Hallelujah I’m a Bum

June 14, 2020 at 9:12 pm (Uncategorized)

Been reading David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. Most of it is not unfamiliar to anyone who has tipped their the modern workforce, but the chapter at the transformation of work is really interesting.

Reminded me of Utah Phillips’ recording of the old Harry McCLintock song “Hallelujah I’m a bum” and especially Phillips’ commentary.

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Why We Can’t Breathe (International Perspective article)

June 11, 2020 at 2:12 pm (Uncategorized)

WHY WE CAN’T BREATHE

No need to recount those awful images. Everybody saw them. They instantly became a powerful symbol that resonated all over the world: “We’ll keep our knee on your neck until you die”, they seemed to say. It soon appeared that many felt that knee pressure on their necks: The pressure of disrespect and discrimination; the pressure of being robbed of a future; the pressure of brutal repression and control. For the second time, the desperate cry of a man being murdered by the police for having transgressed the rules of commerce, was taken over by thousands: “I can’t breathe!!!”

But now the cry is much louder, resounding in seven hundred American cities and around the world. Its symbolism too is powerfully resonating. “We can’t breathe” is a particular apt slogan for today.

We can’t breathe because you stoke hate and violence, racism, nationalism and xenophobia to divide us so you can rule;

We can’t breathe because you take away our means to make a decent living and our hopes for the future while you make the rich ever richer;

We can’t breathe because you poison our environment, as you destroy life on earth for your profits;

We can’t breathe because you facilitate pandemics, and then lock us up and send the lowest paid amongst us, more often than not black or brown men and women, to work in dangerous conditions;

We can’t breathe because, while exalting freedom, your state is an octopus extending its arms into all aspects of life; you spy on us, your police are armies, trained to harass, hunt and kill and most of all, to intimidate us, to keep us small;

We can’t breathe because while you claim to be devoted to justice, you sweat injustice from every pore. The more your system sinks in crisis, the more corruption, oppression, exploitation, hate, discrimination and violence it engenders.

What this worldwide cry is saying, even if most of those shouting it may not be conscious of it, is this: capitalism, you’re suffocating us.

Except for a backwater mayor in Mississippi, who saw nothing wrong in the murder, the entire ruling class quickly and unanimously condemned it. Even hard-line supporters of the police were ‘horrified’,‘appalled’, ‘disgusted’, ‘sickened’, ‘outraged’, etc. “He’s not one of us!”, they wanted to assure us, “Look, we got him behind bars!” And indeed, never before was a killer cop fired and arrested so quickly. That we thank in no small part to the ubiquity of smartphones. If it hadn’t been filmed, this murder would only have been a local tragedy. A mere statistic. American police kill on average about 1,100 persons each year, the majority black and brown. George Floyd was not the first black man killed by Derek Chauvin. Nor was the way in which the cop killed exceptional; his choking ‘technique’ is used by cops all over the world.

Here the “technique” is used against a Palestinian protester

The ruling class did not want to throw oil on the fire, but the fire spread anyway. The movement erupted like a volcano, unpredicted by the political seismologists. The police were mobilized to contain it. There are 700,000 police officers in the US. In recent decades they have been heavily equipped with military hardware and training. Initially, they held back. It didn’t seem smart to try to quench a movement triggered by police violence with more police violence. But as tensions rose, the restraint often gave way to brutal forms of crowd control. Countless protesters were beaten, a few even killed with live ammunition. Tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets were used in copious amounts. The owners of the companies that produce this stuff must have watched it with glee.

Sometimes we saw police officers lay down their batons and march with the protesters, raise their fist or ‘take a knee’ in solidarity. Don’t be fooled by this. There will come a time when some policemen will refuse orders and join the struggle, but this is not what is happening now. While these ‘good cops’ appeased the demonstrators, their colleagues were standing behind a corner, armed to the teeth, ready to crack some skulls.

The police was not enough: the national guard was mobilized in 32 states, four regular army divisions were put on standby, and all sorts of other enforcers like ICE, the DEA and the riot police of the Federal Bureau of Prisons were thrown into the battle. The military police were called to help defend the White House. Curfews were imposed (not very successfully). Still, the protest demonstrations swelled, and the looting increased.

The ruling class again was unanimous in its condemnation of the looting but its attitude to it varied. For the right, it was an opportunity to change the narrative: the murder of George Floyd became a side story, the real story now was nothing less than “a battle between civilisation and barbarism”, as Tucker Carlson, a talking head on Fox News put it. An iron fist is what is needed. The hater-in-chief in the White House, when he escaped from his bunker, joined in, threatening to deploy the army, to unleash “vicious dogs”, declaring Antifa a terrorist organization (Antifa, if it were an organization, should return the favor and declare his government a terrorist organization), exhorting the local authorities to dominate the streets, clearing a path with tear gas to wave a Bible in front of a church, and so on. Clearly he hopes to be re-elected as the law-and-order candidate, the unwavering, implacable strongman we need in this time of rising anxiety and chaos.

For the left (to use this term very broadly), the protest against the murder of George Floyd remained the main story. Most mainstream media and politicians made a sharp distinction between ‘the peaceful protesters’ and ‘the violent fringe elements’. Branding the latter as evil outsiders, professional troublemakers, leeches on the movement, they all exhorted the protesters to stay away from them and seek change through peaceful means, like voting and praying. But the second most popular slogan of the movement is “No justice, no peace!” How can the movement be peaceful and refuse peace at the same time? By ‘peaceful’ the Democrats and others mean harmless for capitalism, respectful of its rules. They want us to believe a better, more humane capitalism is achievable if we vote for them. They turn reality on its head: capitalist society is not inhumane because of bad cops and bad politicians, the latter are the product of a system that is inhumane at its core.

As for the looting, some context is needed. Capitalism is based on looting. From its very beginning until now it has looted human labor and the earth’s resources relentlessly for the sake of accumulating profit. Just recently, its stimulus program showered hundreds of billions of dollars on the owners of capital at the expense of everyone else. It has kept its knee on the necks of African Americans in particular, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow terror and in our time through mass incarceration. Let’s keep things in proportion.

So we shed no tears when we see the police station of the killer cops of Minneapolis go up in flames, when the windows of the bank of America and Manhattan Chase are shattered, when police are pelted and patrol cars are burned, when big chains like Target (with a name like that, they asked for it) who underpay their workers and overcharge their customers are plundered, when kids who barely make enough to survive gleefully empty luxury stores that cater to the rich. They deserve what they get.

But there’s also the senseless violence, such as the attacks on small groceries, restaurants, barber shops etc, many owned by black people or immigrants who sometimes, when defending their stores, were beaten and even shot to death. There is no excuse for that. They victimize the innocent. In poor neighborhoods of Minneapolis, the only places selling food were destroyed. With the bus service halted, the people there now live in a food desert.

Who are these looters?

Many are young people unemployed or earning a miserable wage, who grab the chance to get things for free, even things they never could save enough to buy. They are school kids, enjoying a giddying moment of freedom. They are people who take food, shoes, clothes and of course, toilet paper, because they need them or can sell them to survive.

Then there are the professional criminals, seeing an opportunity for windfall profit. They come well-organized in teams, with crowbars, bolt cutters and guns, loading up vans while enforcers deal with any resistance. Sometimes they compete over looting territory with other gangs.

Further, there are misguided anti-capitalists who romanticize violence and ruin for ruin’s sake, believing it will undermine the system. In practice, they are hard to distinguish from the white supremacists who long for a race war and want Trump re-elected and believe that chaos will contribute to both ends. The white men who drove through Atlanta’s poor neighborhoods giving bricks to teenagers could be either. Who were the people in Davenport driving around shooting, killing a protester? Rarely are they identified as did happen in the case of a twitter account named ANTIFA_US that tweeted: “ALERT Tonight’s the night, Comrades Tonight we say “F**k The City” and we move into the residential areas… the white hoods…. and we take what’s ours #BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica.” It was retweeted by many rightwingers including Donald Trump jr. who called it proof his father was right to call Antifa a terrorist organization before it was revealed that it was a fake account set up by white racists.

Initially, the police often seemed to take a hands off approach to the looting. It concentrated its efforts on confronting the demonstrations. Police officers were observed in their cars, doing nothing, while looting was going on under their eyes. We can only speculate on their motives. Were they scared (not unreasonably), waiting for backup that didn’t come? Were they angry for being scapegoated for everything? Did they want the looting to occur in the hope that it would discredit the movement? Or show “the people with a stake in society” (to borrow another expression of Tucker Carlson) how badly they are needed?

Increasingly, protesters began to resist the looting and wanton acts of destruction because they saw them as senseless and taking attention away from their cause.

But that cause is vague. Obviously, in this case, everybody agrees that the killer cops must be punished, and the authorities gladly will sacrifice them, if that calms the mood. They also concede that the police need better training, although in practice that will likely mean making them more aware of how they come across when they’re being filmed. They increased the charges against the main culprit and leveled charges against his accomplices. What more do you want?, they seem to be asking. But still, the protests are swelling.

What do we want? We’re not sure. More than this. Freedom. Respect. Liberation of worries of how to survive. Continuing the joy of being together, black, white and brown, believing in and fighting for our common future. That’s what we want, to be together, to fight together. Don’t tell us to go back inside, to go back to normal, to vote and pray.

But being together carries risks today. We witness an unprecedented contingency: an explosive spread of social discontent and an explosive spread of a pandemic at the same time. The pandemic played a role in the events. On the one hand it fanned the protest in different ways. The disproportionately high number of Covid-19 victims among black and brown people fed the anger. It put the spotlight on the grievous underfunding of healthcare in poor urban areas, on the unhealthy living conditions there and on the fact that many essential workers were forced to work without adequate protection. It’s no coincidence that in New York for instance, the richest borough (Manhattan) has the lowest number of Covid-deaths per capita and the poorest borough (the Bronx) the highest. Another factor is the relative emptiness of the streets, which makes it easier for the protesters to occupy them (and for the looters to do their thing). Then there was the urge of many people, especially the young, after months of relative confinement, to be out in the streets, to end their isolation and be with others. For many, the joy of fighting together is an exhilarating experience which they will not forget.

Social distance practices went through the window. How could it have been otherwise? Still, the fear of infection keeps many away from the protest, especially older people. The vast majority of the participants are under 35. Most wear masks but are very close together. Especially when they get arrested and locked up in overcrowded jails, as thousands have. Then there’s the tear gas, so abundantly sprayed: it can damage the lungs and make people more vulnerable to the virus.

Health experts warned that a second wave of infections is likely, already before the present upheaval began, because several states started to ‘re-open’ the economy with imprudent haste in their eagerness to get the profit-machine running again. That is the main reason why infections will increase again, because the risk is the greatest in indoor spaces. But when this second wave materializes, no doubt Trump will blame it on the protesters.

As here in Louisville, white women often made a “shield” in front of the demonstrations in the hope of moderating the police violence

The street protests will end. Will that mean a return to normal?

At least, the participants in this global movement will take some valuable lessons home.

One is a lesson of empowerment. They learned that by fighting together, they can put the state on the defensive and focus everybody’s attention on their cause. A new generation has discovered the power and joy of collective struggle. And it won’t be derailed by racial division. There has probably never been a social mass movement in US history that is as diverse in its racial composition. And it did not let itself be captured by organizations and leaders speaking in its name, although the “Black Lives Matter” Network, which has chapters in many cities and has received funding from some big companies, plays a big role in organizing many marches. Most of the action is spontaneous and fluid. There is no fixed set of demands, the goal posts are moveable. But so far, they have not moved beyond the aim of ending police mistreatment of racial minorities. In recent days, demands to “defund the police” and even to “abolish the police”, have grown louder.

Some politicians, like the mayors of New York and Los Angeles, have expressed sympathy for the defunding campaign but what they mean by it is that a modest amount of city funds would be shifted from the police budget to some social programs. Given the size of police budgets in the US ($115 billion in 2017, according to the Urban Institute; the budget of the NYPD alone , $ 6 billion, is larger than that of the World Health Organization)) that would not change much at all. The demand to abolish the police is interesting because it encourages us to try to imagine a different social order. What would a world without police look like? MPD150, a Minneapolis-based group which promotes this demand, explains that it would be a step by step process “strategically reallocating resources, funding, and responsibility away from police and toward community-based models of safety, support, and prevention.” But it does not make sense to want to abolish the police without wanting to abolish capitalism as well. The problem with this and other radical sounding plans such as the Green New Deal or open borders is that they are at once too timid and utopian. By themselves, they solve nothing and they are also impossible to realize within capitalism. We too want to abolish the police, have open borders, and production that does not pollute. But these are not optional parts of capitalist society that can be lopped of. We have to take the bull by the horns.

This movement is a big step forward but there is still a long road ahead of us. Many illusions will have to be shed. Those who expect that, as a result of this movement, the police will become nice, the poor will be treated with respect, and racial discrimination will end, are in for a rude awakening. Of course, a lot of respect will be paid to the idea that black lives matter. Most major US corporations have posted messages claiming they’re devoted to it. Scores of politicians have ‘taken a knee’ in support of it. But in reality, lives only matter in capitalism to the degree they are useful for the accumulation of value. Many millions in this world are not, and their lives don’t matter very much. That won’t change. Capitalism always has used racism and xenophobia to cut off the poorest part of the working class from the rest. That will not change either.

The normal we are returning to after this movement is a world of pain and misery. Capitalism makes it impossible to use the human creative powers directly for human needs. Generally speaking, needs are only met if it is profitable to do so. But that profit mechanism is in trouble. Capitalism is in crisis and will remain in crisis after the present pandemic has ended. The normal that awaits us is a world of soup kitchens, evictions, anxiety and depression, of high unemployment while social wealth gravitates from the working class to the rich and governments prepare for war.

Crimes of poverty will increase. Remember why the two men whose last words are now so famous were arrested. Eric Garner was accused of selling loose cigarettes (stealing tax money from the state) and George Floyd of paying in a grocery store with a counterfeit 20 dollar bill (a sacrilege). Crimes of poverty. They died because they were poor and black.

Social unrest will increase. Class contradictions will become more glaring.

And the police will be the police. Despite the reforms that now may be implemented, the laws that may be concocted, the confederate statues that may be taken down, the police will do what it has to do, protect the capitalist law and order. That’s what it is for. Itt will be violent, and it will be brutal.

What we hope that will happen, after this movement ends, is that many refuse to return to normal.

That the fighting spirit survives the mass demonstrations.

What we hope is that the understanding grows that racial discrimination, poverty and police brutality will only end when capitalism ends.

What we hope is that the struggle will spread from the streets to the working places. Only then will it gain the power to change the world.

What we hope is that the sheer absurdity of the world will agitate the imagination to the point where we are compelled to ask a collective question: what does the world we want to live in and leave behind look like?

INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE

6/7/2020

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McKenzie Wark: ‘The Logic of Riots’

June 3, 2020 at 12:43 pm (Uncategorized)

There’s a lot of discussion at the moment about “riots.” Obviously, this does not address the current situation (This piece was first published on August 16, 2011 on a Verso Books blog ), but it is of interest.

Riots have their own logic. Both those who celebrate and decry them tend to think of riots as irrational outbursts, which can be channeled back towards order either by offering a few concessions or by sending in more police. There is invariably some moralizing that goes along with all this, none of it terribly helpful for understanding why riots are a constant of modern urban life rather than some inexplicable exception.

There’s a short text that always does the rounds whenever riots occur again. It was written by Guy Debord, legendary co-founder of the Situationist International, and bearing the jargon-heavy title of ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.’ These days you don’t have to hunt around for the photocopies passed from hand to hand, it can be easily googled. Its subject is the Watts riots of 1965. Its leading provocation, and the reason for its underground popularity, is this: “But who has defended the rioters of Watts in the terms they deserve?

“The Los Angeles revolt was a revolt against the commodity,” Debord said. It was at least partly so. “The flames of Watts consumed consumption.” In the spectacle of consumer society advertises a life in which all that is good appears on television and all that appears on television is good. This constant circulation of images of the consumer lifestyle, which came into its own in the sixties, could but be a cruel reminder for African Americans in particular of the inequities underlying such images.

The spectacle of consumable life ranks goods in order of their desirability. The fancy brands are so much better than generic knock-offs. But this is also an order that ranks its subjects. To be Black in the sixties is to be at the bottom of the visible order. Just as the ranking of which are the better brands changes over time, so too does the league table of desirable kinds of people. You have your Kate Middletons, and then you have your chavs.

The Watts riot was a moment when African Americans saw through this hierarchy of images. As Debord says: “they demand the egalitarian realization of the American spectacle of everyday life.” This is a constant of the modern riot. Those who are told, at one and the same time, that these and the things they should desire, but that they themselves are not desirable, will periodically get the message, and respond in kind. Like the Watts rioters, they see the swag on offer – and loot it.

The signature Situationist concept for such – recurring – events is potlatch. Where Marx compared the transformation of the object of labor into a commodity to a transubstantiation, the Situationists were interested in a kind of reverse miracle, by which the thing lost its status as commodity and became the gift. The looted object is no longer a commodity. But the perversity of the gesture is that its seizure does not break the spell of exchange and return to things their value. Rather, looting takes the spectacle at its word. In the spectacle, what is good appears and what appears is good. The looter jumps the gap between desire and the commodity. The looter takes desires for necessity, and necessity for their desires, but freeing the commodity from exchange does not expunge exchange from the commodity.

The riot contains a quite contrary movement as well – arson. The arsonist is not quite the same as the looter. The arsonist’s is a negative relation to what appears, particularly to the built environment. The arsonist’s actions are marked by the refusal of spectacular form. Enormous energy is being withdrawn from the labor process and it finds no other outlet than in aggression prompted by dissatisfaction. In the riot, that aggression turns against two of its sources: against the time of the commodity form; against an alienating urban space.

Looting and arson are recurring events within what the Situationists called the “overdeveloped world.” They are the mark of overdevelopment, of the quantitative expansion of production outstripping the qualitative transformation of everyday life, of desires spinning their wheels, without traction in the elaboration of needs. The proximate causes may vary, and are usually to do with the thuggery of the police and the indifference of the state.

What the Situationists point to is the consistency and persistence of what follows, the twin forks of seize it all, or burn it down. Sometimes, the riot takes a different form, and passes toward rebellion, even toward revolution, or perhaps those in the middle of it think it does. This is why May ‘68 has a special place in not only the theory but also the mythology of the Situationists. It was more than a riot. It was the fabled general strike.

There is a lot that is missing from Debord’s account of Watts: The thirty dead, the thousand injured, the four thousand arrests. Still, it might have interested him that later investigations upheld his hunch that while the riots were leaderless they were not without organization. Impromptu meetings in the park after dark coordinated movements, for example. Riots are neither irrational, spontaneous outbursts, nor the secret workings of some conspiracy or other.

They, are rather, the working out of an inner tension in commodified life. That tension is usually finessed through the fine idea that if everyone just knuckles under and does their best, all will be well. The yawning gap between the promise of the spectacle and its actuality can be narrowed with hard work and a bit of luck. When that carrot turns out to be a rotten promise, then there’s nothing for it but the stick. The modern, spectacular society would prefer to be loved, but when push comes to shoved it will settle for being feared.

McKenzie Wark

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In the Heat of the Summer

June 3, 2020 at 12:32 pm (Uncategorized)

Except that it’s not even summer yet. As I watch the events from Canada, I’m tempted to use that quotation about how even a single spark can start a prairie fire. But of course, it’s not a single spark, is it?

The murder of George Floyd may have been the most recent spark, but it’s also Breonna Taylor, shot in her bed eight times by Kentucky police no-knock bursting into the wrong house. It’s Ahmoud Arbery the victim of a latter-day lynching while jogging. It’s watching Covid-19 ravage communities while the government rearranges deckchairs on a new Titanic. It’s the profit by business as untold numbers are cast onto the scrap heap. It’s that there’s no seeming end or escape from any of this.

And so pressure builds.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who has seamlessly transitioned from a dubious real estate developer to a bullying TV host, then from a lazy authoritarian into a fascistic blowhard armed with the flag and the cross about to unleash America’s military on American’s own citizens pours gasoline in the form of angry invective while hiding in bunkers or behind armed thugs.

There was a line on Sunday in a New York Times article noting that this year has felt like 1998 (impeachment), 1918 (Spanish flu), 1929 (economic collapse) and 1968 (social unrest). The thought that struck me was it’s not even hurricane or wildfire season yet.

And so the pressure builds

To make someone listen

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Human Nature in the Corona Virus Crisis

June 2, 2020 at 2:10 pm (Uncategorized)

This article appears on the Internationalist Perspective website.

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Human Nature in the Corona Virus Crisis

The global health crisis is a true revealer of human nature and its contradictions. By partially blocking fundamental aspects of ordinary social life, such as work, human contact, transport, leisure, it throws a different light on many of the ideas, beliefs and practices on which the established order is based. This creates a “void” where reflexes, “natural” human impulses, come more easily to the surface, free of the many shackles and ideological masks behind which they live more or less repressed or disguised.

This crisis has many unique characteristics compared to all the pandemics of the past. The simultaneous paralysis of essential sectors of world production is by no means the least. But for the question which interests us I would like to underline its simultaneously planetary and “wired”, character. Despite the control and limits imposed by national states, despite the great inequalities that persist between countries, the vast majority of the world’s population is connected to the rest of the humans by new information and communication technologies. More than 5 billion people owned a phone in 2017, including 3.3 billion a smartphone. This gives a new dimension to the understanding of what human nature can be.
I do not pretend to deduce here everything that follows from this reality. But it is a new dimension that should never be overlooked.

“The general mood is solidarity” headlined a French newspaper on April 11. The first observation that everyone has made is the explosion of gestures of solidarity, mutual aid wherever the pandemic has raged.

There are many examples and their forms are constantly developing. The dedication and selflessness of health workers has become a model for human behavior. Everywhere, there were numerous initiatives, spontaneous and then self-organized, to thank them, encourage them and support them materially (solidarity funds on the internet). In the most disadvantaged neighborhoods we see a development of voluntary, self-organized actions to come to the aid of the poorest populations who find themselves overnight with no income and with children whom the closure of schools sometimes deprives of their only real meal of the day. This is sometimes done in cooperation with local authorities, but also sometimes in open struggle against them, as was the case when a McDonald’s restaurant in Marseille was transformed by its employees and volunteers into a free food distribution platform for the poorest areas of the city.

Many editorialists and other commentators have noted that, contrary to the dominant thought at the heart of neoliberalism (“man is a wolf for man”), the human being carries within him powerful impulses, instincts of empathy and solidarity towards his fellows. Human nature has become a common subject of reflection and discussion, among other things, because reality has brought to light this primordial characteristic of the human being. Our brains are wired to find pleasure in helping others. A characteristic which is constantly thwarted by the logic of a society which favors and rewards rapacity and ‘each man for himself’, but which carries within itself the means to shatter the foundations of this inhuman society.

But human nature, as we know, is not limited to its altruistic tendencies. The reality of the coronavirus crisis also reminded us of the less positive, self-destructive aspects of our species. A species of which the French biologist Jacques Testart could say: “Because man most of all, is this beast that is capable of annihilating its own life and that of all the others, without even having chosen it.”

To illustrate this reality, I will take, among others, four “negative” behaviors that manifested themselves particularly during this crisis. Behaviors that we share in varying degrees with many animals, in particular with our most intelligent simian cousins: everyone for himself, the tendency to live in a hierarchical manner, xenophobia and the use of the scapegoat mechanisms.

Everyone for himself

In situations of scarcity, or threat of scarcity, when one is convinced that there will not be enough for everyone, individuals may tend to act only in function of their own interest at the expense of everyone else. At the start of the confinement, when many sought to build up food supplies in anticipation of possible future shortages, there were arguments in supermarkets over a last packet of pasta or roll of toilet paper. However, this has remained relatively marginal for the moment, because the shortage has been limited. Such behavior would be self-destructive if it were to become widespread in the event of a more severe shortage.

Hierarchical behaviors

These are the tendencies to voluntarily accept the authority of an “alpha” male and his allies, or of a dominant female and her relatives in the case of bonobos, or of the state and the managers of the system in our case. But they include also the tendency among the most powerful to resort to all means to maintain their authority. All of this has manifested itself powerfully in the current crisis.

In disaster situations that shake society, be it a “natural” calamity, such as an earthquake or one of human origin such as the explosion of a nuclear power plant, individuals spontaneously tend to seek help from the state and to submit to its authority. This apparatus, at the top of the social hierarchy, supposedly representing the interests of the community, is the only one that has the material, human and organizational means to confront the situation.

In the present case, in general, the populations quickly submitted to the emergency measures imposed by the states. Governments everywhere took the opportunity to multiply measures to control the population, to suppress the few individual freedoms that remain. All the more so since the pandemic has arrived on a planet where massive social struggles were developing: Chile, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Iraq, Algeria, … France.

The Chinese regime, whose bureaucratic totalitarianism is partly at the origin of the initial expansion of the pandemic (repression for weeks of the first whistleblowers in Wuhan), seeks to present itself as a model, vaunting the authoritarianism and rigor with which it managed Covid 19. The measures to control the population have been extended and intensified to unprecedented degrees, in particular by the generalization of facial recognition systems and automatically applied sanctions in the event of breach of state rules .

Another example is President Duterte in the Philippines who authorizes his police forces to shoot people who would pose too much resistance to the containment measures. Or that of Viktor Orban in Hungary who took the opportunity to grant himself exceptional powers for an indefinite time.

The economic crisis that accompanies the health crisis will have devastating effects. It does not strike all social classes in the same way. Some estimates predict that the number of deaths caused by the misery of the economic crisis will exceed the number of deaths due to the pandemic, especially in the poorest countries. The attacks on the living conditions of the population will go beyond the pandemic itself, because the economic crisis is not the product of the pandemic alone. Long before this, the warning signs of a new major recession, more serious and destructive than that of 2008, were accumulating. Governments will try to blame the coronavirus for what is in fact a new convulsion caused by the contradictions and absurdities of the system they manage and defend. But it is unlikely that this will be enough to limit the social mobilizations that the economic disaster will provoke. The social combativeness that rumbled before the pandemic will likely resume, breaking with the tendencies to voluntary submission which the health needs imposed.

Xenophobia

Understood as the rejection of the foreigner and everything that comes from abroad, it has manifested itself in various forms, the most obvious being nationalism. This is based on the belief that other nations are less important or enemies. “My country first”.
The management of the global crisis has been and remains constantly hampered by the inability of the various states to cooperate, prisoners as they are of the defense of their own interests to the detriment of others. The examples are spectacular, such as the withdrawal of the first world power from the World Health Organization or the total inability of the European Union to make its 27 member-states act in concert.
The American and Chinese governments rival each other in reciprocal xenophobic nationalist speeches and use them for their war indoctrination.
On another level, we have seen in some countries a xenophobia towards people from China or of Chinese origin. In Paris, some Chinese people carried a sign saying “I am not a virus”.
All this seems all the more absurd as humanity today has, as we said at the beginning of this text, extraordinary means without precedent, for information, communication and cooperation on a planetary scale.

The scapegoat mechanism

It often goes hand in hand with xenophobia but it has its own specificities.
It is a practice which consists in diverting a latent hostility in a group towards someone, something or a group of people. This can allow three processes at the same time:

provide a target for the release of existing hostility;
create or maintain group unity by enabling its members to act, to hate, to punish together;
divert the responsibility for a damaging situation towards a “scapegoat” in order to hide the real culprits.
In this case, the virus has played this role wonderfully. Governments continue to blame it for what is actually the product of the logic of capitalism, of greed and the irrational incompetence of its leaders.

The human being is a social animal, but he is also an individual whose particular interest is not necessarily identical or compatible with that of other individuals, even if these are members of the same group. His whole existence is confronted with the management of the possible contradiction between the individual and the community. The coherence of any human organization depends on its capacity to manage this contradiction and neutralize its explosive capacity.
This contradiction also exists in other social animals, in particular in chimpanzees and bonobos which are quite intelligent animals and possess a great diversity of individual personalities.
The management of this contradiction explains a large number of individual and collective behaviors of these species.
Unlike the tendency of every man for himself, hierarchy, xenophobia and the scapegoat mechanism are all three primitive, rudimentary, instinctive means to preserve the unity and efficiency of the group at all costs. But it is group unity at the expense of all other groups.

Nazi propaganda knew perfectly well how to address these primitive impulses to unite the population behind its state. “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” was a xenophobic discourse by asserting the absolute priority of “our people”. It was also the ultimate expression of the worship of the hierarchy. People greeted each other saying: “Heil Hitler!”, “Hail our alpha monkey!”
Anti-Semitism completed the trilogy by providing a scapegoat, responsible for all ills.

It is in the period following the end of confinements that the upheavals in the expressions of human nature will be most decisive. The situation will probably be very difficult. We will then see what has remained as the dominant lessons from the current global catastrophe.
Three lessons seem essential for a positive outcome.

During the pandemic many denounced the absurdity of having prioritized the “economy” at the expense of health, as all governments have done for more than thirty years, gutting the health systems in the name of “economic” profitability. In fact it is the absurdity of the capitalist system which conditions everything to the profitability of capital at the expense of the most basic human needs. This is a first lesson: there will be no real solution without breaking with the deadly logic of capitalism.

A second relates to the global dimension of the problems and therefore to the global dimension of the solutions. It is the understanding that for humans “the unity of the group” is the unity of the whole of humanity, with all its differences but with the consciousness of being a GLOBAL social animal, a consciousness that no other animal can possess.

Finally, last but not least, there is the certainty that, contrary to what the ideology of a system based on selfishness and greed repeats, we are capable of empathy, sympathy, active and self-organized solidarity towards our fellows. This is written in our genes. The multiple and various forms of concretization of this state of mind during the current crisis have remained confined, forced by the circumstances, to limited scales. We must imagine what could be done if with these same convictions we seized all the levers of economic and social life, if the 99% of the world population (of which the Occupy movement spoke in the USA in 2011) managed to snatch from the 1% who governs and benefits from the established order, the control of the means of production, transport, communication, organization, etc. We will then not only be able to effectively deal with the new viral attacks that are bound to occur, but also and above all to stop the course which leads us in an accelerated way to an irreversible ecological disaster. We will finally be able to build a world which for the first time will make human happiness the goal, the compass of our social life.

Raoul Victor
May 3, 2020

The writer is a member of the left communist discussion group Cercle de Paris (CdP).

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Music Notes – May 2020

May 29, 2020 at 1:15 pm (Uncategorized)

I assume you’re not going out, but never fear, there are good things to listen to at home.

1 Dean and Britta – “The Carnival is Over”

The new single. “The Carnival is Over” is one of those great songs than no matter who covers it, it sounds good. (the Bony M version isn’t terrible!) The Seekers’ original is based on a Russian folk tune, but with English lyrics written by Tom Springfield of the Springfields (and Dusty’s brother). Nick Cave does a great version too.

2. The Seekers – “I’ll Never Find Another You”

Since I’ve already referenced the Seekers, how about what might be a perfect pop song? (Also written by Tom Springfield)

3. Joey Ramone – Don’t Worry Bout Me

I saw a clip of Trump being interviewed by Maria Bartiromo, and remembered the song Joey wrote about her when she was working for CNBC. The song has aged well, but Bartiromo has become a Trump bootlicking Fox anchor.The rest of the album is a sweet reminder of what a talent we lost.

4. Altered Images – “Dead Pop Stars”

Do you remembered when this came out? Scottish Post-punk generating a buzz that positioned them as Banshees-lite. Very quickly, they transitioned into a not-unpleasant new wave pop band with Clare Grogan as a pop queen. While they produced some good stuff, I wonder what would have happened if they had gone in the direction hinted at by this song. (Did you know that Spandau Ballet’s “True” is about Grogan?)

5. UB40 – Signing Off

When I was a lad, I was a little too young for punk. The first wave had already reached land before I was really aware of it. But I was there for New Wave, the Mod Revival and Two-Tone. UB40 were a bi-racial British reggae band, not a ska band, and as much as I loved Two-Tone, this first album really took root with me. To this day “Tyler” and “Burden of Shame” are standouts. Can you believe it fours decades old?

6. X – Alphabetland

My long held belief is when a band reforms, in most cases, the best you can hope for is it doesn’t suck. (Usually it’s an inferior version or a horrible new direction). The new album from X, the first in 35 years, is neither. It sounds like classic X, but not a a retreed of old material. Thomas Wolfe was wrong: Sometimes you can go home.

7. They Might be Giants – ” The Communists Have the Music”

I can’t recall how I came across this one on YouTube. but if you’ve ever dug TMBG or communism (in whatever form), check this out.

8. Coriky – Coriky

Ian MacKaye’s new band’s debut album is finally coming out. Delayed due to the Covid-19 virus, I’m assured it will arrive in my inbox (I bought it through Bandcamp) on June 12. This week another track from the album “Too Many Husbands” showed up. Great.

9. Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Debut Singles

I love lists: Someone sits down and compiles of a list of their choices and throws it to the world, so we can disagree. This is a fantastically fun list, and there’s lots to disagree with – especially, their number one. Now make your own.

10. Live music

Big Thief cancelled their North American tour. To be honest, much as I wanted to see them, I was afraid to cram into the Danforth Music Hall with 1,000 other patrons in late July. Sleaford Mods are playing the same venue (as of today) in September. I haven’t bought tickets yet, and as much as I love the band, I’m wondering even if it isn’t cancelled, would I want to go? Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of those from home concerts, but it’s not the same. Sadly in this age of “Free” music and downloads, many bands survived not on record sales but by touring and merch. As a reslut, the pendulum is swinging back, and bands are earning through music sales. Support the bands you like : And don’t forget Bandcamp suspends its cut on the first Friday of the month. Save your pennies for next Friday, June 5.

Lates

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Red May and More …

May 27, 2020 at 3:59 pm (Uncategorized)

News, gossip and stuff.

For the past few years (maybe longer), a month long celebration of radical thought called Red May has been held in Seattle. This year because of the Covid-19 crisis, all of the events were held on-line. Some technical glitches, but a fairly interesting selection of workshops still up at the Red May site and on their You Tube channel. (They would be happy to accept any donation)

One of the organizations / publications involved in Red May is the Commune magazine, which bills itself as “a popular magazine for a new era of revolution.” Last year Internationalist Perspective reprinted with an introduction the Commune article “Between the Devil and the Green New Deal.” However, mid-way through the festival, the Commune announced it was ceasing publication in response to a sexual assault by a (now) former member of its collective and the subsequent handling of the assault (it’s all on Twitter)

Another group involved in Red May is Endnotes, the UK based journal. My copy arrived in the post a few days ago, but I haven’t had a chance to get into it yet. For those of you who can’t wait for your copy to arrive, Endnotes have made all of the articles in the new issue available as PDFs on their site

If you dropped by the Industrial Workers of the World‘s web site anytime in the last year, you could have been forgiven for wondering if they still existed. Wonder no more: Snappy new web site, lots of updates.

And lastly, I didn’t get around to reading David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs last year, but with some extra time on my hands…I have no doubt that anyone who reads it will be truck with an eerie sense of …”I don’t remember being interviewed for the book, but that happened to me”

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The Madness of King Donald (Part CCXVIII…)

May 22, 2020 at 4:00 pm (Uncategorized)

To be honest, I’m trying to cut down on the amount of Trump news coverage I consume. But it’s difficult. Especially when

a. like coronavirus, it’s all anyone talks about

b. you’re not sure whether he’s just trolling, or he’s a complete idiot ( or both)

So many times this year I’ve been about to catalogue a few days worth of Trumpisms, only to realize there’s half a dozen more to take into account. Just this week

At a Ford plant, I wore a mask, but I didn’t want to give you the pleasure of seeing me in it (I really thought this was a “my girlfriend goes to another school, you don’t know here”, but apparently he did wear it)
Apparently not knowing what per capita means
Seemingly not being about to explain the difference between testing positive and testing negative (In all fairness this struck me as an attempt to troll that got away from him – he trolled himself)
Noting that the US had so many cases because they tested so much (no, you have the same number of cases whether or not you test)
And when was it he seemed completely flummoxed by how Katie Miller tested positive (one minute she was fine, and then she wasn’t – that’s a problem with tests – or maybe you’re confusing a test with a preventative)
Probably in the time it took me to type this there’s more…

I recommend Sarah Cooper’s twitter feed (it’s a public account – you don’t need to be on twitter to watch it) Her lip-syncing Trump might not solve any problems, but it makes me feel better

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