Saturday, September 30, 2006
Musical Interlude – This Week I’m Listening To…
1. M.I.A. – Arular - Yeah, I’m a fan now - another guy just dreaming about Maya (and probably somewhat of an old fart in that crowd)… And I hear she’s turned out to be an interesting role model for some of the girls, too. Well, that makes some sense. I hope the state department of this "free country" lets her back into the U.S. soon. Can we do anything about that? [10/20: Update: No need for us to do anything about that anymore... According to a Brooklyn Vegan post from 9/5 (wish I'd seen it sooner)... As of late August and early September, M.I.A. was back in the U.S. and doing surprise performances at free shows and parties in Brooklyn.]
2. Thievery Corporation – The Mirror Conspiracy - Always good, chill hybrid kind of stuff. I actually prefer a few songs of theirs that I've heard on some comps here and there, but I like this album, too.
3. Terra Musica - Global Explorer II - Another of those really nice comps from the turn of the Millennium... It has Transglobal, Loop Guru, my usual favorites... But another favorite thing on here, surprisingly, is "La La La" by Tranquility Bass, mixed by Fatboy Slim. I never went head-over-heels for either of these outfits separately, but together, they worked out at least one very good, and surprisingly hard-rocking, rave hippie fusion kind of thing. Another song here that definitely grabs me is "Maine" by Sidestepper. I don’t know who these people are, but this is the only song on the album with a South American flavor, and it sent me dancing all over the bedroom. (On second listen, it's really coming out of ska music, through a jungle filter. I almost forgot about ska music!) And there are many other good things here, in addition to the groups I’ve grown to know and love...
4. The KLF - The White Room – Well, now we’re really digging into history; this album must be about 15 years old. But I rediscovered it when I found the cassette at a South Bronx Salvation Army thrift store for 50 cents. And these guys made some very appealing rave, rap, dub and dance kind of music ("acid house," as they used to say), in addition to being known as anarcho art mavericks of some kind. (It seems that they were very bold about thumbing their noses at copyright laws - a less experimental Negativland?) Now I'm pondering whatever happened to them... I know they staged a dramatic exit, shooting a machine gun full of blanks above the audience of some hokey awards show (shades of Sid Vicious there?)... I think one – the one who most people recognize as The KLF - did some solo stuff and a few cameo appearances with other groups, and his partner in the conspiracy became part of The Orb...
5. Reggaeton and Dancehall that I’m hearing in the neighborhood and on the radio… I guess M.I.A. helped to revive my interest in this, in addition to the fact that I am hearing a lot of it in the hood. I used to like dancehall a lot sometime ago; I was once kind of a fan of Lt. Stitchie (well, for the music, if not the image, etc.), but these days, I don’t know what to look for, where to start. A couple of weeks ago, I saw some young Latino guys on a stoop on 136th Street playing a lot of very cool music (I thought at first it was dancehall, but I realized that it was really just very dancehall-leaning reggaeton), and I looked at them, but they looked back at me in a way that I at least interpreted as being not so friendly, so I decided not to ask them about it. But I'll welcome suggestions from anyone...
---------------
P.S. [10/2]: Speaking of suggestions, when I was browsing through a used bin at Other Music Sunday evening, I couldn't help grabbing a copy of the Burial CD...because it had been planted in my mind by Robert of Loveecstacycrime, referring to an interview in Fact Magazine. Both said posts, by the way, were really in reference to the Hyperdub label producer, Kode9, who has his own project coming out right now (due date in the U.S. stores this month - according to a guy on WFMU who played something from it on his show last week). But these posts also planted Burial in my mind. And my impression... Well, pretty minimal, dark; it probably would seem fairly "experimental" to many ears... I, myself, am not completely familiar with all the recent history behind this, the transformation in the UK scenes from jungle to garage to two connected, but recently bifurcated, genres, grime (a British IDM-influenced kind of hip-hop, with emphasis on MC'ing - big M.I.A. influence) and dubstep (which I believe is sort of like stripped down, bleaked up, less vocal-oriented trip-hop - notice how I must take all my references from way back in the '90s, because I am an old curmudgeon)... However, as must be apparent, it's not a completely alien-sounding music to me, either, not far from other things that I've liked before.
The interview, on the other hand, starts in a good place (and it's nice that he refers to old science fiction by J.G. Ballard), but it gets a little annoying when the guy starts talking about his studies as a "sonic theorist" (which was mainly the interviewer's fault for asking about that in the first place). This Kode9 uses a whole bunch of obscure, academic-sounding terminology - a bit too much bongo with the lingo. Why is someone like Brian Eno so much easier to understand? Oh, well. Nonetheless, these sounds are worth some attention, I think.
2. Thievery Corporation – The Mirror Conspiracy - Always good, chill hybrid kind of stuff. I actually prefer a few songs of theirs that I've heard on some comps here and there, but I like this album, too.
3. Terra Musica - Global Explorer II - Another of those really nice comps from the turn of the Millennium... It has Transglobal, Loop Guru, my usual favorites... But another favorite thing on here, surprisingly, is "La La La" by Tranquility Bass, mixed by Fatboy Slim. I never went head-over-heels for either of these outfits separately, but together, they worked out at least one very good, and surprisingly hard-rocking, rave hippie fusion kind of thing. Another song here that definitely grabs me is "Maine" by Sidestepper. I don’t know who these people are, but this is the only song on the album with a South American flavor, and it sent me dancing all over the bedroom. (On second listen, it's really coming out of ska music, through a jungle filter. I almost forgot about ska music!) And there are many other good things here, in addition to the groups I’ve grown to know and love...
4. The KLF - The White Room – Well, now we’re really digging into history; this album must be about 15 years old. But I rediscovered it when I found the cassette at a South Bronx Salvation Army thrift store for 50 cents. And these guys made some very appealing rave, rap, dub and dance kind of music ("acid house," as they used to say), in addition to being known as anarcho art mavericks of some kind. (It seems that they were very bold about thumbing their noses at copyright laws - a less experimental Negativland?) Now I'm pondering whatever happened to them... I know they staged a dramatic exit, shooting a machine gun full of blanks above the audience of some hokey awards show (shades of Sid Vicious there?)... I think one – the one who most people recognize as The KLF - did some solo stuff and a few cameo appearances with other groups, and his partner in the conspiracy became part of The Orb...
5. Reggaeton and Dancehall that I’m hearing in the neighborhood and on the radio… I guess M.I.A. helped to revive my interest in this, in addition to the fact that I am hearing a lot of it in the hood. I used to like dancehall a lot sometime ago; I was once kind of a fan of Lt. Stitchie (well, for the music, if not the image, etc.), but these days, I don’t know what to look for, where to start. A couple of weeks ago, I saw some young Latino guys on a stoop on 136th Street playing a lot of very cool music (I thought at first it was dancehall, but I realized that it was really just very dancehall-leaning reggaeton), and I looked at them, but they looked back at me in a way that I at least interpreted as being not so friendly, so I decided not to ask them about it. But I'll welcome suggestions from anyone...
---------------
P.S. [10/2]: Speaking of suggestions, when I was browsing through a used bin at Other Music Sunday evening, I couldn't help grabbing a copy of the Burial CD...because it had been planted in my mind by Robert of Loveecstacycrime, referring to an interview in Fact Magazine. Both said posts, by the way, were really in reference to the Hyperdub label producer, Kode9, who has his own project coming out right now (due date in the U.S. stores this month - according to a guy on WFMU who played something from it on his show last week). But these posts also planted Burial in my mind. And my impression... Well, pretty minimal, dark; it probably would seem fairly "experimental" to many ears... I, myself, am not completely familiar with all the recent history behind this, the transformation in the UK scenes from jungle to garage to two connected, but recently bifurcated, genres, grime (a British IDM-influenced kind of hip-hop, with emphasis on MC'ing - big M.I.A. influence) and dubstep (which I believe is sort of like stripped down, bleaked up, less vocal-oriented trip-hop - notice how I must take all my references from way back in the '90s, because I am an old curmudgeon)... However, as must be apparent, it's not a completely alien-sounding music to me, either, not far from other things that I've liked before.
The interview, on the other hand, starts in a good place (and it's nice that he refers to old science fiction by J.G. Ballard), but it gets a little annoying when the guy starts talking about his studies as a "sonic theorist" (which was mainly the interviewer's fault for asking about that in the first place). This Kode9 uses a whole bunch of obscure, academic-sounding terminology - a bit too much bongo with the lingo. Why is someone like Brian Eno so much easier to understand? Oh, well. Nonetheless, these sounds are worth some attention, I think.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
U.S. Healthcare – One Good Argument for a Capitalectomy
There are many fronts on which we are being beaten severely by acts of class war waged by the corporate class. But among all of them, the atrocious situation in American healthcare seems to be closest to an all-out class massacre. I can say this from personal experience, as I’ve discussed many times. But it’s not hard to find reports showing the American system to be outrageously unfair and outrageously bad.
For instance, those subversive, left-wing news services called Yahoo News and Business Week Online posted an article a couple of days ago entitled U.S. Health-Care System Gets a "D." As mentioned in this article:
The U.S. health-care system is doing poorly by virtually every measure. That's the conclusion of a national report card on the U.S. health-care system, released Sept. 20. Although there are pockets of excellence, the report, commissioned by the non-profit and non-partisan Commonwealth Fund, gave the U.S. system low grades on outcomes, quality of care, access to care, and efficiency, compared to other industrialized nations or generally accepted standards of care. Bottom line: U.S. health care barely passes with an overall grade of 66 out of 100.
The poor grade is particularly discomfiting, the researchers note, because the U.S. spends more on medicine, by far, than any other country. Approximately 16% of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) is devoted to health care, compared with 10% or less in other industrialized nations....
The U.S. ranks at the bottom among industrialized countries for life expectancy both at birth and at age 60. It is also last on infant mortality, with 7 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 2.7 in the top three countries....
And, most significantly for some of us:
On multiple measures across quality of care and access to care, there is a wide gap between low income and the uninsured, and those with higher incomes and insurance. On average, measures for low income and uninsured people in these areas would have to improve by one-third to close the gap.
Over in CounterPunch (which we can seriously call a left-wing journal - and a very good one at that), Seth Sandronsky points out that The Lower Your Pay, the Less Coverage You Have. More specifically...
The cost of U.S. health care has climbed 43 percent over the past nine years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This price increase is close to double the over-all inflation rate of 26 percent in the same nine years.
We are looking at an inflationary trend that negatively affects the living standards of the nation's working people. And the lower U.S. workers' hourly wages, the more negative the impact, as they are less likely to have employer-provided health care to begin with.
Sandronsky goes on later in the article to discuss recent events in California, where the state legilsature actually passed a single-payer plan "to provide all Californians with high-quality, comprehensive health care." And, of course, it was killed by The Terminator. However, unlike in most parts of the U.S. some people in California at least attempted to fight back:
The day of the Schwarzenegger veto thousands of public-sector workers in Sacramento County went on strike in the biggest such labor action in decades. The main reason they walked out of work was to protest county management's push to shift more health-care costs on them.
The county workers' fear of health-care inflation was well-founded. That these striking workers eventually went back to work and traded wage increases to bear more of the cost for health care is in no way the end of this local story with national relevancy.
Sandronsky closes the article with a prediction of a far more extended class struggle, waged on a national basis, for years to come:
The commonality of U.S. workers coping with the crisis of the health-care market is growing. Whether in or out of labor unions, a mass of wage-earners across the nation can not help but see more clearly with each passing day their actual place in the health-care system that corporate America (for-profit hospitals and health maintenance organizations, and drug companies) owns and controls.
A U.S. health-care system that is broken as far as hourly workers are concerned functions perversely well for a relatively few companies who profit from this set-up.
Such understanding occurs in small steps among the working majority who will in the end have to mobilize on the basis of their class positions to win universal health care from ruling circles of economic and political power.
The upper class forces trying to prevent that outcome are weak in number and strong in resources. In 2006, this situation harkens back to past times in U.S. history that have spawned a working-class politics to better people's living standards.
Personally, I would like to believe these predictions. However, the public response to the healthcare crisis in the U.S. has been incredibly weak and slow. As I've always said, if there is one issue that should outrage the people enough to bring them out into the streets, this is it. But the people within the borders of the United States remain especially, unbelievably passive when it comes to standing up for themselves regarding issues that affect them personally and directly, in their own "backyards" and in their everyday lives. For that passivity to change, there’s going to have to be a big, big change in the social climate. Of course, the ground can shift; it probably has to at some point; there is certainly enough resentment building even if people don't know what to do with it yet. But I don’t think it's going to shift specifically over healthcare, certainly not at first, even if it should.
I wouldn’t say that it's completely impossible for us to gain a better healthcare system, even a single-payer one of sorts. But it's going to happen much too slowly, unless there's a major change in public effort (i.e., all the public outrage, the strikes, disruptions, etc., that seem to be missing here). And how many people will die unnecessarily before things change? I guess that’s a question we can ask about a lot of issues.
As for the more general idea of a "working class politics to better people’s living standards"... I think we need much bigger "politics" that than that to do such a thing on a lasting basis. Even to achieve temporary changes, "better people's living standards" sounds like a fairly weak goal to declare. All these countries in Europe probably would never even have achieved universal healthcare if there weren't big movements aiming much higher than that. (Call it what you want to - use the "s" word, or the "c" word...) And in my opinion, we need such bigger "politics" now more than ever before - only with an eye to the present, because prior moments in history cannot be repeated exactly the same way, nor should they be, with all the prior mistakes.
------
P.S. It is all too tempting to add a few clever words connecting back to the issue of healthcare...
I'm thinking of a line from Marxman, "The system is sick, so here come the surgeons!" (or something like that). Though they were probably repeating an idea they'd heard many times before. There is the notion that I have seen repeated many times that capitalism itself is a cancer - and thus, like a cancer, it needs to be surgically removed. Maybe we will never achieve good universal healthcare without a complete capitalectomy.
For instance, those subversive, left-wing news services called Yahoo News and Business Week Online posted an article a couple of days ago entitled U.S. Health-Care System Gets a "D." As mentioned in this article:
The U.S. health-care system is doing poorly by virtually every measure. That's the conclusion of a national report card on the U.S. health-care system, released Sept. 20. Although there are pockets of excellence, the report, commissioned by the non-profit and non-partisan Commonwealth Fund, gave the U.S. system low grades on outcomes, quality of care, access to care, and efficiency, compared to other industrialized nations or generally accepted standards of care. Bottom line: U.S. health care barely passes with an overall grade of 66 out of 100.
The poor grade is particularly discomfiting, the researchers note, because the U.S. spends more on medicine, by far, than any other country. Approximately 16% of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) is devoted to health care, compared with 10% or less in other industrialized nations....
The U.S. ranks at the bottom among industrialized countries for life expectancy both at birth and at age 60. It is also last on infant mortality, with 7 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 2.7 in the top three countries....
And, most significantly for some of us:
On multiple measures across quality of care and access to care, there is a wide gap between low income and the uninsured, and those with higher incomes and insurance. On average, measures for low income and uninsured people in these areas would have to improve by one-third to close the gap.
Over in CounterPunch (which we can seriously call a left-wing journal - and a very good one at that), Seth Sandronsky points out that The Lower Your Pay, the Less Coverage You Have. More specifically...
The cost of U.S. health care has climbed 43 percent over the past nine years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This price increase is close to double the over-all inflation rate of 26 percent in the same nine years.
We are looking at an inflationary trend that negatively affects the living standards of the nation's working people. And the lower U.S. workers' hourly wages, the more negative the impact, as they are less likely to have employer-provided health care to begin with.
Sandronsky goes on later in the article to discuss recent events in California, where the state legilsature actually passed a single-payer plan "to provide all Californians with high-quality, comprehensive health care." And, of course, it was killed by The Terminator. However, unlike in most parts of the U.S. some people in California at least attempted to fight back:
The day of the Schwarzenegger veto thousands of public-sector workers in Sacramento County went on strike in the biggest such labor action in decades. The main reason they walked out of work was to protest county management's push to shift more health-care costs on them.
The county workers' fear of health-care inflation was well-founded. That these striking workers eventually went back to work and traded wage increases to bear more of the cost for health care is in no way the end of this local story with national relevancy.
Sandronsky closes the article with a prediction of a far more extended class struggle, waged on a national basis, for years to come:
The commonality of U.S. workers coping with the crisis of the health-care market is growing. Whether in or out of labor unions, a mass of wage-earners across the nation can not help but see more clearly with each passing day their actual place in the health-care system that corporate America (for-profit hospitals and health maintenance organizations, and drug companies) owns and controls.
A U.S. health-care system that is broken as far as hourly workers are concerned functions perversely well for a relatively few companies who profit from this set-up.
Such understanding occurs in small steps among the working majority who will in the end have to mobilize on the basis of their class positions to win universal health care from ruling circles of economic and political power.
The upper class forces trying to prevent that outcome are weak in number and strong in resources. In 2006, this situation harkens back to past times in U.S. history that have spawned a working-class politics to better people's living standards.
Personally, I would like to believe these predictions. However, the public response to the healthcare crisis in the U.S. has been incredibly weak and slow. As I've always said, if there is one issue that should outrage the people enough to bring them out into the streets, this is it. But the people within the borders of the United States remain especially, unbelievably passive when it comes to standing up for themselves regarding issues that affect them personally and directly, in their own "backyards" and in their everyday lives. For that passivity to change, there’s going to have to be a big, big change in the social climate. Of course, the ground can shift; it probably has to at some point; there is certainly enough resentment building even if people don't know what to do with it yet. But I don’t think it's going to shift specifically over healthcare, certainly not at first, even if it should.
I wouldn’t say that it's completely impossible for us to gain a better healthcare system, even a single-payer one of sorts. But it's going to happen much too slowly, unless there's a major change in public effort (i.e., all the public outrage, the strikes, disruptions, etc., that seem to be missing here). And how many people will die unnecessarily before things change? I guess that’s a question we can ask about a lot of issues.
As for the more general idea of a "working class politics to better people’s living standards"... I think we need much bigger "politics" that than that to do such a thing on a lasting basis. Even to achieve temporary changes, "better people's living standards" sounds like a fairly weak goal to declare. All these countries in Europe probably would never even have achieved universal healthcare if there weren't big movements aiming much higher than that. (Call it what you want to - use the "s" word, or the "c" word...) And in my opinion, we need such bigger "politics" now more than ever before - only with an eye to the present, because prior moments in history cannot be repeated exactly the same way, nor should they be, with all the prior mistakes.
------
P.S. It is all too tempting to add a few clever words connecting back to the issue of healthcare...
I'm thinking of a line from Marxman, "The system is sick, so here come the surgeons!" (or something like that). Though they were probably repeating an idea they'd heard many times before. There is the notion that I have seen repeated many times that capitalism itself is a cancer - and thus, like a cancer, it needs to be surgically removed. Maybe we will never achieve good universal healthcare without a complete capitalectomy.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Look on The Right Side (for more from the ultra-left, etc.)
Just one of those very occasional notes that I type to remind people to check out the links and blog lists of this blog for the latest additions and changes. I've decided to concentrate on making some changes here because I haven't had much energy to write a good regular post the past few days, due mainly to being dragged down by extra wage work this week (trying to catch up a little after so little work the few weeks before) combined with the usual struggles with my rotting teeth (and it will take a lot more wage work before I can really deal with those problems, that's for certain).
I have moved a few of the newer blogs on my list up to the top, in case people weren't noticing that they'd been added (because they're all definitely worth looking at, I think). And I've made some changes in the format which should correct a problem that was still appearing on some browsers, especially in Firefox.
I checked out Firefox a bunch a couple of weeks ago, when I had the chance to work with asfo_del's computer while she and Mike were out of town (while I also sat for my displaced cat - long story, should be familiar to people who've been reading this for a while). And, I have to say, I don't see Firefox as being any better, at least from the viewing perspective. Though people are probably right when they say it's safer and that it's better not to support you-know-what corporation with your browser all the time. So, for those reasons, I guess I'll download it one of these days, when I finally manage to get a newer computer, one that can add some up-to-date programs without greatly risking a crash. But I suspect it's a bit overrated, from what I've seen.
However, I didn't start writing this (quasi)-post to contribute another boring opinion about Firefox vs. Explorer to the endless supply of such opinions already available in the Blogosphere. As the saying goes, I digress... I just wanted to let people know that they should actually find some new things here, if they look on the right side.
I have moved a few of the newer blogs on my list up to the top, in case people weren't noticing that they'd been added (because they're all definitely worth looking at, I think). And I've made some changes in the format which should correct a problem that was still appearing on some browsers, especially in Firefox.
I checked out Firefox a bunch a couple of weeks ago, when I had the chance to work with asfo_del's computer while she and Mike were out of town (while I also sat for my displaced cat - long story, should be familiar to people who've been reading this for a while). And, I have to say, I don't see Firefox as being any better, at least from the viewing perspective. Though people are probably right when they say it's safer and that it's better not to support you-know-what corporation with your browser all the time. So, for those reasons, I guess I'll download it one of these days, when I finally manage to get a newer computer, one that can add some up-to-date programs without greatly risking a crash. But I suspect it's a bit overrated, from what I've seen.
However, I didn't start writing this (quasi)-post to contribute another boring opinion about Firefox vs. Explorer to the endless supply of such opinions already available in the Blogosphere. As the saying goes, I digress... I just wanted to let people know that they should actually find some new things here, if they look on the right side.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Kissinger and Huntington vs. Hardt and Negri on the "War of Civilizations"
Well, actually, it's a direct debate only in my mind because of a weird coincidence (which I'll get to in a minute), but it's amusing all the same...
Tonight, I stumbled upon an article at Yahoo News (AFP) about Henry Kissinger's comments regarding a "war of civilizations." As the first couple of paragraphs tell us:
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger warned that Europe and the United States must unite to head off a "war of civilizations" arising from a nuclear-armed Middle East.
In an opinion column in the Washington Post, the renowned foreign policy expert [otherwise known as the old infamous war criminal - RS] said the potential for a "global catastrophe" dwarfed lingering transatlantic mistrust left over from the Iraq war.
"A common Atlantic policy backed by moderate Arab states must become a top priority, no matter how pessimistic previous experience with such projects leaves one," Kissinger wrote.
"The debate sparked by the Iraq war over American rashness vs. European escapism is dwarfed by what the world now faces.
"Both sides of the Atlantic should put their best minds together on how to deal with the common danger of a wider war merging into a war of civilizations against the background of a nuclear-armed Middle East."
Now, by some very strange coincidence, right before I stumbled upon this article, I had been reading Hardt and Negri's Multitude and left off just after their discussion of the "clash of civilizations" that had been described by Samuel Huntington (someone else who apparently was "renowned" in political circles, from his earlier days in the Trilateral Commission, etc.):
...The old mole of reactionary thought resurfaces again. It is very unclear what these bizarre historical identities called civilizations might be, but in Huntington's conception they are largely defined, it turns out, along racial and religious lines. The generic character of civilizations as criteria of classification makes it all the easier to subordinate "science" to political tactics and use them to redraw the geopolitical map. The "secret adviser" of the sovereign here draws on an old reactionary hypothesis that casts political groupings as fusional communities (Gemeinschaften) and locates the power (Machtrealitaten) within spritual entities. He has conjured up the phantasm of these civilizations to find in them a grand schema that rearranges the friend-enemy division that is basic to politics. Those who belong to our civlization are our friends; other civilizations are our enemies. Gather round and hear the good news: war has become a clash of civilizations! Spinoza aptly called this conjuring up of enemies and fears superstition, and such superstition, he knew well, will always lead to the ultimate barbarity of perpetual war and destruction.
And, I think, we can leave it at that...
-----------------------
P.S. I'm finding Multitude to be much more enjoyable so far than trying to slog through Empire. I know I'm not the only one who's said that. Who knows, maybe I might even get to like these guys. Certainly, there had been other things by Negri that had intrigued me previously, but that was long before their greatest hit...
Tonight, I stumbled upon an article at Yahoo News (AFP) about Henry Kissinger's comments regarding a "war of civilizations." As the first couple of paragraphs tell us:
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger warned that Europe and the United States must unite to head off a "war of civilizations" arising from a nuclear-armed Middle East.
In an opinion column in the Washington Post, the renowned foreign policy expert [otherwise known as the old infamous war criminal - RS] said the potential for a "global catastrophe" dwarfed lingering transatlantic mistrust left over from the Iraq war.
"A common Atlantic policy backed by moderate Arab states must become a top priority, no matter how pessimistic previous experience with such projects leaves one," Kissinger wrote.
"The debate sparked by the Iraq war over American rashness vs. European escapism is dwarfed by what the world now faces.
"Both sides of the Atlantic should put their best minds together on how to deal with the common danger of a wider war merging into a war of civilizations against the background of a nuclear-armed Middle East."
Now, by some very strange coincidence, right before I stumbled upon this article, I had been reading Hardt and Negri's Multitude and left off just after their discussion of the "clash of civilizations" that had been described by Samuel Huntington (someone else who apparently was "renowned" in political circles, from his earlier days in the Trilateral Commission, etc.):
...The old mole of reactionary thought resurfaces again. It is very unclear what these bizarre historical identities called civilizations might be, but in Huntington's conception they are largely defined, it turns out, along racial and religious lines. The generic character of civilizations as criteria of classification makes it all the easier to subordinate "science" to political tactics and use them to redraw the geopolitical map. The "secret adviser" of the sovereign here draws on an old reactionary hypothesis that casts political groupings as fusional communities (Gemeinschaften) and locates the power (Machtrealitaten) within spritual entities. He has conjured up the phantasm of these civilizations to find in them a grand schema that rearranges the friend-enemy division that is basic to politics. Those who belong to our civlization are our friends; other civilizations are our enemies. Gather round and hear the good news: war has become a clash of civilizations! Spinoza aptly called this conjuring up of enemies and fears superstition, and such superstition, he knew well, will always lead to the ultimate barbarity of perpetual war and destruction.
And, I think, we can leave it at that...
-----------------------
P.S. I'm finding Multitude to be much more enjoyable so far than trying to slog through Empire. I know I'm not the only one who's said that. Who knows, maybe I might even get to like these guys. Certainly, there had been other things by Negri that had intrigued me previously, but that was long before their greatest hit...
Friday, September 08, 2006
Another Funny Look at the Self-Delusion of Hipsters - At the Point of Production
I may have hipper tastes than most people my age (something which I just can't seem to help), but for a long time I've had a hard time understanding so many people who seem to be regarded as the real hipsters of the current era. For instance, I have often found it hard to understand how so many of these people who pride themselves in somehow opposing(?) the corporate-capitalist establishment so often seem to have absorbed bourgeois-capitalist values and attitudes more deeply than anyone else, and often seem to be supporting the system more than anyone else.
Probably for these reasons, I got a very good chuckle out of a review in Monthly Review written by Forrest Perry, discussing a new book Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, written by Richard Lloyd (probably not to be confused with the Richard Lloyd who co-founded the hip band of yesteryear called Television, though it is a nice coincidence of names). As Perry convincingly points out, this book about the contradictions of hipness is different from the sort of work produced by Thomas Frank/The Baffler, because it deals with hipsters at the point of production rather than consumption. In other words, it doesn't deal with the way that hipsters help to further capitalist enterprise by seeking their identity through the purchase of hip commodities. Instead, it deals with the ways that hipsters support capitalism through their work lives; i.e., the jobs that they take, the attitudes that they take toward their work, and the denial or ignorance that they exhibit sometimes while thinking that they are so much cooler than all the business types or worker drones.
Sometimes, as with the behavior exposed by Thomas Frank for the past couple of decades, the hipsters whom Lloyd writes about simply don't realize that the way of life they take pride in opposing has for the most part fallen by the wayside and the existence that they supposedly choose to pursue perfectly satisfies the demands of the present capitalist establishment. So, for instance:
Many of the people Lloyd interviews fail to see that the life of risk and instability they take themselves to have freely chosen is a life they (and most Americans) are more or less forced to choose. As Lloyd explains, with several decades of deindustrialization and the decline of Fordism has come the dominance of a new, "flexible" mode of capitalist accumulation, which generates insecure jobs in the very sectors Wicker Park’s artist types find employment. The artists in Wicker Park are like their bohemian predecessors in "insist[ing] upon their opposition to an imagined mainstream," but they rely on an "imago of the mainstream [that] is anachronistic, as the old promises of career and social security under the terms of the Fordist corporation and the welfare state have increasingly evaporated."
Although, having encountered so many temps for so many years (even during the long stretches when I, myself, was a full-time worker), I might add that the line between supposedly choosing such a lifestyle and having to live it can be a mirage. These days, there are more proofreading temps whom I meet who actually do openly understand that they are doing what they're doing out of necessity because of the limited opportunities they have. However, during the late '80s and '90s, I encountered many more people who seemed to be using their artistic "calling" as an excuse not to adimt that they had ended up in a place where they didn't really want to be. Too often, I would encounter people who'd make a big noise about being an artist or a writer or an actor to convince everyone that this temp work wasn't what they "really did." (It was one of the things, I think, that caused me, as a reaction, to stop telling anyone that I was "a writer," before I found so many other reasons why I just didn't want to label myself that way anymore.)
However, these sorts of vanities are fairly excusable and not really worthy of ridicule. When human beings are subject to ludicrous social pressure to define themselves according to the means by which the earn their wages (yet are for some reason unable to break away from this conditioning), it's understandable for those who've gotten stuck doing work that they would consider lame to support their egos with some artistic crutch.
But as Perry tells the story, based on Lloyd's book, the hipsters can get much more ridiculous in other ways. For instance, I found the following passage to be a hoot:
Most of Lloyd’s interviewees take themselves to be anticorporate, but when one’s business depends on the patronage of at least some "big corporations," exceptions must be made. Thus although MTV (more specifically, its program "The Real World") and Starbucks were greeted with hostility when they set up shop in Wicker Park, the director of one design boutique, when asked whether he would work on advertisements for Nike, acknowledged that "there’s controversy about the company" (because of its sweatshops) but nevertheless said he would willingly do work for them, his reason being that Nike is the kind of client that "allows you to express your own artistic vision within the context of their brand." He welcomes the prospect of doing creative work but does not single out as problematic the fact that his artistic vision must not break through the confines of what is good for Nike’s brand identity. His company could not, for instance, create a commercial consisting of documentary-style footage of garment workers in "free trade zones" being disciplined - perhaps to the ultra-hip musical accompaniment of Japanese death metal - with bamboo rods bearing the imprint of the Nike swoosh. That would most certainly be "cutting-edge" material, but it would also, no doubt, threaten to cut too much into Nike’s profits, thus resulting in the loss of a lucrative client. And not just any client. As the director of the boutique claims, Nike isn’t like other corporations - it’s "fun" and "flexible." Implicit in such a statement is the neo-bohemian belief that most corporations are still run by the 1950s Organization Man. As Lloyd puts it, "The traditions of dead generations are what make it possible to understand oneself as resisting the stultification and injustice of corporate capitalism while working twelve-hour days making...ads for Nike."
And that is the passage that led me to wonder whether most hipsters of today are simply idiots.
I'm assuming that the passage about sweatshop workers in the video being beaten to the soundtrack of Japanese death metal was Lloyd's idea, accurately conveyed by Perry. If Lloyd's writing is that funny, then I think I will have to get this book.
Probably for these reasons, I got a very good chuckle out of a review in Monthly Review written by Forrest Perry, discussing a new book Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, written by Richard Lloyd (probably not to be confused with the Richard Lloyd who co-founded the hip band of yesteryear called Television, though it is a nice coincidence of names). As Perry convincingly points out, this book about the contradictions of hipness is different from the sort of work produced by Thomas Frank/The Baffler, because it deals with hipsters at the point of production rather than consumption. In other words, it doesn't deal with the way that hipsters help to further capitalist enterprise by seeking their identity through the purchase of hip commodities. Instead, it deals with the ways that hipsters support capitalism through their work lives; i.e., the jobs that they take, the attitudes that they take toward their work, and the denial or ignorance that they exhibit sometimes while thinking that they are so much cooler than all the business types or worker drones.
Sometimes, as with the behavior exposed by Thomas Frank for the past couple of decades, the hipsters whom Lloyd writes about simply don't realize that the way of life they take pride in opposing has for the most part fallen by the wayside and the existence that they supposedly choose to pursue perfectly satisfies the demands of the present capitalist establishment. So, for instance:
Many of the people Lloyd interviews fail to see that the life of risk and instability they take themselves to have freely chosen is a life they (and most Americans) are more or less forced to choose. As Lloyd explains, with several decades of deindustrialization and the decline of Fordism has come the dominance of a new, "flexible" mode of capitalist accumulation, which generates insecure jobs in the very sectors Wicker Park’s artist types find employment. The artists in Wicker Park are like their bohemian predecessors in "insist[ing] upon their opposition to an imagined mainstream," but they rely on an "imago of the mainstream [that] is anachronistic, as the old promises of career and social security under the terms of the Fordist corporation and the welfare state have increasingly evaporated."
Although, having encountered so many temps for so many years (even during the long stretches when I, myself, was a full-time worker), I might add that the line between supposedly choosing such a lifestyle and having to live it can be a mirage. These days, there are more proofreading temps whom I meet who actually do openly understand that they are doing what they're doing out of necessity because of the limited opportunities they have. However, during the late '80s and '90s, I encountered many more people who seemed to be using their artistic "calling" as an excuse not to adimt that they had ended up in a place where they didn't really want to be. Too often, I would encounter people who'd make a big noise about being an artist or a writer or an actor to convince everyone that this temp work wasn't what they "really did." (It was one of the things, I think, that caused me, as a reaction, to stop telling anyone that I was "a writer," before I found so many other reasons why I just didn't want to label myself that way anymore.)
However, these sorts of vanities are fairly excusable and not really worthy of ridicule. When human beings are subject to ludicrous social pressure to define themselves according to the means by which the earn their wages (yet are for some reason unable to break away from this conditioning), it's understandable for those who've gotten stuck doing work that they would consider lame to support their egos with some artistic crutch.
But as Perry tells the story, based on Lloyd's book, the hipsters can get much more ridiculous in other ways. For instance, I found the following passage to be a hoot:
Most of Lloyd’s interviewees take themselves to be anticorporate, but when one’s business depends on the patronage of at least some "big corporations," exceptions must be made. Thus although MTV (more specifically, its program "The Real World") and Starbucks were greeted with hostility when they set up shop in Wicker Park, the director of one design boutique, when asked whether he would work on advertisements for Nike, acknowledged that "there’s controversy about the company" (because of its sweatshops) but nevertheless said he would willingly do work for them, his reason being that Nike is the kind of client that "allows you to express your own artistic vision within the context of their brand." He welcomes the prospect of doing creative work but does not single out as problematic the fact that his artistic vision must not break through the confines of what is good for Nike’s brand identity. His company could not, for instance, create a commercial consisting of documentary-style footage of garment workers in "free trade zones" being disciplined - perhaps to the ultra-hip musical accompaniment of Japanese death metal - with bamboo rods bearing the imprint of the Nike swoosh. That would most certainly be "cutting-edge" material, but it would also, no doubt, threaten to cut too much into Nike’s profits, thus resulting in the loss of a lucrative client. And not just any client. As the director of the boutique claims, Nike isn’t like other corporations - it’s "fun" and "flexible." Implicit in such a statement is the neo-bohemian belief that most corporations are still run by the 1950s Organization Man. As Lloyd puts it, "The traditions of dead generations are what make it possible to understand oneself as resisting the stultification and injustice of corporate capitalism while working twelve-hour days making...ads for Nike."
And that is the passage that led me to wonder whether most hipsters of today are simply idiots.
I'm assuming that the passage about sweatshop workers in the video being beaten to the soundtrack of Japanese death metal was Lloyd's idea, accurately conveyed by Perry. If Lloyd's writing is that funny, then I think I will have to get this book.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
A Great Visit to Labyrinth Books...and Interesting Stuff at Bluestockings
It's not like me to be pushing a commercial establishment (unless you count rock and techno bands as commercial establishments), but I was very pleased with my visit to Labyrinth Books today. This store has a better selection of non-Leninist Marxist works (that is, libertarian Marxist, left communist, autonomist, etc.) than any other store in New York City.
Labyrinth actually has two branches, but only one is in New York. That's the original one, right near Columbia University, which I have been going to for at least 10 years. Apparently, there is a newer one too, in New Haven (not Mott Haven, unfortunately). Clearly, this store is oriented toward students and academics, and I suspect that non-academics such as myself are a minority there. It is a shame that the only place where you can find a huge selection of all this good stuff has to be connected to the university crowd. It would be better if there were a perceived market for non-academic, anti-market workers and other "ordinary" people interested in coming in and finding texts of social analysis and guides to revolution. But that's not exactly how things are right now in the U.S., even in New York.
Anyway, Labyrinth has addressed another, bigger problem that I've encountered in this store in the past, i.e., the general unaffordability of most of their books. Now they seem to have added a lot more used books, "price reduced" books and remainders, and integrated them completely with the general books. (I think I remember a time when you could find just a few "special discounts," which weren't even always in the same place as the regular books. If I remember correctly... But that was a while ago, and whatever the case, there has been a marked improvement in the selection of used or reduced-price books that I've been finding just in the past few weeks.)
So, today, since I was pretty sure I wouldn't have to deal with any stint of wage slavery, I made a specially pre-planned trip through the pouring rain (which is perfectly all right with me, because I am so, so happy that it is not hot anymore), and I got to Labyrinth earlier than I usually manage to get there, so that I could indulge in the pleasure of using it as a library too.
If I had money, I would have walked off with a dozen books. But I put most of them back - put back the Gorz book, put back the Negri (because, let's face it, I still find him pretty unreadable), put back that book talking about the limits of identity politics (though I always enjoy books about that) and the other book, about "dialectical urbanism," and the other eco-Marxist thing... And I settled on just two nice old trade paperback editions: a collection of Jean-Paul Sartre (essays and interviews) called Between Existentialism and Marxism - which I'm enjoying immensely already, before digging into or contemplating ideas, just for the sheer quality of the writing and talking; and The Breaking of the American Social Compact by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, which I already like a lot, just from the reading that I did in the aisle. I got both these very nice volumes together for under $23 - which is actually a pretty good anti-capitalist bargain compared to most of the books that you will find in the places that may have this sort of stuff here in New York.
I also like the motto on Labyrinth's new shopping bag: "think read think read think read act think read." I guess it's appropriate to slip the "act" in there just once because not many of us are doing much of that right now. But I am having a great time with the "think" and "read" parts!
------
I suppose if I want to think more about "acting," I might go to some more of the talks at the volunteer-run bookstore called Bluestockings. I admit that I shied away from Bluestockings for a while, possibly for a few reasons. Most of all, I guess, I was in retreat from a section of the NYC activist scene that I expected to encounter there. I'm not going to go into that issue any more here, but I suppose I did have some personal reasons to avoid this place and a couple of others, though that inclination may have been only partly grounded in reality. I still may see a face or two that I don't like at some of these things, but I've finally stopped caring about that (I hope).
I also never quite got into the selection at this bookstore, or maybe just not so far... I'm not going to make any big criticisms about it, because I admit I've only glimpsed it a few brief times, while going to something else. But when I think about this place, I think about it more for events and lectures than for books. And some of the events are quite worthwhile...
I like the stuff that's being put together there by the Team Colors collective, a series of talks that they're calling the This Is Forever series. The other night, it actually featured Chris Carlsson, whose blog is featured in my links and gets regular visits from me. I didn't make that one, unfortunately, but I was happy to catch a prior talk by someone in Precarias a la Deriva, which was very interesting. And I'll probably be going to more of these in the future, though I can never really be sure exactly when - because of my contingent work situation and all this, you know, precarity...
Labyrinth actually has two branches, but only one is in New York. That's the original one, right near Columbia University, which I have been going to for at least 10 years. Apparently, there is a newer one too, in New Haven (not Mott Haven, unfortunately). Clearly, this store is oriented toward students and academics, and I suspect that non-academics such as myself are a minority there. It is a shame that the only place where you can find a huge selection of all this good stuff has to be connected to the university crowd. It would be better if there were a perceived market for non-academic, anti-market workers and other "ordinary" people interested in coming in and finding texts of social analysis and guides to revolution. But that's not exactly how things are right now in the U.S., even in New York.
Anyway, Labyrinth has addressed another, bigger problem that I've encountered in this store in the past, i.e., the general unaffordability of most of their books. Now they seem to have added a lot more used books, "price reduced" books and remainders, and integrated them completely with the general books. (I think I remember a time when you could find just a few "special discounts," which weren't even always in the same place as the regular books. If I remember correctly... But that was a while ago, and whatever the case, there has been a marked improvement in the selection of used or reduced-price books that I've been finding just in the past few weeks.)
So, today, since I was pretty sure I wouldn't have to deal with any stint of wage slavery, I made a specially pre-planned trip through the pouring rain (which is perfectly all right with me, because I am so, so happy that it is not hot anymore), and I got to Labyrinth earlier than I usually manage to get there, so that I could indulge in the pleasure of using it as a library too.
If I had money, I would have walked off with a dozen books. But I put most of them back - put back the Gorz book, put back the Negri (because, let's face it, I still find him pretty unreadable), put back that book talking about the limits of identity politics (though I always enjoy books about that) and the other book, about "dialectical urbanism," and the other eco-Marxist thing... And I settled on just two nice old trade paperback editions: a collection of Jean-Paul Sartre (essays and interviews) called Between Existentialism and Marxism - which I'm enjoying immensely already, before digging into or contemplating ideas, just for the sheer quality of the writing and talking; and The Breaking of the American Social Compact by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, which I already like a lot, just from the reading that I did in the aisle. I got both these very nice volumes together for under $23 - which is actually a pretty good anti-capitalist bargain compared to most of the books that you will find in the places that may have this sort of stuff here in New York.
I also like the motto on Labyrinth's new shopping bag: "think read think read think read act think read." I guess it's appropriate to slip the "act" in there just once because not many of us are doing much of that right now. But I am having a great time with the "think" and "read" parts!
------
I suppose if I want to think more about "acting," I might go to some more of the talks at the volunteer-run bookstore called Bluestockings. I admit that I shied away from Bluestockings for a while, possibly for a few reasons. Most of all, I guess, I was in retreat from a section of the NYC activist scene that I expected to encounter there. I'm not going to go into that issue any more here, but I suppose I did have some personal reasons to avoid this place and a couple of others, though that inclination may have been only partly grounded in reality. I still may see a face or two that I don't like at some of these things, but I've finally stopped caring about that (I hope).
I also never quite got into the selection at this bookstore, or maybe just not so far... I'm not going to make any big criticisms about it, because I admit I've only glimpsed it a few brief times, while going to something else. But when I think about this place, I think about it more for events and lectures than for books. And some of the events are quite worthwhile...
I like the stuff that's being put together there by the Team Colors collective, a series of talks that they're calling the This Is Forever series. The other night, it actually featured Chris Carlsson, whose blog is featured in my links and gets regular visits from me. I didn't make that one, unfortunately, but I was happy to catch a prior talk by someone in Precarias a la Deriva, which was very interesting. And I'll probably be going to more of these in the future, though I can never really be sure exactly when - because of my contingent work situation and all this, you know, precarity...
