Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

December 26, 2020

Belushi

Filed under: comedy,Film,television — louisproyect @ 9:18 pm

Like many other baby boomers (technically speaking, I predated them as having been born during the war), I became a big fan of Saturday Night Live when it premiered in 1975. I had more than the usual interest in the show because I had been a good friend of Chevy Chase at Bard College and was following his career.

As such, I was curious to see what the Showtime documentary on John Belushi would have to say, given the interviews with Chevy and other personalities who worked with him. Belushi was interesting enough in his own right for me to have read Bob Woodward’s “Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi” back in 1984. Woodward’s lurid (how could it have been anything else?) biography reminded me a lot of Albert Goldman’s Elvis Presley biography that came out the same year and which I also read. I was struck by the similarities between the two books and the two men. Woodward and Goldman had little sympathy for their subjects and wrote books that were meant to portray them as self-indulgent freaks done in by their gargantuan drug habits and their huge popularity.

In 2005, Tanner Colby wrote another Belushi biography that relied exclusively on taped interviews with his friends and co-professionals. As an oral history, it was a badly needed corrective to the Woodward hatchet job. The Showtime documentary relies on these interviews as well as new material to produce both a tribute to the comedian as well as an effort to understand his decline and fall. For those who are old enough to remember SNL in its prime and those who want to see how good TV sketch comedy can be, I strongly recommend a look at the film, which is titled “Belushi.”

Directed by 58-year old filmmaker R.J. Cutler, it turns Colby’s interviews and newer material into a very good documentary, which is not only an examination of a personal tragedy but implicitly a warning about the dangers of worshipping the bitch-goddess success. Belushi started off as a political radical, having been within 20 feet of the police riot in Chicago in 1968, and saw the theater as his calling, not television that he found vulgar and not worth his time. Indeed, SNL co-producer Dick Ebersole had to plead with Belushi to join the show even as fellow co-producer Lorne Michaels feared that he would be more trouble than he was worth.

Belushi was the son of an Albanian immigrant who put in long hours working behind the counter of a diner he owned in Chicago. Born in 1949, he was typical of my generation. Rebellious to the core, he saw comedy as a means to challenge the status quo just as I saw radical politics. If the ratio between radical art and radical politics was 80 percent to 20 in his case, the numbers were reversed in my own life. In college, Belushi recruited a couple of his friends to become the “The West Compass Trio” that became the talk of the town in Chicago. Belushi’s comic power on stage soon caught the attention of Bernard Sahlins, the head of the city’s legendary Second City improvisational comic troupe and brother to famous anthropologist and fellow CounterPunch contributor Marshall Sahlins.

Belushi joined the group and became its star, alongside future SNL star Gilda Radner. Meanwhile, in NYC, comedy was taking a new and experimental form through Ken Shapiro’s Channel One, an off-off-Broadway revue that satirized TV. Ken was a classmate at Bard alongside Chevy, who had been developing the material down the hall from me in a mansion called Ward Manor that had been turned into a dorm. Chevy joined the cast of Channel One with other Bardians like Lane Sarasohn and my good friend Richard Allen.

In 1972, Chase and Belushi’s paths crossed as they both became cast members of the off-Broadway National Lampoon Lemmings in NYC that was a satire on the Woodstock musical festival. It was there that Belushi developed his over-the-top imitation of Joe Cocker performing “A Little Help From My Friends”. From there, Belushi went on to write and perform for the National Lampoon Radio Hour, where he was soon joined by Danny Ackroyd who had been a member of the Second City revue in Toronto. Chase, Ackroyd, and Belushi would then go on to become the original cast members of SNL with Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Michael O’Donoghue and Gilda Radner. This group of 8 would leave its mark on SNL that declined over the years, largely because Lorne Michaels preferred to recycle stale material that would satisfy an increasingly dimwitted fan base that doted on shtick. Although nobody interviewed in “Belushi” commented on this decline, it was obvious to me that Belushi was part of the problem. By getting easy laughs, such as his “cheeseburger, cheeseburger” skit, he helped the show drift away from sharp political commentary.

Yes, Belushi was a gifted physical comedian but I preferred Chevy’s razor-sharp Weekend Update:

Chevy Chase: Good evening. I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not. The top story tonight: The Senate Intelligence Committee has revealed that the CIA has been involved in no less than nine assassination plots against various foreign leaders. Commented President Ford upon reading the report, quote, “Boy, I’m sure glad I’m not foreign.”

Later, Mr. Ford pierced his left hand with a salad fork at a luncheon celebrating Tuna Salad Day at the White House. Alert Secret Service agents seized the fork and wrestled it to the ground.

Former Governor of California Ronald Reagan formally announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination Wednesday. Reagan stated, quote, “I haven’t lost my looks yet, and I’m still as knowledgeable on foreign affairs as I was when I was narrating Death Valley Days.”

Meanwhile in Miami, a man tried to attack Reagan with a fake pistol a few short hours after the announcement. Reagan said he was not shaken, but later, he about-faced on an issue that he strongly opposed for years, calling for strenuous toy gun control legislation.

Well, after a long illness, Generalissimo Francisco Franco died Wednesday. Reactions from world leaders were varied. Held in contempt as the last of the fascist dictators in the West by some, he was also eulogized by others, among them Richard Nixon, who said, quote “General Franco was a loyal friend and ally of the United States. He earned worldwide respect for Spain through firmness and fairness.” Despite Franco’s death and an expected burial tomorrow, doctors say the dictator’s health has taken a turn for the worse.

It wasn’t just that Belushi was good at physical comedy, a throwback to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in many ways. It was also that his skits incorporated brilliant mashups of wildly disparate elements. For example, we see him working behind the registration desk in a hotel but in the guise of a samurai warrior:

The documentary shows Belushi explaining how he got the idea for the skit. He was up in his hotel room and stumbled across some vintage samurai film. The first thought that came to him was how to work that into an SNL routine.

For someone like myself, a longtime fan of Akira Kurosawa, this skit, and even those that recycled the same material, made me laugh.

After watching the documentary, I had a sense of déjà vu. Hadn’t I seen a satire of samurai movies before? Where or when?

All of a sudden, I realized that Sid Caesar had featured the same kind of material on his legendary television show back in 1956, except that he was satirizing a film genre unfamiliar to most Americans. He called his parody “Ubetu”, an obvious reference to Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 “Ugetsu”.

Could John Belushi have seen Caesar’s “Ubetu”? It’s impossible to say but one thing is clear. For the six years Sid Caesar had a weekly show on NBC, he and his fellow writers and performers were pushing the envelope in the same way that Chevy Chase, John Belushi were doing twenty years later. With Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and Woody Allen writing for him, Caesar’s shows were made for the ages.

You had the same kind of powerhouse team working for SNL early on. Unlike Sid Caesar, Lorne Michaels had staying power. Young people continue to watch the show because it is geared to a young person’s tastes rather than to the connoisseur sensibilities of a baby boomer in the year 1975. I avoid commenting on anything going on at SNL today because I simply never watch it, except for whatever shows up on YouTube.

Besides Belushi’s illness (drug addiction is an illness), you cannot escape the feeling that his sad decline and fall was mostly attributable to his worries that he had reached an impasse in his career. He tried making more “mature” films but the critics and the audiences hated them. As his health declined, he was incapable of carrying out the madcap physical stunts that made “Animal House” so memorable.

As for Belushi memorabilia, let me conclude with this photo of Belushi take in 1981 by acclaimed photographer Marcia Resnick, an old friend who wrote this as a preface:

— In early September 1981 I spotted John Belushi in the New York after hours club AM PM. I asked him when he was going to do a photo session with me for my series Bad Boys: A Compendium of Punks, Poets and Politicians. He said, “Now”. I didn’t believe him, until upon returning home at six am I saw a limousine waiting in front of my building. I turned on the music as John and his entourage filed into my loft. I then directed John to an area lit by strobe lights and I began shooting.

John paced around like a caged animal, fidgeting incessantly. He seemed unable to sit still for my camera, uncanny for someone known for being deliberate and fluid when performing. “Where are the props?”, he queried. I first gave him sunglasses, then a scarf. He requested a beer, then a glass. After donning a black wool ski mask that he took off a nearby mannequin, he settled into a chair. Only his eyes and mouth peeked through the openings in the mask. The large, ominous and anonymous ‘executioner’ had finally reached his comfort zone.

December 25, 2020

Welcome to Chechnya

Filed under: Chechnya,Counterpunch,homophobia,television — louisproyect @ 5:25 pm

COUNTERPUNCH, DECEMBER 25, 2020

Chechnya’s strongman ruler Razman Kadyrov appears to be even more determined to repress gays than Stalin. He doesn’t bother with the niceties of the courtroom, even if based on prejudicial laws. Instead, he has encouraged mob rule in which gay men are entrapped by either cops or vigilantes who have the power to torture anybody caught up in their net.

With his barbaric mixed martial arts background, made even worse by Islamist homophobia, Kadyrov brazens his way through interviews, making Donald Trump look Gandhian by comparison. During an interview with Bryant Gumbel in July 2017, Kadyrov said, “We don’t have such people here. We don’t have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada. Praise be to God. Take them far away from us. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them.”

Currently showing on HBO Max, “Welcome to Chechnya” allows you to hear from the people suffering from a brutal crackdown that began in early 2017. The documentary states it started with a drug raid, rather than a Stonewall-type assault. One of the arrested men had a cell phone with messages to his male lovers as well as gay porn. The cops then used the phone to begin a massive campaign that sounds quite a bit like the witch-hunts of the 1950s that targeted both Reds and gays. To get lenient treatment, you had to name names. If you refused to incriminate fellow gays, you’d end up spending months in prison being tortured.

Continue reading

December 23, 2020

Aaron Maté and Moon of Alabama slander Anand Gopal

Filed under: conspiracism,jingoism,Syria — louisproyect @ 7:39 pm
Anand Gopal

As part of my daily rounds of checking the conspiracist “left”, I make sure to include a visit to Moon of Alabama, a website that grew out of Billmon’s Whiskey Bar from the early 2000s. Most of what appeared there before 2011 was unobjectionable, just as was the case with Seymour Hersh or Robert Fisk’s reporting from the Middle East. When the civil war began in Syria, there was little engagement with its cause. Instead, we were told that this was a new “regime change operation” based on bogus reports about WMD’s. It didn’t matter that Assad was really using sarin gas. Moon of Alabama posted dozens, maybe hundreds, of articles claiming that such reports were “false flags” intended to provoke a full-scale invasion that would replace Assad with rebels linked to al-Qaeda. It didn’t matter that the CIA prevented the FSA from getting its hands on MANPAD’s shipped from Libya. Even after 9 years of asymmetric warfare that left the opposition to Assad huddled and defenseless in Idlib, Moon of Alabama continues to warn darkly about American intervention even if Trump cut off funding to the rebels right after taking power.

Generally, I don’t comment on Moon of Alabama (MofA) since it has little sway outside the Assadist cocoon. However, when I noticed that it had made common cause with Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal’s mini-me next to Ben Norton, over an Anand Gopal article in The New Yorker, I decided to speak up. Once upon a time, the Grayzone crew—Blumenthal, Norton, and Maté—might have had a shot at being published in legitimate magazines like the New Yorker but after becoming indistinguishable from MofA, they are a sideshow. I suppose the rubles compensate for the illegitimacy but one will never know until we get a chance to see their tax returns that are probably more closely guarded than Trump’s.

The MofA blogger, some guy in Germany named Bernhard, and Maté both objected to this paragraph in Gopal’s article:

The U.S.-led coalition waged its assault on Raqqa with exacting legal precision. It vetted every target carefully, with a fleet of lawyers scrutinizing strikes the way an in-house counsel pores over a corporation’s latest contract. During the battle, the coalition commander, Lieutenant General Stephen J. Townsend, declared, “I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare.” Although human-rights activists insist that the coalition could have done more to protect civilians, Townsend is right: unlike Russia, America does not bomb indiscriminately. The U.S. razed an entire city, killing thousands in the process, without committing a single obvious war crime.

Missing from their denunciation of Gopal as making the unforgiveable sin of absolving the USA from “committing a single obvious war crime” is any engagement with the central point of his article, namely that the American rules of war legitimize war crimes.

Behind a paywall (contact me if you need a copy), the article makes clear that the USA has entered a new mode of war-making that is conducted from the air, using guided missiles, drones and bombers beyond the reach of conventional anti-aircraft weapons that make it possible for our military to kill thousands without a single casualty on our side. These paragraphs will make Gopal’s logic clear even though anybody with an IQ over 80 could have figured out his point from the paragraph above:

During the summer of 2016, residents of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria, gathered every night in four houses on the community’s edge, hoping to evade gunfire and bombs. This was the farthest point from a front line, a mile away, where U.S.-backed forces were engaging ISIS fighters. Every night, a drone hovered over Tokhar, filming the villagers’ procession from their scattered homes to these makeshift bunkers. The basements became crowded with farmers, mothers, schoolgirls, and small children. On July 18th, at around 3 a.m., the houses exploded. Thick smoke covered the night sky. Limbs were strewn across the rubble. Children were buried under collapsed walls.

People from surrounding villages spent two weeks digging out bodies. The coalition, meanwhile, announced that it had destroyed “nine ISIL fighting positions, an ISIL command and control node, and 12 ISIL vehicles” in the area that night. Eventually, after reports surfaced that many civilians had died, the coalition admitted to killing twenty-four. When a colleague and I visited, a year after the raid, we documented at least a hundred and twenty dead civilians, and found no evidence that any isis members had been present near the four houses. A mother told me that some small children were obliterated, their bodies never found.

“We take all measures during the targeting process . . . to comply with the principles of the Law of Armed Conflict,” U.S. Marine Major Adrian J. T. Rankine-Galloway said. The essence of this legal code is that militaries cannot intentionally kill civilians. It is true that no one in the chain of command wished to massacre civilians that night—not the pilot or the targeteers or the lawyers. The U.S. points to this fact in calling the Tokhar incident an error, regrettable but not illegal. Yet, though it is reasonable to invoke intention when referring to the mind-set of an individual—this is the idea behind the legal concept mens rea—it seems odd to ascribe a mental state to a collective actor like an army or a state. It is clear, however, that the coalition could have foreseen the outcome of its actions: it had filmed the area for weeks, and intelligence indicating that the village was populated would not have been difficult to gather. During the coalition’s campaign against ISIS, it often based its bombing decisions on faulty assumptions about civilian life; in Mosul, it targeted a pair of family homes after failing to observe civilians outdoors over the course of a few afternoons. Iraqis typically avoid the blazing midday heat. Four people died. The Law of Armed Conflict excuses genuine errors and proscribes intentional killing, but most American warfare operates in a gray zone, which exists, in part, because the law itself is so vague.

Unlike Gopal, Bernhard and Maté only know Syria from afar. Perhaps Maté has visited Damascus as well but if he did, he probably stayed at the same kind of 5-star hotel Blumenthal stays at when he is on one of his junkets. Over lunch a few years ago, Anand told me that he learned Arabic just so he could be able to conduct interviews with people living under the dictatorship. He also didn’t come in on jets landing at the airport in Damascus. Instead, he snuck under barbed wire at the Turkish border and followed painted stones to avoid land mines as he wended his way toward a village that opposed Assad. That is a real reporter as opposed to the corrupt, mendacious, low-rent writers at Grayzone and Moon of Alabama who will have about as much chance getting paid for writing an article in a legitimate magazine as I have winning the NY Marathon in 2021.

December 20, 2020

Me and the Calvinists

Filed under: religion — louisproyect @ 8:08 pm
John Calvin

The other day I was both startled and pleased to see a scorching attack on “The Cult of Christian Trumpism” by Michael Horton, a Calvinist theologian. It began:

On Saturday, December 12, a bizarre rally was held on the Washington Mall. Shofars were blown. A flyover from Marine One was cheered by shouts of praise to the Messiah (evidently distinguished from Jesus). My Pillow founder Mike Lindell shared prophetic visions of Donald Trump.

I was pleased to see any hard-core Christian trashing the rightwing evangelicals who form Trump’s main political base but why was I startled? It turns out that this was not my first exposure to Horton. Decades ago, I used to listen to a radio show on WMCA, NY’s all-Christian station, called the White Horse Inn that featured Horton and his fellow Calvinists discussing the finer points of original sin, predestination, and how to live a Christian life.

The show got its title from a 16th century pub in Cambridge, England where Lutherans met to discuss how they could advance the goals of the Reformation. Horton and his cohorts paid homage to the pub because they see themselves a spearheading a New Reformation, the title of a magazine that promotes their views, most of which are at odds with the Prosperity Gospel and all the other decadent Protestant institutions that they see as being badly in need of purgation. If the original Reformation was aimed at the excesses of the Catholic Church, Horton sees a New Reformation as one targeting Joel Osteen, et al.

Like Marxists, these Calvinists are deeply committed to making their teachings accessible to a wider audience. Like me trying, for example, to make V. 1 of Capital meaningful to a 21st century audience, they try to rescue someone like Jonathan Edwards from obscurity. Edwards, an 18th century Calvinist, wrote a sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” that is both a theological classic as well as work literary scholars have studied for its power:

There is no Fortress that is any Defence from the Power of God. Tho’ Hand join in Hand, and vast Multitudes of God’s Enemies combine and associate themselves, they are easily broken in Pieces: They are as great Heaps of light Chaff before the Whirlwind; or large Quantities of dry Stubble before devouring Flames. We find it easy to tread on and crush a Worm that we see crawling on the Earth; so ‘tis easy for us to cut or singe a slender Thread that any Thing hangs by; thus easy is it for God when he pleases to cast his Enemies down to Hell.

To their credit, the White Horse crew hold Edwards to the same standards as any other human being despite his great renown among Calvinists:

The ugly truth is that Jonathan Edwards was a slave owner. I hate typing those words, since much of my professional and academic life has been spent studying this man’s best thoughts and writings. I am also slightly concerned that some readers of this article might run to the nearest Edwards-related plaque or historical marker and deface it with spray paint or tear it down entirely. In my view, neither idolizing Edwards nor eliminating his legacy from the annals of history is appropriate. But we can start with this fact in bold print: Edwards owned slaves. Several. We know this because he actually wrote down some of the purchase records, including credits and debits in his famous Blank Bible, as well as his “Last Will and Testament,” where he recorded financial matters from time to time in lieu of a digital Excel Spreadsheet. We also know at least three of the Edwards family slaves’ names, Venus (a fourteen year old girl), Leah (converted during the revivals) and Titus (an African boy).

There’s quite a bit of irony in this since David S. Reynolds’s biography of John Brown mentions how this sermon was read repeatedly by Brown throughout his life and gave him the resolve he needed to make war on slavery, as if any were needed.

So why would a Marxist like me be a regular listener to White Horse Inn? I’ll let you into a little secret. I was not only a religion major at Bard College but someone fixated on Christian theology. My senior thesis was on St. Augustine’s “City of God”, although looking back in retrospect, I was far more interested in his Confessions.

In the early 60s, existentialism was a big thing. People read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to get up to speed. From there, it was Camus, especially “The Stranger”, and Sartre, even though his radicalism lessened him in our eyes. From Kierkegaard, it was a short hop to the German Christian existentialists like Paul Tillich and Karl Jaspers.

Although I long ago put all this behind me, courtesy of LBJ’s war, there are times I reminded of my studies, especially with John Brown’s Calvinism and this surprising turn of events from Michael Horton.

Probably, the association remains strongest with ex-Calvinist Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” that in its odd way featured a John Brown type figure in Travis Bickle who felt justified in killing a pimp. More directly related to Schrader’s theological studies at Calvin College is “First Reformed”, a 2017 film I nominated for best that year. Like John Brown and Travis Bickle, Ethan Hawke’s priest was ready to blow up a bunch of fat cats at a fundraiser for a Prosperity Gospel type church.

From my CounterPunch review :

Made forty-two years after “Taxi Driver”, “First Reformed” depicts the inner turmoil of men upset with the state of the world, at least the world that confronts them respectively. For Travis Bickle, New York was a Sodom and Gomorrah that impelled him to rain down destruction on its sinners since it was clear that no supernatural being could do much about 13-year old girls working as prostitutes. For Father Toller, it a different kind of degradation that must be confronted. At one point, we see him looking balefully at a lake polluted by the toxic waste flowing from Balq Industries, the largest donor to Abundant Life. The incestuous ties between corporate mammon and the prosperity gospel are staring Toller in the face.

Now seventy-one, Paul Schrader has made a film that is not only the pinnacle of a long career but one that reflects his deepest worries about the future of the planet–the same ones of his characters. In an interview with Variety, Schrader explained why he chose to make a film about the environmental crisis:

We have this contemporary crisis of ecology, which takes all the historic, philosophic questions of meaning and puts them in boldface. Man has always wondered whether life has any meaning and what comes after death. Now that we can sort of see the end of the role in the physical world the questions have an added urgency.

A follow-up question is about Hurricanes Irma and Harvey. His reply:

I wouldn’t isolate these events. They’re part of the new normal. It’s not just hurricanes. The icebergs are falling into the seas. California’s on fire. It’s an accelerating process.

I would think that homo sapiens as we know them will not outlive this century. When they create a great museum of the animal world, hopefully the filmmakers will get a room.

Amen.

December 18, 2020

A reply to John Molyneux and Michael Lowy on degrowth

Filed under: Ecology — louisproyect @ 11:44 pm
John Molyneux
Michael Lowy

Generally speaking, my defense of degrowth is mounted against the ecomodernists at Jacobin/Catalyst: Leigh Phillips and Matt Huber, who both stand on Marxist orthodoxy, at least in their view. Although I’ve never answered him specifically, Neo-Keynesian Robert Pollin has staked a position against degrowth in the July-August 2018 NLR. If you’re interested in this debate, I recommend tracking down the NLR and to look for articles by Phillips and Huber on Jacobin and Catalyst.

This is the first time I will be responding to people much closer to me ideologically, John Molyneux, an ex-member of the British SWP, and Michael Lowy, a longtime member of the Mandelista Fourth International. Molyneux’s article is titled “Growth and De-growth: What should ecosocialists say” and can be read on the Global Ecosocialist Network. Lowy’s article is titled “Ecosocialism: A Vital Synthesis” and appears on Ian Angus’s Climate and Capitalism website.

Let me turn to Molyneux first, if for no other reason that the title of his article indicates a willingness to take on his ideological adversaries head-on.

Unfortunately, Molyneux cherry-picks an intellectual exercise from leading degrowth theorist Giorgos Kallis and proceeds to trash what amounts to a straw-man. In an article that appeared in “The Internationalist”, Kallis wrote:

The Left has to liberate itself from the imaginary of growth. Perpetual growth is an absurd idea (consider the absurdity of this: if the Egyptians had started with one cubic metre of stuff and grew it by 4.5% per year, by the end of their 3,000-year civilization, they would have occupied 2.5 billion solar systems.). Even if we could substitute capitalist growth, with a nicer, angelic socialist growth, why would we want to occupy 2.5 billion solar systems with it?

This is what they call a hypothetical and it is foolish to use it to represent degrowth analysis, which is completely steeped in the actual ecological limits we are dealing with. Kallis is an ecological economist by profession and is involved in studies of water development and urbanization, so turning him into a promoter of specious theories based on Egypt’s alternative history does not do him justice.

The remainder of Molyneux’s article is a rehash of the arguments I’ve heard and made about the anarchy of capitalist production for the past 53 years. For example, “If the productive forces constitute society’s general capacity to produce then their development or advance need not necessarily result in more production of things at all but might equally result in producing the same amount in less time. Marx, himself, put a lot of emphasis on this economy of labour time as he saw it has having the potential to free human beings from necessary labour, reduce the working week and enhance human freedom.”

Well, who can argue with that? Unquestionably, socialism will be a more rational system. Commodity production based on profit is the number one cause of environmental despoliation. If the economy is based on the production of use-values, you can finally use science and humanism to create a livable world.

Molyneux proceeds to define some of the norms we can expect under world ecosocialism. This one stuck out for me: “The extensive retrofitting of homes”. I am not sure what this means exactly but it would point to the banning of any house or apartment over 3,000 square feet for a family of four. I’m definitely for that but within such an advanced new way of sheltering, how do we create the furniture that people need for a modicum of comfort? We certainly need chairs, tables, beds, desks, and bookshelves, don’t we? Can we have a socialist Ikea that supplies such basics?

Over the past four decades, China has tried to make sure that its citizenry can live a comfortable middle-class existence. That has meant becoming the world’s largest importer of wood. (The United States is second.) It is also the largest exporter — turning much of the wood it imports into products headed to Home Depots and Ikeas around the world.

The irony is that Ikea brags about its environmentalist values. Its website states: “We’re also working towards 100% renewable energy – producing as much as we consume in our operations – and sourcing all of our wood from more sustainable sources by 2020.” All that is well and good but the inexhaustible demand for cheap furniture will simply lead other corporations to rely on Chinese suppliers. That’s how capitalism works, after all—supply and demand. So efficient at reducing forests to toothpicks.

Now, under world ecosocialism, how could you continue to provide the wood needed for the average household without encroaching on the forests and hence the risk of a new pandemic? For pete’s sake, Marxism is a powerful tool but it cannot produce wood out of thin air. That’s the purview of the sorcerer’s apprentice and you saw how much trouble Mickey Mouse got into.

Degrowth is completely focused on the question of how humanity can not only survive into the 22nd century but how can civilization continue until the planet dies due to astrophysical realities. It poses solutions based on the needs of a modest life-style that while giving up on SUV’s and all the other crap can allow the full development of the human being, who might have to work 10 hours a week while painting landscapes or growing orchids the rest of the time. That means addressing the population question that people like Molyneux recoils from. There is scant attention to that in his article, with this being typical:

In particular we should also challenge the idea, implicit in the arguments of many ‘degrowthers’, especially those that favour population control , that all human activity, indeed all human existence, is inherently damaging to nature.

I don’t know about “many” degrowthers. I do want to know, however, whether Molyneux has engaged at all with the numbers that both Kallis and Jason Hickel have crunched. Let me direct him to something that Hickel wrote to get started. This is the heart and soul of degrowth scholarship, not Kallis’s intellectual exercise about Egypt:

Adopting a higher poverty line makes it more difficult to end poverty while remaining within planetary boundaries. At the US$7.40 line, Belarus is the most promising, with minimal social shortfall (a score of 0.98) excluding qualitative indicators, but its average biophysical score is 1.64. Of the nations that achieve all non-qualitative social thresholds, the most biophysically efficient is Oman, which has an average biophysical score of 2.66. In other words, given the existing best-case relationship between resource use and income, achieving a good life for all with an income threshold of US$7.40 per day would require that poor nations overshoot planetary boundaries by at least 64% to 166%.

Of course, Hickel could have just said that ecosocialism will solve these problems with scarcely a need to figure out the desperately important balance between humanity and nature under conditions of declining water, soil and climate. I hope he continues on his current trajectory.

Turning now to Lowy’s article, it is closely related to Molyneux’s with the idea of socialism replacing capitalism on a world-scale being the solution to our problems. He writes:

The issue of economic growth has divided socialists and environmentalists. Ecosocialism, however, rejects the dualistic frame of growth versus degrowth, development versus anti-development, because both positions share a purely quantitative conception of productive forces. A third position resonates more with the task ahead: the qualitative transformation of development.

A new development paradigm means putting an end to the egregious waste of resources under capitalism, driven by large-scale production of useless and harmful products. The arms industry is, of course, a dramatic example, but, more generally, the primary purpose of many of the “goods” produced — with their planned obsolescence — is to generate profit for large corporations. The issue is not excessive consumption in the abstract, but the prevalent type of consumption, based as it is on massive waste and the conspicuous and compulsive pursuit of novelties promoted by “fashion.” A new society would orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, including water, food, clothing, housing, and such basic services as health, education, transport, and culture.

So,  “A new society would orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, including water, food, clothing, housing, and such basic services as health, education, transport, and culture.” Let’s start with water.

Okay, how is ecosocialism going to generate groundwater that is the key to sustainable agriculture? Will making the Ogallala Aquifer people’s property somehow overcome the ecological limits on a resource that took thousands of years to accrue? Natural forces produced it and it was used to grow the wheat that is a necessity for urban life. You can take the position that cattle and wheat have to go but any foodstuff is going to have to rely on water. Even under the best of conditions, water can become scarce because it is serving a population that far exceeded the numbers that lived in North America 30,000 years ago. Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the saturated volume of the aquifer by an estimated 9%. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall. (Wikipedia) Instead of bad-mouthing Giorgos Kallis’s speculation on Egypt, Molyneux and Lowy could both benefit from his work on water conservation.

I consider Molyneux and Lowy’s attempt to debunk degrowth feeble at best. I have been following debates within the left on ecology for the past 30 years and have been shocked by the way that long-time Marxists just skate over the surface of degrowth scholarship. My advice to them and others is to put the Marxist verities on the back burner, roll up their sleeves, and begin to delve into the details of how the human race can continue with the current set-up. Socialism can do many things but it cannot produce wood and water out of thin air.

December 12, 2020

Mank

Filed under: Counterpunch,Film — louisproyect @ 1:52 am

CounterPunch, December 11, 2020

In the first twenty minutes or so of David Fincher’s overrated Netflix film “Mank,” we see Gary Oldman lying in bed with his leg in a full cast slugging down one whiskey after another. Mank is the nickname of Herman J. Mankiewicz, who wrote the screenplay for “Citizen Kane,” widely regarded as the greatest American film ever made. It is 1940 and Orson Welles has tasked him with cranking out a script in sixty days while he recovers from a serious automobile accident in a country retreat. There are two women trying to keep him productive, a thankless task given his alcoholism. One is a German nurse who barely escaped the Nazi death camps. The other is a British secretary who is both taking dictation from Mank and nagging him to stay sober and focus on his work.

Played by Gary Oldman in a scenery-chewing performance that impressed most critics, Mank is always coming up with some arch, overly clever dialog that has about as much relationship to the way that people speak as I do with running in a marathon. When the secretary learns that Mank was a frequent guest of William Randolph Hearst, she asks him what his mistress Marion Davies was like. He replies: “Why is it when you scratch a prim, starchy schoolgirl, you get a swooning motion picture fan who has forgotten all she learned about the Battle of Hastings.” The secretary, of course, is the starchy schoolgirl and his reference to the Battle of Hastings was a put-down since he assumed she knew nothing about it. She immediately shows him up by identifying the day it took place, which is the kind of drama you can expect from this film.

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December 8, 2020

Bob Dylan’s $300 million dollar bash

Filed under: beatniks,capitalism,commercialism,fashion,music — louisproyect @ 8:38 pm

Well, I looked at my watch
I looked at my wrist
Punched myself in the face
With my fist
I took my potatoes
Down to be mashed
Then I made it over
To that million dollar bash
Ooh, baby, ooh-ee
Ooh, baby, ooh-ee
It’s that million dollar bash

–Bob Dylan, “The Million Dollar Bash”

Yesterday the NY Times reported on the blockbuster deal between Bob Dylan and the Universal Music Publishing Group. They acquire ownership of his entire songwriting catalog for $300 million. It was clear that the deal would pay off for both parties. Universal would benefit from the royalties paid by other artists covering his songs and from corporations using his songs to accompany their commercials. Perhaps Universal began to salivate seeing the new Volvo ad that has Pete Seeger’s “Hard Time in the Mill” playing in the background. It depicts a young couple trying to manage the job of caring for twin boy infants, changing diapers, etc. I doubt that anybody in the market for a $40,000 car will identify much with the lyrics but, then again, I am no expert on marketing.

Every morning just at five
Gotta get up, dead or alive
It’s hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill

The FolkSongIndex website provides some background on the song:

The [textile] industry’s growth was based on a vastly expanding number of women and children in the mills. In the four textile states in 1890, men formed only 35 percent of the work force, women made up 40 percent, and children between the ages of ten and fifteen made up 25 percent. A seventy-hour workweek earned about $2.50 in 1885 and slightly less in 1895. At the same time profits were phenomenal. According to historian Broadus Mitchell, “It was not unusual . . . in these years to make 30 to 70 percent profit.”

I have no idea how or why Pete Seeger’s estate would have allowed his performance to be associated with a company like Volvo that would build a factory in a right-to-work state like South Carolina. As it happens, Volvo is owned by the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. in China. Given the Chinese preference for a tame workforce, it is doubtful that a union will ever prevail at Volvo, no matter the willingness to exploit Seeger’s pro-working class song.

As for Dylan, he is not a virgin when it comes to selling out. The Times article mentioned his promiscuous past:

In 1994, Dylan let the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand — predecessor of the current giant PricewaterhouseCoopers — use Richie Havens’s rendition of his 1964 protest anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in a TV spot. Fans, media commentators and even other artists reacted in horror; Time magazine wrote about the controversy with the headline “Just in Case You Hadn’t Heard — The ’60s Are Over.”

The Coopers & Lybrand spot was far from Dylan’s last commercial license: He did a prominent deal for a Victoria’s Secret TV spot in 2004, and later worked with Apple, Cadillac, Pepsi and IBM. Two years ago, he launched a high-end whiskey brand, Heaven’s Door.

Like most rich people, Dylan will undoubtedly (and his estate after he dies) make substantial contributions to the charities he favors like Amnesty International and the End Hunger Network. But what troubles people is the way that corporations exploit his reputation as a rebel in order to sell crap. Take the Victoria Secret’s ad:

Victoria’s Secret is a terrible company, allowing Jeffrey Epstein to use its credibility to carry out his crimes.

Perhaps we’ve reached the point where “cred” is only established by relying on the music of icons like Bob Dylan and Peter Seeger. Dylan, after all, will always convey rebelliousness just as Jack Kerouac still does for many undergraduates today. Even the ultimate bad boy William S. Burroughs figured out that there was money to be made from one’s reputation:

I should mention that Jack Kerouac got into the act himself:

Madison Avenue pays attention to anti-corporate iconography because it helps them market goods to the 18-30 year old consumer group. After all, unless you are an evangelical Trump voter in that sector, you too want to buy things that make you feel bold and special.

Was there any culture that was more hostile to the corporate world than the punk music scene? Take the Pogues, for example. This great Irish punk band was not only on the left politically but featured a singer named Shane MacGowan who abused alcohol and drugs. None of that got in the way with them doing a Cadillac commercial:

In 1988, Thomas Frank started a magazine called Baffler that sought to explain how capitalism was capable of co-opting the rebel. It stopped publishing in 1995, perhaps because it had become commonplace about the interaction. Frank relaunched it in 2011 as a general leftwing magazine that I subscribe to.

The original Baffler had the slogan “Commodify Your Dissent” that became the title of a collection Frank published in 1997. Have a look at an excerpt from the first chapter to get an idea of how they got to the heart of this most peculiar relationship:

Why Johnny Can’t Dissent

The public be damned! I work for my stockholders.
–William H. Vanderbilt, 1879

Break the rules. Stand apart. Keep your head. Go with your heart.
–TV commercial for Vanderbilt perfume, 1994

Capitalism is changing, obviously and drastically. From the moneyed pages of the Wall Street Journal to TV commercials for airlines and photocopiers we hear every day about the new order’s globe-spanning, cyber-accumulating ways. But our notion about what’s wrong with American life and how the figures responsible are to be confronted haven’t changed much in thirty years. Call it, for convenience, the “countercultural idea.” It holds that the paramount ailment of our society is conformity, a malady that has variously been described as over-organization, bureaucracy, homogeneity, hierarchy, logocentrism, technocracy, the Combine, the Apollonian. We all know what it is and what it does. It transforms humanity into “organization man,” into “the man in the gray flannel suit.” It is “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery,” the “incomprehensible prison” that consumes “brains and imagination.” It is artifice, starched shirts, tailfins, carefully mowed lawns, and always, always, the consciousness of impending nuclear destruction. It is a stiff, militaristic order that seeks to suppress instinct, to forbid sex and pleasure, to deny basic human impulses and individuality, to enforce through a rigid uniformity a meaningless plastic consumerism.

As this half of the countercultural idea originated during the 1950s, it is appropriate that the evils of conformity are most conveniently summarized with images of 1950s suburban correctness. You know, that land of sedate music, sexual repression, deference to authority, Red Scares, and smiling white people standing politely in line to go to church. Constantly appearing as a symbol of arch-backwardness in advertising and movies, it is an image we find easy to evoke.

The ways in which this system are to be resisted are equally well understood and agreed-upon. The Establishment demands homogeneity; we revolt by embracing diverse, individual lifestyles. It demands self-denial and rigid adherence to convention; we revolt through immediate gratification, instinct uninhibited, and liberation of the libido and the appetites. Few have put it more bluntly than Jerry Rubin did in 1970: “Amerika says: Don’t! The yippies say: Do It!” The countercultural idea is hostile to any law and every establishment. “Whenever we see a rule, we must break it,” Rubin continued. “Only by breaking rules do we discover who we are.” Above all rebellion consists of a sort of Nietzschean antinomianism, an automatic questioning of rules, a rejection of whatever social prescriptions we’ve happened to inherit. Just Do It is the whole of the law.

The patron saints of the countercultural idea are, of course, the Beats, whose frenzied style and merry alienation still maintain a powerful grip on the American imagination. Even forty years after the publication of On the Road, the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs remain the sine qua non of dissidence, the model for aspiring poets, rock stars, or indeed anyone who feels vaguely artistic or alienated. That frenzied sensibility of pure experience, life on the edge, immediate gratification, and total freedom from moral restraint, which the Beats first propounded back in those heady days when suddenly everyone could have their own TV and powerful V-8, has stuck with us through all the intervening years and become something of a permanent American style. Go to any poetry reading and you can see a string of junior Kerouacs go through the routine, upsetting cultural hierarchies by pushing themselves to the limit, straining for that gorgeous moment of original vice when Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl” in 1955 and the patriarchs of our fantasies recoiled in shock. The Gap may have since claimed Ginsberg and USA Today may run feature stories about the brilliance of the beloved Kerouac, but the rebel race continues today regardless, with ever-heightening shit-references calculated to scare Jesse Helms, talk about sex and smack that is supposed to bring the electricity of real life, and ever-more determined defiance of the repressive rules and mores of the American 1950s–rules and mores that by now we know only from movies.

December 5, 2020

John Brown and the American Indian

Filed under: african-american,American civil war,slavery — louisproyect @ 6:51 pm

It is a terrible disgrace that some on the left have praised the Showtime series on John Brown, including Eileen Jones on Jacobin, Ben Travers on IndieWire and Melanie McFarland on Salon. I say that without having seen a single episode but am sure that if it is even 1/100th faithful to James McBride’s novel, it is a hatchet job on John Brown.

As I work my way through David S. Reynolds’s superlative biography, I can imagine a great biopic about John Brown that would finally put the stake in the heart of all the trashy films that preceded it, including “Santa Fe Trail” and “The Good Lord Bird”. The following excerpt from Reynolds’s book details the relationship between Brown and the American Indians in Kansas. Yes, Brown was a Calvinist—with all its faults—but he was also a deeply ethical human being. A biopic about Brown would salvage him from all the mud that has been thrown by Hollywood and premium cable. He might have been a fanatic but that’s what it took to stand up to racism. Thank goodness the white participation in BLM protests shows that his soul goes marching on.

In Kansas there was a close link between the incursions of slavery and the maltreatment of Native Americans. As late as 1854, Kansas was still so sparsely settled that no settlement there could be identified as a white town or village. Native Americans, many of whom had been forced out of the East, were the main inhabitants of the Territory. Although white towns formed as proslavery and antislavery forces competed for supremacy after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Indians were by far the largest ethnic group during the time John Brown was there.

In warring against proslavery forces, John Brown was defending the rights of not only African Americans but also of Native Americans. Indian tribes occupied the finest lands in Kansas. From 1854 onward, proslavery settlers took control of most of these lands through unfair bargains, out-right confiscation, or deadly force. A contemporary journalist noted, “Nearly all of the Indian agents [i.e., white officials who dealt with the natives] were slavery propagandists, and many of them owned slaves.” The first to introduce slavery into Kansas was the Reverend Tom Johnson, an illiterate, coarse, slaveholding minister who appropriated some of the Shawnee tribe’s finest land and converted it into Shawnee Mission, a pro-slavery center.

Thereafter, proslavery settlers attempted to spread the so-called bless-ings of the South’s culture, including its incongruous mixture of Christianity and slavery. Nearly 1 oo,000 Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws established Christian communities in the territory south of Kansas, in what is now Oklahoma. These Indian communities had newspapers, churches, and, shockingly, slavery. Many Cherokee farmers owned black slaves.

Most of the natives who remained in Kansas, however, adopted few white customs other than excessive consumption of firewater. For the most part, the natives in Kansas were cheated or displaced by the invading whites.

Both proslavery and antislavery whites were prejudiced against the natives. The Free State settlers loathed the prospect of Indians remaining in Kansas as strongly as they desired the exclusion of blacks. John Brown and his family were as unusual on the Native American issue as they were in their opinion of blacks. John Brown’s respect for Native American culture dated from his Ohio childhood and ran through his adulthood. A story dating from his period in western Pennsylvania during the 1820s, when he was starting his family near Meadville, showed his deep sympathy for Indians. Every winter, natives from western New York would flock to the Meadville area to hunt. Many times the Browns welcomed groups of natives, supplying them with food and provisions. Some local white families, incensed over the annual arrival of the Indians, went with guns to John Brown’s house, asking him to join them in driving off the natives. John Brown replied firmly, “I will have nothing to do with so mean an act. I would sooner take my gun and help drive you out of the country.”

His notion of fighting racist whites while aiding Indians was fully real-ized in Kansas, where he befriended the natives as he battled the proslavery types who were trying to displace them. From the start, the Browns established friendly relationships with local tribes such as the Sacs, the Foxes, and the Ottawas. Bands of thirty to forty natives would frequently pass back and forth near Brown’s Station. Often four or five would break off from the pack and ride over to talk with the Browns. “While we were in Kansas,” recalled Jason Brown, “I did not know, or hear of a single act of unkindness by any of these Indians to the white settlers.”

In the summer of 1855, John Jr. visited a nearby Indian chief, who was so pleased with their meeting that later he sent members of his tribe to the Browns bearing gifts of melon and corn. The chief made it clear to John that he would have nothing to do with the efforts of whites to “civilize” Native Americans. Civilization, the chief indicated, was corrupting. “We want no houses and barns,” he said. “We want no schools and churches. We want no preachers and teachers.” He added with a laugh, “We bad enough now.” His tribe met in council and chose the Browns as the surveyors of its land, sensing it would thereby be protected against proslavery settlement.

On the eve of the Pottawatomie killings the Browns found that racism tainted even their close followers. John Jr., after seeing his father off with an anxious warning not to do anything “rash,” liberated two enslaved blacks (a teenaged boy and girl) from a farm a dozen miles outside of Lawrence. His subordinates in the Pottawatomie Rifles denounced this bold action, calling it “a great mistake and a terrible outrage upon humanity.”

His brother Jason reported later that the freeing of the slaves “raised a good deal of commotion and division among us” on the issue of race. He explained: “It was objected to by the ‘Free White State’ men, as they called themselves, who wanted Kansas only for whites, when it should be admitted to the Union as a State, leaving out the broken and disheartened remnants of eleven or twelve tribes of ‘red man’ around us, for another removal and the black man to be sent into a still more hopeless bondage.” The volunteers, who “did not want to mix up with ‘niggers’ or abolitionists,” voted to return the blacks to their owner. They also voted to relieve John Jr. of his command of the company.

The incident showed that the problems of blacks and Indians were intermingled. In the eyes of the Browns, the “hopeless bondage” of the slaves and the removals of “broken and disheartened” native tribes were equally despicable. For ” ‘Free White State’ men,” in contrast, both blacks and Indians were loathsome creatures to be banished from the presence of whites. Most Free State whites in Kansas were just as racist as their proslavery opponents, whom they were more inclined to compromise with than to murder.

John Brown’s actions around the time of his Pottawatomie raid show how distanced he was from such racism. Not only did he respect Native Americans, but his closest ally, other than family members, was the half-breed John Tecumseh “Ottawa” Jones. He finalized his plan on the reserve where Jones lived, and after the killings he spent much of his time there. He later credited his Indian friend with saving him and his family from starvation in the desperate months just after the raid.

Ottawa Jones was a prosperous and well-educated farmer who lived on the ten-mile-square Ottawa reserve along with more than three hundred other Indians. He had attended Hamilton College and in 1845 was married to a Maine woman who had come to Kansas as a missionary to the Indians. He owned over a hundred cattle and fourteen horses, and his three-hundred-acre farm produced 4,000 bushels of grain annually. Jones was familiar with the cruelty and treachery of whites. He had established a large hotel that was burned to the ground by forty proslavery men, who also stole money from his wife. His total loss was between $6,000 and $10,000. He had also witnessed the apostasy of Dutch Henry Sherman. For years Sherman had worked on Jones’s farm, until he earned enough to venture out on his own. While working for Jones, Sherman had been equivocal on slavery, but when he left to run the store on Mosquito Creek he became a rabid proslavery activist. On the Joneses’ reserve, near Middle Ottawa Creek, was a way station where Brown and his party camped the night of May 22. Brown’s group used a large grindstone there to sharpen the two-edged broadswords that had been brought from Ohio. The swords, inscribed with eagles, were reportedly left over from a failed filibustering scheme to take over Canada. Now they were going to be put to the service of a new kind of filibuster: one against slavery and racism, one that coupled the gratuitous violence of Southern lynchings with the bloodiness of revolts by enslaved blacks and massacres by Native Americans.

December 3, 2020

A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson

Filed under: african-american,Counterpunch — louisproyect @ 3:52 pm

COUNTERPUNCH, DECEMBER 4, 2020

In the aftermath of the New York Times’s Project 1619 that appeared in the August 2019 Sunday Magazine section, there have been howls of protest over Nikole Hannah-Jones’s claim that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” Those howls have come from both the right and the left, with Donald J. Trump and Sean Wilentz being prime examples.

Anybody with an open mind who reads Sharon Rudahl’s superlative A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson: Ballad of an American will conclude that Hannah-Jones’s statement is truthful. The degree to which racists both in and outside of government tried to “cancel” this African-American icon is shocking. Like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Robeson was an assassination victim. In his case, the murder weapon wasn’t a bullet but decades of harassment and even a possible drug attempt to make him lose his mind. It was an example of a death by a thousand cuts.

Although it is “merely” a comic book, the term that Harvey Pekar preferred to describe his own and similar works, it draws from a wealth of other books, including Martin Duberman’s highly regarded 1988 biography. However, the relationship between his life’s details and the popular form the book assumes is seamless. It is stunning to see how the minutiae of a man’s life can capture your attention. Of course, with someone like Paul Robeson, the inherent drama can overcome even the most pedestrian rendering. Suffice it to say that Rudahl has written one of the best radical comic books I have ever read.

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December 1, 2020

Marxism for Beginners

Filed under: Introduction to Marxism class — louisproyect @ 9:29 pm

From time to time, I get email asking me advice on how to learn something about Marxism or a particular aspect of it. I always answer publicly on my blog since I expect that others might benefit from my response. The last example was my Readings on Race and Class that recommended texts by Ted Allen, et al.

A couple of weeks ago someone sent me an email from a self-described “working class person” who was looking for all the educational resources on Marxist theory she can find and asked “Would you have any ideas of any sort of online Marxist free schools or anything like that?” What follows is my response. I admit that I have not listened to the recommended videos below but am relatively sure that they will be of benefit.

Academics

Richard Wolff:

Wolff is a professor emeritus from the University of Massachusetts who has turned YouTube into a virtual Marxist free school. I don’t know of any other scholar, retired or otherwise, who has made more YouTube videos addressing the needs of newcomers to Marxism than him. Although I have some political differences with Wolff, I give him credit for being an exceptionally lucid and engaging speaker.

1. Introduction to Marxist Economics This is a six-part series consisting of short videos averaging around 12 minutes that gets into the basics. They were recorded at the Brecht Forum in NYC in 2009, exactly the kind of Marxist free school that my correspondent was referring to. Unfortunately, the Brecht Forum no longer exists, the result of NYC’s real estate luxury prices. Wolff describes his talks as providing “a working foundation in the core concepts of Marxian economic theory — necessary and surplus labor, labor power, surplus value, exploitation, capital accumulation, distributions of the surplus, capitalist crises, and the differences between capitalist and other class structures.”

In addition to these talks, Wolff gave another lecture at the Brecht Forum in 2012 titled “Crisis and Openings: Introduction to Marxism” that tied the financial crisis of 2008 to new anti-capitalist movements.

Finally, while the Brecht Forum no longer exists, there is a virtual school that emerged out of its ashes called The Marxist Education Project that contains both archived videos from the Brecht Forum’s past as well as new classes such as one based on Andy Merrifield’s new book, “Marx Dead and Alive: Reading Capital in Precarious Times”. The book has gotten rave reviews and the class is relatively inexpensive at $20.

David Harvey

Now 85, Harvey is still going strong. I am not sure if he a professor emeritus like Wolff but I surmise that most of his pedagogical efforts are devoted to his website that contains his heralded lectures on Marx’s Capital that was presented at the People’s Forum in NYC, an attempt to continue the legacy of the Brecht Forum. Harvey used to give talks at the Brecht Forum himself, including one that I wrote about 20 years ago. Like Wolff, Harvey is a very clear and lively lecturer. Also like Wolff, I have my political differences with him and respect his long-standing commitment to socialism.

I also recommend bookmarking the People’s Forum since it has a wealth of videos recorded at their headquarters, including ones that would be of interest to folks trying to get a handle on Marxist theory, such as one titled “The Ballot, The Streets- Or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution” that is an interview with August Nimtz, the foremost scholar on this subject.

Ben Fine

I know Fine mostly by reputation. He is a Professor of Economics at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies who has written a lot about South Africa.

There’s a recording of his lecture titled Introduction to Marxist Economics that is divided into two parts.

One of the comments under the YouTube video sounds like it might be very useful. “May be finally I got someone to clear the wooly muddled thinking that years of studying Economics has created in my mind.”

Political groups

Within this category, I found two resources that look promising. I generally look askance at material produced by self-described Leninist groups since much of it is tied to their own particular ideology. However when it comes to something as basic as introducing Marxism, less harm is produced.

Jo Cardwell

Cardwell is a member of the British Socialist Workers Party. I know next to nothing about her but her introduction to Marxist economic theory is probably worth listening to.

Alan Woods

Woods is the long-time leader of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), which is based in England. The IMT is Trotskyist and their website is an excellent repository of articles about culture and science that I have referred to over the years. His talk on The Relevance of Marxism Today is probably intended as an advertisement for his group but I suspect that it will contain some interesting insights.

Non-video resources

Introduction to Marxism Class

In 2008, I set up a mailing list on Yahoo on this topic. All of the articles I posted can be read here. They are not exactly anything like an ABC’s but primarily reflect my own preoccupations for better or for worse.

Books

1. RIUS, Marx for Beginners

This is an absolutely great comic book written by a Mexican cartoonist that I read when it first came out in the sixties. There’s nothing like it and it can be read for free here.

2. The Communist Manifesto: A Graphic Novel

Another comic book with illustrations by Martin Rowson. I am not sure about its value, at $19.99 for only 80 pages. This review might help you make up your mind.

3. Marx’s Capital Illustrated: An Illustrated Introduction

Co-written by David Smith (Author), Phil Evans (Illustrator), this 216 page book that can be purchased for $7 used on Amazon and is published by Haymarket Books, the imprint of the now dissolved ISO. This tends to recommend it. Smith is both a scholar and an activist, maybe even an ex-ISOer. In any case, this deserves a close look.

4. Marxism: a Graphic Guide

Co-written by Woodfin, Rupert, Zarate and Oscar, this 205-page book is available for free as an eBook. I took a brief look and it seems worth your time.

This is just a start. I imagine that others will add to this in the comments below.

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