#class and a us relation to the americas class that could all theoretically work. AND THEY ARE OFFERING NONE OF THEM

[broke-on-books]

What do you MEANNNNN

[literaturereviewhelp]

To be specific, my father is the president of a local bank in China. My father and mother have always been interested in their jobs, and they frequently used to discuss financial problems and solutions. In addition, when I was a high school student, I used to look through books beyond my textbooks. For instance, I used to read my parents’ books related to management and business law. Obviously, these books were useful to them as bank employees, and they were stimulating to me as a person developing an increasingly deeper interest in economics. Gradually, I came to realize that learning economics could help me to have a secure life in the future. My work experience and internship include some basic work in a local bank in China. For example, during last summer vacation, I worked as a teller. This helped me to have practical experience in dealing with customers. Moreover, this internship helped me to acquire the basic skills that are essential to a bank employee. Now, I realize that work experience and internship are most helpful for an individual who is aiming to be a bank employee. So, I gained the basic skills in customer care, especially the skill to deal with short-tempered customers. My core courses at City College have included macro-economics, micro-economics, Statistics, Calculus- Biology, Social Science and Business. These courses have helped to develop my interest in the major. For instance, all these courses, except Social Science, are related to the theoretical area of banking. On the other side, Social Science relates to the practical matter of customer relations. The course subjects like macro-economics, micro-economics, Statistics, Calculus at City College and major requirements at the University of California are same. Besides, I am particularly interested in macro-economics and micro-economics, especially the theories like Classical Economics and New Classical Economics and theory of Demand. The classes at City College sparked my curiosity in the subject in part because macro-economics was familiar to me. Later, I discussed this matter with my parents and they encouraged me in my habit of reading books. The lecture classes at City College have also helped me to grasp new concepts and even to develop some ability to predict the ups and downs in the banking sector. Prompt #2 In China, one’s family is the most influential factor in one’s individual growth and development. As far as I am concerned, my family is clearly the most important motivation behind my personal growth. However, when I immigrated to the United States of America, I discovered the amalgamative power of American culture. For instance, it would seem that an individual who is so close to his or her family might face a number of problems on his own in a different culture. In America, however, I did not feel any difficulties because it is a multicultural society. Larry L Naylor opined that “In fact, many Americans believe that culture does come from their families where they learned their family traditions and their heritage” (1). I was aware of the fact that I needed to let myself be absorbed into the core of the American society. To be specific, personal qualities like receptiveness and open-mindedness can be helpful for an individual to accept a different culture. As an open minded individual, I was able to gain a number of friends at the College. Besides, the multicultural atmosphere of the College campus helped me to be open-minded and receptive towards others who are from Read the full article

[hectormcfilm]

Writing about movies- Cultural analysis

As part of my weekly reading for communication and practise we were tasked to read chapter 4 of Writing about movies by Gocsik, Barsam and Monahan. This chapter is vital in my current study as we are studying a cultural theorist and mine (Jean Baudrillard) has some theories related to film so here are my notes and summaries from this chapter.

Chapter 4:

All films have meaning, some is explicit and shown on screen, others implicit and hidden below the surface with symbolism and parallels. Often times the people making movies may be just as oblivious of the cultural attitudes and deeper meanings shaping their cinematic stories as the people watching, this means certain implicit meanings are so subtle it may not be noticed by the filmmaker when writing, could be accidental.

Cultural analysis: when looking at a film through its representation, the most important theoretical frames we focus on are: Marxism (socioeconomic status) feminism, race and ethnicity studies and queer theory.

Socioeconomic status: When humans tell stories we cannot avoid issues of socioeconomic class because characters have to be rich, poor or something in between. Films decide whether to show certain classes in a negative or approving light  as well as deciding whether to undermine or reinforce the dominant power structure in society. Sadly, movies typically lure the lower working class to rally around ideas that benefit the top percent and internalize the dominant culture’s values and ideas. Money ahs been in focus in many gangster and sports films as it motivates EVERYONE.

Feminism: Gender is a part of every story ever told, it is one of the core elements of many films. Representations of women have been harmful and objectifying throughout film history. Representations of women as passive objects of male desire prove this. Laura Mulvey takes the position that films lure audiences to identify with the male protagonist’s gaze and to thereby judge the worth of female characters as we would any beautiful object.

Race and ethnicity: In the long history of American cinema it presents only white characters onscreen. Others have a diverse cast of characters but present racial or ethnic minorities in a mildly unflattering or even blatantly prejudicial way. Hollywood movies even now often stumble into caricatures and stereotypes. For beginning film students a sensitivity to the relevant issues can enrich analysis of a movie and teach you how to properly represent people. When watching films ask yourself if it reinforces traditional views or using certain lighting or camera cues to alienise or “other” a diverse character.

Queer theory: Some movies especially older ones reinforce the idea that heterosexuality is the sole “normal” variety of human sexuality. Film scholars focus their attention on the various ways that movies convey heteronormativity- the subtle and not so subtle messages they send about homosexuality. When watching a film you must ask if the movie does portray alternative sexualities are the characters presented as social deviants or abnormal.

FILM GENRE: One of the most crucial and recurring elements of film analysis is its genre, understanding some basic principles about film genres and their importance I the industry help you develop critique even if your essay doesn’t focus on genre. Film genres are created organically over time as more films follow a certain structure, tone or setting. Genres are created because of society, horror films were created because of our collective fear of death and the human psyche’s need for catharsis. Westerns endorse ideals about America that Americans want to believe. Genres endorse fundamental beliefs. Genres once recognised and defined offer familiar stories, conventions themes and conflicts thar are easy for studios to sell and market. Studios and distributors can develop genre-identified stars. Genre’s share the same story formulas, themes, character types, setting, stars and presentation/ iconography.

For example if you look at gangster films, the mafia genre. The story is usually a down on their look disrespected immigrant who works there way up a gang or creates their won, rising until their own hubris gets the better of them. Themes of Greed, corruption and power. Character types of a young gangster, an aggressive or strong older one who is dangerous, an older gangster showing the younger one the ropes who usually dies. A setting of the streets of New York or another large urban city. Stars usually Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino. Iconography of guns, suits money. Etc.

Historical analysis: Film history has been recorded since the first moving images from early experiments up until now in contemporary times. Film history includes the history of people, technology and industrial organisations that created the film. There are five basic approaches to film history. The economic approach( learning how every film has an economic history, seeing how films were funded, produced, distributed) auteurism,( this mainly judges the director as an author, it breaks down a directors style and their artistic integrity, what makes a film Hitchcock or Tarantino)  the technological approach, ( they track the progression of each technological advancement made in the film industry, tracking when inventions were made who first used them and how they changed or influenced the industry) the aesthetic approach ( evaluating individual films by assessing their artistic significance, how does this work of art effect cinema what is it trying to say) and Film as social history ( since films are greatly influenced by the society and culture of the time this studies film as social history. We ask who made and saw the movie and why. They are interested in audience marketing and criticism. Overall they study the complex interaction of film as a social institution.)

[bloodyethanol]

wrote an essay for uni about the bourgeoisification of country music and how 9/11 ruined the country genre and radicalized the right-wing once. pre 9/11 country has so many bangers. post 9/11 country is mostly just nationalistic party anthems that appeal to the american working class made by people who are millionaires and haven’t worked a day on a farm in their life, and lick the boot of america in a peacocking of performative patriotism, and pretty much just suck or at best are painfully average musically too. country used to be something anyone could identify with theoretically, a fantastic storytelling device to reach and relate to many, now it’s a very specific identity to be and listen to country which is why old country is generally better than new country (not to say there aren’t still good modern country songs, just not as many, and the objectively good ones don’t align with the modern country genres feel/definition) anyways, i love big iron, good ass song

sorry if my reply sounds weird (just woke up)

you're very smart and after getting into marty robbins and seeing some older fans comments on the videos, I've really noticed their views align with yours (though none pointed out the 9/11 correlation!)

mostly the reason so many people shit on it (and i used to too) is because of the new wave of country i figure. just plain boring music that doesn't speak anything to me at all. but that marty robbins album is amazing, every single song tells a beautiful story and it just sounds good overall. he has some amazing writing really.

I'm sad to see the genre got turned into this, but i guess this has happened with many genres to a lesser extent too. i hope to eventually get more into the genre's old good stuff as time passes. and yeah I've gotta thank big iron not only does it FUCK it also opened my eyes a bit to what the genre can offer! i rarely see other genres do storytelling like that.

also hope your resume went well and you have a nice day, thank you for the insightful ask and for taking the time to type this out ^^

[postmodernbeing]

Shingeki no Kyojin headcanons: 104th training corps (College AU)

Hello, Postmodernbeing here. This time I wanted to write about things that I actually know, since I’m a college student and I’m studing History and Social Sciences I found myself wondering about what would the 104th training corps focus their studies on if all of them had chosen humanities as their career. I hope you find this funny and at least a bit accurate.

IMPORTANT:  I do not own Shingeki no Kyojin, only these HCs are my own. // Might contain a few spoilers from the manga. // English is not my first language and I study uni at Latin America, so scientifical terms/words/concepts may vary. Anyhow, I thank you for reading and for your patience.

Eren Jaeger

He’s passionate about Military History, not to be confused with history of army. Eren’s rather focused in strategies, weapons and semiotics involved in military speech.

First started with books about great wars in modern era. The use of certain weapons took him by surprise due the technological development.

Then he took classes about discourse analysis, semiotics and such, and felt inspired by the discourse reflected in emblems, uniforms, flags, etc.

Eren doesn’t really have a preference between occidental or oriental, North or South, Modern or Ancient settings. He would simply devour all the books that deal with military strategy and warlike conflicts. Although he has more experience and information about great wars in modern era.

He’s fascinated with the inexhaustible human desire of freedom and the extent that it can reach. This fascination might not be very healthy, he concludes.

Also, finds a cruel beauty in violence when showed in freedom and ideals are protected over one’s own life. But he won’t tell his classmates or professors. He knows is a controversial opinion for he’s still aware the implications of massive conflicts and the abuse of power.

One thing led to another, Eren is now taking classes and reading about philosophy in war and anthropological perspectives about violence through time.

He’s so into social movements besides his main interest in college: “No one’s really free until all humanity is”, that’s his life motto pretty much.

Due his readings and researches he decided it was important to develop a political stance about the world’s problems. Eren strongly believes all lives worth the same, but systems and nations had imposed over others and vulnerated other human's lives.

Yes, Eren is anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.

Mikasa Ackerman

Asian Studies Major / History Minor.

She thinks by studying these degrees, she pays honor to her heritage. Specially to her mother. Her family is the proudest for Mikasa is also the best student in her whole generation.

Mikasa received a scholarship thanks to Azumabito family, who are co-founders of an academic institution dedicated to Asian historical and cultural research. She might as well start working when she graduates.

Although she’s passionate about Japan’s history, she has written a few articles and essays about Asian Studies themselves and the importance of preserving but also divulging by means of art and sciences.

In her essays and research work, she likes to employ tools from many disciplines since she strongly believes all humanities and social sciences serve the very same purpose at scrutinize the social reality all the same. Might as well use demographics, ethnology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, archeology, and so on. For it proves to bring light into questions that history by itself could answer unsatisfactorily (in Mikasa’s opinion).

Even her professors wonder how she manages to organize that much information and pull it off successfully. She might as well be more brilliant than a few PhD’s students.

Armin Arlert

Prehistoric studies / Archeology

He’s so into the studies about the prehistoric humans and routes of migration.

Passionate about the ocean and natural wonders since kid, Armin believed his career would be environmentalist or geoscience related.

That was the agreement he had with his grandad since middleschool, until he read Paul Rivet’s “The Origins of the American Man” book and captured him thoroughly. The way the book explained logically the diverse theories about global migration and enlisted the challenges of modern archeology -for there are numerous mysteries- simply devoured his conscience.

He knew from the books he’d read that most evidence of the first settlements are deep under dirt or far away in the ocean whose level has risen over the centuries leaving primitive camps – and answers – unreachable. 

That’s the reason he is so eager to study and give his best to contribute both archeology and history disciplines. Also, he’ll forever love the ocean and nature, just leave him do all the fieldwork, please.

Jean Kirstein

History of industry / Industrial heritage / Historical materialism

Jean first started interested in capitalist industries and production development in first world countries. Kind of rejected other visions and explanations since he’d read about positivism studies.

His interest in such matters started when he was a just boy. He often found himself wondering how things were made and that question captured him ever since. As he grew up, he realized that machines and industrial processes were highly involved in the most mundane objects creation.

Nonetheless, he learnt that not always the best machinery was used, nor the best work conditions were available for mass production. From that moment he’d started to read about the First Industrial Revolution and his mind just took off with questions. Invariably, he learned about labour struggle and the transforming power due workforce.

Between his readings and university classes, he’d knew more about labour movements, unions. And in the theoretical aspect, he'd learned about historical materialism analysis.

One could say that Jean possesses a humanistic vision of the implications in mass production under capitalist system along history and nowadays.

Marco Bodt

Royalty's history / Medieval Studies 

I wanted to keep his canonical fascination to royalty and the best way to do that was including Medieval Studies.

Marco would study since the fall of Roman Empire until the latest gossip of royal families all across Europe.

Might get a bit of Eurocentric with his essays but in real life discussions he’s always open to debates about decolonization. He has even read Frantz Fanon books and possesses a critical thinking about colonial countries and their relations with the so named third world.

Nevertheless, Marco finds a strange beauty in the lives of monarchs and he’s interested in study from their education, hobbies, strategies, relationships, everything.

I’d say that his favorite historical period is probably the establishment of the descendants of the barbarian peoples in the new kingdoms such as the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Vandals, Huns, Saxons, Angles and Jutes (holy shit, they're a lot).

Because this would transcend as the beginning of his favorite matter of analysis.

Sasha Braus

History of gastronomy, development of cooking, antropology and archeological studies.

Sasha’s interested in the history that shows human development of food and cooking. She finds wonders when she inquires into cultural aspects from the first farming till modern artistic expressions that would involve food.

Such as gastronomy. But her attention got caught in literature’s food representation too, with its symbols and allegories, also in paintings that belong in still life movement, but also Sasha finds interest when food is used as rhetorical devices (for example: the apple in Adam and Eve’s myth).

She’s curious about primitive systems of irrigation, cultivation, food distribution, adaptation of wild species; as well as the domestication of animals, the diversification of the diet and its link with sedentary life, as well as the subsequent division of labor once the need for food was assured in humanity’ first cities.

Sasha’s convinced that alimentation is the pilar of civilization as we know it. For it involves cultural, artistic, economic, emotion and social aspects. Food is a microcosm of analysis of humanity.

Sasha hasn’t a favorite historical period or setting. But she definitely has a special fascination for first civilizations and their link with alimentation. Also, she likes to study the development gastronomy in occident world around different regions, social classes, and time.

Although, let’s be honest, Sasha would devour (lol, couldn’t help it) ANY book about agriculture, cattle raising, cooking or gastronomy. 

Connie Springer

Micro-history / History of everyday life.

Connie loves his hometown, has a deep respect to his family and traditions. That’s why he finds himself wondering about the most ordinary events that developed in his dear Ragako. 

The book “The Cheese and the Worms” by Carlo Ginzburg changed the way he used to understand history and capture him into meaningful discussions about what he learned was called micro-history.

His favorite quote from that book is: “As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty.”

Once deep into studying the Italian historians and their works, he decided to give it a try, and ever since he’s mesmerized with the mundane vestiges craftsmen that worked in his village left behind.

Connie’s parents are so proud of him and his achivements, but mostly because he became a passionate academic over human and simple matters, (so down to earth our big baby).

His attitude towards his essays and research works truly shows his great heart and humility. Connie is aware that academic works have no use if they are not meant to teach us about ourselves too and current times.

Empathy and hard work, that’s how one could describe the elements that integrate his recently started academic career.

Historia Reiss

Political History / Statistician

Her father’s family pressured Historia since she was a little girl into studying History just like his dad. For he’s a very famous historian that had made important researches and books about the greatest statesmen of Paradis.

She thought in numerous ways that she could sabotage her career or study any other career without her family’s consent and end with her linage of historians. But she ended up enrolling in tuition and so far, she is trying her best in her studies. Historia swears this is the right path for her.

But don’t let the appearances fool you, even thought she studies her father’s career and the very same branch of history’s discipline, she has her own critical sense and she’s so talented on her own, very meticulous with her research papers.

Definitely wants a PhD about women, power and politics. We stand a Gender Studies Queen.

Her complementary disciplines are Political Sciences. Historia also has a talent for philosophy and owns a diary with all her thoughts about them. She hopes one day she would write a book or a manifesto about an innovative methodology for research and teaching History of Politic Thinking.

Ymir 

Religion’s History / Theology

Just like Historia, Ymir was pressured into studying History. And if she’s totally honest, she still has some doubts about it. Even if she couldn’t imagine herself studying anything else.

Anyways, Ymir thought that she could build her career around topics that she enjoys. So, she finally chose theology for unusual reasons.

Her classmates had grown up in religious families or had experience studying the doctrines they practiced. But she, being an agnostic, found satisfaction in unraveling belief systems in different cultures and time periods.

Albeit she studies in Paradis’ University, she currently has the opportunity of taking an academic exchange at Marley’s University. This only made Ymir more conflicted about her future, for she wants to stay (near Historia) but she’s aware that Marley would offer her more academic opportunities for her specialization.

Nowadays she’s working in some collaborative research paper with some people from Mythological Studies from the Literature department. She’s nailing it, writing some historical studies about titans in Greek mythology and its impact in shaping neoclassical poetry. Her brains ugh, love her.

Reiner Braun

Official History / Biographies of heroes and great wars.

His mother convinced him with numerous books about great national heroes, but mostly because she knew that would mean sure job to her son. All political administration in every level requires of an official chronicler. 

When he started his college courses, Reiner felt motivated and he was actually convinced that he had the vocation. But the more he read the less sure he felt that the academic world was for him. He wondered if he made the right choice. If he did it for him or for his mother.

Stories and myths about heroes have always cheered him up. That gave him purpose and consoled him when feeling down. Or at least it was like that when younger. Reiner truly didn’t feel like himself when regretting his choices, but he couldn’t help it for he was changing in more than a way.

That’s why he decided to experiment with other disciplines and with time he would find joy in historical novels. He would analyze them just as good as a litterateur and research about historical context in the written story AND study the artwork’s context itself.

His favorites theorical books are: “Historical Text as Literary Artifact” by Hayden White and Michel de Certeau’ “The Writing of History”.·        

Heroes stories would always accompany him, just differently now.

Bertolt Hoover

History of mentalities / Les Annales

Intimate relationships, basic habits and attitudes. / Culture

Bertie has always been a much reticent and shy guy. As he grew up, he consolidated his sullen personality, but maintained a friendly attitude towards anyone who needed him. That’s why he thought that the priority in his studies was to be at the service of his classmates.

So, although he was passionate about research and was a fan of the French Les Annales current, he considered his mission to be in the Archive. As a cataloger, organizer and curator of ancient documents.

But the ways of History are always mysterious, and Doctor Magath showed him that other way of being was possible. Before Bertolt picked his specialty, he met Theo Magath, a professor who recently had finished writing a book: “The Idea of Death in Liberio’s Ghetto in Marley During its War Against Eldia (Paradis)” (long-ass titles are historians specialty btw). After Magath ended his book’ presentation, Bertolt reached him. They talked for hours and finally, he felt inspired into pursuing his true passion. Magath gifted him “The Historian’s Craft” by Marc Bloch as a way to reminding him his way.

By the time Bertolt took History of Mentalities as optional class, he already had some basic notions about Les Annales, Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Jacques Le Goff and such. 

Being the gentle giant he is, Bertolt finds joy in reading about different lifestyles in diverse cultures. He constantly wonders about the origin of social constructs and the way they shape thinking as much as identity.

This boy is a wonder, he might not be the best in oral presentations or  extracurricular activities but sure as hell he’ll graduate with honors.

Annie Leonhart

Oral history, about institutions. Particularly, police and justice system in early XXs.

Albeit she got into the same University than Bertolt and Reiner, even shared classes and hopes, Annie regularly felt disconnected from her studies. With time she realized it wasn't due her career itself but rather because of the currents that her professors had suggested her taking. Until now.

Talking with Hitch and Marlow about their doubts concerning subjects and departments it came up the topics of history and present time but also oral history. She’d never heard something like that before. So, that very same week, Annie started searching for information about that.

She ended up with more questions: is it all of this just academic journalism? Or maybe sociology? When we can talk about regular history and when it starts being present time? If she introduces interviews due oral history, then that makes it an interdisciplinary work? Which are the best systems for analyzing data? Definitely, she’ll need help from anthropology and sociology departments if she wants to keep going. 

Contrary to her initial prognostic, philosophy and history of historic writing became her new allies, and the text “Le temps présent et l'historiographie contemporaine” (Present Time and Contemporary Historiography) by Bédarida among others, provided Annie another perspective. 

Regarding her favorite topics, she wouldn’t say that she selected them freely. They were just practical preferences. For institutions own extensive archives and numerous functionaries. One way or another, she ended up tangled in judicial system and police issues.

With new tools and object for studying, one could find Annie having a blast as detective too. Even if her academic essays focus on institutions’ history and configuration, she’s also working in corruption and more. She doesn’t do it because she believes it’s the right thing, but besides, the thrill of the tea is spicy. Although she won’t admit it. 

[fr-economics]

A Brief History of Neoliberalism  #2

Here's the second post in which I summarize and discuss David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. In this post, you'll learn:

how a specific group of people plotted to advance neoliberal theory and ideology

how the U.S. created the Iraqi and Chilean governments to benefit the wealthy

the historical events that led to the adoption of neoliberal policies

how the Darkest Timeline emerged, as the 1% started to consolidate political and economic power

Please feel free to ask any questions. This post is longer than the previous one and this material is a lot to take in.

Chapter 1: Freedom’s Just Another Word...

The founding figures of neoliberalism specifically aimed for neoliberal thought to become dominant. In order to do this, they advanced a “conceptual apparatus,” as Harvey puts it, that appeals to our intuitions, instincts, values, and desires.

They aligned their theory closely with "political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom." These were, of course, threatened "by all forms of state intervention that substituted collective judgements for those of individuals free to choose.”

So who were these founders? In 1947, Austrian political philosopher Friedrich von Hayek and a group of advocates (including Ludvig von Mises and Milton Friedman) created the Mont Pelerin Society. They called themselves neoliberals after liberalism, in the traditional European sense, because of their (supposed) commitment to personal freedom, and neoclassical economics from the 19th century.

In the 1970s, advocates of neoliberalism aimed to garner financial and political support, such as in think tanks and academia (most notably, the University of Chicago). The theory also gained credibility "by the award of the Nobel Prize in economics to Hayek in 1974 and Friedman in 1976."

The Creation of Neoliberal States

According to Harvey, a neoliberal state is "a state apparatus whose fundamental mission [is] to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital."

The promotion of "freedom" was used as a key justification for invading Iraq by President Bush. However, Bush had no intention of actually promoting the well-being of the Iraqi people. In 2003, Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, promulgated orders for "full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, elimination of nearly all trade barriers" and more. However, the labor market was strictly regulated. Strikes were forbidden in key sectors and the right to unionize restricted.

Some argued these orders violated the Geneva Conventions, "since an occupying power is mandated to guard the assets of an occupied country and not sell them off." However, "they would become legal if confirmed by a ‘sovereign’ government." The interim government appointed by the US was given the power to only confirm the existing laws, not edit them for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

We've seen this creation of a neoliberal state under the "coercive influence of the U.S." before. This famously happened for the first time in Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet enacted a coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. This coup was backed not only by "domestic business elites threatened by Allende’s drive towards socialism" but also by U.S. corporations and the CIA.

This coup violently repressed and dismantled leftist social movements and popular organizations, such as community health centers. Pinochet then brought Chicago-trained economists into the government. Since the '50s, the U.S. had funded training of Chilean economists there "as part of a Cold War programme to counteract left-wing tendencies in Latin America." These economists "privatized public assets" and "opened up natural resources to private and unregulated exploitation." They also facilitated direct foreign investment.

Why the Neoliberal Turn?

After WWII, the aim of the "restructuring of state forms and of international relations" was to "prevent a return to the catastrophic conditions that had so threatened the capitalist order in the great slump of the 1930s." The new post-WWII states all accepted that "the state should focus on full employment, economic growth, and the welfare of its citizens, and that state power should be freely deployed, alongside of or, if necessary, intervening in or even substituting for market processes to achieve these ends.”

Keynesian policies were widely deployed to meet these goals. States regulated industry and constructed welfare systems, including healthcare, education, etc. State-led planning and even ownership of specific sectors were not uncommon. "This form of political-economic organization is now usually referred to as ‘embedded liberalism'," and it delivered high rates of economic growth in the '50s and '60s.

However, by the end of the '60s, problems emerged. Unemployed and inflation surged, causing "stagflation" well into the '70s.

One potential solution was to "deepen state control and regulation of the economy." "The left assembled considerable popular power behind such programmes," even in the U.S., where even Republican President Nixon oversaw a wave of regulatory reform, including creating the EPA. There was an "emergence of a socialist alternative to the social compromise between capital and labour" and "popular forces were agitating for widespread reforms and state interventions." This was obviously a threat to ruling elites.

Elites were also threatened by reduced economic growth in the ‘70s. U.S. control of wealth by the 1% plunged during this decade. Implementation of neoliberal policies in the ‘70s, such as deregulation under President Carter, helped the income and wealth of the 1% so much that some writers "have concluded that neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power." "...Increasing social inequality [has] in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project."

However, keen observers of American politics in the past couple of decades will note that there's often a tension or outright clash between actual neoliberal theory and what neoliberal politicians implement. There is even a tension within neoliberalism itself. For example, distrust of the state's intervention sits alongside the need for a coercive state that will enforce private property rights. Harvey says, "when neoliberal principles clash with the need to restore or sustain elite power, then the principles are either abandoned or become so twisted as to be unrecognizable."

Harvey concludes that the "theoretical utopianism" of neoliberal theory, meaning all that talk about human freedom and individual liberty, "primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve" the restoration of class power after the crisis of the 70s.

The Reagan Administration

Reagan's presidency was preceded by "the Volcker shock" in 1979. Paul Volcker, chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank under President Carter, promoted "a policy designed to quell inflation no matter what the consequences might be for employment." This was in contrast to Keynesian policies that aimed for full employment. By steeply raising interest rates, Volcker jumpstarted a recession "that would empty factories and break unions in the US and drive debtor countries to the brink of insolvency."

Reagan himself, starting with the 1981 air traffic controllers' strike, began an "all-out assault on the powers of organized labour at the very moment when the Volcker-inspired recession was generating high levels of unemployment (10% or more)." This began the long decline in wages, and was accompanied by massive deregulation in many industries and huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy—the top personal tax rate was reduced from 70% to 28%.

A series of events had begun in the '70s which came to a head in the '80s. The OPEC oil crisis of 1973 led to Middle Eastern oil-producing states being pressured militarily by the U.S. to funnel their wealth through New York investment banks. These banks needed new outlets for this influx of funds, and turned their predatory gaze towards foreign governments.

Previously, the U.S. exerted military pressure on various nations to meet its own financial needs, and primarily exploited raw material resources or cultivated specific markets. However, the New York investment banks became more active internationally by lending capital to foreign governments. Developing nations were "encouraged to borrow heavily... at rates that were advantageous to the New York bankers."

However, since the loans were in U.S. dollars, any rise in U.S. interest rates "could easily push vulnerable countries into default," leaving the banks exposed to huge losses. This was proved when the Volcker shock drove Mexico into default in 1982. Reagan's administration oversaw the pioneering of structural adjustment, in which the IMF, World Bank, and other lenders rolled over debt in return for the debtor countries implementing neoliberal reforms, such as cuts in welfare, privatization, and reduction of labor protections.

Remember that tension between neoliberal theory and practice, though? If free market principles were truly implemented, then the lenders would be on the hook for the loss if their borrowers default. They took the risk of lending, so it's their problem. However, in this case, borrowers are forced by the U.S. to repay their debts no matter the consequences for the well-being of their people.

The Meaning of Class Power

"While neoliberalization may have been about the restoration of class power, it has not necessarily meant the restoration of economic power to the same people." There are several trends under neoliberalism that reorganized what it meant to be part of the upper class.

First is the fusion of ownership and management of companies, for example, CEOs being paid in stock options. Stock values are then prioritized rather than production. Second is the reduction of the gap between capital earning dividends/interest and production/manufacturing. Large corporations became more financial in their orientation. An example of this is car companies opening departments to finance car purchases, instead of simply making cars. Mergers helped spur this trend, creating larger and larger diversified conglomerates.

There were also new innovations in financial services, creating "new kinds of financial markets based on securitization, derivatives, and all manner of futures trading." "Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything." Finance's tentacles became embedded in all areas of the economy as well as the state, and companies became more profitable not through gains in manufacturing, but through increased financial services.

All of these changes allowed "new processes of class formation to emerge," for example, the creation of tech millionaires and billionaires who got newly rich on new technologies, as well as newly acquired wealth through creation of conglomerates.

[theculturedmarxist]

@expatiating​

>Literally anyone who lived in a communist or socialist regime: it was terrible..... 16 year old white girl on tumblr: yeah but that wasn’t real communism :///

You mean anyone like this, you stupid fucking asshole?

Oppressive and grey? No, growing up under communism was the happiest time of my life

When people ask me what it was like growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary in the Seventies and Eighties, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state.

They are invariably disappointed when I explain that the reality was quite different, and communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact, rather a fun place to live.

The communists provided everyone with guaranteed employment, good education and free healthcare. Violent crime was virtually non-existent.

But perhaps the best thing of all was the overriding sense of camaraderie, a spirit lacking in my adopted Britain and, indeed, whenever I go back to Hungary today. People trusted one another, and what we had we shared.

Learn from Cuba, Says World Bank

The island's economy, which suffered devastating losses in production after the Soviet Union withdrew its aid, especially its oil supplies, a decade ago, has yet to fully recover. Annual economic growth, fuelled in part by a growing tourism industry and limited foreign investment, has been halting and, for the most part, anaemic.

Moreover, its economic policies are generally anathema to the Bank. The government controls virtually the entire economy, permitting private entrepreneurs the tiniest of spaces. It heavily subsidises virtually all staples and commodities; its currency is not convertible to anything.  It retains tight control over all foreign investment, and often changes the rules abruptly and for political reasons.

At the same time, however, its record of social achievement has not only been sustained; it's been enhanced, according to the WDI.

It has reduced its infant mortality rate from 11 per 1,000 births in 1990 to seven in 1999, which places it firmly in the ranks of the western industrialised nations. It now stands at six, according to Jo Ritzen, the Bank's Vice President for Development Policy who visited Cuba privately several months ago to see for himself.

By comparison, the infant mortality rate for Argentina stood at 18 in 1999; Chile's was down to ten; and Costa Rica, 12. For the entire Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, the average was 30 in 1999.

Similarly, the mortality rate for children under five in Cuba has fallen from 13 to eight per thousand over the decade. That figure is 50 percent lower than the rate in Chile, the Latin American country closest to Cuba's achievement. For the region as a whole, the average was 38 in 1999.

"Six for every 1,000 in infant mortality - the same level as Spain - is just unbelievable," according to Ritzen, a former education minister in the Netherlands. "You observe it, and so you see that Cuba has done exceedingly well in the human development area."

Indeed, in Ritzen's own field the figures tell much the same story. Net primary enrolment for both girls and boys reached 100 percent in 1997, up from 92 percent in 1990. That was as high as most developed nations, higher even than the US rate and well above 80-90 percent rates achieved by the most advanced Latin American countries.

"Even in education performance, Cuba's is very much in tune with the developed world, and much higher than schools in, say, Argentina, Brazil, or Chile."

It is no wonder, in some ways. Public spending on education in Cuba amounts to about 6.7 percent of gross national income, twice the proportion in other Latin America and Caribbean countries and even Singapore.

There were 12 primary pupils for every Cuban teacher in 1997, a ratio that ranked with Sweden, rather than any other developing country. The Latin American and East Asian average was twice as high at 25 to one.

The average youth (ages 15-24) illiteracy rate in Latin America and the Caribbean stands at seven percent. In Cuba, the rate is zero. In Latin America, where the average is seven percent, only Uruguay approaches that achievement, with one percent youth illiteracy.

"Cuba managed to reduce illiteracy from 40 percent to zero within ten years," said Ritzen. "If Cuba shows that it is possible, it shifts the burden of proof to those who say it's not possible."

Similarly, Cuba devoted 9.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) during the 1990s to health care, roughly equivalent to Canada's rate.  Its ratio of 5.3 doctors per 1,000 people was the highest in the world.

The question that these statistics pose, of course, is whether the Cuban experience can be replicated. The answer given here is probably not.

"What does it is the incredible dedication," according to Wayne Smith, who was head of the US Interests Section in Havana in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has travelled to the island many times since.  "Doctors in Cuba can make more driving cabs and working in hotels, but they don't.  They're just very dedicated," he said.

This amazing video and documentary, produced by Neighbor Democracy, details the evolving communal organs within the Rojava Revolution, from security to health care.

This 40 minute video is an in-depth look into the inner workings of the commune system of Rojava and how they work in practice. Rojava is the colloquial name for the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS), a multi-ethnic, pluralist, women’s liberationist, and radically democratic autonomous zone that has grown out of the context of the Syrian Civil War. While there is frequent and thorough reporting on the military aspects of the Revolution in Rojava, especially their fight against Daesh (ISIS) and the Turkish State, the social revolution as it relates to the everyday lives of the people living there is rarely given anything more than a cursory overview, even in radical circles.

This video is one attempt to make up for that gap in easily digestible information about the way the day-to-day autonomous organizing affects daily life in Rojava. It also closes with a call for people in the US and elsewhere to build communes along similar lines, while discussing some possible contextual considerations specific to North America.

The communes in the DFNS are birthed out of tireless organizing by everyday people, predominately Kurdish women, in an effort that started clandestinely in the days of the Regime, but has since led to structures that could fill the power vacuum left in the war. The people of the DFNS are working out in practice through trial-and-error the culmination of 40 years of theoretical and practical knowledge built through the Kurdish struggle, and most thoroughly laid out by the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

The communes have many similarities to the neighborhood assemblies that were the focus of the late American communalist Murray Bookchin, who was an inspiration for Ocalan. There are an estimated 4,000 communes in Rojava today, run through direct democracy of all the residents (50-150 families). The work of the commune is divided up into committees which anyone can join. The most common committees are explored in-depth in this video, and their timestamps can be found below. Each committee covered in the video can be found in its own short clip on the Neighbor Democracy channel so that these short, easy-to-digest videos can me shared in discussions about specific topics relating to communal approaches to various aspects of life.

Marinaleda: Will 'free homes' solve Spain's evictions crisis? 

In the wake of Spain's property crash, hundreds of thousands of homes have been repossessed. While one regional government says it will seize repossessed properties from the banks, a little town is doing away with mortgages altogether.

In Marinaleda, residents like 42-year-old father-of-three, David Gonzalez Molina, are building their own homes.

While he burrows with a pneumatic drill into the earth, David nonchalantly says it "should take a couple of years".

However, when his new house is finished he will have paid "absolutely nothing".

Free bricks and mortar

The town hall in this small, aesthetically unremarkable town an hour-and-a-bit east of Seville, has given David 190 sq m (2,000 sq ft) of land.

He and others are only eligible after they have been registered residents of Marinaleda for at least two years.

The bricks and mortar are also a gift, this time from the regional government of Andalusia.

Only once his home is finished will he start paying 15 euros (£13) a month, to the regional government, to refund the cost of other building materials.

Of course, most people do not know how to build a house, so the town hall in Marinaleda throws in some expertise.

It employs several professional builders and plumbers, a couple of whom work alongside David, to help him construct his house.

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA 

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune.

Feel free to unfuck yourself you class cuck.

[arcticdementor]

“Hey bro! Check out this Nike ad!” This was my entry point into a new world.

…

Since Carlos had lived mostly outside the United States, he was able to follow soccer on a level I’d never encountered in my hometown. Back then, before social media and the advent of scarf-wearing Northwestern fútbol hipsters, big-time European soccer was like the metric system: Known to almost all but ourselves. But Carlos knew, and immediately used LimeWire to curate me a massive archive of 1990s through early 2000s soccer highlights. What was I doing in the world without them?

Oddly enough, in trying to inculcate me in soccer fandom, he started not with game highlights, but with the advertisements. Yes, Carlos was an educator and a voluntary footsoldier for Big Apparel. Going in, I had no clue about high-quality, internationally popular Nike soccer ads. The ads, written by the legendary Wieden+Kennedy firm, were miniature movies, films that were often creatively daring but also quite funny. The most popular of these ads might be “Good vs. Evil,” from 1996, where Nike’s best soccer players team up to play Satan’s literal army. The blending of sacrilege, theology and comedy just worked, like a more ambitious version of Space Jam that somehow took itself less seriously than Space Jam.

…

Yes, I know ads aren’t supposed to be high art. I understand that they are the purest distillation of manipulative greed. And yet, they sometimes are culturally relevant generational touchstones. While Nike was weaving soccer into enduring pop culture abroad, it was having a similar kind of success with basketball and baseball stateside. These ads weren’t just pure ephemera. Michael Jordan’s commercials were so good that, as he nears age 60, his sneaker still outsells any modern athlete’s. “Chicks dig the long ball” is a phrase (a) that can get you sent to the modern HR department and b) whose origins are fondly remembered by most American men over the age of 35.

Modern Nike ads will never be so remembered. It’s not because we’re so inundated with information these days, though we are. And it’s not because today’s overexposed athletes lack the mystique of the 1990s superstars, though they do. It’s because the modern Nike ads are beyond fucking terrible.

…

They’re bad for many causes, but one in particular is an incongruity at the company’s heart. Nike, like so many major institutions, is suffering from what I’ll call Existence Dissonance. It’s happening in a particular way, for a particular reason and the result is that what Nike is happens to be at cross-purposes from what Nike aspires to be.

…

For all the talk of a racial reckoning within major industries, Nike’s main problem is this: It’s a company built on masculinity, most specifically Michael Jordan’s alpha dog brand of it. Now, due to its own ambitions, scandals, and intellectual trends, Nike finds masculinity problematic enough to loudly reject.

This rejection is part of the broader culture war, but it’s accelerating due to an arcane quirk in the apparel giant’s strange restructuring plan, announced in June. Under the leadership of new CEO John Donahoe, Nike is moving away from its classic discrete sports categories (Nike Basketball, Nike Soccer, etc.) in favor of a system where all products are shoveled into one of three divisions: men’s, women’s and kids’. Obviously Nike made clothing tailored to the specificities of all these groups before, but now, Nike is emphasizing gender over sport. Gone is the model of the product appealing to basketball fans because they are basketball fans. It’s now replaced by a model of, say, the product appealing to women because they are women.

And hey, women buy sneakers too. Actually, women buy the lion’s share of clothing in the United States. While women shoppers are market dominant in nearly every aspect of American apparel, the clothing multinational named after a Greek goddess happens to be a major exception. At Nike, according to its own records, men account for roughly twice as much revenue as women do.

You might see that stat and think, “Well, this means that Nike will prioritize men over women in its new, odd, gendered segmentation of the company.” That’s not necessarily how this all works, thanks to a phenomenon I’ll call Undecided Whale. The idea is that a company, as its aims grow more expansive, starts catering less to the locked-in core customer and more to a potential whale which demonstrates some interest. Sure, you can just keep doing what’s made you rich, but how can you even focus on your primary business with that whale out there, swimming so tantalizingly close? The whale, should you bring it in, has the potential to enrich you far more than your core customers ever did. And yeah yeah yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but those were birds. This is a damned whale! And so you start forgetting about your base.

You can see this dynamic in other places. For the NBA, China is its Undecided Whale. It could be argued that the NBA fixates more on China than on America, even if the vast majority of TV money comes from U.S. viewership. The league figures it has more or less hit its ceiling in its home country, so China becomes an obsession as this massive, theoretical growth engine.

…

Here’s the main issue for Nike in this endeavor: The company, as a raison d’être, promotes athletic excellence. While women are among Nike’s major sports stars, the core of high-level performance, in the overwhelming majority of sports, is male. Every sane person knows that, though nobody in professional class life seems rude enough to say so. Obviously, there’s the observable reality of who tends to set records and there’s also the pervasive understanding that testosterone, the main male sex hormone, happens to give unfair advantages to the athletes who inject it.

Speaking of which, there’s a famous This American Life episode from 2002 where the public radio journos actually test their own testosterone levels. The big joke of the episode is just how comically low their T levels are. Sure, you would stereotype bookish public radio men in this way, and yet the results are on the nose enough to shock.

As a nerdy media-weakling type, I can relate to the stunning realization that you’ve been largely living apart from T. Before working in the NBA setting, I was an intern in the cubicles of Salon.com’s San Francisco office, around the time it was shifting from respectable online magazine into inane outrage content mill. Going from that setting to the NBA locker room was some jarring whiplash, like leaving the faculty lounge for a pirate ship. To quote Charles Barkley on the latter culture, “The locker room is sexist, racist, and homophobic … and it’s fun and I miss it.”

…

The “Good vs. Evil” ad boasts a “Like” to “Dislike” ratio of 20-to-1 on YouTube. On June 17th of 2021, Nike put out an ad ahead of the Euro Cup that referenced “Good vs. Evil” as briefly as it could. In this case, a little child popped his collar and used Cantona’s catchphrase. As of this writing, the new ad has earned a thousand more punches of the Dislike than of the Like button.

When you see it, it’s no surprise that the latest Euro Cup ad is disliked. I mean, you have to look at this shit. I know we’re so numb to the ever-escalating emanations of radical chic from our largest corporations, but sometimes it’s worth pausing just to take stock and gawk.

…

But today we are in the land of new football, where we take dictatorial direction from less-than-athletic minors. After her announcement, we are treated to a montage of different people who offer tolerance bromides.

“There are no borders here!”

“Here, you can be whoever you want. Be with whoever you want.”

(Two men kiss following that line, because subtlety isn’t part of this new world order.)

Then, a woman who appears to be breastfeeding under a soccer shirt, threatens, in French, “And if you disagree …”

And this is when the little boy gives us Cantona’s “au revoir” line before kicking a ball out of a soccer stadium, presumably because that’s what happens to the ignorant soccer hooligan. He gets kicked out for raging against gay men kissing or French ladies breastfeeding or somesuch. Later, a referee wearing a hijab instructs us, “Leave the hate,” before narrator girl explains, “You might as well join us because no one can stop us.”

Is that last line supposed to be … inspiring? That’s what a movie villain says, like if Bane took the form of Stan Marsh’s sister. Speaking of which, was this ad actually written by the creators of South Park as an elaborate prank? It’s certainly more convincing as an aggressive parody of liberals than as a sales pitch. Why, in anything other than a comedic setup, is a woman breastfeeding in a big-budget Euro Cup ad?

It’s tempting to fall into the pro-vanguardism template the boomers have handed down to us and sheepishly say, “I must be getting old, because this seems weird to me,” but let’s get real. You dislike this ad because it sucks. You are having a natural, human response to shitty art. This a hollow sermon from a priest whose sins were in the papers. Nobody is impressed by what Nike’s doing here. Nobody thinks Nike, a multinational famous for its sweatshops, is ushering us into an enlightened utopia. Sure, most media types are afraid to criticize the ad publicly. You might inspire suspicion that what you’re secretly against is men kissing and women breastfeeding, but nobody actually likes the stupid ad. No college kid would show it to a new friend he’s trying to impress, and it’s hard to envision a massive cohort of Gen Z women giving a shit about this ad either.

Now juxtapose that ad not just against the classics of the 1990s but also the 2000s products that preceded the Great Awokening. Compare it to another Nike Euro Cup advertisement, Guy Ritchie’s “Take It to the Next Level.”

…

Here’s the problem, insofar as problems are pretended into existence by our media class: The ad is very, very male. Really, what we are watching here is a boyhood fantasy. Our protagonist gets called up to the big show, and next thing you know he’s cavorting with multiple ladies, and autographing titties to the chagrin of his date. He can be seen buying a luxury sports car and arriving at his childhood home in it as his father beams with pride. Training sessions show him either puking from exhaustion or playing grab-ass with his fellow soccer bros. This is jock life, distilled. Art works when it’s true and it’s true that this is a vivid depiction of a common fantasy realized.

Nike’s highly successful “Write the Future” ad (16,000 Likes, 257 Dislikes) works along similar themes.

…

The recent Olympic ads were especially heavy on cringe radical chic, and might have stood out less in this respect if the athletes themselves mirrored that tone on the big stage. Not so much in these Olympics. It seems as though Nike made the commercials in preparation for an explosion of telegenic activism, only to see American athletes mostly, quietly accept their medals, chomp down on the gold, and praise God or country. Perhaps you could consider Simone Biles bowing out of events due to mental health as a form of activism, but overall, the athletes basically behaved in the manner they would have back in 1996.

But Nike forged onwards anyway. This ad in celebration of the U.S. women’s basketball team made some waves, getting ripped in conservative media as the latest offense by woke capital.

…

“Today I have a presentation on dynasties,” a pink-haired teenage girl tells us. “But I refuse to talk about the ancient history and drama. That’s just the patriarchy. Instead, I’m going to talk about a dynasty that I actually look up to. An all-women dynasty. Women of color. Gay women. Women who fight for social justice. Women with a jump shot. A dynasty that makes your favorite men’s basketball, football, and baseball teams look like amateurs.”

When she says, “That’s just the patriarchy,” the camera pans to a bust of (I think) Julius Caesar. At another point, the girl says, “A dynasty that makes Alexander the Great look like Alexander the Okay.” Fuck you, Classical Antiquity. Fuck you, fans of teams. You’re all just the patriarchy. Or something.

Nike could easily sell the successful American women’s basketball team without denigrating other teams, genders and ancient Mediterranean empires that have nothing to do with this. Could but won’t. The company now conveys an almost visceral need for women to triumph over men because … well, nobody really explains why, even if it has something to do with Undecided Whaling. In Nike’s tentpole Olympics ad titled “Best Day Ever,” the narrator fantasizes about the future, declaring, “The WNBA will surpass the NBA in popularity!” ​

…

There are theories on the emergence of woke capital, with many having observed that, following Occupy Wall Street, media institutions ramped up on census category grievance. The thinking goes that, in response to the threat of a real economic revolution, the power players in our society pushed identity politics to undermine group solidarity. Well, that was a fiendishly brilliant plan, if anyone actually hatched it.

I’m not so convinced, though, as I’m more inclined to believe that a lot of history happens by happenstance. If we’re to specifically analyze the Nike Awokening, there is a recent top-down element of a mandate for Undecided Whaling, but that mandate was preceded by a socially conscious middle class campaign within the company.

This isn’t unique to Nike, either. Given my past life covering the team that tech moguls root for, I’ve run into such people. They aren’t, by and large, ideological. Very few are messianically devoted to seeing the world through the intersectionality lens. They are, however, terrified of their employees who feel this way. The mid-tier labor force, this cohort who actually internalized their university teachings, are full of fervor and willing to risk burned bridges in favor of causes they deem righteous. The big bosses just don’t want a headline-making walkout on their hands, so they placate and mollify, eventually bending the company’s voice into language of righteousness.

…

All the guilt and atonement transference make for bad art. And so the ads suck. There’s no Machiavellian conspiracy behind the production. It’s just a combination of desperately wanting female market share and desperately wanting to move on from the publicized sins of a masculine past. So, to message its ambitions, the exhausted corporation leans on the employees with the loudest answers.

There’s a lot of interplay between Nike and Wieden+Kennedy when the former asks the latter for a type of ad, but the through line from both sides is a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Based on conversations with people who’ve worked in both environments, there’s a dearth of personnel who are deeply connected to sports. In place of a grounding in a subculture, you’re getting ideas from folks who went to nice colleges and trendy ad schools, the type of people who throw words like “patriarchy” at the screen to celebrate a gold medal victory. The older leaders, uneasy in their station and thus obsessed with looking cutting edge, lean on the younger types because the youth are confident. Unfortunately, that confidence is rooted in an ability to regurgitate liturgy, rather than generative genius. They’ve a mandate to replace a marred past, which they leap at, but they’re incapable of inventing a better future.

…

Ironically, Nike mattered a lot more in the days when its position was less dominant. Back when it had to really fight for market share, it made bold, genre-altering art. The ads were synonymous with masculine victory, plus they were cheekily irreverent. And so the dudes loved them. Today, Nike is something else. It LARPs as a grandiose feminist nonprofit as it floats aimlessly on the vessel Michael Jordan built long ago. Like Jordan himself, Nike is rich forever off what it can replicate never. Unlike Jordan, it now wishes to be known for anything but its triumphs. Nike once told a story and that story resonated with its audience. Now it’s decided that its audience is the problem. It wouldn’t shock you to learn that Carlos hated the new Nike ads I texted to him. His exact words were, “I don’t want fucking activism from a sweatshop monopoly.” He’ll still buy the gear, though, just not the narrative. Nike remains, but the story about itself has run out. Au revoir. 

[woman-loving]

He-Yin Zhen and the analytic category “nannü”

(Selection from The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, ed. Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, 2013)

In 1903, Jin Tianhe (aka Jin Yi; male), a liberal educator and political activist, published in Shanghai what historians have commonly called a feminist manifesto entitled The Women’s Bell (Nüjie zhong). In the preface, Jin contrasts his own pathetic existence with that of an imaginary counterpart in Euro-America[…] This extraordinary confession of racial melancholy by a young man is an odd opening to what is touted as the first Chinese feminist manifesto. The desire to emulate an upper-class white European man in his marital bliss reflects the painful situation of Chinese men and their psychic struggles in relation to white European men. But what does this have to do with Chinese women and, more important, with feminism? Must racial melancholy mask itself in the image of subjugated gender and civilization? Were women readers of The Women’s Bell in China troubled by such mental projections?

He-Yin Zhen (1884—ca.1920), a preeminent feminist theorist and founding editor of an anarcho-feminist journal Natural Justice, was among the first women readers of Jin Tianhe’s manifesto. In 1907–1908, she published a perceptive critique of Jin and other contemporary male feminists in an essay called “On the Question of Women’s Liberation.” She writes:

“Chinese men worship power and authority. They believe that Europeans, Americans, and the Japanese are civilized nations of the modern world who all grant their women some degree of freedom. By transplanting this system into the lives of their wives and daughters, by prohibiting their practices of footbinding, and by enrolling them in modern schools to receive basic education, these men think that they will be applauded by the whole world for having joined the ranks of civilized nations… . I am inclined to think that these men act purely out of a selfish desire to claim women as private property. Were it not so, why would a woman’s reputation, good or bad, have anything whatsoever to do with them? The men’s original intention is not to liberate women but to treat them as private property. In the past when traditional rituals prevailed, men tried to distinguish themselves by confining women in the boudoir; when the tides turn in favor of Europeanization, they attempt to acquire distinction by promoting women’s liberation. This is what I call men’s pursuit of self distinction in the name of women’s liberation.”[2]

He-Yin Zhen’s attack on the progressive male intellectuals of her time–men who championed women’s education, suffrage, and gender equality and who would have been her allies—opens up a vast space for a new interpretation of the rise of feminism in China and in the world. […]

A long-suppressed intellectual figure in modern Chinese history, He-Yin Zhen is an original thinker and powerful social theorist often identified as an anarcho-feminist. Her writings, some of which were selected for inclusion in this volume, suggest an impressively broad awareness of women’s suffrage movements in Europe and in North America. They address not only the oppression of women in China, past and present, but also the conditions of women’s livelihood in industrializing Japan as well as the anarchist and socialist struggles around the world. Her objective was to develop a systematic global critique of the political, economic, moral, and ideological bases of patriarchal society in critical response to the social agendas of progressive Chinese men who also promoted women’s rights. The strength and richness of her critique, in particular her discovery of the analytic category of nannü 男女 (literally, “man and woman” or “male/female”), and its relevance to our own feminist theory making will be elaborated in later discussions in the present introduction. […]

Our goal in translating the texts of early Chinese feminist theorists, and in highlighting He-Yin Zhen, is threefold: First, we aim to bring to light��for the first time in English or Chinese—the vital contributions of early Chinese feminists to global feminist thought and theory. Tien Yee (Tianyi bao) or Natural Justice, in which all He-Yin Zhen’s extant writings first appeared, was an anarchist-leaning Chinese feminist journal published by the Society for the Restoration of Women’s Rights in Tokyo in 1907–1908.[5] Although short-lived, this journal, which He-Yin Zhen edited with the support of her husband, Liu Shipei (1884–1919), has a vital contribution to make to our understanding of the revolutionary and internationalist fermentations of the time in its rejection of the facile opposition of tradition and modernity.[6] The journal offers some rare early feminist critical analyses in Chinese of political economy, capitalism, the modern state, and patriarchal systems; indeed, we cannot go without pointing out that the earliest Chinese translation of The Communist Manifesto, the first chapter, was published in Natural Justice in 1908. The significance of this detail has heretofore been overlooked: it was Chinese feminism that first translated communist thought, among other radical ideas, and introduced it to China (by way of Japan), not the converse.[7] [...]

Translating Nannü as Analytical Category

Nannü is the most crucial term in Chinese feminist discourses in the twentieth century. The key slogan for the feminist movement throughout the century has been nannü pingdeng, the standard translation of which is “gender equality” (in legal status, access to education, right to vote, social benefits, and so on). In this context, the equation of nannü with “gender” as a shorthand for male-female is most appropriate. But He-Yin Zhen’s use of the term is different and singular. From early on in the translation process, the editors were struck by how He-Yin’s notion of nannü exceeds and resists facile rendition into “man and woman,” “gender,” “male/female,” or other familiar English concepts. A brief explanation of our theory and practice of translation is in order here before we go on to explore the potential theoretical contributions of He-Yin Zhen’s categories to Anglophone feminist theories in the twenty-first century.

Interpreting nannü as a kind of “gender” has the advantage of assimilating He-Yin Zhen’s work into the discourse of late-twentieth-century feminism familiar to Anglophone readers. By the same token, it could ensnare us in conceptual traps. Translating nannü literally word for word—nan for “man” and nü for “woman”—into two or several English words, “man and woman” or “male/female,” is just as unsatisfactory because the literal translation could contradict He-Yin Zhen’s theoretical project, which takes nannü as a single conceptual mechanism, used as both noun and adjective, that lies at the foundation of all patriarchal abstractions and markings of distinction. These abstractions and markings apply to both men and women but are by no means limited to socially defined men and women. In the end, we decided to leave nannü untranslated in some situations, whereas in others we allowed it a full range of semantic mobility when contextually appropriate—“gender,” “man and woman,” and “male/female.” This decision was based on our understanding that the issue here was not so much about the existence or nonexistence of verbal equivalents as it was about the translingual precariousness of analytical categories as they pass or fail to pass through different languages and their conceptual grids. [...]

For this reason, we believe that the historical valences of “gender” as an analytical category in contemporary feminist theory should itself be reevaluated in this comparative light. Joan W. Scott has observed in her classic essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” that “gender” was not part of the social theories in Europe in the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The earlier social theories had drawn on the male and female opposition to build their logic or to discuss the “woman question” or sexual identities, but “gender as a way of talking about systems of social or sexual relations did not appear.”13 When it did appear in the late twentieth century, feminists found the category tremendously useful—albeit fraught with ambiguities and contradictions—for analyzing “social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” and examining gender as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Scott 1067).

Gender historians, in particular, have allowed the category of “gender” to range across cultural and linguistic divides and across historical time. “Gender” is extended to the study of a historical past in which the category itself is missing while the epistemological distance between the subject and object of analysis is guaranteed. This cannot but pose a series of intellectual as well as political challenges to feminist theorists. Should a category that purports to analyze history remain itself ahistorical? Does its historicity from the time of Latin grammar belong only to our world and not theirs, i.e., the world of the past and that of the foreign? Why are we anxious about maintaining the distance between the subject and the object of knowledge, a distance that feminists have long identified as a patriarchal prerogative that defines the modern subject? He-Yin Zhen’s concept of nannü is helpful in suggesting ways out of these binds.

Nannü: Beyond the Sex-Gender Problematic

In “On the Question of Women’s Liberation” (1907), He-Yin posits that men have created “political and moral institutions, the first priority of which was to separate man from woman (nannü). For they considered the differentiation between man and woman (nannü youbie) to be one of the major principles in heaven and on earth.”14 This use of nannü performs a kind of analysis that the category of gender also does, but it does more. For nannü is simultaneously an object of analysis and an analytical category, which confounds the need for “distinguishing between our analytic vocabulary and the material we want to analyze.”15 Like all other terms of the vocabulary we inherit from the past, the concept of nannü is a historical elaboration and a normative distinction internal to patriarchal discourse itself. He-Yin Zhen identifies this concept as central to and ubiquitous in Chinese patriarchal discourse over the past millennia and treats it as a highly developed philosophical and moral category that has legitimated men’s oppression of women.

What, then, can we learn from He-Yin Zhen’s approach to the category of nannü? Inasmuch as nannü is a well-established concept in Chinese philosophical discourse, He-Yin Zhen’s method is to turn it inside out and against itself, making the term bear the burden and evidence of its own patriarchal work. Her critique demonstrates that the normative function of nannü is not only to create “gendered” identities (which it also does) but also to introduce primary distinctions through socioeconomic abstraction articulated to metaphysical abstractions, such as the external and the internal, or to such cosmic abstractions as yang and yin. He-Yin Zhen sees nannü as a mechanism of distinction or marking that has evolved over time, capable of spawning new differences and new social hierarchies across the boundaries of class, age, ethnicity, race, and so on. This is in part why, at the end of her “Feminist Manifesto” (1907), He-Yin argues that “by ‘men’ (nanxing) and ‘women’ (nüxing), we are not speaking of ‘nature,’ but the outcome of differing social customs and education. If sons and daughters are treated equally, raised and educated in the same manner, then the responsibilities assumed by men and women will surely become equal. When that happens, the nouns nanxing and nüxing would no longer be necessary.”16 Here, she clearly calls for the end of philosophical dualism and its naming practice, for that practice, she observes, is neither neutral nor innocent but, rather, creates and spawns insidious social hierarchies that make a claim to social truth and historical reality.[...]

Now, what does it mean for her, as well as for us today, to push the nannü distinction, rather than “gender” or “sexual difference,” as a fundamental analytic rubric for feminist theory? He-Yin Zhen insists that feminists must take nan and nü together as a single conceptual dividing mechanism rather than focusing on “nü-woman” or on “difference” per se. The notion of nü cannot possibly be captured outside of the originary structural distinctions introduced by the binary opposition of nannü, which produces both nan and nü as meaningful concepts and social categories. From a structural viewpoint, woman is the problem of man. The articulation of nannü, therefore, is not so much about biological or social differences, which can never be settled, as it is about reiterating a distinction that produces historically a political demand for social hierarchy. On this view, we can see that when Jin Tianhe issued his manifesto for women’s rights and spoke about women’s equality, he did not question the nannü category and he failed to see the nan side of the nannü distinction as operational and central to the philosophical and ideological production and reproduction of social domination. By contrast, He-Yin Zhen’s questioning of this category enabled her to identify the sources of that domination and trace the conditions of women’s oppression to the category of distinction itself. In this sense, the solution to nannü is not for “woman” to become “man,” nor for “man” to be the standard against which “woman” and social justice are measured; rather, the solution is the elimination of this category of distinction as a metaphysical-political principle.

In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler does something very interesting to the idea of “sexual difference,” which parallels what He-Yin Zhen did nearly a hundred years before to the operational power of nannü. Butler writes: “Understood as a border concept, sexual difference has psychic, somatic, and social dimensions that are never quite collapsible into one another but are not for that reason ultimately distinct… . Is it, therefore, not a thing, not a fact, not a presupposition, but rather a demand for rearticulation that never quite vanishes—but also never quite appears?… What does this way of thinking sexual difference do to our understanding of gender?” (Emphasis added.)28 We must press Butler’s questions further by asking, What can the thinking of nannü do to our understanding of “sexual difference” as well as “gender”? Does it have something to do with “a demand for rearticulation that never quite vanishes—but also never quite appears?”

The answer lies in He-Yin Zhen’s understanding of nannü, which, as we have seen, is not about the positive or negative marking of gendered identities but about something more totalizing and foundational. To summarize her main argument: First, the nannü category—as elaborated and reinvented by philosophers and scholars in the millennia-long discursive traditions of China—was the foundational material and metaphysical mechanism of power in the organization of social and political life in China. The prestige of that category was reinforced by the Confucian philological exegesis of classical scholarship and by the imperial patriarchal system supported by its ideology. This argument is made in the most concentrated fashion in her long essay “On the Revenge of Women,” whose incantatory style will surely strike readers, as it struck us, with its comprehensive erudition and scholarly reach.

Second, as an operational category of distinction, nannü is first and foremost political because its function is not only to generate social identities but also to create forms of power and domination based on that distinction. Such domination is reiterated through lived social life by maintaining the divisions of the inner (domestic) and outer (public) in terms of how labor, affect, and the value of human life should be organized. As He-Yin Zhen argues repeatedly, the Chinese written character for “slave” (nu 奴) is inflected by the stem-radical nü 女, suggesting that the body is nannü’ed and thus “enslaved” in a political-material discursive prison even before it is “sexed.” This argument is clearly made in her essay “On the Question of Women’s Liberation.”

Finally, armed with that insight, she moves on to discern new forms of distinction, discrimination, and domination that have emerged in the capitalist reorganization of life and labor. Her essays “On the Question of Women’s Labor” and “Economic Revolution and Women’s Revolution” rehearse this argument in full. There, she observes a rearticulation and reiteration of the nannü distinction in the modernizing societies of Europe, America, and Japan, which becomes the basis for her vigorous rejection of the liberal argument on behalf of women’s suffrage. He-Yin Zhen is thus a feminist theorist in the most fundamental sense of the word.

[grouchomarxiste-blog1]

Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite: Marx and Violence

Warning: A majority of this was written pre-pandemic, so please excuse my overly optimistic tone. It was a different time.

Yes, another Bong Joon-Ho film. Can you blame me? The guy’s a genius. Parasite was another one of those great films that will never leave you. You can watch the movie simply without doing a major analysis in your head and you will still agree that it’s a great movie. Which personally, is why I believe it's made its way into the major American awards season. Parasite winning Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes was one of the few decisions I’ve agreed with. I didn’t see any of the winners in the film categories besides Parasite, and I’m very much ok with that. It’s making its way into Hollywood and the favorite lists of celebrities. Elon Musk said he loved Parasite (he also turned Grimes, the former “anti-imperialist,” to the mother of his future child). Chrissy Teigen loved Parasite (a lot can be said about her, so let’s not). Obama loved Parasite (but I have some serious doubts about the authenticity of his yearly favorites list. Mainly because I can’t imagine him listening to Summer Walker). I was completely boggled at all of those tweets. How? How is one so blind? How did one watch Parasite and not feel a thing? After I watched Parasite, I rushed back to school to attend the discussion section of my Political Theory class so I could read and discuss primitive accumulation through dispossession with revolutionary fervor. I recommended it to everyone near me. I even wrote a note to my professor who tucked it into his book. But is that the problem- that all these beloved figures (not mine) end up loving the sheer adrenaline of the story and tweet to their followers about how great the movie is. Those followers, with their favorite celebrities’ seal of approval, watch the movie, not putting it together either. Bong Joon-Ho is critiquing those very figures! In every post-Parasite interview, Bong Joon-Ho has said that Parasite is about America and capitalism, but we have just reduced those statements to memes on Twitter. As funny as they are, Parasite is rich for its class analysis. The Hollywood reaction is just as important. Marx is all over this movie, there's no question about it. I also want us to understand these controversial moments from a Fanonian perspective, again all with relation to Marx. I hope for us to understand that everything about this movie is intentional and every bit of it is worth pages and pages of discussion. I nearing 11 pages as I write this. I also hope that this film can be a way for us to understand economic exploitation in the 21st century. While many celebrities have misunderstood it, it is important that you, us, the people, the working class, grasp every bit of this radical film.

I’m not going to bother with another one of my “brief summary” because I’m assuming, we’ve all seen it. It's on Hulu now and I believe Apple TV. If you don’t want to pay for either platforms, watch a pirated version online, I genuinely don’t think Bong will mind.

I want to talk about the home. I know we all had the same reaction to that beautiful home: awe, admiration, and envy. The Park’s home itself is significant, but also in contrast to the Kims’ home. The Kim’s live in a small semi-basement home, where they have to reach up in order to look out their window and see the street level. Their home is dirty, cramped, just not a place where anyone wants to be. But immediately, I thought of Fanon and the native sector. I know that Parasite isn’t about colonialism, but space is important to Marx (I’ll return to Fanon). In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels attribute many things to the process of proletarianization. To name a few: literacy campaigns and public education, the politicization of the proletariat towards the end of feudalism, expansion of media, etc. One that stands out, is the mass migration and urbanization of the proletariat. Through that, the proletariat was concentrated into the poorest parts of the city where they shared their most intimate quarters with workers like themselves (Marx and Engels, 15) One might dismiss this as a historical example specific to Europe, but if we go back to my thoughts on Memories of Murder, we’d note how Korea’s transition to a modern capitalist society, was a fairly recent one (from 1987 onwards). As the agricultural sector suffered, Koreans living in the rural provinces were forced to move into the major cities. Park (Song Kang-Ho’s character in Memories) was lucky enough to become a successful businessman, unlike the Kims who earn their livelihood by holding pizza boxes- the most insignificant work. Along with urbanization, the proletariat also occupied the small space of the factory, where they are reminded of the everyday brutality of their work. The Park’s home is not cramped, but the one scene where everyone is rushing to hide from them, results in Ki-taek, Ki-jeong, and Ki-woo hiding underneath a coffee table overnight. After that lengthy battle with Geun-sae and Moon-gwang, the Kims are exhausted. They do not want to be laying side by side hearing the Parks have sex. My friend Sef also reminded me that the Parks had weird sex as Mr. Park recalled how their old chauffeur possibly had sex with a drugged-up prostitute, a scenario that previously made Mrs. Park scream out of disgust. Revisiting this, I believe this definitely deserves a psychoanalytic analysis.

This isn’t their breaking point, but also hearing Mr. Park say that Ki-taek smells like the subway is a factor. Once making their break they run outside where it's raining heavily. They come to their home which is flooded and destroyed. Here is where I’ll start talking about Fanon. [READ NOTE]. Again, I know the colonial system is not the case in Parasite. Fanon was a Marxist and expanded on Marxist theory in the colonial context. I just want to warn you that I am using Fanon as carefully as possible, not using concepts that are distinctly racial. I know there’s probably also much more relevant work out there on spatiality and violence, but I think Fanon’s prose style in The Wretched of the Earthis quite appropriate for the film. Let’s consider the colonial bourgeoisie as the Parks and the natives as the Kims. Fanon calls the colonial world, a “compartmentalized world.” The colonists’ sector is clean and protected whereas the native sector is overcrowded, envious, and starving. Sounds about right so far.

The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The colonizer’s feet can never be glimpsed, except perhaps in the sea, but then again you can never get close enough. They are protected by solid shoes in a sector where the streets are clean and smooth., without a pothole, without a stone… The colonized’s sector or at least the “native” quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place, inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of each other. (Fanon, 4)

This becomes extremely relevant when the Kims run out of the Parks’ home in the pouring rain. I kept noticing that they were all barefoot, only focused on getting out of there. My toes curled in the movie theater watching that. Running away from that traumatic house to find your own home destroyed, relocating to a displacement camp, THEN going to work the next day for your unaffected employer who has the audacity to audibly take a sniff of you. I don't know about you, but to me, this sounds like the conditions for a proletarian revolution. Besides the literal allegory, the tone sharply shifts. One could argue that it began to change when they found Geun-sae in the bunker or when Moon-gwang hit her head but that was just some good old dark comedy for me. After the flooding, things are different. Ki-taek has this unmoving face. Things turned grim and we knew something climactic was about to happen. Fanon’s most famous chapter, “Concerning Violence,” maintains that decolonization will always be a violent event because colonialism is a violent system itself. Something that I absolutely love about this chapter is that it isn’t some dense, theoretical work. It’s a revolutionary call to arms for all colonized people. It has a strategic pace which parallels Parasite so well. He sets the scene- the compartmentalized, Manichaen world. He slowly intensifies the antagonistic relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, until this culminating point:

The colonized subject thus discovers that his life, his breathing and his heartbeat are the same as the colonist’s. He discovers that the skin of the colonist is not worth more than the “natives.” In other words, his world receives a fundamental jolt. The colonized’s revolutionary new assurance stems from this. If no longer strike fear into me or nail me to the spot and his voice can no longer petrify me. I am no longer uneasy in his presence. In reality, to hell with him. Not only does his presence no longer bother me, but i am already preparing to waylay him in such a way that he will no longer have any solution but to flee (Fanon, 10)

As corny as it sounds, when I first read that, it brought me to tears. I’m not sure if it was just because I was up for three days straight writing my midterm and I was finally breaking, or because it just meant that much to me. But that section in which the colonized discoversthat his life is worth as much as the colonizer is such a crucial moment. This parallels the infamous birthday scene. Geun-sae gets out of the bunker, stabs Ki-jung, the Park’s kid (I’ll look his name up later) has a seizure, and Chong-sook is wrestling with Geun-sae. Shit is going down. If we recall, Mrs. Park mentioned that it takes a few minutes for her son to die after a seizure and needs to go to the hospital immediately. So much is going on and Mr. Park starts screaming at Ki-taek to give him the keys. Ki-taek is immobilized at this point. His daughter has been stabbed, son attacked, wife almost killed, the Parks’ got him dressed up in some cultural appropriation, Hollywood Indian regalia. In fact, I find it very fitting that he’s dressed up as a Native American at this moment. I see this as Bong’s satirical nod to old ultra-capitalist Hollywood. But if enough wasn't going on, Mr. Park sniffed. He got close to Geun-sae, a man who’s been living underground for 3 years and audibly sniffed him in disgust. The same way that he sniffed Ki-taek. Of course, there’s probably a difference between a “subway” smell vs. “I haven't showered in 3 years” smell but at the moment it feels as if it's almost the same thing. In my initial viewing, I thought what happened next was because of that, but no. Ki-taek realized that his life was worth the same as the Parks, and their presence no longer bothers him, but he is now plotting against him, and the time of action is now. Ki-taek stabs Mr. Park and flees. Annoyingly, the YouTube section for this clip is filled with people feeling bad for the Parks and discussing how what Ki-taek did was wrong. Of course, the average viewer will view the Parks as some sympathetic rich suckers who only treated the Kims kindly. The casual reader who picks up Fanon for the first time would also dismiss his theory of violence as immoral in comparison to non-violent methods like Gandhi’s. A lot can be said about Gandhi, but Fanon says that non-violence is a strategy created by the colonizer to deter decolonization and paint the colonizer as a gentle ruler who wants peace. This is not the case. Colonialism is a violent system. Capitalism is a violent system. Colonialism can only be undone violently. Capitalism can only be undone violently. Now I don't mean to make this all about colonialism, as my friends say I often do. But the similarities are clear. The question isn’t whether the murder of Mr. Park was a justified act, but what were the conditions that forced Ki-taek to murder. Geun-sae killed Ki-jung, but no one in the comment section is having a debate on whether his murder was ethical. Because in our heads we feel bad for him, and the life that he’s lived- why don’t we feel the same towards Ki-taek? Geun-sae and Ki-taek are two sides of the same coin. Geun-sae’s exploitation is naked. He’s confined to the basement, controlling the lights of the home. A feature of the house that Mr. Park doesn't even pay attention to, never mind considering that there is someone manually operating it. A clear example of how our labor is alienated. All while blindly worshipping Mr. Park- a man who knows nothing of his existence. Honestly, I hope some of you see yourselves in Geun-sae the next time you defend billionaires online. But Ki-taek is just another exploited worker. I understand this can be hard to understand in our current understanding of the world. How is Ki-taek exploited? Him and his family conned their way into their jobs and leech off of the Parks. Again, we must return to the system as a whole to understand. None of this wouldn’t have happened if the Kims weren’t desperately poor in a capitalist society, which enables families like the Parks, to live a life of excess at the expense of the Kims. Capitalism is a system of exploitation; we cannot forget that. Quite simply, no one is rich without thousands that are poor.

          The levels of the home are also this unforgettable feature. I just want to make this quick note about the issue of the ghost. Did you forget about the ghost? Da-Song didn’t (yes, I finally looked his name up!). I find the story of the ghost such an interesting touch. Not just as a way for Bong to warn the audience about Da-Song’s history of seizures. When Mrs. Park tells Chung-sook of the story, she says “they say a ghost in the house brings wealth.” This, of course, is true since the exploitation of those like Geun-sae are responsible for the wealth of the Parks, in the larger picture. I’d like to look further into this. There's a twofold meaning to this. I do believe that this ghost is symbolic to the exploitation of the Kims, and the proletariat in general, but that’s Mrs. Park’s understanding of this ghost. The way she understands this ghost, is as a source of wealth. Maybe Mrs. Park isn’t as ditzy as we imagine- she to some degree, understands her class position. But like most, she doesn’t question the ghost, or her class position. She knows that if she looks into either, it would result in the ugly truth. Da-Song, however, is just a child. He’s too young to really understand the economic and social relations which are responsible for his wealth. He’s also too young to consciously suppress any desire to investigate the matter like his mother. He is a child after all and is naturally curious. But his first encounter with the ghost was the one that resulted in a near fatal seizure. This can be his body’s reaction to the life-threatening figure of a ghost. The ghost isn’t just a threat to his mortal life, but his wealth, some may argue that these are the same. Mrs. Park pays for therapy for his “trauma” so he could forget the event, but he still knows. He saw this ghost and is the only one to seriously consider its threat. Mrs. Park knows it's real but chooses to not think about it. I want to return to the Manifesto. Let's hear these famous words: “A specter is haunting Europe- the specter of communism… Two things result from this fact: Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers itself to be a power...” (Marx and Engels, 8). Don’t think I’m just including this because he’s talking about a specter, in fact, I think this story of the ghost is an intentional allusion to the specter of communism. Da-Song represents this figure of the bourgeoisie who is in constant anxiety over the threat of his wealth. When he reappears at his birthday party, he has another seizure. Also, at this time, the family, and all of their guests are witness to the horrors of their wealth and what it's created. This naked, hideous display, this moment of confrontation is a pivotal point in the dialectic. Of course, this murderous moment is not seen as a success to the viewer with Mr. Park, Ki-jung, and Geun-sae dead, Ki-woo presumed to be dead, and Ki-taek missing. This just shows us that the bourgeoisie are their own gravediggers- to again invoke the Manifesto. On a larger scale, this would be the moment of a revolution- but we don’t. Ki-woo survives with Chung-sook and is put on probation. Ki-taek is missing to the police, but Ki-taek realizes that he’s living in the bunker in hiding. Ki-woo declares that he will make enough money to buy the home and free his father. At first, I wondered “why couldn't he just sneak him out of the house when the new owners were asleep?” “Why did he have to buy the home?” As much as I wanted to portray the Kims to be revolutionary figures, Ki-woo has the common fate of most. Instead of usurping power from the bourgeoisie, he believes he can free his dad from the home, by owning the house. Everyone who lives in the basement is stuck there for a reason, because someone is forcing them to stay there. A perfect allegory for the relations of production as I have repeatedly mentioned throughout this text. Ki-woo desires a bourgeois life (as most working-class folk do!) in order to lift his father out of the despair of poverty. He believes the only way he can save his father is to own the home, which could easily be seen as the means of production. A nice touch which I had to look up, was as Ki-woo tells us of his desire to buy the home, a song plays called “546 years”- the amount of time it will take for him to earn enough money. I wish this song title was more obvious for the American viewer. I am not trying to take away from this film by saying that, but for a viewer who knows Korean or the song title, they’ll understand the tragic nature of his dreams. Whereas the American viewers will sympathize with his dreams- as we’ve done with immigrants and “the American Dream” or the bootstrapping mentality of some people. In some way I do think Bong didn’t want an overtly revolutionary ending. I don’t think the average viewer, especially in this day, could handle an ending like that. Not to say that we don't understand class inequality and such. We are not living in, say the 60s/70s where there were Marxist movements all throughout the world. I don’t think we have the conditions for a revolution at this moment, although I do think the mass unemployment and the other severe economic consequences of this virus will radicalize the working class in large numbers, to a degree that we haven't seen in a long time. But to make my point, I feel that we are living in historic political times and we are coming to understand ourselves in a liberating way.  It is my hope that films like Parasite will awaken the revolutionary potential in us all.

Note: I wanted to use Fanon’s theory of violence and diagnosis of colonialism as a violent structure, in relation to capitalist society. I don’t want us to interpret his writings as something that can be isolated from the racial structure of colonialism, but i do think it is a beneficial guide to understanding this film.

Work Cited:

Philcox, Richard, translator. “On Violence.” The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Grove Press, 2004.

Joon-Ho, Bong, director. Parasite. Barunson E&A, 2019.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. International Publishers, 1948.

[dist-the-rose]

Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation1 Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only. In Western Europe, the home of Political Economy, the process of primitive accumulation is more of less accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly conquered the whole domain of national production, or, where economic conditions are less developed, it, at least, indirectly controls those strata of society which, though belonging to the antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay. To this ready-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property inherited from a pre-capitalistic world with all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction, the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology. It is otherwise in the colonies. There the capitalist regime everywhere comes into collision with the resistance of the producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself, instead of the capitalist. The contradiction of these two diametrically opposed economic systems, manifest itself here practically in a struggle between them. Where the capitalist has at his back the power of the mother-country, he tries to clear out of his way by force the modes of production and appropriation based on the independent labour of the producer. The same interest, which compels the sycophant of capital, the political economist, in the mother-country, to proclaim the theoretical identity of the capitalist mode of production with its contrary, that same interest compels him in the colonies to make a clean breast of it, and to proclaim aloud the antagonism of the two modes of production. To this end, he proves how the development of the social productive power of labour, co-operation, division of labour, use of machinery on a large scale, &c., are impossible without the expropriation of the labourers, and the corresponding transformation of their means of production into capital. In the interest of the so-called national wealth, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people. Here his apologetic armor crumbles off, bit by bit, like rotten touchwood. It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies2 , but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its origin3 attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s colonization theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonization.” First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative – the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.4 Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.”5 Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River! For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield, two preliminary remarks: We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the 386 Chapter XXXIII immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer. But this capitalist soul of theirs is so intimately wedded, in the head of the political economist, to their material substance, that he christens them capital under all circumstances, even when they are its exact opposite. Thus is it with Wakefield. Further: the splitting up of the means of production into the individual property of many independent labourers, working on their own account, he calls equal division of capital. It is with the political economist as with the feudal jurist. The latter stuck on to pure monetary relations the labels supplied by feudal law. “If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire.” 6 So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself – and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production – capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting. How, then, in old Europe, was the expropriation of the labourer from his conditions of labour, i.e., the co-existence of capital and wage labour, brought about? By a social contract of a quite original kind. “Mankind have adopted a... simple contrivance for promoting the accumulation of capital,” which, of course, since the time of Adam, floated in their imagination, floated in their imagination as the sole and final end of their existence: “they have divided themselves into owners of capital and owners of labour.... The division was the result of concert and combination.”7 In one word: the mass of mankind expropriated itself in honour of the “accumulation of capital.” Now, one would think that this instinct of self-denying fanaticism would give itself full fling especially in the Colonies, where alone exist the men and conditions that could turn a social contract from a dream to a reality. But why, then, should “systematic colonization” be called in to replace its opposite, spontaneous, unregulated colonization? But - but - “In the Northern States of the American Union; it may be doubted whether so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the description of hired labourers.... In England... the labouring class compose the bulk of the people.”8 Nay, the impulse to self-expropriation on the part of labouring humanity for the glory of capital, exists so little that slavery, according to Wakefield himself, is the sole natural basis of Colonial wealth. His systematic colonization is a mere pis aller, since he unfortunately has to do with free men, not with slaves. “The first Spanish settlers in Saint Domingo did not obtain labourers from Spain. But, without labourers, their capital must have perished, or at least, must soon have been diminished to that small amount which each individual could employ with his own hands. This has actually occurred in the last Colony founded by England – the Swan River Settlement – where a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements, and cattle, has perished for want of labourers to use it, and where no settler has preserved much more capital than he can employ with his own hands.” 9 We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this – that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.10 This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice – opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.”11 As in the colonies the separation of the labourer from the conditions of labour and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, nor the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. 387 Chapter XXXIII Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labour in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.”12 With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists? The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this – that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-worker as wage-worker, but produces always, in production to the accumulation of capital, a relative surplus-population of wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that indispensable requisite, is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence, which the smug political economist, at home, in the mother-country, can transmogrify into one of free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of commodities, the owner of the commodity capital and the owner of the commodity labour. But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mothercountry, because many labourers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labour-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labour falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage labourer as wage labourer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage labourers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labour-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage labourer remain indecently low. The wage labourer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage labour, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labour is always not only small but uncertain.”13 “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the labourer be large, the labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.”14 The labourers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labour. It avails him nothing, if he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be labourers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour-market.”15 Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers – for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.... In ancient civilized countries the labourer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.”16 What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of producers and national wealth. 17 The parcelling-out of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own account, annihilates, along with the centralization of capital, all the foundation of combined 388 Chapter XXXIII labour. Every long-winded undertaking, extending over several years and demanding outlay of fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a moment, for the working class constitutes its living appurtenance, always in excess, always at disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells and extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes stagnant and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” labourers. “Our capital,” says one of the characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labour which, we knew, would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retaining the labour of such emigrants, we should have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it, even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it.”18 After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its “combined” labour with the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising, and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural labourer is miserable wretch, a pauper.... In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labour employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the labourer? ... Undoubtedly , farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.” 19 But, never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people. How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also – the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant.20 The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labour by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage labour market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic colonization.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of labour must be constant and regular, because, first, as no labourer would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant labourers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce capital for the employment of more labourers; secondly, because every labourer who left off working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for bringing fresh labour to the colony.” 21The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient price” – i.e., so high “as to prevent the labourers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.”22 This “sufficient price for the land” is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the labourer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage labour market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist “capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more labourers; then he must place, at his own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labour market, whom the Government forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist. It is very characteristic that the English Government for years practised this method of “primitive accumulation” prescribed by Mr. Wakefield expressly for the use of the colonies. The fiasco was, of course, as complete as that of Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act. The stream of emigration was only diverted from the English colonies to the Untied States. Meanwhile, the advance of capitalistic production in Europe, accompanied by increasing Government pressure, has rendered Wakefield’s recipe superfluous. On the one hand, the enormous and ceaseless stream of men, 389 Chapter XXXIII year after year driven upon America, leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United States, the wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labour-market there more rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away. On the other hand, the American Civil War brought in its train a colossal national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, &c., in brief, the most rapid centralization of capital. The great republic has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for emigrant labourers. Capitalistic production advances there with giant strides, even though the lowering of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought down to the normal European level. The shameless lavishing of uncultivated colonial land on aristocrats and capitalists by the Government, so loudly denounced even by Wakefield, has produced, especially in Australia23 , in conjunction with the stream of men that the gold diggings attract, and with the competition that the importation of English-commodities causes even to the smallest artisan, an ample “relative surplus labouring population,” so that almost every mail brings the Job’s news of a “glut of the Australia labour-market,” and the prostitution in some places flourishes as wantonly as in the London Haymarket. However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of selfearned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer. End of Book I

[antoine-roquentin]

Media speculation over military intervention in Venezuela grew after Duque’s election in June 2018 and intensified following Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil in October. Venezuela’s two largest neighbours are both now run by neoliberal rightwing administrations bitterly hostile to chavismo. They in effect ensnare Venezuela in a pincer: Colombia from the west and Brazil from the south.

Besides opposition to the peace agreement, Duque’s election campaign was notable for vilifying Venezuela, exploiting the neighbour’s economic struggles to attack Duque’s progressive opponent, Gustavo Petro. In 2016, Duque’s party, the Democratic Centre, orchestrated the successful ‘no’ vote in the peace plebiscite, which partly explains his willingness to risk the agreement’s future to pursue Maduro’s overthrow.

Three days before Duque’s inauguration, Maduro survived an assassination attempt when a drone exploded above a speech he was giving in Caracas. Maduro blamed the Colombian government. With tensions heightening, Duque cast himself as a moderate compared to the hardline former president Uribe, Duque’s mentor, who many Colombians suspect is the true power behind the throne.

Since then, increased US pressure on Venezuela appears to have signalled a shift. Furthermore, on 17 January, a car bomb attack on a police academy in Bogotá killed twenty-one cadets. The National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s last guerrilla insurgency, subsequently claimed responsibility. Large demonstrations against ‘terrorism’ were held in Colombian cities and attended by Duque and other high-profile politicians. Many demonstrators demanded a tough response to the ELN. Colombian media accused Maduro of harbouring the group. The Colombian right was on the warpath, and it came just days before Guaidó’s self-proclamation in Venezuela. Sectors of Duque’s uribista political base now sense a monumental opportunity: to overthrow chavismo, crush the ELN and end the hated FARC peace deal.

In November 2016, the Juan Manuel Santos government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed an agreement to end over half a century of internal conflict. The agreement focuses not only on ending violence, but also tackling historic socio-political conditions that generated guerrilla insurgency. Unfortunately, the agreement has suffered from slow or non-implementation in important areas. In a recent report, the United Nations found that ‘peace faces serious obstacles to its consolidation,’ particularly around polarisation, reincorporation and legal challenges.

Most alarming is the chronic human rights insecurity across much of the country. Up to five hundred social activists and human rights defenders have been murdered since the agreement was signed. Impunity surrounds most cases. Even when the material killers are caught, the intellectual authors are rarely identified.

Violence is particularly concentrated in regions historically affected by poverty, underdevelopment, and conflict. Following the FARC’s withdrawal and reformation as a political party, armed groups have sought to fill resulting power vacuums. This has brought confrontation with communities resistant to illicit activities such as coca production, illegal mining and extortion. In 2018, coca production and forced displacement — both of which theoretically should be in decline — soared as armed groups made their presence felt.

This instability could escalate and spread if war breaks out in Venezuela. Under the shadow of conflict, familiar patterns of violence could target leftist political groups, substituting the old tag of ‘guerrilla sympathiser’ for ‘Maduro sympathiser.’ Long-established clientelist relations between elites and paramilitary groups could exploit conflict with Venezuela to consolidate ruling-class interests, targeting trade unionists, community leaders, and environmental defenders who would be labelled supporters of Maduro. ‘Stigmatisation against anyone who is associated with the Left will increase, and that will have a very negative impact,’ says Andrei Gómez-Suárez, a Colombian political analyst and author.

Colombia’s oil-producing border zones with Venezuela are wracked by instability. Regions such as Catatumbo and Arauca have high coca yields and are lucrative for whoever controls them. Strategically, the border location makes it easy to evade security forces and shift contraband. Historic state neglect compounds the difficult social conditions.

“Since President Duque’s arrival, we’ve seen an intensification in military force,” says Jhunior Maldonado of the Catatumbo Peasant Farmers Association, a regional human rights organisation that had five of its members murdered last year. ‘We’ve seen troop and tank mobilisations. The armed forces say its territorial control, or border exercises. But these movements are not normally seen on the border.’

Recently, new conflicts have emerged, involving a plethora of armed actors besides the army. These include right-wing paramilitary groups, so-called ‘FARC dissident groups’ that have not subscribed to the peace process and the ELN. Some are fighting each other, others against the state: mainly it’s a combination of both. Each would be inexorably sucked into conflict between Colombia and Venezuela and could help advance larger objectives free from the restrictive standards of international conduct.

This could produce a Syria-style situation in which right-wing paramilitaries are cast as ‘rebels’ and given US backing. Although officially demobilised in 2006, remnants of these groups remain active. In November, Colombian paramilitaries attacked an army base in Amazonas, southern Venezuela, killing three soldiers. A paramilitary campaign in Venezuela would occupy security forces, target chavismo’s popular base and spread terror and chaos. Experience of US-backed interventionist tactics elsewhere, from Central America to the Middle East, suggests these groups would not lack material and financial support.

However, groups that oppose the Colombian state may also sense an opportunity and ramp up their own military actions. Stretched Colombian security forces, already at war, would likely resort to serious attacks on human rights attempting to quell internal instability. Civil society would bear the brunt, especially in border zones.

Border communities often cross daily between countries for work. ‘In the case of [the Colombian border city] Cucutá, there is over 70 per cent unemployment or informal employment. State abandonment means many people depend economically on Venezuela,’ says Jhunior Maldonado. Closing the border, and restricting this vital economic lifeline, would cause social conditions to deteriorate further. Consequently, illegal economies could surge, enriching armed groups and providing them with a large recruitment pool.

Venezuelan migration into Colombia has played into hawkish hands. Stoked by media xenophobia, and with many Colombians already suffering from dire economic conditions, migrants are often unwelcome, viewed as an unsustainable burden.

Yet there is less focus on the millions of Colombians living in Venezuela, many of whom fled there during the armed conflict. With so many of either country’s citizens in the respective other, what would an outbreak of war mean? Would all these people be forced to abandon lives they have built, in some cases, over decades? Would they be expelled, or worse? Would they remain passive as the state where they reside threatened their homes and families? The potential blowback — social unrest and state repression driven by media hysteria over fifth columns — could engulf urban areas.

With Colombia’s security apparatus and economy inextricably beholden to US influence, the country is highly susceptible to Washington’s directives. That Colombia potentially would be a willing agent in its own catastrophe encapsulates the right-wing authoritarian model that uribismo, enabled by massive US military backing, has sought to impose on the country. Under the Right, Colombia’s conflict was lucrative for multinationals and domestic elites: indeed, a new war could further deepen capitalist enrichment and regenerate old accumulative practices of massacre, forced displacement, and forced disappearance.

While deadlock in Venezuela persists, the hawks will push ever harder for full invasion. The inferno of war in Venezuela would consume Colombia in its flames. With the future of both countries at stake, voices of reason must prevail.

[fatehbaz]

Wait, what's the anthropomorphism debate? If you'd prefer not to answer dw! I can look more into it online

Apologies in advance for this long post! I’m not all that great with ontology and theory, so take what I say here with a grain of salt; I am not “an authority.” I’m going to hijack the ask to summarize “the ontological turn in anthropology.”

So: the ontological turn in anthropology from 2008-2012, and the debate about anthropomorphism

I’m sorry that I did not answer this sooner. I’m also sorry that this is going to be a very long post. You might know all this stuff already, so please feel free to disregard all this text! A recap for viewers who missed the previous episode:

This question was - I’m assuming - in response to me being a silly-billy and making a meme of a distressed, sweaty person awaking from a nightmare, to illustrate the anxiety that confronted me when I noticed that there has been some recent Tumblr discourse replicating the heated academic anthropology debate about anthropomorphism from around 2008-2012. I was at relatively progressive university, focused on ethnoecology at the time (a field of anthropology right at the heart of the discourse), so I was forced to participate!

Basically, the 2008-2012-ish period saw the relative “mainstreaming” of a movement to “decolonize anthropology and conservation/ecology” and uplift Indigenous/non-Western worldviews as an alternative to Western views of the natural world, and this movement was basically referred to as “the ontological turn in anthropology.” It sought to acknowledge that Indigenous cosmologies were legitimate - as in, Indigenous/traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is very sophisticated, and therefore the cosmologies that maintained this knowledge ought to be given more credit. A major, if not the central, issue in this dialogue was how to prevent “intellectual colonization” by respecting the utility/validity of specific Indigenous worldviews like Buen Vivir, animism, totemism, etc. Thus, one of the most frequent and intense focal points of discussion and argument was “anthropomorphism” and animal emotion. Technical scientists were still uncomfortable accepting the environmental knowledge of non-Western cultures that believed in things similar to literal animism. The discourse was also deeply concerned with “the Anthropocene” and the climate/ecological crisis, and sought to uplift Indigenous relationships with ecology as examples of alternatives to capitalist resource extraction economies.

At the time, I fried my brain out while reading hot-take after hot-take about anthropomorphism - but I’m not all that great with ontology and theory, so this subject might not be as overwhelming to other readers!

The discourse was extensive; and some Tumblr discourse I’ve seen lately seems to be asking similar questions that the 2008-2012 discourse also grappled with.

Many Latin American scholars - and Indigenous people - had been actively writing about Indigenous cosmology’s importance to anthropology/ecology/conservation for decades but especially since at least the late 1980s and early 1990s (especially Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, an anthropologist working in Latin America and since dubbed the leading scholar of “Amazonianist” thinking promoting the knowledge of Andean/Amazonian peoples). However, this movement begun to be taken much more seriously in American academia around 2008-2010, led by the influential writing of ecology-adjacent anthropologists and theorists like Bruno Latour, Phillipe Descola, and Isabelle Stengers.

This discourse and its mainstreaming coincided with the rise of “object-oriented ontology” (OOO) - headed by Graham Harman, who was given more attention partially because of the rising popularity of his friend Mark Fisher, at this time. OOO played a major part in some of these discussions, since it basically (don’t quote me on this) allows for statements like “all other living things - and perhaps non-living things, but that’s more complicated - probably experience some strange alien form of subjectivity, and are therefore are potentially sentient at their own scale depending on how you want to define sentience.” Timothy Morton (who coined the term “dark ecology” - after which my blog was named) is/was a close colleague of Graham Harman’s. Morton sort of “bridged the gap” between the anthropology/ecology enthusiasts and the more space-y OOO theoretical stuff.

-

Anthropomorphism?

A sort of conclusion to this discourse, which was eventually acknowledged by many anthropologists and ecologists, is similar to Isabelle Stengers’ notion of “cosmopolitics”: Animals and plants have unique experiences and perspectives, probably very bizarre and strange to the human observer. Humans and other living things engage in “world-building” and may have an “interiority” that isn’t always going to match definitions of sentience or consciousness, and therefore it can be difficult to “translate” the experience of other living things in a way that humans can understand or relate. However, it is still worthwhile to attempt to translate the experience of other living things, partially by acknowledging that we live in a strange community of living things and therefore should value the biosphere as a community.

But I think Adrian Ivakhiv, an environmental scientist at University of Vermont, better summarizes this view of anthropomorphism which is gaining popularity. You can read the summary here, from December 2010.

You might recognize these themes from Tumblr discourse about animism/anthropomorphism. This is a discussion of how various human cultures conceive of other living things, and how living things, whether “sentient” or not, still “subjectivate,” and therefore participate in their own “world-building” at some scale.

“On animism, multinaturalism, & cosmopolitics.” December 2010/Janurary 2011. Adrian Ivakhiv.

Excerpts:

Either most existing entities are supposed to share a similar interiority whilst being different in body, and we have animism,  as  found among peoples of the Amazonian basin, the Northern reaches of   North America and Siberia and some parts of Southern Asia and  Melanesia.  Or humans alone experience the privilege of interiority  whilst being  connected to the non-human continuum by their materiality and we have  naturalism – Europe from the classical age. Or some  humans and  non-humans share, within a given framework, the same  physical and moral  properties generated by a prototype, whilst being  wholly distinguishable  from other classes of the same type and we have totemism –  chiefly to  be found among Australia’s Aborigines. Or all the world’s  elements are  ontologically distinct from one another, thence the  necessity to find  stable correspondences between them and we have analogism –China,  Renaissance Europe, West Africa, the indigenous peoples of the Andes and Central-America [6]. [“Who owns nature,” 2008]

These ontological options can be portrayed as follows:

This would be a world that demands an ontological politics, or a cosmopolitics, by which the choices open to us with respect to the different ways we can entangle ourselves with places, non-humans, technologies, and the material world as a whole, become ethically inflected open questions. […]

In her multivolume work Cosmopolitiques (1996–97) and publications that followed it, Isabelle Stengers (2005) forwards a “cosmopolitical proposal” that, unlike most forms of cosmopolitanism, does not presume the existence or even the possibility of a “good common world,” an ecumenically peaceable cosmopolis. On the contrary, her proposal is intended to “slow down the construction of this common world, to create a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say ‘good’” (2005:994). The “cosmos” of her cosmopolitics “refers to the unknown constituted by [the] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable” (2005:994). Such a cosmopolitics does not pre-assume what will count as “common,” whether it is “human nature,” “cultural differences,” or the laws and discoveries of science; or, on the other hand, gods, souls, spirits, or anything else that anyone might bring to the table.

Stengers’s call is echoed by Latour (2004b), Mol (1999), and Law (2004), who argue on behalf of a politics for building, enacting, or co-producing shared or common worlds — not worlds that posit “nature” as the “unique author of a single account” (Law 2004:123) propping up a “reality that is independent, prior, singular, and definite,” but worlds in which “everything takes effort, continuing effort” (Law 2004:131–132). Such methods and modes of knowledge-making recognize their own complicities in the worlds they enact; and they are political in the sense that they raise questions about how the world of associations — the society of humans and other entities — is to be organized. Seeing ourselves as cosmopolitically entwined with each other and the other others of the world means seeing ourselves as actively practicing ways of “worlding” or “world-making” (Wilson and Connery 2007).

More importantly, if world-building is something that all entities are involved in, then all are carving up, in their own way, what will qualify as subject and what will qualify as object. (…)

A balanced processual perspective, however, would be one that argues that all things participate in subjectivity — all things subjectivate — in their own different ways, which may be more or less like ours depending on the specificity of those things; and that all things participate in objectivity — all things objectivate, becoming objective, material, bodily data for other things — also in their own different ways, which are also more or less like ours depending on the specificity of the things.(…)

-

Sorry again for the wall of text.

Thanks for the ask!

[orpheus-type-beat]

radical reimagining fanfic

Harry missed the days when his scar burned in anticipation of trouble, because at least then he knew when trouble was coming.

For example, his scar hadn't so much as itched the day he and Ron got sent to America. That day had started like any other scar-pain-free day as an Auror: he and Ron had met up for their morning cup of Wizard's coffee (literally the same as normal coffee) before trudging up three flights of stairs to their small, cramped office. Ron had just lit a Wizard's cigarette when the pair heard a knock at the door. Then, She walked in.

She was all streaming hair, smooth skin, and long legs. This was the kind of client, Harry thought, that was in real trouble. A woman like this was surely caught deep in the webbing of the underworld: a rich heiress with powerful enemies, maybe, a drug mule with a conscience, or, just maybe, an international spy turned against her government. Whatever the case, this was the sort of woman that Harry --- or at least, the detective he wanted to be --- would risk it all for.

"Hi Ginny," Ron said, not looking up from his cigarette.

"Hullo Ron. Hermione's not a fan of the cigarettes, you know."

"They're Wizard cigarettes! They're enchanted, they're nothing like those plant things Muggles smoke. I've tried to explain this to her..."

"I have half a mind to tell on you," Ginny replied, looking amused at the thought of getting her older brother in trouble. Then, she turned to Harry, and sighed.

"We've talked about the hat, Harry."

“Look, I like it, it makes me look like a detective."

"Hats haven't been in style for almost a century."

"Maybe I'm trying to bring them back? I am Harry Potter after all; people care about what I wear, apparently."

"Yes, exactly, you're Harry Potter, and if you're going to maintain whatever modicum of respect you've earned in the public consciousness, you need to not wear that hat."

"Dumbledore wore a hat..."

"Dumbledore also wore pajamas to work, so..."

Harry knew that he had lost and took the hat off. Instantly, it shrunk down into a flat, textured disc that Harry put into his wallet. He walked over to Ginny and slid his arms around her waist. She smiled and gave him a peck, but then pushed away.

"I'm here on semi-official business, unfortunately." She walked over to the door, checked outside quickly, and then muttered muffliato under her breath. A dull, heavy soundlessness settled over the tiny office.

Ron put out his cigarette. "Honestly, Ginny, being an associate diplomat has made you paranoid. All the cases we get from the Ministry are dull and unimportant anyway."

Ginny glared at him. "I'm an assistant diplomat who's responsible for the entire Southeastern United States. And this isn't a Ministry case, exactly. This is a case from me."

Harry and Ron exchanged a confused, worried look.

"Have either of you listened to the news at all recently?"

"Not from America, if that's what you mean" said Ron.

"I usually get my news from you talking about it," Harry admitted.

"Alright, well, listen. There's an active serial killer in Orlando right now."

"In Disney World?" Harry asked, wide-eyed.

"No, not in Disney World."

"What's Disney world?" Ron's speech was muffled by the cup of his hands, lighting another cigarette.

"Only the most magical place on Earth, Ron" Ginny said. Harry chuckled a bit.

"Really?"

“No, it's a theme park," Harry said.

"What's a theme park?"

Ginny cleared her throat. "Listen, this is a wizard serial killer, and he's targeting half-bloods." She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out some photographs. Harry and Ron looked at them. Ron winched. One of the bodies had the word "MUTT" written across the forehead in angry red lines.

"That's bloody disgusting."

Ginny nodded tensely. "It's awful. And the Aurors over there; they haven't been able to catch whoever's doing this."

The fog of a lazy morning had been blown violently from Harry's mind. "You want us to go and catch this guy. But why? This seems like an American issue."

"It was. Until this morning." She pulled out another picture.

"This is Pallav Patil." Her voice broke when she said it.

It was a gruesome picture.

"Related to the Patils we know?" Ron asked, quietly.

"A cousin," Ginny said. "I knew him, a little, at Hogwarts." She swallowed a sob.

"He was a really happy kid. On an exchange trip in America for the summer." Ginny steadied herself. Harry tried to gulp quietly.

"So it's our problem now too. It'll take a few days to get the Ministry to agree to send you over there to assist the investigation, but I want you there now. Start looking around. Try to find this guy."

Ron and Harry nodded, wordless. Ron started to pack his work bag while Harry gave Ginny a hug. While they embraced, she spoke to him quietly.

"This guy --- he's hunting half-bloods. Please be careful, Harry."

He let go.

"I'll be in touch," she said, and Disapparated. Harry pulled his wallet out, flicked his hat back to full size, and put it on.

The worst part of the picture, he thought, was the bloody message the killer had left on the floor around Pallav Patil's body in huge, jagged letters:

"Go Back Home."

The little thrill Hermione got, when she walked to the front of a classroom and started teaching her class, hadn't quite worn off yet. She figured it should have; she had attended King's College right after the war (because she could take Muggle classes alongside magical ones) and --- in typical Hermione fashion --- had become a TA by her second semester. Now, she was working towards a doctorate in Theoretical Charms, and was teaching introductory courses --- Modern Charms 1 with Theory, this semester. She felt like she was almost a professor. Although, she reminded herself, she would never become one, because finishing a draft of her dissertation was (in her estimation) literally completely impossible.

But she despite that fact, she really loved Theoretical Charms. As she had explained to Ron, Harry, and Ginny one day over tea, Theoretical Charms was a very practical, grounded subject --- unlike some fields under the umbrella of Theory of Magic she could mention. Theoretical Charms had the excitement of being abstract and universal, of being concerned with fundamental questions, and the satisfying objectivity of being bounded by the real magical world. Plus, it was very interdisciplinary: Hermione got to work with people who did Wand Lore, Enchantments, even Potions! Despite people who told her 'Hermione, it doesn't make sense to normal blokes like Harry and I, we really don't care,' she thought it was a wonderful subject.

"Today we start the unit on revelio, which is one of my personal favorite charms --- actually, it's what I do research on! As you all will remember, of course, revelio is essentially an information gathering spell --- yes, you have a question?" A boy with messy hair and bad posture had raised his hand.

"How do you do research on a charm? Didn't somebody make it, can't you ask them?" It wasn't a bad question really, if it had been asked more politely.

"That's a good question! You'll learn about this a little later in your Spellcraft classes, but spells aren't really 'made' per se, they're sort of discovered. Well, discovered isn't quite right either... it's hard to explain at your level, but basically there are some spells that exist whose properties we don't fully understand. I'm studying some of those properties, and what they might imply about the nature of magic. Does that answer your question?"

The mop of hair nodded and slouched a little lower in its chair.

"As I was saying, revelio is commonly used to locate nearby people or examine the magical effects that have been applied to an object. But it's different than other purely informative spells because it can produce effects --- actually removing enchantments designed to disguise or hide. Let's start with an idealized example..."

After class, the group of two or three students who cared (and weren't just taking Modern Charms to meet the Healing requirements) came up to ask questions. They were led by a tall girl with circular glasses and curly hair, who was clearly their leader.

"You said your research is on revelio, but what exactly does that mean?"

"Umm... Do you remember talking about spell modifiers at all in school?"

The students shook their heads no. Really, the more Hermione learned, the more she wanted to burn the entire educational system down and start again.

"Well, you know how you say revelio to remove cloaking enchantments, but Homenum revelio to reveal nearby people? Homenum is a modifier --- it changes the behavior of the charm."

"Oh!"

"So I do research on the behaviors of a specific revelio inflection."

"Oh!! What is that?"

Hermione checked her watch. She had a few minutes.

"I'll show you! Step back a little please?"

The blob of student somehow stepped back as one, unified mass.

"Anima revelio!"

The rush felt like wind, but no sound came. Hermione and the three students started glowing, wispy tendrils of light peeling off their bodies and dissipating into the air.

"Woah! Wow! Amazing!" That's how people usually responded to the spell. Even Ron had quit being a smart-ass for a few minutes when she had finally been able to demonstrate it for him at home.

Hermione grinned. "It's cool, right?" The tall girl was examining her hands, astonished.

"Why do my hands glow so much more than the rest of me?"

All four sets of hands glowed with bright, quiet energy that pulsed lazily. Smoky light was densely coiled around their fingers and breathed across their palms. It was like the tube of a fluorescent light bulb, or the light of star, had been loosely wrapped around their hands.

"Because you all are magic-users."

The students looked at Hermione, with glowing eyes and open mouths. That wasn't part of the spell, necessarily.

"This spell --- it makes your soul, your energy, the life inside you visible. Everyone has it --- the aura, the energy that surrounds and permeates living things. It's just, for magic users, it's a little less... connected."

The students looked at her with wonder and mild confusion.

"If there was a non-magical person here in this room, they'd light up too, but their aura wouldn't extend so far outside their body. It'd look tighter. Try walking around!"

The students moved around, trancelike, leaving trails of glowing mist in their wake.

"Non-magical people wouldn't leave trails that long --- their soul and body are much more tightly coupled. For magic users, the soul-body coupling is especially weak around the hands, for some reason, which is why they glow so brightly --- more of your aura can 'escape' your body and permeate the air around you."

"Is that why we hold wands in our hands?" Tall girl was holding her wand in her hand, with her arms stretched all the way out in front of her, half afraid and half in awe.

"Yep! Wands, well, wands are complicated, but because so much of a magic user's aura can escape through their hands, your wand can 'talk' to your aura through them. That's why magic users have wands: they can make it easier to access and focus the aural energy that's stored inside you."

For effect, Hermione pulled out her wand and shot sparks through the air. Her students gasped. They could see the glowing aura flow through her fingertips, lighting up her wand and trailing behind the sparks, dissipating into the air like ink into water. Then, Hermione flicked her wrist, and the glowing stopped.

Her students looked disappointed.

"But I don't understand? Why is it called an aura? How do wands talk to your soul? How does this make any sense?"

"Honestly, we don't really know," Hermione admitted. "But what I do know is that other professors use this room. So, unfortunately, I can't explain everything about Theory of Magic to you all today."

The students nodded and started shuffling towards the door.

"Thank you!" The tall girl with curly hair waved as she left with her friends.

Hermione smiled, waved back, and started packing up. She hardly noticed that someone had Apparated into the room until she looked and saw a figure in a long coat walking towards her.

"Ginny!" Hermione beamed as her friend shook off that just-Apparated feeling. "How are you? It's been ages!"

"I know! I've just been so busy with work, and I'm sure you've been just dying with that dissertation you're writing."

A dark look came over Hermione's face, which indicated to Ginny that this topic was off limits.

"I wish I had just come to visit, but I'm sort of on official business. Muffliato." The quiet felt heavy and pressed against their ears.

"What's going on?" Hermione looked worried.

"Have you been following the news from America?"

"The serial killer in Orlando?"

Ginny nodded.

"I'm sending Harry and Ron over there to investigate. Something... something's not right. I'm not sure what exactly. But I'm wondering, is there any way you could go over there with them? I just..."

"Want to make sure they have adult supervision?"

Ginny smiled. "Exactly."

[flamboyantlybewildered]

Discourse and Me: A Short History

What is discourse analysis? And what does it have to do with multimedia? In my view, discourse analysis is a set of techniques for making connections between texts and their meanings. Originally formulated for the analysis of purely linguistic texts, discourse analysis methods have come to form the basis for analyzing “texts” that consist not just of words, but also of visual forms such as images and diagrams (static or animated), full-­‐ motion video, sound-­‐effects and music, and various interactive features.

There are a number of different intellectual traditions that contribute to discourse and multimedia analysis. I came to this field before it really had a name, because I wanted to understand how physicists came to think and talk and write the way we did, and it seemed to me that we learned these things mostly through verbal and non-­‐verbal communication with people who were already doing it. In the 1970s I was a student and junior researcher in theoretical physics, and it was pretty obvious that I was learning to frame and solve problems, to mobilize theory, and even to tell jokes like a physicist from sitting in classes, reading books, talking with other students and with physics faculty members, and watching the occasional video or display on a computer screen.

Would it be possible, I wondered, to videotape other students doing what I was doing and from the videos to figure out how the ideas and practices of physicists were being “transmitted” or learned? How would you analyze a videotape to achieve this?

As a theoretical physicist, I dealt mostly with text, mathematics, diagrams, and talk about them. I was less concerned about operating experimental apparatus. It seemed to me that most of what I was learning, I had to be learning from talk and writing (whether in books, articles, or just on the chalkboard), so I asked around among my friends whether linguistics or anthropology had anything useful to offer on this subject. By good luck I was pointed in the direction of the work of Michael Halliday, a British linguist who was interested in how we make meaning with words (Halliday, 1978). This was not the dominant focus in linguistics at the time, where most linguists were following Noam Chomsky’s lead and ignoring meaning in favor of purely formal analysis of grammatical structures.

I had also been reading the work of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist of the 1920s, who presented a theory of learning and intellectual development based on the hypothesis that people internalized the cultural meanings around them, largely through the medium of language (Vygotsky, 1963, 1978). And I had an interest in cultural anthropology, where there was a prevailing notion that people acquired the habits and values of their communities by active social participation. It was fashionable at that time to see all forms of cultural meaning as similar to language in that they formed semiotic systems (Levi-­‐ Strauss, 1963). What would we discover, I wondered, if we applied Halliday’s analysis of the relationship between wording and meaning to what students and teachers said in a physics class?

Extending this idea to the learning of science in general, I persuaded some people at the National Science Foundation in the US to fund a project to videotape science classes in secondary schools and a university, transcribe the talk in its contexts of classroom activity, and apply Halliday’s methods of analysis. The funding also allowed me to go to visit Halliday, who had recently moved to the University of Sydney in Australia, and also to go to England, where other people were engaged with similar efforts to do linguistically-­‐based discourse analysis (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975).

It was an exciting time, because what we call discourse analysis today was just being created then (in the late 1970s and early 1980s). There was also at that time what later became known as the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences, led by people like the anthropologist Claude Levi-­‐Strauss and the historian and social theorist, Michel Foucault. Levi-­‐Strauss followed an essentially semiotic approach to the analysis of the texts of myths from indigenous peoples, mainly in South America, but had much wider influence with his philosophy of “structuralism” (Levi-­‐Strauss, 1963, 1969). Foucault had a somewhat less semiotic and more cultural-­‐historical approach to the analysis of archives of texts from earlier historical periods, supporting his inquiries into intellectual and institutional history (Foucault, 1969). Textual data was becoming the focus of important work in the human sciences.

Discourse analysis was shaped by the kinds of questions people were asking, and the kinds of uses to which it was being put. It was being developed as a tool for specific purposes, and its different variants reflect the variety of questions being posed. Levi-­‐Strauss wanted to know if the many different versions of the same myth across different indigenous groups could be seen as systematic variants of one another, rather as Chomsky was showing that different grammatical constructions could be transformed into one another by a set of simple rules (Chomsky, 1965). Foucault wanted to know what kinds of discourses were possible about a given topic in a given historical period, how they changed across the centuries, and how this was related to changing social institutions. Halliday wanted to know what kinds of meanings it was possible to make in the English language, and how different grammatical resources were deployed in different contexts to make those meanings.

Today it is easy to see how these different enterprises could support one another, but at the time it was just a leap of imagination. There were also other pieces to the puzzle. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and his linguist collaborator Valentin Voloshinov had developed in the 1920s and 1930s a theory of the inherent dialogism of texts, the sense in which anything said or written tended to situate its meanings in an implicit dialogue with other texts (Bakhtin, 1973; Voloshinov, 1929). This led to a general principle of intertextuality which connected the work of Levi-­‐Strauss and Foucault to the social semiotics of Halliday. Pierre Bourdieu was combining traditional quantitative sociology with an interest in the development of a social or cultural habitus, a mostly unconscious disposition to do and say things in particular ways that were like those of others in the same social position (Bourdieu, 1972). Basil Bernstein was connecting a kind of linguistic habitus to social class differences in learning in schools and primary socialization in families, and turning to Halliday’s linguistic methods to find supporting evidence (Bernstein, 1971).

In 1981, I found myself with a hundred pages of transcript of dialogue in science classrooms, a number of sociocultural frameworks for making sense of the general phenomena, and a set of specific linguistic tools for analyzing various aspects of the meanings being made. I had the overhead lights and the floor tiles, but the task of furnishing the room remained. What lies between the general theories of social learning (Vygotsky, Bernstein) and sociocultural structure (Levi-­‐Strauss, Foucault, Bourdieu) on the one hand, and the line by line, clause by clause analysis of the meaning of what was being said and done in these classrooms? Everything. Discourse analysis, and its multimedia successors, is about filling in the gap between macro-­‐social theory and micro-­‐social data. It is about construing patterns of various kinds at some intermediate levels between what Halliday called the “system” – what is possible – and the “instance” – what actually happened this time – in order to say something about what is typical. And not just what is typical in general, but what is typical for whom, when, and why (Lemke, 1995).

Most of Halliday’s work was a description of the grammar of English as a set of possibilities, linking each option that the grammatical resources of the language make available (such as singular or plural, past or future, transitive or intransitive, interrogative or imperative) to the kinds of meanings we make with it. But he did this within a larger theoretical framework that he and the group in Sydney called “social semiotics” (Halliday, 1978; Hodge & Kress, 1988). In brief it was a model of the relationship of language to society, and it held that meaning was made by language in use in a context of situation and a context of culture. Every different social setting evoked a different meaning potential, a different set of probabilities that particular meanings would be made, using particular resources from the grammar of the language.

This entailed a theory of which features of the setting were related to which kinds of meaning that could be made with the language. And it went both ways; that is, using language in part made or changed the nature of the setting, just as a given setting evoked the use of certain sorts of language. In this way it was possible to understand such notions as register (the kind of language typical for a particular kind of setting or activity) and genre (the forms of sequential discourse that people in a community use for particular purposes).

I had a setting, the classroom, and within it a variety of activities, from going over homework to explaining new concepts to having a dialogue about the best answer to a question. There were spoken genres, such as extended sequential dialogue in which teachers posed questions and evaluated student answers to them, and written genres, such as textbook chapters and student lab reports. But there was also a great deal more. There were patterns of semantic relationships among technical terms that were worded differently but remained essentially the same across textbooks, classroom dialogues, and tests or curriculum documents. There were typical rhetorical patterns of reasoning and logical justification that appeared again and again. There were regularities across different sessions and different classes in how lessons started and ended. The room began to fill with furniture (Lemke, 1990).

I had begun from an interest in seeing how the conceptual content of physics was embodied in the dialogue between teacher and student. Over the course of a few years of analysis of the data, I came to see that this was just one part of a much more complex social process, linked to such matters as power, control, authority, and respect in the social relationships of the classroom, and to wider beliefs and values about the nature and role of science in society. People were expressing feelings and evaluations that were inseparable from the process of learning. Students were learning not just facts and theories from science, but ways of behaving in classrooms, and beliefs and values about science, society, and themselves. The meanings being made in the classroom could often not be understood apart from other meanings and texts not present in the classroom. The learning process, and its stumbles, were also part of longer-­‐term developmental processes of students’ (and teachers’) identities, careers, and lives outside school.

The discourse of the science classroom was a window on much more than science education; it was a window on a society and a culture, just as social semiotics was claiming had to be the case for any use of language.

The importance of discourse analysis was not just as a tool to see what was happening in some event. It was a tool that could enable us to look far beyond the immediate events, whatever they were. Indeed you had to look beyond in order to understand what was in front of you.

- Lemke, J. (2012). Multimedia and discourse analysis. In Gee, J, P. & Handford, M. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis (79-96). New York, NY: Routledge.

[berniesrevolution]

Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning upset in a congressional primary election against one of the most powerful Democrats in the U.S. House has inspired discussion and debate about how this campaign fits into the project of advancing the socialist left. SocialistWorker.org is hosting a dialogue in our Readers’ Views column. This installment has a contribution from Hadas Thier.

Thank you to Socialist Worker, the Socialism 2018 conference, Jacobin and other outlets which have helped to facilitate a very important debate about the relationship between socialists, elections and the Democratic Party. It’s critical that we learn from each other in order to deepen our theoretical and practical understanding.

Frankly, the stakes are high on both ends of the debate. On the one hand, we face the dangers of taking any action that could potentially undermine the political independence of a developing working class movement; on the other hand, the cost of missing opportunities that we have not had in decades could leave us a small organization, isolated from a growing left.

I believe we are in a new political moment that challenges us to think freshly about how we operate on many fronts, including the electoral one. When a socialist candidate garners millions of votes; when powerful party leaders are unseated; when the likes of CNN has to report on “a mass, multiracial, working-class movement” whose aim is “totally transforming the system”; we have a new political terrain on which to contend.

I will attempt to raise three questions here: 1) What is the historical context out of which we’ve come? 2) Do our old arguments regarding the Democratic Party still apply in the present? and 3) What is a matter of principle and what is a matter of strategy and tactics?

The last two years have witnessed a level of political volatility and whiplash unseen in decades. This has led to a growth, internationally, of both the far right and the socialist left.

In the U.S., we’ve seen the teachers’ strike wave alongside the reactionary Janus ruling against public-sector labor, and successful electoral campaigns of open socialists alongside Trump’s unhinged right-wing ascendancy to the White House.

Politics is more polarized than ever, and both political parties have in some significant ways lost their grips over their bases. We live in scary times, but we also have more opportunities than we have during the lifetime of this organization to build the revolutionary left, engage in activity and relate to class struggle. Millions of people are looking for an alternative to the rotten status quo.

But the political terrain that we have inherited is one of a historically weak left and decades of low levels of class struggle. In the ISO(International Socialist Organizational), we have long bemoaned the gap between left-moving consciousness and concrete organization and action on the ground. Powerful struggles have flared over the years, but have still remained episodic. Movement ups and downs have largely not translated into enough organization and connectivity between struggles to make a qualitative breakthrough.

One key element in all of this is the confidence of our side. The wider the gap between what people believe and how they see their ideas reflected in society (whether that be in struggles or in formal politics), the more confidence is undermined.

At the same time, third-party challenges to the status quo have remained relegated to symbolic runs and, certainly since Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, outside of a few exceptional pockets, have not gained traction.

This isn’t the fault of the hard-working, principled candidates who have run for office, but a result of the objective barriers to third-party runs, set up by the two parties themselves and their corporate backers. The calculation of our comrades in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that the ground is not yet ready for a third party is, I believe, correct.

For both of these reasons — the need to build up the confidence of our side and the inability of third party runs to do so — I think we need to reassess our past arguments. One after another, they will leave us ill-equipped to address the current situation:

First, we have rightly argued against the politics of lesser evilism: the idea that we must vote for Democrats, no matter how rightward their politics have turned, so that we don’t get the “greater evil” of the Republicans. We’ve been absolutely correct to say that this approach lets the Democrats get away with (literally) murder and has a narrowing effect on political consciousness.

As the great socialist Eugene Debs put it: “I’d rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don’t want, and get it.”

But we have to be clear that the new generations of radicals, activists and young people who are voting for Bernie Sanders, and much more so Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are very much voting for what they want! Sanders, Orcasio-Cortez, Julia Salazar and others, even where their politics are unsatisfactory, are not a lesser evil.

Relatedly, we’ve always argued that elections have a narrowing, depoliticizing effect, lowering people’s expectations of what’s possible. I think we have to recognize now that in some cases, this is true — and in some cases, the opposite is true!

There is no other way to understand Bernie’s primary successes other than having raised people’s confidence and expectations. Striking teachers told us exactly this at the Socialism conference. And where I organize, at Brooklyn College, literally every student that has come around the ISO this past year was politicized and activated by Bernie’s campaign.

Lastly, we’ve said that the Democrats are the “graveyard of social movements,” both because electoral campaigns take people away from activism, and because the party actively co-opts movements. We are absolutely right that this is what the Democratic Party intends to do. But that does not mean that they can always succeed, or that every person who runs on their line has that intention.

The DSA, by running candidates and simultaneously building its own organization on the ground shows that the opposite can be true. It is providing an organizational vehicle for newly politicized people. In the words of DSA National Director Maria Svart, it is “organizing people and building concrete power with a politically aware grassroots base that understands who the enemy is and is willing to hold politicians accountable.”

What then can we say of the principles at stake, and what room do we have in terms of plotting out a strategic position?

I think Owen Hill and Paul LeBlanc’s excellent contributions have already framed this discussion well. Rather than a blanket refusal to ever support a candidate who runs on the Democratic Party line, the key principle at stake is maintaining the independent organization of the working class

(Continue Reading)