Remember Lenin's 1920 essay, Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder? Nicholas Kozloff describes a similar disorder: What he calls the "authoritarian left" is so convinced that the enemy of my enemy is my friend — the "enemy" being western capitalism — that writers like Alex Cockburn and Robert Dreyfuss find nice things to say about Muammar Gadaffi and Bachar Al-Asad, and even Noam Chomsky refrains from critical analysis of the crazed Bolivarian Hugo Chávez. That means they're having trouble distinguishing "left" from "right."
The authoritarian left goes awry: From the Arab Spring to Latin America - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
2012/03/19
2012/03/09
The pain in Spain
One of my politically astute American friends, journalist and photographer Don Monkerud, has asked how things are going for us in our little town of Carboneras (Andalucía, Spain). I'll share my reply.
Thanks for asking, Don. Yes, things are going well for us personally,
but it's hard not to share the anxiety of our neighbors. Spain has the
highest unemployment in the European Union, and several of our friends
have lost their jobs and others are naturally worried. The right-wing
assault on public services is cutting deep into public health care
(Americans don't even know what that is, but in most of Europe and
especially in Spain standards have been high and people count on it),
public education, research and other frivolities. The new "labor reform"
makes it cheap and easy for employers to dismiss workers with very
little compensation and for them to disregard contracts simply if their
profits have declined over the past 9 months. Only the banks get
backing. The attitude of the EU, the European Central Bank and the
"Merkozy" team, backed by Spain's new president Rajoy, is: We've got to
save the euro, who cares about the Europeans? Regional and municipal
governments in Spain have fallen into such deep debt (income that used
to come from the building boom, in the forms of licenses and taxes,
having disappeared) that in some towns they haven't been able to keep
the lights on. Our little town still has street lights, but there's no
money for acquisition in the public library and there have been, and will be, other cuts.
I've just been reading Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (click link for NYRB article where he summarizes the argument). He explains what has been happening very clearly, though things have got even worse since his death (6 August 2010)— the lands are faring far more poorly. Spain however, as Manuel Fraga (Franco's minister of tourism) liked to say, is "different": out of phase with the general historical pattern. The "neo-conservative" or, as we would say in Europe, "neo-liberal" offensive against the welfare state in the UK, US and other advanced economies coincided with the late beginnings of public services here, under the Socialist Party governments led by Felipe González (1979-1996).
The dismanteling of the state apparatus that protected citizens began furiously, however, when the so-called "Popular Party" under Aznar came to power (1996-2004). And now, after an ambiguous and largely ineffective social democratic return (Zapatero, 2004-2012), with the return of the PP in the context of the huge European economic débâcle, the offensive had been renewed with greater vigor, meeting furious but so far unconcerted opposition. We've got to get our act together! (See Rx above.)
 |
| Dibujo de Manel Fontdevila en Público |
I've just been reading Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (click link for NYRB article where he summarizes the argument). He explains what has been happening very clearly, though things have got even worse since his death (6 August 2010)— the lands are faring far more poorly. Spain however, as Manuel Fraga (Franco's minister of tourism) liked to say, is "different": out of phase with the general historical pattern. The "neo-conservative" or, as we would say in Europe, "neo-liberal" offensive against the welfare state in the UK, US and other advanced economies coincided with the late beginnings of public services here, under the Socialist Party governments led by Felipe González (1979-1996).
The dismanteling of the state apparatus that protected citizens began furiously, however, when the so-called "Popular Party" under Aznar came to power (1996-2004). And now, after an ambiguous and largely ineffective social democratic return (Zapatero, 2004-2012), with the return of the PP in the context of the huge European economic débâcle, the offensive had been renewed with greater vigor, meeting furious but so far unconcerted opposition. We've got to get our act together! (See Rx above.)
2012/03/07
Say something 'Left'!
 |
| Chine Informations |
Lots of people are outraged by one or all of these injustices, and many are taking great risks to confront them. But our actions are dispersed, sometimes mutually conflicting because of lack of commuication or of understanding, and at best have only puny, local effects. The so-called socialist parties have grown too timid and too compromised with the system to oppose it effectively — François Hollande is the only socialist leader with a chance of achieving state power who is even making left noises, but even if he means what he says and even if he wins, the whole political-economic system in which that institution is embedded (not just French vested interests but also the European Union) will make structural changes impossible without massive support from outside the system. As we've seen with Obama, once the great hope (and still the best of the bad alternatives) for the US.
We need some coordinating mechanism, and a widely-shared theory to give direction and define the priority objectives and better ways to mobilize our efforts to work together. We see signs of their emergence, of both organization and theory, but they haven't coalesced yet. And we may not have much time to create such a movement — hardly any at all, if nobody stops Netanyahu. What we need is something comparable to the international communism that gave energy and direction to so many struggles until its spectacular disintegration in 1989 and the years immediately following.
I don't mean to idealize international communism, or to minimize the cruel ways in which its tradition and doctrine were often used — gulags, famine, massacres of supposed class enemies, mortal struggles among Stalinists, Trotskyists and other self-proclaimed communists, invasions of allies such as Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), China's "cultural revolution" and the other well-documented horrors. But it would be seriously self-defeating, and we would be missing an enormously instructive opportunity, if we did not study that movement to learn not only of its errors (and its horrors, which were not the same thing) but also how and why it achieved its enormous successes. For example, the great burst of activity and productivity in the first decades of the USSR, transforming the backward, semifeudal Russian Empire into a scientific, educational, artistic and industrial powerhouse, or the mobilizing of international brigades to fight fascism in Spain, the critical support for needed revolutions in Cuba, Vietnam and other places, and many less dramatic local efforts that widened freedom at least for a time. Those revolutions haven't always turned out as happily as we had expected, and that too we need to understand, but for a time they were all inspiring and gave hope and purpose to millions of lives and they did accomplish good and important things for the people — even when, as for example in Nicaragua under Ortega and his wife, or Guinée-Conakry after Sékou Touré's early heroic years, or Algeria after independence, much of the good work was destroyed by later and narrower ambitions.
So why have I thought it important to tell you all this? I guess it's just my way of explaining, to you and to myself, why we need to examine the history of such a powerful, worldwide movement, including the deeper, structural causes of its embarrassingly sudden collapse, which has left leftists confused and disorganized or even ashamed of themselves when we need all their energy. Given where I am (geographically, socially, temporally), such an examination may be the best way I can contribute to rebuilding our movement.
2012/02/29
Grantham wonders if Marx was right after all - Al Lewis - MarketWatch
Grantham wonders if Marx was right after all - Al Lewis - MarketWatch
Thanks to Dirk Van Nouhuys for flagging this article.
Thanks to Dirk Van Nouhuys for flagging this article.
2012/02/27
What is art? And what's it for?
 |
| At least 3 different artists on display here |
A young chap named Laurence was particularly persistent in asking himself, and me, the purpose of art, as we walked through Brick Lane and other alleys and streets of what continues to be London's most diverse and colorful low-rent district, the notorious East End, now partly gentrified but still offering innumerable spaces — walls, doorways, cornices, lintels and window ledges — for constantly surprising and ever changing drawings, paintings and sculptures of the most heterogeneous materials. What was the purpose of the art we were looking at, and what could or should be the purpose of the novel that he was writing? As I said to him, "art" doesn't have to have a purpose, and in fact can't have one, but that every artist must. "Purpose" implies intention, which can be formulated only by self-conscious beings. Or another way of saying this would be, art has as many purposes as the artists who are creating it.
It was obvious that the makers of the circles of stone at Stonehenge, the weavers and painters and builders of the intricate objects and structures that have become part of the Hajj, a writer like Charles Dickens (is there any writer like Charles Dickens?), and contemporary street artists all have or had particular and dissimilar intentions. And except for the street artists and maybe Dickens, most of them seem to have been unconcerned about the esthetic function of their work. The builders of Stonehenge and the craftsmen and craftswomen of the Hajj were/are expressing devotion; their works are merely the material manifestations of prayer. They look like "art" to those of us who view them from outside the devotional ecstasy. Dickens' intentions were mainly to entertain and to sell. The esthetic function was certainly important, but mainly for those purposes — better to sell his booklets. If he ever described his stories as "art" it must have been in the sense of skill, comparable to the craftsmanship of a bootmaker or any other artisan.
This discovery of intention is what makes the experience recounted in "The Pitmen Painters" so lively and provocative. The barely educated "pitmen" (coal miners) who gathered for classes in Ashington, Northumberland (U.K.) from 1934 to 1984 discovered "art" and their own intentionality through their own practice. Or, as the better-read Marxists among them would have said, praxis. Check out their story here, The Ashington Group. And then look at some samples (regrettably, in too-tiny images) of the Ashington Group's pictures.
The question Laurence or I, or you or any other artist must ask, is what is my purpose? And we won't really know until we do it.
2012/02/22
Zipping into the dismal future
The Time Machine by H.G. WellsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
In his London bachelor quarters, a well-to-do amateur inventor and mechanics enthusiast astounds his friends with a tiny working model of what he describes as a time machine, which when a little lever is adjusted slightly, vanishes — into the future, according to the host. A week later, some of these same friends and others return for a second dinner, but when the host returns late, he looks haggard and his clothes are torn. He has, he tells them, journeyed on his machine (the full-sized model, like a stationary bicycle with special levers) far into the future — to 802,701 AD — when London no longer exists but in its place are strange ruins inhabited by a gentle, listless, indolent race of little people called the Eloi, who do no work and seem to make no special effort at all but are well-clothed and fed. He eventually discovers that underground lives another race of much more enterprising and savage little people, the Morlocks, who presumably manufacture the clothing and other necessities of the Eloi and ghost-like emerge at night to snatch some of them to carry back underground and cook and eat them. Such is the distant future of the division of London's social classes, the ever more indolent and incapable aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, and the ever more savage laboring poor on whom they come to depend. This is not the first time-travel fantasy (see Wikipedia Time Travel in Fiction) nor even the first to claim a mechanical conveyance, but is the one that has inspired more imitators. The characters are exceedingly simple, the dialogue is completely monotone and the physical descriptions are also very simple, but the one thing this little book has going for it is its stimulating concept, time travel.
View all my reviews
2012/02/20
2012/02/09
Thinking about fiction
This is Not a Novel by David MarksonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
An entertaining and provocative experiment in writing "A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever.... / And with no characters. None. ... / Plotless. Characterless. / Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless." Oddly, it works. If not a novel, it is perhaps an epic poem, if Writer says it is, or, most accurately, as he suggests on one of the last pages, "a kind of verbal fugue." The paragraphs, some no more than two words and none more than five lines, are like (or simply are) stanzas, most containing odd facts about writers and other creative people ("Frans Hals was once arrested for beating his wife.") A recurrent theme is the manners of death of these people, further emphasized by this repeated statement:- "Timor mortis conturbat me. / The fear of death distresses me." Another is the ironies of anti-Semitism: "What the world would know of the Holocaust if the Germans had won" is one entire stanza. (The answer? Not much, I suppose.) The overriding theme is the writer's right to create whatever he pleases and call it whatever he wants. "Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta / Che cosa faccio? Scrivo." It's an inspiring note for any writer, or at least for this one (me) 021215.
(I read this book almost ten years ago, but now the latest novel of Enrique Vila-Matas made me think of it again. There is an English translation of the Vila-Matas novel, Dublinesque. Look for it.)
View all my reviews
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)