Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

May 31, 2016

The Lanthanide Series

Filed under: Film,science — louisproyect @ 3:37 pm

In a 1956 lecture titled “The Two Cultures”, C.P. Snow lamented the failure of scientists and those involved with the humanities to understand each other’s world: “Not to have read War and Peace and La Cousine Bette and La Chartreuse de Parme is not to be educated; but so is not to have a glimmer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

If he had had the occasion to a see a film like “The Lanthanide Series” that opens tomorrow at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, he would have not only made an exception for the director Erin Espelie but urged everybody he’d ever met to see the film as an example of how the two cultures could be bridged.

The title of the film derives from the fifteen metallic chemical elements in Mendeleev’s Periodic Table that begin with atomic number 57 and ends with 71. The first in the series is lanthanum, which is Latin for “to lie hidden”. These elements are also known as the rare earths but as Espelie points out, they are not rare at all. They can be found in abundance but the process to extract them from the surrounding soil and non-valuable compounds is complex and expensive.

For the rare earths that come under Espelie’s scrutiny, each of the Latin names becomes a way of meditating on other possible meanings that transcend the laboratory or factory framework. What “lies hidden” is not only an element that can be used in making glass or electron cathodes but the memories of past love affairs or childhood traumas that are evoked through Espelie’s voice-over narration from a variety of sources, including Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf. Throughout the film, we hear musical accompaniment to her meditations both on science and being human (a term more appropriate than “the humanities”) from Jim Morrison, Meredith Monk and John Cage. All of it is completely spell-binding and amounts to a documentary “art film” that pushes the cinematic envelope in a way that I have not seen in years.

Erin Espelie is a filmmaker in residence at the University of Colorado who is also the chief editor at Natural History magazine. As probably the most obvious example of her ability to straddle the two cultures, she has a degree in molecular and cell biology from Cornell University and an MFA in experimental and documentary arts from Duke University.

Throughout the film, there are astonishing examples of her erudition in both disciplines but her ability to synthesize them in a way that leads to a higher understanding. She alludes to Primo Levi, the Jewish chemist who was a prisoner at Auschwitz and who wrote “The Periodic Table”, a collection of 21 tales drawn from his life story, each titled by a different element. In “Cerium”, an element in the Lanthanide Series, he describes how he found some in an Auschwitz laboratory where he was being forced to work. He whittled them down to make lighter-flints that were bartered for food sufficient enough to keep him alive until the allies liberated him in a few days. It is obvious that Primo Levi was another exception to C.P. Snow’s rule and very likely an inspiration for Espelie’s film.

While most of the film is focused on the individual and his or her relationship to the commodities based on rare earth elements ranging from microphones to glass, there is an awareness of their role in a global economy ever-increasingly threatened by war and environmental despoliation. In her review of Europium, she recounts how a truck driver leaving the Mountain Pass Mines in California (the largest producer of the element in the world) pulled up alongside her parked car on the side of the road to see what she was up to—more out of curiosity than anything else. When she told him that the steady procession of enormous trucks away from the mines just like his couldn’t possibly be filled with a relatively scarce output, he was candid enough to admit that they were not loaded with Europium but contaminated radioactive water—the result of an industrial accident of the sort that typifies mining today. Where were the trucks going with the carcinogens? You guessed it. They were being dumped in the Pacific Ocean.

Europium, which is used in cathode ray tubes, is now being mined mostly in China, where lax (or non-existent) environmental regulations have led to ground water contamination that caused a cancer epidemic. It also seems that Afghanistan is a major possible source of this and other rare earth elements. While much of the left harped on the country’s value as a link in Eurasian petroleum pipelines, it is just as likely that the USA was even more interested in the possibilities of extracting elements that are critical in all sorts of high technology from computers to cameras whatever the cost to the Afghan people.

“The Lanthanide Series” is not to be missed.

May 30, 2016

Is America committing slow-motion suicide? A look at the decline of CUNY

Filed under: economics,Education,financial crisis — louisproyect @ 5:19 pm

Since my wife is a faculty member at Lehman College, the picture of its library in yesterday’s NY Times captured my attention:

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Lehman and other City University of New York colleges were profiled in an article titled “Dreams Stall as CUNY, New York City’s Engine of Mobility, Sputters” that like so many in the newspaper recently depicts an American in deep if not irreversible decline. Lehman’s library was a case in point:

At Lehman College in the Bronx, Robert Farrell, an associate professor in the library department, said the library’s entire book budget this academic year was $13,000, down from about $60,000 a decade ago. Because the roof has been chronically leaky, about 200 books were damaged during a rainstorm three years ago; a tarp still covers some volumes.

Mr. Farrell also said that the library has had to reduce its spending on academic journals and database subscriptions. “We can’t be a serious institution of higher learning without providing our faculty and students with access to these kinds of things,” he said.

It was just one more reminder that the ruling class of the USA has no intention of funding the public good. With respect to private enterprise, unless the same kinds of profits can be generated on American soil that can be made overseas in an epoch when capital takes wings and flies around the globe in search of higher profits, you will wait in vain for the post-WWII prosperity that both the Trump and Sanders campaign evoke. After all, capitalism does not exist to create middle-class jobs. It exists to allow men and some women to be able to buy $15 million condominiums in New York and vacation in St. Bart’s just like Gaddafi’s sons did.

The article mentions that the City University of New York was founded by Townsend Harris in 1847 as the Free Academy of New York to educate “the children of the whole people.” What a benign figure. But if you take five minutes digging into his past, you will learn that he was named the first Consul General to Japan in July, 1856 just after Commodore Perry made the Japanese an offer they couldn’t refuse. Perry commanded a fleet of four warships that arrived in Edo Bay on July 8, 1853. After the Japanese instructed him to go to Nagasaki, the designated port for foreign contact, he threatened to burn Edo to the ground unless they kowtowed to American demands to “open” up their country for trade. As it happens, the American Manifest Destiny that led to this gunboat diplomacy and the creation of a school for “the children of the whole people” went hand in hand. Slavery, colonial expansion abroad and internal expansion through the grab of Mexican and Indian land were essential to the consolidation of a modern capitalist powerhouse that needed an educated workforce to maintain its ledger books and sell its commodities.

It is questionable whether the same imperative exists today, even as neocolonialism and the oppression of Mexicans and Indians continue.

It is probably not news to people who have been following higher education issues as I have ever since I began working at Columbia University in 1991, but essentially the powers that be are “starving the beast” as Grover Norquist urged. The Times reports:

Since the 2008 recession, states have reduced spending on public higher education by 17 percent per student, while tuition has risen by 33 percent, according to a recent report by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Arizona is spending 56 percent less, while students are paying 88 percent more. In Louisiana, students are spending 80 percent more on tuition, while state funding has been cut by 39 percent.

The article places emphasis on feuding between NYC mayor Bill De Blasio, hailed by the liberal left like Obama was in 2008, and Governor Cuomo about whom there are no illusions. Cuomo has foisted much of the funding for CUNY on the city, a burden it can ill afford. Some say that this is his way of paying back the PSC, my wife’s union, for backing his rival Zephyr Teachout in the DP primaries in the last gubernatorial election.

As a frequent visitor to the Nicaragua Network meetings in 1989, De Blasio struck me as a smooth operator but I hardly figured him as a future mayor. Despite dark reminders about his visit to Cuba and Sandinista sympathies, De Blasio has been a reliable friend of real estate interests. In yesterday’s Times, there’s an op-ed piece on the gentrification of Harlem that nails him for his failure to take them on:

Still Harlem endures as a community with high hopes, and in 2013, we felt sure we had found a champion. Bill de Blasio ran as the mayor for everyone, which we figured had to include Harlem. Black voters were crucial to his victory, and we thought we were covered and cared for. He even has a likable son, as liable to get stopped by the police as ours might.

We were wrong. The man we saw as “our mayor” may talk about housing affordability, but his vision is far from the rent control and public housing that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia once supported, and that made New York affordable for generations. Instead, he has pushed for private development and identified unprotected, landmark-quality buildings as targets. He and the City Council have effectively swept aside contextual zoning limits, which curb development that might change the very essence of a neighborhood, in Harlem and Inwood, farther north. At best, his plan seems to be to develop at all speed and costs, optimistic that the tax revenues and good graces of the real estate barons allow for a few affordable apartments to be stuffed in later.

Corey Robin, who teaches at Brooklyn College, one of the more prestigious campuses in the CUNY system, blogged about the article:

The piece makes a brief nod to my campus, Brooklyn College, whose “rapidly deteriorating campus” has earned it the moniker “Brokelyn College.”

I can personally attest to that. On Thursday, as I left campus, I stopped in the men’s room of our wing of James Hall. One of the two urinals was out of business, covered by a plastic sheet. I sighed, and thought back to the time, about a year ago, that that urinal was so covered for about six months. The clock in my office has been stopped for over a year. Our department administrator tried to get it fixed: it worked for two days, and broke again.

He includes a picture of the desks in a classroom:

You can bet that there are no desks like that at NYU or Columbia where the students are being prepped for jobs in the financial services or those sectors of the economy that look after big business’s far-flung empire. I imagine that an MBA from either of these two schools and a minor in computer science might open doors at an accounting firm or investment bank. Art history or sociology? Forgettaboutit.

You have to understand the decline of CUNY in the context of public higher education’s nationwide crisis. Everywhere you look, schools are being denied funding adequate to their needs. This almost certainly means that it will be more and more difficult for American corporations to staff the middle-tier managerial positions for which these schools are expected to furnish. The Times article points to the difficulties a young woman is facing trying to become qualified as a public school teacher:

At City College, Anais McAllister, 22, a senior from Yonkers, said she had planned to major in English with a concentration in education, which would have allowed her to become a teacher after graduation. When some of her required education classes were canceled, she realized she would need another year — and another $6,000, at least — to graduate with the education credential.

With her scholarship expiring at the end of this academic year, and a younger brother entering trade school in the fall to obtain his plumber certification, she dropped the education concentration.

“The fact that this can happen, where your department can be cut financially where you have to think about dropping it, is ridiculous,” she said.

With her problems probably being repeated across the system, it will be difficult for public schools to operate effectively, which obviously will be of little importance to someone like Cuomo who is a major backer of charter schools.

When Corey Robin posted a link to the Times article yesterday morning on FB, the first comment to appear was this: “We’re committing slow-motion suicide as a country.” I responded as follows:

This is obviously related to the state of American capitalism that in its current phase has little interest in the kind of national development that led to all sorts of public investments such as expressways, railway systems, higher education on one hand and on the other private investment in nationally-based manufacturing (auto, steel, etc.) Bernie Sanders advocates investment in the former but really has no idea how to get the capitalist class to invest in American manufacturing when you can get Mexican auto workers to accept much lower wages. The writing is on the wall but it is not suicide–it is homicide. Andrew Cuomo, the Koch brothers, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama–all of them could care less if Lehman College, where my wife works, has a leaking ceiling. They are only interested in serving their own class interests. The USA needs a socialist revolution and the longer we place hopes in capitalist reform, the longer we delay confronting the tasks that are staring us in the face.

Of course in FB, you are loath to post longer comments but I’d like to now expand upon what I wrote.

On May 15th Barack Obama gave the commencement speech at Rutgers University that contained this Panglossian statement:

Point number one:  When you hear someone longing for the “good old days,” take it with a grain of salt.  (Laughter and applause.)  Take it with a grain of salt.  We live in a great nation and we are rightly proud of our history.  We are beneficiaries of the labor and the grit and the courage of generations who came before.  But I guess it’s part of human nature, especially in times of change and uncertainty, to want to look backwards and long for some imaginary past when everything worked, and the economy hummed, and all politicians were wise, and every kid was well-mannered, and America pretty much did whatever it wanted around the world.

Guess what.  It ain’t so.  (Laughter.)  The “good old days” weren’t that great.  Yes, there have been some stretches in our history where the economy grew much faster, or when government ran more smoothly.  There were moments when, immediately after World War II, for example, or the end of the Cold War, when the world bent more easily to our will.  But those are sporadic, those moments, those episodes.  In fact, by almost every measure, America is better, and the world is better, than it was 50 years ago, or 30 years ago, or even eight years ago.  (Applause.)

Although the students were likely to appreciate the president’s visit, they might have questioned his take on the “good old days” considering that the school’s tuition is now $13,000 per year, one of the most expensive public university in the country. Of course, the school has tried to generate revenue through its athletic program but it keeps running into scandals on an almost yearly basis, the latest one connected to the football coach trying to get the administration to overlook a star player’s failing grades.

The problem for Obama is that many Americans do remember “the good old days”, which were not that long ago. When I was a student at the New School in 1967 and had completed most of the credits I needed for a PhD in Philosophy, I needed a job to keep me going as I worked on my dissertation. That led to jobs as a welfare worker and 5th grade teacher in Harlem that went begging back then when AFDC and funding for public education were in ample supplies as part of the Great Society—funded to some extent by feverish war spending a la Military Keynesianism.

When those jobs became too much of a psychological toll, I began looking at the classified ads in the Sunday Times business section, which usually ran for 5 pages or so. They were in alphabetical order and I turned directly to those that started “college graduates”. There were usually about three hundred listed that read something like this: “Major insurance company seeks programmer trainees, starting salary $6000. No experience necessary.” That’s how I got my first job at Met Life in 1968. The $6000 was adequate to pay for a modest one-bedroom or studio apartment. For me that was “the good old days” even though it was inextricably linked to a brutal imperialist war that would cost the lives of millions of Vietnamese.

For most working people in the area, jobs could be landed at places like Ford Motors in Mahwah, New Jersey or the oil refineries just across the river along the New Jersey Turnpike. Those were good union jobs that paid the kind of money that would allow you to live in a suburban tract housing and send your kids to college. Those who remember those “good old days” are being wooed by both Trump and Sanders who have about as much of an idea to bring them back as I do about the origins of the universe.

None of this matters to Barack Obama or the rich bastards who are funding both the Democrats and Republicans an on equal opportunity for profit basis. Their newspapers like the NY Times and even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal can publish hand-wringing items like the one on CUNY but in the final analysis, they have no idea how to make America “great” again.

We are living in a period that can both be described as capitalist decline and capitalist expansion. Places like Detroit go down the tubes but for the capitalist investor, it could not be any better. All you need to do is stroll around the Chelsea neighborhood in NYC and gaze at the new condominiums that are the preferred homes for Wall Street hedge fund operators or plutocrats from Brazil, Russia, India or China, the bloc of nations that are supposed to be rescuing us from neoliberalism according to imbeciles like Mike Whitney.

The truth is that we are in a new kind of “The Other America”, the 1962 book that SP leader Michael Harrington wrote about the pockets of poverty in a nation in which everybody else was prospering. The coal fields of West Virginia and California’s Central Valley came under the spotlight. Nowadays, it is getting to the point where there will be pockets of extreme wealth surrounded by oceans of poverty or near-poverty only relieved by those middle-class families that can tread water sufficiently to keep from drowning.

This is not a nation “committing suicide”. It is one in which the superrich are killing the rest of us through a slow process of attrition. There is absolutely nothing in Bernie Sanders’s economic program that can reverse this. The idea that the USA can adopt a Nordic socialist model when Northern Europe itself has been cutting back on social programs and making life hell for immigrants is—in a word—utopian. The sooner we revive the radical movement of the sixties in which Sanders was committed to genuine socialism, the better.

 

 

May 27, 2016

Party, class, and Marxism: Did Kautsky advocate ‘Leninism’?

Filed under: Uncategorized — louisproyect @ 10:30 pm

John Riddell

By Eric Blanc. (Eric Blanc is an activist and historian based in Oakland, California. For the text of the Kautsky article discussed here, see “Karl Kautsky: Sects or class parties”.)

Karl Kautsky Karl Kautsky

The question of broad parties has been heatedly debated by socialists in recent years. Many have argued that “Leninism” should be discarded in favor of wider formations such as Syriza, Podemos, the British Labour Party, the Greens, etc. Others have rejected participating in such structures, on the “Leninist” grounds that building independent revolutionary Marxist parties remains the strategic organizational task for socialists.

Intertwined with this debate has been a serious reassessment of “Leninism” itself. Particularly following the publication of Lars Lih’s monumental Lenin Rediscovered, big questions are being asked: Did Lenin break in theory and/or practice with the “orthodox” strategy articulated by Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky? Were the Bolsheviks, in other words, a “party…

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Truth is the first casualty of warfare, especially in Syria

Filed under: Syria — louisproyect @ 7:10 pm

In yesterday’s Counterpunch, there’s an article by Alex Ray titled “The Death Toll in Syria: What Do the Numbers Really Say?” that might have been expected to incorporate some scholarly rigor given that the author is identified as a “a postgraduate student at the Australian National University and a former student of the University of Damascus.” One assumes that having been a student in a Syrian university, he would have the advantage of reading and writing Arabic, a skill possessed by very few non-Arabic commentators on the Syrian revolution. Of course, given the fact that it was published on Counterpunch, my expectations were lowered somewhat.

But in the very first paragraph when Ray cites Sharmine Narwani as an authority on how the West might be exaggerating the casualties caused by Assad’s scorched earth tactics, my bullshit detector went off immediately. This woman had been described by Max Blumenthal as “the blogger who was nickel-and-diming civilian casualty counts, who was blaming the victims of the Assad regime and who was attacking the international press corps for attempting to gain access to the scene of the Assad regime’s crimes, which reminded me of the Israeli government during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza when they banned reporters from Gaza.” This assessment was made in an interview on The Real News shortly after he resigned from Al Akhbar over its pro-Assad Syria Coverage. Of course, Blumenthal might be suspected of bias since his father worked for Bill Clinton and we know what a wretch he was from Christopher Hitchens’s many articles. To be consistent with the “anti-imperialist” left, you not only have to “follow the money”; you also have to follow the genes.

Whenever I run into an Assadist like Ray citing another Assadist, I wonder if people nowadays read Noam Chomsky even though to some extent he is a patron saint of this kind of geopolitical Manicheanism. If you do read Chomsky, you’ll never find him quoting Edward Herman or John Pilger. What would be the point of that? He instead cites George Kennan, etc. I guess that despite being a postgraduate student, Ray is more comfortable reading only those who are in his comfort zone.

Ray’s article is mostly an attempt to discredit various sources of casualty figures from the war in Syria, including one called Syrian Revolution Martyr Database that has the temerity to include “a quote from the Qur’an, revering martyrs in the service of god (Surah Al-Imran 169-170).” God, what an offense—nearly as bad as yelling “Alluah Akbar” when you shoot down a Baathist helicopter on its way to barrel bomb street vendors.

After several paragraphs of pointing out discrepancies in the statistics recorded by various groups, Ray concludes that they “serve to cast doubt on the narrative that the Syrian government is only a perpetrator of violence and not also a major victim.” Well, of course. Everybody knows that the FSA air force has cost the lives of countless Baathist soldiers as well as rendering the wealthy neighborhoods of Damascus looking like Grozny after Putin got finished with it. Their F-16’s are merciless. Other reports are at variance:

Talk about normal life in Syria after two years of civil war which have killed more than 70,000 people and left five million more destitute and homeless.

Yet in the neighborhood of Malki, a tree-lined enclave of central Damascus, a wealthy group of elite, pro-government Syrians still enjoy shopping for imported French cheeses, gourmet hand-made chocolates and iPad minis in the well-stocked, recently built Grand Mall and in nearby boutiques.

In Malki, sprinklers water the manicured lawns outside their blocks of million-dollar apartments. Maids and drivers cater to their every whim and birds sing in the trees. Fuel for their BMWs and electricity for their air-conditioning is plentiful and the well-guarded streets are free of loiterers.

“Look at this display and you feel all is well, life is good and everything is here,” said an elegantly dressed Hiyam Jabri, 50, as she placed her order at the delicatessen counter in the mall’s main supermarket.

Malki residents continue to enjoy material comforts and abundant supplies of imported goods, even as millions of their compatriots subsist on food handouts.

Continuing with his scholarly rigorous attempt to look at all sides of the casualty question, Ray quotes Sharmine Narwani once again, an article this time that cites an unnamed American diplomat who confided in her that the number of casualties attributed to the Baathist military could not be trusted. He tells her, “How do we know 260 people were killed by the regime in Homs yesterday?” Love that “unnamed” source. Apparently Narwani was an apprentice to Seymour Hersh at one point. Speaking of Homs, I don’t know if it was 26 or 260—and it is almost impossible to know given the chaos in Syria and the complete absence of a centralized civilian or military apparatus that can keep accurate records as well as the refusal of the Baathist dictatorship to keep such records—but all you need to do is look at Youtube clips or photos of Homs to get an idea of what kind of violence was visited on its unfortunate population that had the nerve to demand freedom.

I wish to god that people like Alex Ray could spend one day in a place like Homs but I assume that when he was in Damascus, he was much more familiar with the Malki neighborhood.

The boy also has the chutzpah to quote Robert Fisk on these matters, another unimpeachable source who was as embedded in the Syrian military as Fox News reporters were embedded in the invasion forces in Iraq some dozen years ago or so. While Ray does not bother to provide a link or date for the Fisk article that claims the “good guys” don’t get on casualty lists, it could very well be the Oct. 4 2015 piece titled “Syria’s ‘moderates’ have disappeared… and there are no good guys.” This is the typical pile of stinking horse manure we can expect nowadays from Fisk that asserts:

“American officials” – those creatures beloved of The New York Times – claim that the Syrian army does not fight Isis. If true, who on earth killed the 56,000 Syrian soldiers – the statistic an official secret, but nonetheless true – who have so far died in the Syrian war? The preposterous Free Syrian Army (FSA)?

You can see that Fisk does not even bother to address the question of the de facto non-aggression pact that existed between the fascists in neckties and those with beards. But even more dubious is the business about 56,000 Syrian soldiers being killed. This he claims is an “official secret” that he is only privy to. Once again we are in the realm of the Seymour Hersh School of Journalism, funded by Elmer Fudd and Scrooge McDuck. Here we have Alex Ray delivering lofty observations on  the need for scrupulous reporting on casualties but refers us to a journalist who furnishes unverifiable numbers. Oh well, you have to go by what Robert Fisk says. Like Alex Ray, he is a member in good standing of the Assad cult.

After slogging through the rest of Ray’s shallow propagandistic piece, I did find one paragraph worthy of deeper analysis. He writes:

Emile Hokayem – senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London – is one academic who admits that the statistics issue is problematic for the Western regime-change narrative. Yet he insists on overlooking it, saying “I can understand the controversy about the numbers, but that cannot distract from the bigger picture”.

Once again you are dealing with a failure to document the source. I hope that when Ray writes for scholarly journals he supplies a reference. Of course, writing for Counterpunch might be seen as a vacation from such burdens, even though I tried to supply them during my days there.

It is too bad that Ray neglected to quote Hokayem’s next comment that might have made the reference to the “bigger picture” meaningful. You can find it in a Foreign Policy article titled “The War Over Syria’s War Dead” from January 13, 2016:

The truth is Assad has far superior firepower and is willing and able to inflict much greater casualties, including civilians. It’s part of the Assad strategy. It is a deliberate regime strategy to shift the suffering on neighboring countries and humanitarian agencies, leading to policy proposals where stopping the fighting is the focus rather than a [political] transition.

This is obvious to anybody outside the Assad cult. We are dealing with classic asymmetrical warfare in which one side has an air force, heavy artillery, tanks and a centralized command while the other consists of relatively lightly-armed militias that emerged initially to defend a city or a neighborhood. When the militias became successful at keeping out Baathist death squads, the war rapidly turned into one in which MIG’s, armored helicopters, tanks and artillery turned entire neighborhoods and large parts of a city like Homs or Aleppo into something resembling Grozny or Stalingrad.

People like Alex Ray who write cheap propaganda should be careful not to allow the easy lie to seep into his scholarly work. This is perhaps one of the saddest things about the transformation of a broad swath of the left into cynical bullshit artists in the service of “anti-imperialism”. This intellectual and moral rot will likely not only taint their work in more legitimate areas; it will also make them ineffective in the broader task of transforming society or perhaps even put them in the enemy camp.

May 25, 2016

Samuel Farber: avoid Che Guevara, he is not good for you

Filed under: cuba,Samuel Farber Cubanology — louisproyect @ 9:35 pm

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Is there a more unctuous Pecksniff on the American left than Samuel Farber? I’d be hard-pressed to name one.

In an article for Jacobin, which is rapidly adopting many of the colors of the “socialism from below” part of the left that measures revolutions against its own lofty standards and invariably gives them a failing grade, Farber warns radical youth against Che Guevara like some parents warned against smoking marijuana in the early 60s—it was not good for you..

You can practically figure out what will be in Farber’s rancid article without going past the title:

Assessing Che
Che Guevara was an honest and committed revolutionary. But he never embraced socialism in its most democratic essence.

How generous of Farber to find Che “honest and committed”. But the poor thing never “embraced socialism” as presumably Farber did many years ago when he belonged to YPSL. Embracing socialism, as we all know, rather than Cuban petty-bourgeois authoritarianism is an acid test for the left. Very few souls have been pure enough to pass the test but Farber, Tim Wolforth, and James Robertson were among those who stood up for genuine Cuban socialism when a repressive, petite-bourgeois, anti-proletarian regime was making life hell for the workers.

The point of Farber’s article is to wake up the left to the fact that “Che Guevara’s politics had far more in common with the politics of the Castro brothers than many of his current admirers would care to admit.” Well, gee, I don’t know how to put this but most leftists who are ready to trash Fidel and Raul are just as ready to trash Che.

Farber’s case for seeing Che as an enemy of the vaunted “socialism from below” is consistent with his shabby record of either bending the truth or simply writing lies.

He starts off by saying that “he shared with them a revolutionary politics from above that allowed him to retain, along with the Castros, the political control and initiative on the island, based on a monolithic conception of a type of socialism immune to any democratic control and initiative from below.”

I always get a chuckle when I read Farber about the need for democratic control. This is a guy, after all, who viewed the Cuban CP as more in the socialist tradition than the July 26th movement, not being bothered apparently that the CP urged a vote for Batista in the 1930s. But the Stalinists can be forgiven because their party was the  “only significant political force in Cuba that claimed to be socialist or Marxist” in contrast to the July 26th movement that was “antitheoretical” and “antiprogrammatic”:

Last but not least, the PSP [Popular Socialist Party, the pro-Kremlin official party] was the only significant political force in Cuba that claimed to be socialist or Marxist and therefore stressed the importance of a systematic ideology and program for the development of strategy and tactics. Its ideology and program were tools used to win ideological support from radicalized Cubans seeking a systematic explanation of the country’s situation. This aspect of the PSP is even more noticeable when contrasted to the antitheoretical and antiprogrammatic stance of the Twenty-sixth-of-July movement.

–Samuel Farber, “The Cuban Communists in the Early Stages of the Cuban Revolution: Revolutionaries or Reformists?”, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 18, No. 1 1983

So that’s what “embracing socialism” means, voting for Batista and being “theoretical”. What a joke.

Moving right along, Farber contends that a sign of Che bureaucratic/centralist tendencies was his response to a difficult situation in the Congo. Che supposedly had a panacea: the creation of a “vanguard Communist Party that would singlehandedly lead a revolution” in the Congo even though he believed that it lacked “any of the necessary conditions for socialist revolution.” So what kind of asshole would be for the creation of a vanguard party in a country that could never have a revolution to begin with? Farber helps us out by linking to an excerpt from Che’s Congo Diary, which appeared in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/12/cuba.artsandhumanities. I defy you to find a single word about building vanguard parties. In fact, the excerpt is mostly a cautionary note about expecting too much out of a badly divided country and insisting on the need for practical assistance such as doctors and technicians. Does Farber expect people reading his idiotic article not to bother to check his sources? Maybe Jacobin can hire a good fact-checker so that the unwary reader does not waste his time on such shoddy journalism.

Farber does credit Che with being a radical egalitarian unlike the Castro brothers. So what made him a good guy at least on this count? It can be explained by his “bohemian upbringing” in Argentina. I don’t have a clue what Farber is talking about here. Jon Lee Anderson’s fairly decent biography does not yield a portrait of a guy walking around in sandals reading Rimbaud. Instead Che is seen as a deeply idealistic student who chooses to become a doctor so he can help the poor. Maybe because Che and a friend went “on the road” in Latin America on a beat-up old motorcycle, this is supposed to evoke Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. But if you read “Motorcycle Diaries”, the thing that stands out is his outrage over the suffering of the poor, especially the Indians. Che Guevara was no “bohemian”. He was an embryonic revolutionary.

This alleged bohemianism apparently went hand in hand with asceticism, according to Farber (as if potheads in the early 60s weren’t fond of a pint of cherry vanilla ice cream when they were feeling kind of groovy.) So ascetic was Che that he believed that the Cubans could be “educated” to live without the boob tube according to Farber’s latest book “The Politics of Che Guevara”, which is now available from Haymarket. Since the Vietnamese were building socialism without TV’s, why couldn’t Cuba? After consulting this book on Google, I could find no reference to Che’s actual words, only Farber’s extrapolation thereof from what seems like an off-the-cuff observation. You would have to search in vain to find any extended analysis that Che made about consumer goods. His main emphasis was not on living like monks but in avoiding the competition and materialism that exists in bourgeois society. All you need to do is read “Socialism and Man in Cuba” to see that the question of consumer goods is not even posed. In fact, Farber seems to grasp this in referring to his “hyper-voluntarism that expressed itself both in politics and in economic policy through his stress on moral incentives and creating a ‘New Man’ who was totally dedicated to society and oblivious to his individual fulfillment.” For that matter, you can find the same sort of revolutionary zeal in the USSR in the early years (or the French revolution for that matter) not that this would make any difference to Farber who looks just as much askance at Bolshevik rule as he does the Cuban CP.

Farber ends his article with a bouquet of platitudes:

Socialism: because the true liberation of working people can only be attained when both the economy and the polity come under the control of the women and men who through their work make social existence possible. Democracy: because majority rule and respect for minority rights and civil liberties is the only way that working people can in fact, and not in theory alone, control their destiny. Revolution: because even the most welcome, authentic reforms cannot bring about true emancipation and liberation.

You can obviously say that the USSR also failed to achieve socialism. Indeed, the entire history of the revolutionary movement since the time of Karl Marx has been marked by failure. While everybody is for the economy and the polity coming “under the control of the women and men who through their work make social existence possible”, the challenge for the left is how to bring that about.

Cuba has failed to satisfy these benchmarks for a variety of reasons. To start with, an “open society” would have been exploited by its enemies to destroy the revolution in its infancy. How do I know that? Because I saw it happen in Nicaragua where the government following Cuban advice to avoid their own excesses gave the USA the opening it needed to pour millions of dollars into the counter-revolutionary press and parties. When Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in 1861, he was facing far less of a threat than Cuba did 100 years later. Does that matter to Farber? Certainly not. He has one yardstick for Cuba and another for the rest of the world.

The other problem is that the Castro brothers and Che Guevara were men of their times. In the late 50s when they went into the mountains to launch a guerrilla war in combination with the student and trade union movement in the cities, the USSR was at the height of its prestige globally. The Russians had defeated Hitler, were providing aid to nationalist movements around the world (even if often ineffectively), and were making great industrial and scientific progress. The Cubans were likely to be influenced by ideology that diffused outwards from the Kremlin, as was obvious with Fidel’s highly critical support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The kind of people who sounded like Sam Farber in Cuba were affiliated with J. Posadas’s Fourth International. Posadas had all of the same ideas as Sam Farber and Cubans were free to read them in the Posadista bookshop, which for some reason avoided being shut down by the dictatorship. Posadas advocated a working class revolution that most certainly conformed to Farber’s strict guidelines of “socialism from below”. He also had some other odd ideas that Farber probably would have had problems with, such as advocating a first strike nuclear attack by the USSR so that socialism could emerge out of the radioactive ashes.

Fortunately, the Castro brothers steered clear of the Posadas bookstore even if it meant disappointing Sam Farber.

 

May 24, 2016

My Father’s Vietnam

Filed under: Film,Vietnam — louisproyect @ 3:03 pm

Over the years there have been any number of narrative films about Vietnam veterans ranging from the sensationalistic Rambo series to quieter and more serious films like “In Country” or “Coming Home”. As for documentaries, they tend to be made under the impact of the antiwar movement such as “Winter Soldier” or harrowing tales of survival like “Return with Honor” or “Little Dieter Loves to Fly”, both of which are focused on the ordeals of POW’s.

If you’ve seen these sorts of films, you’ll have a little bit of trouble getting the hang of “My Father’s Vietnam”, a documentary that premieres on VOD today, a deceptively modest but powerful work that combines stock footage, family photos and interviews with a number of veterans who were connected in some way with a man named Peter Sorensen whose son Soren directed the film.

The documentary begins with an epigraph drawn from a letter Ernest Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925 that “war is…the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.” This of course is not only appropriate for the experience the film contemplates but the particular connection made between Peter Sorensen and another soldier named Loring M. Bailey Jr. who was killed by an IED in Vietnam. Sorensen and Bailey, known to his friends as Ring, were white, middle-class and well-educated men who became friends at Officer’s Candidate School after joining the army in 1968 and discovering that they shared a love for Hemingway.

Either of them could have figured out a way to stay out of the military as I and most people from their milieu did but they joined mostly as a way of fulfilling a necessary obligation. Neither were particularly gung-ho but there were factors that likely influenced their decision. Sorensen came from a long line of military men, including the director’s great-grandfather who is seen in a Danish army uniform at the beginning of the film, looking for all the world like a cast member of a 19th century operetta.

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Ring Bailey’s father, who died in 2010 at the age of 96, is interviewed throughout the film. He was a lifelong employee of the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics in Groton, Connecticut where he designed warships. Unlike Peter Sorensen, who describes the Vietnam war as imperialist toward the end of the film without using the word, the elder Bailey says nothing about the war itself. His thoughts are riveted on his dead son who was lost to this senseless war at the age of 24 back in 1969. At one point, when you see him with an American flag lapel on his suit jacket, you assume that he was likely part of Nixon’s “silent majority”.

The other figure with a key role in the film is Ring Bailey’s brother-in-law Rik Carlson, who was an SDS member the year that Bailey was killed. He had a beard and shoulder length hair at the time with a willingness to do anything to oppose the war, including risking arrest for putting oil drums in the Connecticut River that were supposed to look like mines just after Nixon mined Haiphong harbor. Despite his hatred for the war, he loved his brother-in-law and remains haunted by his death. Forty-seven years after his death, he can’t help but cry over his loss.

Peter Sorensen is a thoughtful and reflective man whose recollections anchor the film. He had hopes of being a journalist before enlisting and actually realized them in the military after being reassigned to a media unit after writing an article about a battle with the Vietnamese. He tried to arrange a transfer for his friend Ring Bailey who was killed before it could come through. Like Rik Carlson, he can’t get the dead man out of his memory.

Soren Sorenson decided to make the film in order to figure out what made his highly introverted father tick. To some extent, this was a change of personality that followed the trauma of Vietnam. He suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome for years without understanding what was bothering him. In being interviewed by his son, he probably experienced a catharsis similar to those who have had successful psychotherapy.

For his part, Soren Sorenson was inspired to make the film to understand what made his self-contained father break down into tears at the Maya Lin Vietnam Memorial in Washington when he accompanied him at the age of 8. It disturbed him to see a strong man sob.

My own father, who died in 1970, was in the thick of the most brutal American campaign in Europe during WWII—the Battle of the Bulge. I could never get him to speak about it and doubt that having a video camera would have made much difference. For him, as it was for most GI’s, the war was such a horror show that he would not want to relive the experience even if only in his mind. He came back from Europe with the hope of enjoying a normal life and a modicum of security. The post-WWII boom fulfilled his wishes up to the point when LBJ escalated the war and turned me into a revolutionary. I sometimes wonder what he would make of the world today, with its ever-increasing insecurity for people like him and its non-stop imperial wars. I suppose he would have remained tight-lipped as ever, the characteristic of a man who simply lacked the perspective to put everything into context. As for me, I have that perspective but would have much preferred to have been untouched by the war that forced me to dig deeply into the question of why it began in the first place. Although Trotsky was misattributed by the wonderful leftwing novelist Alan Furst, I was impacted forever by these words: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

May 23, 2016

Living on $2 per day

Filed under: poverty,racism — louisproyect @ 5:45 pm

In the latest NY Review of Books, there’s a review of Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer’s “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” by one Christopher Jencks, a name I am familiar with even though I know next to nothing about his ideas or what he stands for. After reading the review titled “Why the Very Poor Have Become Poorer”, I decided to have a closer look.

“$2.00 a Day” has been hailed by most reviewers. For example, William Julius Wilson concluded his NY Times review with this:

This essential book is a call to action, and one hopes it will accomplish what Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” achieved in the 1960s — arousing both the nation’s consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens.

Jencks does appear in places to side with the authors, but in a highly qualified way. Last year he wrote an article in the NY Review claiming that “official” poverty statistics were misleading since they neglected to include food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) that can yield a refund for the lower-income families that qualify. For Jencks, this has led to “roughly half the families now counted as officially poor” having “a higher standard of living than families with incomes at the poverty line had in 1969.”

But after reading Edin and Shaefer, Jencks is forced to admit that “the poorest of the poor are also worse off today than they were in 1969.” So, what accounts for the discrepancy?

Much of “$2.00 a Day” is devoted to reporting on the problems faced by poor women with children who used to depend on AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) that was abolished by President Clinton in 1996 as part of a “welfare reform” that Hillary Clinton supported at the time and still supports.

AFDC was replaced by something called TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) that allowed states to shaft indigent mothers through a variety of methods, especially the right to reallocate TANF funds to financial aid for college students, etc. Many women give up on TANF because the application process is so discouraging, intentionally so. Jencks recounts what one woman had to put up with:

[Modonna] Harris looked for new jobs, without success. After her unemployment benefits ran out, a friend noticed that Harris had no food in her apartment for herself or her child and persuaded her to apply for TANF. The welfare office opened at 8:30 AM, so Harris showed up at 8:00. At least on that particular day, however, there were only enough appointment slots for applicants who had joined the line in the rain outside the welfare office before 7:30. After waiting most of the day, Harris left without having been given a chance to apply, convinced that TANF would never help her.

This is obviously related to the “discouraged workers” syndrome that led many men and women with good jobs all their life to remain permanently unemployed after losing jobs when they were in their fifties. It was just too demoralizing and pointless to apply for positions that they had no chance of nailing down. As it happens, such people are not considered to be unemployed by government agencies.

Jencks ultimately returns to his food stamp/EITC arguments in order to demonstrate that despite all the difficulties, Modonna Harris was not that bad off since the authors leave that out of the equation. There is another criticism I found positively chilling:

Another concern about Edin and Shaefer’s estimates of extreme poverty in $2.00 a Day is that they include families whose income fell below $2 a day per person for even one month. If a single mother loses her job, has no relatives, no close friends, no romantic partner, and no assets she can sell or borrow against, one month without income can be catastrophic now that TANF is so hard to get. However, a single mother who has just lost her job often has some of those assets, as $2.00 a Day shows. When that is the case, her first month without income does not always mean that her family will go hungry, much less that they will all be put out on the street for not paying the rent. The longer she goes without income, however, the more likely she is to exhaust her relatives’ sympathy, her boyfriend’s willingness to bring over pizza for dinner, or the cash she had left from her EITC refund for her work during the previous year. There is no “one-size-fits-all” rule for deciding how long a family can survive without income, but for some, at least, one month need not be disastrous.

I lingered for a minute on this sentence realizing that Jencks was trying to minimize the impact of trying to live on $2 per day for a month. This is a Harvard professor who has no idea what kind of suffering that entails. Plus the business about the “romantic partner” and “her boyfriend’s willingness to bring over pizza for dinner” smacks of the welfare investigator’s mentality that was embodied in the Clinton administration’s “welfare reform”.

Wikipedia indicates that Jencks is hardly the sort of person a “liberal” magazine like the NY Review should be calling upon to review such a book:

Jencks was on the dissertation committee of former member of The Heritage Foundation Jason Richwine, who completed his Ph.D. thesis, “I.Q. and Immigration Policy,” at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Widely discredited for the way it linked race to I.Q. levels, the thesis lost Richwine his job at the Foundation. Asked to pass comment on his involvement in what journalist and historian Jon Wiener calls a “travesty,” Jencks replied “Nope. But thanks for asking.”

The dissertation chair was one George Borjas, a conservative economist who writes about immigration for National Review and The Wall Street Journal according to Wiener but he had trouble understanding why Jencks would vote with Borjas on approving a dissertation whose last sentence was: “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

This perplexed Wiener who described Jencks as “a leading figure among liberals who did serious research on inequality—a contributor to The New York Review of Books, the author of important books, including Inequality: Who Gets Ahead?, The Homeless and The Black White Test Score Gap.”

In 2004, Jencks co-authored an article with Scott Winship for Harvard Magazine titled “Understanding Welfare Reform”. ()  Winship was a Harvard grad student when he wrote this neoliberal article but he continued rightward until he finally settled into a position at the toxic Manhattan Institute where he writes articles like “Inequality Does Not Reduce Prosperity”. Nice.

Winship and Jencks argue that the Clinton abolition of AFDC was not so bad because of the provision of food stamps, EITC and Medicaid. In fact, poor people probably benefited from the changes:

Fast-forward to 2002, when the welfare legislation was set to expire. That year the welfare rolls were less than half their size in 1996. Female-headed families with children were less likely to receive welfare benefits than at any point in at least 40 years. The magnitude of the change surpassed everyone’s predictions. Even more remarkably, however, the official poverty rate among female-headed families with children — based on $14,500 for a woman with two children in 2002 — had fallen from 42 percent to 34 percent during this period. At no time between 1959 (when the Census Bureau first began tabulating such data) and 1996 had this figure dropped below 40 percent. Welfare reform is now widely viewed as one of the greatest successes of contemporary social policy. [emphasis added]

I have to give credit to people like Barbara Ehrenreich and Charles Platt who took minimum wage jobs to be able to write about what life is like when you are poor. This is something that Christopher Jencks obviously would never consider. Let him try to live on $2 for “only a month” and see what it is like.

Although I never did this myself, I got insights on what this meant when I worked for the Department of Welfare in Harlem back in 1968. This and the war in Vietnam was enough to turn me into a revolutionary. Here’s an excerpt from my memoir that is covered under fair usage law that covers this shattering experience:

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May 22, 2016

A guide to classical music programming on the Internet

Filed under: music — louisproyect @ 8:56 pm

The Sonos Playbar: my salvation from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”

As probably many of you know, I am married to a professor who works in the CUNY system and like all those on the tenure-track is obligated to publish articles or—as they put it—perish. This means that when she is at work on an article in the living room, I cannot play CD’s or listen to the FM on my beloved high-end stereo.

A year or so ago we bought a 40 inch flat-screen Samsung TV for the bedroom that came at a very reasonable price from Best Buy since it was probably toward the end of its market life-cycle. Not long afterwards, I decided to get a Sonos Playbar that replaces the TV speakers with amplified speakers of a much better quality. It costs $700 and is worth every penny since not only is it great-sounding, it is also an Internet streaming device that allows you to listen to Spotify et al but also Radio by Tunein  that gives you access to FM stations all around the world as well as “cloud” based streaming services that are sometimes funded by advertising. Although the Sonos is no competition for my Dahlquist DQ-20 speakers in the living room, they are quite listenable and more importantly don’t interfere with my wife’s research. Needless to say, they will sound a lot better than any speaker that comes with your computer or even those that are sold as a substitute from companies like Logitech.

Before identifying my “bookmarked” Radio by Tunein sources, a few words about the question of classical music programming are in order. One of the reasons I looked forward to having access to Internet-based streaming was the utterly bankrupt nature of WQXR, NYC’s only station devoted to 24/7 classical music programming. I hated it when it was a commercial station laden with Volvo and Heineken ads, but I hated it just as much when it went “non-profit” after being sold to NPR. It has the same annoying commercials every 15 minutes but now they are called “underwriting” spots.

In a perceptive article for the NY Times (the station’s owner before it was bought by NPR) dated September 30, 2009, Daniel Wakin reported on the new WQXR. Right at the top of the article he warned listeners “Don’t expect to hear much vocal music.” Such music obviously is not geared to the sensibilities of what station management views as its ideal audience. Wakin continued:

Tradition, though, appears to top boat-rocking. A mission statement prepared by WQXR’s new programmers said, “There may indeed be times when the more radical and unfamiliar pieces work, but we will not favor them over the work that speaks directly to the needs of uplift, beauty and contemplation.”

“Greatness matters,” it added. “Bach trumps Telemann.”

Yeah, well, Bach might be greater than Telemann but if that means the 37th time in a given year there’s a Brandenburg concerto, I’d much rather hear some obscure and “minor” work by Telemann. When you repeat even the greatest composition ad infinitum, the effect is almost as grating as a Trivago commercial.

Wakin continued:

The mission statement proclaims a philosophy of “the right music at the right time.”

“Monday morning, when you’re trying to get your kids to school, you won’t hear the large choral works,” said Limor Tomer, the executive producer for music.

The programmers also provided a sample list of “core composers” and the works that would most likely play on the radio versus the Internet. They stressed that the list was but a guideline.

Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner were there. So were Copland, Janacek, Gershwin, Satie, Sibelius and the ever-popular Vivaldi. Mahler was missing.

Schubert symphonies were deemed radio-worthy but not the piano trios or songs, which were reserved for Q2. Radio received Ravel orchestra music but not solo piano works; Sibelius’s symphonies but not his tone poems; Janacek chamber works but not operas; Brahms symphonies but not choral works; Beethoven symphonies and piano concertos but not the late piano sonatas, songs or chamber works.

Vivaldi had sweeping approval. Except for “shorter sacred works.”

Right, the “ever-popular” Vivaldi who had “sweeping approval”. Except for me who upon hearing “Four Seasons” feels like a prisoner in Abu Ghraib having Billy Joel blasted into his cell 24 hours a day.

Probably the best take on this kind of shitty programming can be found on Radio Survivor, the website of Matthew Lasar and two other editors who are committed to the idea of radio as a source of stimulating cultural material, both classical and popular:

I believe that contemporary classical music should be integrated into the larger classical music picture. Instead, most classical radio stations restrict themselves to a very limited and conservative version of the “common practice period” of classical music. You hear lots of Baroque (Bach), Classical (Mozart), and Romantic (Chopin) content on these stations, but not much else. Pre-Baroque content is filtered out because it is mostly vocal and most classical operations avoid music that foregrounds the human voice. Post-Romantic content is filtered for anything that smacks of twelve-tonalism, non-western scales, pop music hybridity, prepared instrumentation, and, of course, the human voice again.

The result is that your typical classical music radio station functions as a sort of a portable easy listening museum for the work cubicle. This is unfortunate and sad. Real classical music is the music of God, of history, of nations, of utopia, dystopia, empire, and revolution. It is a wonderful conversation about the past, present, and future of the human race full of tone poems, operas, sonatas, symphonies, song cycles, and solo performances. But for a long time San Francisco’s principal classical music station adopted the very odd motto “Everyone Remain Calm.” This has nothing to do with real classical music. Ludwig von Beethoven did not want everyone to remain calm. “Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman,” Beethoven famously declared.

I should add that WQXR does have a redeeming feature. It created an Internet-only auxiliary that is sort of its ghetto for interesting music. It is first rate and earns a spot on my recommended Internet sources. In fact, Lasar salutes it in the very article where he blasts WQXR for programming music for the work cubicle:

Hallowed New York City classical radio station WQXR’s “Q2” channel is now well over three years old. I am a big fan of the service. It is one of the few places in the classical music radiosphere in the United States where you can consistently listen to a high quality stream of contemporary classical music on a 24/7 basis. Let me dispense with my mixed feelings about classical radio in general before getting to the unqualified praise section of this post.

Q2 has a variety of program hosts, all of whom are passionate and expert about 20th and 21st century classical music. My favorite show is The Brothers Balliett, identical twin composers and performers who say that they “work tirelessly to one-up each other. This drive creates a self-fueling passion to write the best work, listen to the best music, and learn as much as possible.” I strongly recommend reading their “ten point manifesto,” which begins with “We are the Brothers Balliett” and ends with “We believe in the groove.” Then there is “Sample Rate,” which explores “adventurous sonic manipulations,” and “Hammered,” a show dedicated to keyboard music.

As these program descriptions suggest, Q2 plays avant-garde content, but not too much. Lots of wonderful tonal music pervades the stream. Right now the station is broadcasting its “new music countdown.” Q2 listeners were asked to send in their favorite compositions of the last 100 years. They were broadcast through the weekend and into this week. Here are the last ten compositions played (last time I checked):

Kaija Saariaho – L’amour de loin

Jean Sibelius – Symphony No. 7

Igor Stravinsky – L’histoire du Soldat

Edgard Varese – Poeme Electronique

John Adams – Short Ride in a Fast Machine

Edgard Varese – Ionisation

Caroline Shaw – Partita for 8 Solo Voices

Alban Berg – Lyric Suite

John Adams – The Chairman Dances

György Ligeti – Atmospheres

Béla Bartók – String Quartet No. 6

Any radio station that plays a Bartok string quartet deserves our unwavering support.

My recommendations come in two parts. The first are FM stations that before Radio by Tunein could only be heard on a conventional radio. This means that if you wanted to hear BBC Radio 3, you had to go over to London. I should add that I am not including it because in my view, it is not that much different from WQXR. While including much more vocal music, it has a tendency to keep selections to within 15 minutes or so. This means you will only hear an excerpt from a Handel opera rather than the whole thing. Finally, there are some conventional stations like WQXR that offer a streaming service as mentioned in the article above. This means that they can be heard on the Internet but not on a radio. As a bonus, these auxiliary services tend to use HD audio, which sound really good over something like the Sonos. They will be indicated below in italics.

The second part are “cloud” stations, which means that they are fairly automated without any on-air hosts. So you don’t get anybody putting the work into context but at the same time benefit from the absence of the sort of banal chatter that plagues WQXR and—to be honest—BBC Radio 3 as well.

FM Stations:

  1. WHRB: Harvard University’s station. It has jazz programming but the classical programming is dominant. Very original and often very challenging music as you might expect from a prestigious Ivy League school.
  2. WWFM: This is owned and operated by Mercer County Community College in New Jersey and features a lot of syndicated programming but of a very high quality, including for example Bill McGlaughlin, whose shows originate on Chicago’s WFMT. WFMT is much more famous than WWFM but I prefer this rather obscure but essential station near Princeton, NJ.
  3. KQAC: This is a nonprofit station in Portland that thankfully is not affiliated with NPR, which tends to the overly familiar despite its nominally nonprofit status. To give you an idea of the sort of thing you might hear, they are playing a Mozart symphony this afternoon but it is number 4 rather than the overexposed number 40.
  4. Toscana Classical Network FM 93.1: From Italy, of course. Can’t tell you much about the station except that the music is outstanding.
  5. WQXR-Q2: Described above.
  6. WTSU-HD2: This is the streaming service of Troy University in Georgia. This is a bare-bones operation that does not even offer a playlist on the website but the music is damned good.
  7. WGBH Early Music: WGBH is Boston’s classical music station and overrated like Chicago’s WFMT. Its main value is providing this streaming service that consists of an archive of live performances of early music originally heard on the station. Most of it is baroque and earlier but they do feature the occasional rarity from Schubert as I am listening to now.

Cloud-based programming:

  1. Ancient FM: Commercial-free programming of music from the renaissance and earlier. Just fabulous if your tastes like mine run toward Jannequin and Hildegarde of Bingen.
  2. Audiophile Baroque: Superb programming from Greece of all places, without any commercials. Considering the nation’s economic situation, this is a miracle.
  3. Twentysound: Devoted to 20th century music but with qualifications as the website puts it: “twentysound is an internet radio channel dedicated to classical music from the 20th and 21st century, focussing on those composers who have carefully developed the great traditions of the 18th and 19th century instead of following radical musical ideologies like twelve tone theory and serialism.” That’s okay with me since I prefer my Webern in very small doses.
  4. Venice Classical Music: From Italy, of course. Music spanning the ages with an emphasis on the unfamiliar, in particular Italian composers. Right now it is playing a Locatelli flute sonata. Yummy!

May 21, 2016

Bernie Sanders announces plans for a new left party

Filed under: Bernie Sanders — louisproyect @ 3:52 pm

Bernie_Sanders_Arrested_1963_Chicago_Tribune

Sanders being arrested at a 1963 anti-segregation protest in Chicago. He was later found guilty of resisting arrest and charged $25. (From Wikipedia)

(This is a thought experiment based on some of the discussion taking place around the need for the Sanders campaign to “continue the struggle” after Clinton becomes the Democratic Party candidate for president.)

My fellow Americans, it is always difficult to admit you are wrong especially when you are a Senator. But the refusal of the convention to approve or even consider reforms that will make the Democratic Party more attractive to voters leaves me with no alternative but to begin the difficult but necessary task of building a new party that not only embraces such reforms but fights for them in municipal, state and national elections. It was my hope that the Democrats could return to the values of the New Deal and the New Society but in the final analysis they insisted on defending the values of Wall Street banks. If they refuse to stand up for the middle class, we have no alternative except to make a stand for the overwhelming majority of Americans who survive from paycheck to paycheck.

The fact that over 4 out of 10 voters agreed with me on the need for a $15 minimum wage, single-payer health insurance, breaking up the largest banks and an end to fracking shows that a basis for a new party exists, one that is not afraid to take on the special interests on Wall Street and that is willing to fight for the right of middle class Americans to enjoy job security, good health and a better future for their children. These were rights that were once at the core of the Democratic Party, the ones that FDR named as the Four Freedoms. If the party has abandoned its core beliefs, then it is up to us to reclaim them in the name of fairness and decency.

full: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12557

May 20, 2016

Almost Holy

Filed under: Film,religion,Ukraine — louisproyect @ 4:12 pm

Opening today at the Village East in New York is “Almost Holy”, a documentary about a Ukrainian pastor named Gennadiy Mokhnenko who created the Pilgrim Republic, a home for drug addicted street kids in Mariupol in 1998. Mokhneko is a larger than life character with an absolute conviction that he is doing the right thing even if it involves what amounts to vigilantism. When he goes into a pharmacy that has been selling opiates to children and reads the pharmacist the riot act, you tend to view him in a positive light especially in a society like Ukraine where the cops are frequently nothing but criminals themselves. Although Jesus Christ was only a figure of legend, it is remarkable to see a contemporary Christian trying to emulate that side of the son of god who drove the money changers from the temple.

The film is also of interest as a running commentary on the civil war in Ukraine as Mokhnenko has to dodge rockets and artillery attacks to continue with his mission, which mostly consists of going into what amounts to the Ninth Circle of hell to reach 13 to 17-year-old boys and girls who are living in abandoned buildings or shacks with needle tracks running down their arms and nothing to live for until their next fix. Mokhnenko lays it on the line: Come with him to the Pilgrim Republic if they want to live. Oddly enough, it evokes Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line in Terminator 2 especially since Gennadiy Mokhnenko looks like he is carved out of granite.

The film is a good companion piece to “The Tribe” that I reviewed almost a year ago. Like “Almost Holy”, it was set in a home for Ukrainian society’s marginalized youth—in this instance deaf teenagers who were trapped into gang life and prostitution by the men who ran the institution. Although it would have been obvious to anybody following the recent history of Ukraine, director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiiy made it explicit in the press notes:

A boarding school is better than just a school because it is a closed system, which––like a prison––can be perceived to be a metaphor of the state even if that isn’t the intention. The Tribe is, to a certain extent, a metaphor of the arrangement of the Ukrainian state, at least the pre-revolutionary Ukraine. And the arrangement of the state of Ukraine was based on the principle of a Mafiosi group.

In “Almost Holy”, the children are victims more of neglect than direct exploitation by Fagin like characters. They have run away from impossible situations at home, usually the result of having alcoholic and abusive parents. Indeed, the social portrait that emerges is the same as Russia during Yeltsin’s rule when Jeffrey Sachs’s shock therapy was destroying the economy and driving millions of Russians into drug and alcohol addiction. Now that Sachs has recast himself as an “anti-imperialist”, he would obviously side with the Russian special forces that were bombing Mariupol when the film was being made. In a CNBC article, he justified Russian intervention in the Ukraine using the favorite talking point of the “realists” like Stephen F. Cohen or John Mearsheimer:

Some claim that each country has the “right” to choose its own military alliance: that this is simply Ukraine’s choice to make. Yet the U.S. has never allowed its own neighbors like Cuba (or Nicaragua, Granada, and several others) to choose their own alliances. To claim to Russia that Ukraine’s membership in NATO is Ukraine’s decision alone is the beam in the eye of the West.

So there we have it. If it was all right for the USA to blockade Cuba, it was also all right for Russia to launch a separatist war.

Apart from what it says about life in Ukraine, the film is documentary at its finest. Director Steve Hoover starts with a compelling main character, something that is essential to the success of most documentaries, and uses the camera and film score to sustain your attention for the film’s entire 100 minutes. This is a morality tale that will force many of my readers, who like me tend to be atheists and skeptical of organized religion except for the Latin American liberation theology current, to engage with a personality who in many ways has more in common with the Christian right in the USA. Gennadiy Mokhnenko is not a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church but a Protestant sect. For that matter, he doesn’t appear to be functioning as a pastor but much more as a kind of community activist. It should also be understood that he is an anti-Communist, endorsing at one point the trashing of a Lenin statue. As the son of factory workers, he probably came to resent not only the social distinctions of Stalinist society but its failure to at least satisfy the needs of the population as it reached its terminal stages in the 1980s.

In doing some background research on the director, I discovered that I had reviewed his last documentary, which was titled “Blood Brother” and had a main character resembling Gennadiy Mokhnenko:

When I first heard that the documentary “Blood Brother” was about a young American going to India to work with HIV-positive orphans, the first thing that entered my mind was “another Mother Teresa”. The only question is what would motivate someone to take what amounted to a vow of poverty and devote himself to people he barely knew and who were in such desperate straits. Was it religion? Was it a kind of AIDS activism that was prevalent in the USA during the early years of the outbreak?

It turns out that the protagonist, a lean and handsome youth named Rocky Braat who grew up in Pittsburgh, remained as much of a mystery as the film ended as when it began. This, however, is what makes it appealing. You are both impressed with his dedication but at a loss to figure out what makes him tick. In an age when people his age are desperate to find a job—any job—it is a mystery (in the original sense) as to why Rocky would reject that path and choose to live a Christ-like existence. As the press notes state: “Rocky endures a daily diet of rice, a rat infested hut, visa problems.”

Upon further investigation, I discovered what motivated Hoover to make “Blood Brother” and why that troubled some critics. It turned out that Braat and Hoover were both members of the evangelical Greater Pittsburgh Church of Christ, which is part of the International Churches of Christ. This is a church that deploys missionaries and proselytizes for beliefs that are probably not that far from Gennadiy Mokhnenko’s. Although it has no connections to the rightwing fundamentalists who follow politicians like Ted Cruz, it is not exactly an institution that most film critics would feel sympathy for.

Writing for PBS’s POV blog, Tom Roston offered a carefully nuanced assessment of “Blood Brother” and its ties to the International Churches of Christ:

Hoover says he did not have a Christian agenda making the film. It’s up to you if you want to connect the dots the way I have. But, I should add, these questions become more pointed when you remember that the credits direct viewers to the charity LIGHT. Is there an appropriate amount information provided by Hoover’s documentary, or even on LIGHT’s website, to make an informed decision to donate? Presidential candidate Barack Obama had to answer for his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. He confronted those issues and was able to move on — and get elected. Hoover might not want us to go there, but I think this is the price of membership in his church.

I hope three things come from me raising this issue. One, that we can have a constructive discussion about when and whether a filmmaker’s personal life is relevant to a discussion about his or her film. Two, if Hoover puts himself in his next film, about a rogue Ukrainian priest who goes to extreme measures to get drug-addicted youth off the streets, that he considers acknowledging his past doing similar work and mentioning how his faith relates to how he tells that story. And, third, that Blood Brother gets that Oscar nomination. Hoover is a good filmmaker and Blood Brother‘s cause, as it is presented in the film, is more than just.

Keeping this background in mind, it is appropriate to quote Steve Hoover from the film’s press notes as to “mentioning how his faith relates to how he tells that story.” It is also a fascinating account of what it meant for Americans to make a film in a war-torn nation:

The journey of this film began in 2012 when some of my co-workers were commissioned to do a promotional video in Ukraine. While in Mariupol, they met Gennadiy Mokhnenko and spent a few days with him. After listening to his stories and witnessing his amorphous work, they returned with enthusiasm and proposed doing a feature length non-fiction film on Gennadiy. I wasn’t interested in the idea until they shared raw footage with me and further explained some of the context. I was struck by the character of Gennadiy.

Once in Ukraine, we encountered many challenges, the most obvious being that we don’t speak Russian. With the exception of the main subject’s broken English, almost all of the dialogue was Russian. While shooting, we relied heavily on a translator, observation and the main subjects’ limited explanations of events. We had four cameras; two of them were constantly rolling. We committed to filming everything we possibly could, which made for a difficult but rewarding post process.

My life has changed radically throughout the making of this film. Formerly, I was Christian, or I at least identified as one, but I no longer am. There’s a lot to the story. I was raised in a religiously apathetic, broken, Catholic family. I converted to a nondenominational church in college. To me, faith was a solution to the existential confusion I found myself in after a long, overindulgence in psychotropic drugs, which spanned my adolescence. As a teenager, I was obsessed with hallucinating and the drugs were boundless. The faith eventually helped me to pull myself together, giving me guidance, discipline and a moral framework, all of which I didn’t really have beforehand. It also dispelled an attraction I had to heroin. I had never used heroin, but I was always seduced by the idea and a step away from it, along with several friends who came to die from overdoses. My college roommate at the time was dealing and coaxing me with free dope. He has since overdosed and died.

Gennadiy’s former work with drug addled street kids in Ukraine struck a chord with my darker past. Had I been born in Mariupol, Gennadiy would have had me by the collar. I found deeper interest however, not in the kids I empathized with, but in a character I didn’t understand. The story could have gone in many different directions.

Eventually, I found myself standing in a van while our crew was being attacked by an angry Pro-Russian mob in Ukraine. I was both terrified and calm. I knew that if we made it out of the situation, my life would change – this time in a different way. Up until that point, for several years I had resisted coming to terms with the fact that my beliefs had changed. My cultural liberalism didn’t align with the faith, no matter how hard I tried to squeeze it in. I had grown weary of the behavior and practices of the church that I was a part of and increasingly uncomfortable with the social pressures that some of the members were asserting on me.

The van broke through the mob and after a short car chase, I found myself resolute. I would embrace my worldview and move on. I spent the remainder of the year, mostly alone with the edit. Working on the edit of the film was a means of catharsis for me.

Though the making of this film had a distinctive effect on my life personally, this is definitely not a call to action film; if anything, it’s more of a portrait. It is something to look at, reflect on and discuss. In light of current events, I hope it gives people a reason to research the conflict in Ukraine. Although this film isn’t designed to be a political tool, it has obvious relevance to the turmoil between the EU, Russia and Ukraine and offers some context. The film could develop additional relevance as the conflict progresses.

While the film was in development, I was told by different establishments that there was some controversy surrounding the film. Some felt the portrayal of Gennadiy was too objective and people wanted to know “how the director felt about him.” Some liked Gennadiy, while others were disapproving. I believe Gennadiy is confounding, so I wasn’t comfortable telling people how to think and feel about him. I wanted to show the complicated nature of this character and the world he lives in.

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