named Henry Brown: five feet eight inches tall, two hundred pounds, and, as far as anyone knows, the first person in United States history to liberate himself from slavery by, as he later wrote, “getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state.”

McKim, a white abolitionist with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, had by then been working for the Underground Railroad for more than a decade, and he was awed by the courage and drama of Brown’s escape, and of others like it. In an article he wrote some years later, he predicted that future generations of Americans would come to share his emotions:

Now deemed unworthy of the notice of any, save fanatical abolitionists, these acts of sublime heroism, of lofty self-sacrifice, of patient martyrdom, these beautiful Providences, these hair-breadth escapes and terrible dangers, will yet become the themes of the popular literature of this nation, and will excite the admiration, the reverence and the indignation of the generations yet to come.

It did not take long for McKim’s prediction to come true. The Underground Railroad entered our collective imagination in the eighteen-forties, and it has since been a mainstay of both national history and local lore. But in the past decade or so it has surged into “the popular literature of this nation”—and the popular everything else, too. This year alone has seen the publication of two major Railroad novels, including Oprah’s first book-club selection in more than a year, Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” (Doubleday). On TV, the WGN America network aired the first season of “Underground,” which follows the fates of a group of slaves, known as the Macon Seven, who flee a Georgia plantation.