Just by coincidence I received copies of two print publications by snail mail yesterday that include my articles. It occurred to me that it would be a good time to motivate taking out a subscription to them for my sake, the sake of other contributors, and your own reading pleasure. (Motivate—that’s a word I haven’t used in this way since my days in the Socialist Workers Party! Old habits die hard.)
The first is Counterpunch magazine, Volume 21 Number 3. My article is titled “A Hero for Our Time? The Return of Karl Marx”. The magazine has a nifty picture of Karl Marx in a Superman type uniform.
Subscription information is at http://store.counterpunch.org/product-category/subscriptions/. A year’s subscription is $55 for the print edition and $35 for the digital.
My article starts out with an examination of the renewed interest in Karl Marx following the 2007 financial crisis and proceeds to a discussion of Marx’s political legacy, something that would not come under the purview of those Financial Times and Bloomberg News contributors whistling past Lehman Brothers’ gravesite.
Here’s an excerpt:
Like the nuclear reactor that withstood a meltdown in China Syndrome, the American economy supposedly is in recovery. Of course there are those unfortunates who cannot seem to find a job, especially in the Black community, but the stock market is at an all-time high and the housing market—according to the experts—is doing quite well. GM is showing a handsome profit even if it faces criminal charges for failing to inform owners of their cars that a faulty ignition might lead to fatal accidents.
More to the point, the NY Times of March 12, 2014 reported on economist Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century that would be of little assurance to anybody except the wealthy. Piketty deploys a mountain of data to prove that economic inequality will not only persist into the future but that the system itself is the primary generator, not “vampire squids” as Matt Taibbi put it. It is the very nature of the system that leads to a concentration of wealth at the top and misery at the bottom. Timesman Eduardo Porter, not a critic of capitalism after the fashion of Nouriel Roubini, puts it bluntly:
The deep concern about the distribution of income and wealth that inspired 19th-century thinkers like David Ricardo and Karl Marx was attributed to a misunderstanding of the dynamics of growth leavened with the natural pessimism that would come from living in a time of enormous wealth and deep squalor, an era that gave us “Les Misérables” and “Oliver Twist.”
Today, of course, it’s far from obvious that the 19th-century pessimists were entirely wrong.
Glancing back across history from the present-day United States, it looks as if Kuznets’s curve swerved way off target. Wages have been depressed for years. Profits account for the largest share of national income since the 1930s. The richest 10 percent of Americans take a larger slice of the economic pie than they did in 1913, at the peak of the Gilded Age.
By subscribing to Counterpunch magazine, you will be helping to sustain the website, a source of many useful articles including my own contrarian film reviews. Speaking of contrarian film reviews, in the current issue of the magazine you can read Kim Nicolini’s take on Matthew McConaughey. Kim is my film co-editor at the magazine and we frequently disagree—that’s what makes life interesting after all. But on McConaughey, I couldn’t agree more with Kim. Her final paragraphs:
Some might critique these roles as crude stereotypes. But stereotypes are derived from reality. McConaughey’s roles fit into a cultural tradition that depicts the decadence and debauchery of the South through baroque exaggeration, myth, and dark humor. Sure, not everyone living in the CSA is a pervert, racist homophobe. McConaughey shows the complexity of being a white man in the South by playing his roles to the edge of absurdity then turning them into images of tragic sincerity, not unlike the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd which plays during the violent drunken brawl in Dazed and Confused.
When McConaughey won his Oscar and thanked God and family for his success, he got a lot of shit from the liberal media. But nothing in the roles McConaughey has played over the last three years propagates a Christian agenda. In fact, they turn the Christian agenda on its head. Discriminating against him for his religious choices is the same as discriminating against anyone else for their choices. Discrimination is discrimination.
The consistency of his roles has made his body a landscape of Southern culture and an embodiment of the Southern literary canon. As far as I’m concerned, that is “Alright, alright, alright.”
I also received number 10 of Critical Muslim, a journal co-edited by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Ziauddin Sardar. I first motivated a subscription to Critical Muslim in January 2014 and invite you to review that post. Instructions on how to buy single issues and subscriptions are here http://criticalmuslim.com/subscribe. Of course, I urge you to subscribe.
Issue number 10 is titled “Sects”, a reminder that it is not just Marxism-Leninism that is subject to this problem.
In fact, many of my old friends and comrades on the left will be both amused and edified by a keynote article co-authored by Sardar and MerrylWyn Davies titled “Sectarianism Unbound”:
‘Taz’, a new channel on the Pakistani Geo TV network, is dedicated to twenty-four-hour news. There is a rapid-fire news bulletin every fifteen minutes: hence the name, Taz, or fast. But even after an endless stream of stories about sectarian violence, terrorist atrocities, suicide bombings, ‘target killings’, ‘load shedding’, political corruption and the defeats of the Pakistani cricket team with mundane regularity, there is still ample time left in the schedule. So the slots between the news bulletins are filled with what they call tazaabi tottas – acidic bits, short satirical skits. In one particular sketch, a man, sitting on a bridge, is about to commit suicide by jumping into the river. He is spotted by a passer-by who runs towards him shouting ‘Stop! Stop!’ The two men then engage in the following dialogue:
‘Why are you committing suicide?’
‘Let me die! No one loves me.’
‘God loves you. Do you believe in God?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you a Muslim, or…’
‘Allah be Praised! I am a Muslim.’
‘I too am a Muslim. Are you a Shia or a Sunni?’
‘Sunni.’
‘I too am a Sunni. What is your school of law?’
‘Hanafi.’
‘Me too! Do you belong to the Deobandi or Bralevi sect?’
‘Deobandi.’
‘Me too! Are you a Tanzihi (pure) Deobandi or a Takfiri (extremist) Deobandi?’
‘Tanzihi.’
‘Me too! Tanzihi of Azmati branch or Farhati branch?’
‘Tanzihi Farhati branch.’
‘Me too!’ Tanzihi Farhati educated at University of Amjair or Tanzihi Farhati educated at Noor University of Mawad?’
‘Tanzihi Farhati educated at Noor University of Mawad.’
‘Infidel, kaffir! You deserve to die!’
The man who came to help then pushes the suicidal man over the bridge.
The humorous sketch gives us deep insight into the state of the Muslim ummah – the transnational Muslim community. It is simply not good enough to be a Muslim. You have to be labelled Sunni or Shia, and from there on progressively put in smaller boxes right down to which particular institution of learning you subscribe to. And those who deviate one iota, follow a different school of thought, or a different historic tradition, or a different fatwa issuing seminary, are, by definition, kaffirs – infidels who deserve to die.
Just in case you think that the sketch deliberately takes sectarianism to ridiculous lengths, consider how the Deobandi sect describes itself. The institution that established the sect, and from which it takes in name, Darul Uloom, Deoband, which in the words of Faizur Rahman is ‘the undisputed Islamic authority in India’, defines its creed as follows: ‘religiously Darul Uloom is Muslim; as a sect, Ahl-e-Sunnatwal-Jama’at (Sunni); in practical method (of law), Hanafi; in conduct, Sufi; dialectically, Maturidi Ash’ari; in respect of the mystic path, Chishtiyyah, rather comprising all the Sufi orders; in thought, Waliyullhian; in principle, Qasimiyah; sectionally, Rasheedian; and as regards connection, Deobandi’. So it is clear! Deobandis are, in descending order: Muslim, Sunni, Hanafi, Sufi, followers of the classical School of Ashari theology, cohorts of the Indian reformer Shah Waliyullah, and supporters of the ‘principles of some marginal scholar called Qasim and partisans of an even more obscure scholar called Rasheed!’
My own article is a review of Akbar Ahmed’s “The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam”, a book that makes the case that the victims of Obama’s drone attacks have more in common with the Apaches or the Lakotas than al-Qaeda.
An excerpt:
Although some anthropologists consider the word “tribal” retrograde and/or imprecise, one would never confuse Ahmed with the colonial-minded social scientist that used it as a way of denigrating “backward” peoples. For Ahmed, the qualities of tribal peoples are to be admired even if some of their behavior is negative. Most of all, they are paragons of true democracy resting on the “consent of the governed”. Their love of freedom inevitably leads them to conflict with state-based powers anxious to assimilate everybody living within their borders to a model of obedience to approved social norms.
While tribal peoples everywhere come into conflict with those trying to impose their will on them, it is only with Islamic tribal peoples that global geopolitics gets drawn into the equation. “The Thistle in the Drone” consists of case studies in which the goal is to disaggregate Islam from tribal norms. For example, despite the fact that the Quran has strict rules against suicide and the murder of noncombatants, tribal peoples fighting under the banner of Islam have often resorted to such measures, especially on the key date of September 11, 2001. In an eye-opening examination of those events, Ahmed proves that a Yemeni tribe acting on the imperative to extract revenge was much more relevant than Wahabi beliefs. While most of the hijackers were identified as Saudi, their origins were in a Yemeni tribe that traced its bloodlines back to the prophet Mohammad. And more to the point, they were determined to wreak vengeance against the superpower that had been complicit in the murderous attack on their tribesmen in Yemen, an element of the 9/11 attacks that has finally been given the attention it deserves.
