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Ghosts of Anti-Fascism Past

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Ghosts of Anti-Fascism Past

Category Archives: Rant

Calling All Anti-Fascists!

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Rant

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A22, anti-fascism, Anti-Racist Action, antifa, Chuds, coalition for human dignity, Portland Oregon, Trump Caravan

A22 2021 this Sunday in Portland is a deliberate Chud provocation and cynical attempt at rebranding. Their “Summer of Love” is scheduled on the one-year anniversary of the brawl they instigated outside of the JC that featured the PPD openly collaborating with the far-right.

This Sunday numbers are critical for our safety. While not every anti-fascist can take a physical stand against fascists in the streets, every anti-fascist should support those who can and do. The time-honored Anti-Racist Action slogan of yore still applies: We go where they go.

In addition to the historical parallel with A22 (2020) where Chuds faced fierce opposition from anti-fascists, there is what transpired on August 29, 2020 to consider. That was the day of the Trump caravan that left from the Clackamas Mall and headed to downtown Portland. 

As the miles-long convoy approached the city, some of those cars and trailer trucks—overflowing with far-right militants—began peeling off I-5 onto the Morrison Bridge offramp directly into downtown Portland. I have a fond memory of “Trumpet Man” and a small number of anti-fascists blocking the off ramp and trying to halt their ingress. 

And they succeeded for a time.

I also recall in the days immediately prior the caravan some comrades expressing indecision as to whether to mobilize against the onslaught. As I recall there was no main counter rally organized. Instead of a unified front in the downtown area, it was left to a frighteningly small number of comrades to hold the line, until later in the evening when reinforcements arrived and Patriot Prayerist Aaron Danielson met his ignominious demise and Joey Gibson was forced to walk a gauntlet. That series of events could have easily gone the other way. Numbers are life in this situation. Thankfully there is an anti-fascist action organized for A22 2021. 

Anyone who self-describes as an anti-fascist should be supporting those comrades who choose to hold the line. That support can take many forms—direct action, money, legal aid, equipment, boosting, or platters of brownies. What’s important is that we build public support for them. We should show our deepest solidarity with resistance ground crews, many of whom will be people of color and other targeted communities. Those “anti-fascists” who equivocate or decry the principled choice of some to risk all in the defense of us don’t deserve to be called anti-fascists. Their failure amounts to hanging comrades out to dry. 

And fuck Ted Wheeler.

We are many, they are few. Be Safe. Be Dangerous.

Defend Portland on A22!

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Liberals Lean In, But Don’t Go Anywhere.

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Essay, Rant

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Amerika, Bill Clinton, exceptionalism, Liberalism, Sheryl Sandberg, socialism, Triangulate, universalism, Weebles

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The contemporary Amerikan liberal is a specimen of political animal whose greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The roly-poly toy Weebles captures perfectly the broad but shallow political tradition that narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the recent presidential elections: “Tipping an egg-shaped Weeble causes a weight located at the bottom-center to be lifted off the ground. Once released, gravity brings the Weeble back into an upright position.” (Weeble–Wikipedia Retrieved 11/10/20). The weight is fidelity to private property and markets as the sine-qua-non of democracy; the “wobble” constitutes repeated attempts to solve the intractable and recurring crises that this unstable marriage of democracy and capitalism produces. The key here is that Weebles are very kinetic, but only over a very limited terrain. They move a lot, but not very far nor very quickly. They are remarkably stable, but also inflexible. To stop fascism and replace capitalism with a political economy that serves the many and not the few, we need to move. Weebles only move slowly, in a haphazard manner, and never in a predetermined direction. Push a Weeble one way, and it will lean the other, while its fulcrum will shift in an altogether different direction. Kinda frustrating. Indeed, they don’t fall over, but we should not mistake such leaning to and fro as movement toward any destination other than where they already reside.

Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive and faux feminist, is generally credited with popularizing the term “lean in” as a meta concept for contemporary progressives. The core operating principle behind “lean in” Democrats is the Weeble wobble. If one is standing still, to lean in is to initiate a deviation from a perpendicular position; it is to begin an inclination as one tips the body into a slope. Above all it signals a state of readiness to move in a particular direction. Such a maneuver does not, however, fully commit one to moving in that direction. When one leans there is always an element of hedging; always an aspect of waiting, of anticipating, and therefore the possibility of staying put or even reversing the lean and heading off in another, even opposite, direction. To lean is also by definition to be a bit off balance. Bill Clinton was the consummate practitioner of the political maneuver known as triangulation, something similar to the Weeble wobble, but with one major difference. Clinton’s triangulating was always a form of political calculation; the Weeble wobble is a function of the limits of the liberal philosophical horizon.

This Weeble wobble is almost always well-meaning but also ineffectual; it is earnest and committed waffling, passionate virtue signaling and much celebrated but empty representational politics. Hence, its popularity amongst liberal ideologues. They lean a great deal, but go nowhere. They are perpetually “leaning” towards justice, yet never actually moving to it. Everything is about intention, not results; opportunity, not equality. It’s no wonder so many people hate them. Conservatives, by the way, practice much the same politics. In times of social quiescence such middle-of-the-road centrism anchors capitalism by bracketing out radical solutions to systemic problems.

These are not those times.

Liberals always link political freedom to private property and markets; economic opportunity to the capitalist ship of state. This means they necessarily undermine struggles for economic equality, anti-racism, gender liberation and anti-fascism. To uphold the universalism and exceptionalism claimed by the United States of Amerika involves punching downward in an effort to thwart popular revolutionary struggles. When the political center no longer offers solutions to the recurring crises endemic to capitalism, people look elsewhere for an exit. They will look to fascism or socialism. The first is a door that opens to a cliff. The second must not be a door that binds us to more of the Weeble wobble. Our class solidarity and mutual aide is the only guarantee of a different future. That means we must break decisively with liberalism in the direction of radical democracy and equality.

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Left Woos Right: Glenn Greenwald’s Pink-Brown “Populist” Alliance

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Essay, Podcast Review, Rant

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Black Lives Matter, fascism, George Floyd murder, George Wallace, Glenn Greenwald, Krystal Ball, left-wing populism, Nathan Robinson, Reagan Democrats, Right-wing populism, TINA, Tucker Carlson

Introduction

This is a deliberately splenetic critique of an Intercept Podcast hosted by Glenn Greenwald that aired on June 25, 2020, entitled “Should the Populist Left Work With the Populist Right Where They Have Common Ground or Shun Them?” Along with Greenwald as a not-so-disinterested-host, the podcast features Krystal Ball and Nathan Robinson. Since 2018 Ball has promoted a left-right “populist” convergence through the television show Rising, which she co-hosts with right-winger Saagar Enjeti. The two debate topical fare “Crossfire” style (arch-paleoconservative Pat Buchanan was an original “Crossfire” host in the 1980s, a noteworthy historical reference here). Ball and Enjeti also co-authored The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising, released in February 2020. Robinson is the editor-in-chief of the socialist magazine Current Affairs, arguably the most unfortunately named socialist magazine in the history of socialist magazines, but a socialist magazine nonetheless. He wears funny outfits but is an articulate reform-minded socialist.

This debate was ostensibly prompted by Robinson’s article in Current Affairs “Isn’t Right-Wing Populism Just Fascism?” but has been ongoing ever since Greenwald first appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight a few years ago. Given Carlson’s growing status as a more authentic neo-fascist alternative to Trump, it’s of no small importance that we try and understand how efforts to engage with him are utter folly. I think both Greenwald and Ball argue for what amounts to a ‘pink-brown’ alliance, a potentially disastrous response to the ongoing collapse of the center in American politics. Robinson’s critique of Greenwald and Ball is largely correct, although because he upholds much of the language and theoretical framework of “populism” rather than discarding it altogether, his response is somewhat misguided. I think there is an alternative to all three of these pundits, but it can only be conceptualized by challenging the basis from which Greenwald and Ball base their politics. Robinson doesn’t quite do this; hence the need for this essay.

To Robinson’s question “Isn’t right-wing populism just fascism?” the short answer is: Fascism is fascism; populism isn’t anything at all (at least not in 2020). That means the short answer to Greenwald’s question “Should we work with or shun them?” should be: We should crush them.

But I’m fond of long answers.

Glenn Greenwald is a litigation attorney; his worldview is steeped in laws, constitutionalism, and abstract theories of rights. This bourgeois legalism can provide powerful critiques of the political economy of capitalism, but too often in America it is also blind in the white eye. For instance, Greenwald the activist helped found and lead The Intercept, an important investigative journalism project. But, Greenwald the attorney has also represented in court neo-Nazis such as Mathew Hale. Anti-fascists understandably have a problem with this. Greenwald thinks such professional conduct is a testament to his fidelity to equal access under the law. We think it’s collaboration. This contradiction is not unique to Greenwald, it is the case with all celebrity intellectuals, entertainers, and liberal idealists. On principle we should figuratively hammer those who would sacrifice lives on an altar of abstract rights.

Greenwald is also preternaturally clever. If one accepts his premises (sometimes unstated) it’s difficult to argue his conclusions. Therefore, we need to challenge the foundation of his framework to show why the coalition-building he and Ball are proposing involves a disastrous politics of the pink and brown.

It’s important to note that “pink” here means blue-dog, liberal or social Democrat, not LGBTQ+. “Brown” means far-right, white nationalist, and fascist. Red is far-left (not Republican) and denotes revolutionary socialist, communist, and anarchist politics. With me? The dangerous overlap here is not “red-brown” but “pink-brown”; between disaffected (white) Democrats, and far-rightists. In terms of historical precedence think George Wallace or Reagan Democrats. Greenwald and Ball want to break out the beer and bratwurst and discuss “legitimate grievances”; I want to destroy their organizations, from the top down, and thereby their capacity to organize, even function. By doing so we can also make space for a good many of their rank and file to become anti-racists, anti-fascists, even raging leftists.

Part of what Greenwald will not accept is that many radical conservatives have moved into a more revolutionary camp and prefer an eliminationist form of actually existing capitalism. Such a radical turn means that when they inveigle against “elites” or “foreign wars” they are not reinvigorating “populist” democracy or helping constrain American imperialism. This is not an opportunity for cross-class coalition building, nor is it a component of a “popular front” against fascism. It is one important aspect of a burgeoning 21st-century fascism in formation. It must be fought, not finagled.

Greenwald’s TINA (There Is No Alternative) 

Greenwald introduces the podcast exchange as follows:

“For me, the starting point has to be the current state of left-wing populism. I don’t think that it can be reasonably disputed that left-wing politics in the United States does not claim a majority of people which support it. By which I don’t mean that left-wing populism has no views which garner the support of a majority of people. Left-wing populism does have key views, such as medicare for all and raising the minimum wage and even to some extent universal healthcare that garner substantial support among the entire U.S. population if not a majority which means it has broad appeal beyond its left-wing precepts. But, left-wing populism as a movement, as an ideology, as a philosophy, does not claim anywhere close to a majority–nowhere near a majority among people in the United States claim to be leftists or left-wing populists…That means in order for it to implement its policy goals–which has to be the ultimate objective of politics, otherwise, politics is like art or poetry, something one does for the art of it, or the purity of it, or the self-enjoyment of it, but not actually to change the world for the better in meaningful ways through legislation and reform. If that is the goal (which it has to be) it means that left-wing populists have to form coalitions and alliances with other people in order to form majorities. And the question becomes, in those numerous instances where left-wing populists can’t form a majority with democratic corporatists and democratic imperialists and democratic centrists–and oftentimes they can’t, which is why there is such a cleavage…the fact that there are so many instances where there is no way to form a coalition or a majority with democratic centrists because they oppose the agenda of left-wing populism prompts the question: With whom are left-wing populists going to form coalitions and alliances on an issue-by-issue basis–not permanently, not for every issue, but on an issue-by-issue basis where there is common ground, if there is a prohibition, as Robinson argues there should be, in that article at least, where he said: “the left should have nothing to do with that movement?” With whom is the left-wing going to form alliances and coalitions if not right-wing populism?”

This is a clever, but fatuous, elevation of congressional politics at the expense of other forms of political struggle. Social movements like Black Lives Matter are expected to reach their apex of development when politicians are all in Kente cloths; anarchist mutual aid networks, worker militancy, housing occupations, teacher and health care worker strikes, and much more are completely ignored here. Nothing exists outside “serious politics.” Greenwald is trying to defend a sweeping claim about how power functions in a capitalist society by reducing that power to a very narrow expression of it: legislation in the congress between donkeys and elephants. Furthermore, the American political spectrum is notoriously tilted to the right, at least in part because there has never been a labor party here; just two capitalist parties. That’s a long-term, built-in, structural disadvantage to working-class, multi-racial, movements that must be overcome. We can overcome it, but not through elections. Social movements often drive and move beyond electoral politics, as is now the case with the uprising following the murder of George Floyd. Greenwald and Ball seem to think the best response to cops murdering Black people is making tactical alliances with Rand Paul and Josh Hawley.

So Greenwald’s first premise is that electoral politics is the only form of politics; everything else is just art or self-expression. Notice also that throughout this debate so-called ‘left-wing populists’ are limited to two choices: pacts with corporate democrats or those with right-wing populists.

Anti-fascists refuse both options.

My central argument is that one cannot practice what Greenwald and Ball are proposing and expect to defeat fascism and build an alternative to capitalism. Of course, if one’s goal is majority control of both chambers of Congress, then none of this applies. If you accept his premise here, it’s hard to reject his conclusion. Don’t accept the premise. Greenwald and Ball inhabit a thought world with self-limiting horizons. Our politics are excluded from their world of “There Is No Alternative”; what is hardly ever acknowledged is that this engenders a built-in preference for and susceptibility to the siren songs of the far-right. When the center of what is acceptable debate between the two capitalist parties has moved so far to the right that it includes fascist ideas, the solution is not to accommodate such ideas, but to reject them. Fascist ideas have moved from the margins to the mainstream of that electoral consensus precisely because the “dead center” of liberalism and conservatism is bereft of solutions to today’s crises. They fear the Black-led uprising more than they do fascism.

One of the strongest arguments to be made against cooperating with the far-right is this: forging alliances with them — tactical or otherwise — precludes movement building that is genuinely multi-racial, working-class, and that promotes left-unity.  The far-right is so steeped in eliminationist and accelerationist politics as to make the tactical alliances Greenwald and Ball so cherish a fool’s errand. To court allies among fascists is to court disaster for people in their crosshairs.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Greenwald poses a hypothetical union member who believes in workers over management, medicare for all, raising the minimum wage, and is against free trade agreements because of offshoring. On the other hand, this worker is also a social conservative — pro-life, not LGBTQ positive, and favors restrictive immigration policy. Are they to be shunned? Greenwald doesn’t mention anti-Black racism, police brutality, or the carceral state in his convenient equation. He doesn’t mention this hypothetical (white) worker’s support for “law and order” expressed through “Back The Blue” bumper stickers. I think the omission is instructive. This podcast aired on June 25, 2020, while protests were still ongoing (as they are now) across the United States. While statues to confederate generals and colonialist masters were being hauled down throughout the country, Greenwald and Ball persisted with their fantasy of building a multi-racial, working-class movement without confronting racism and white supremacy while one was underway all around them. Instead of turning to that movement, they mistook a phantom constituency for a new “agent of history.”

Greenwald’s Exemplar of Right-Wing Populism

But Greenwald isn’t just talking about breaking bread with regular white workers; he’s got something very particular in mind when he uses the term ‘right-wing populist’:

“For this discussion to be profitable we need to have an understanding of what right-wing populism is…To me, the most vivid and comprehensive expression of right-wing populism in the United States is the rhetoric and the branding of the 2016 Trump campaign. Not the reality of the Trump presidency, which deviated radically and abruptly from what the rhetoric and branding of what the campaign was, but the campaign itself. What did the campaign in 2016 say that it stood for, particularly when engineered by Steve Bannon in order to attract enough voters, particularly in the industrial Midwest, in order to win the election…?”

What it stood for then, as now, is “America First”: a reinvigorated racist nationalism that is the core of a 21st-century fascism-in-formation. Greenwald argues that Trump “deviated radically and abruptly” from Bannon’s authentic populist program. This amounts to a distinction without a difference. Here, both the thing he is trying to measure and evaluate together with the ruler and criteria which he uses to measure it, are both flawed. Bannon and his ilk engineered Trump’s campaign from largely the same template Trump is now governing, setting aside the wild card of the global impact of COVID-19. In other words, there has been no substantive break between promises and results that don’t always occur when either capitalist party secures the executive. Far more important is the continuity that persisted from campaign to governing regime: building the wall and ICE raids, vicious anti-Black racism, organized misogyny, hyper-nationalism, more advanced forms of kleptocracy and cronyism, together with an iron-fisted fidelity to the economic imperatives of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and corporate America. Even if one were to hold that there is a meaningful difference between Bannon’s “populism” and that of Trump, the proposition that the former offers viable terrain for cooperation is reprehensible.

There should be no need for a quote here from Bannon to demonstrate his moorings in the white nationalist, alt-right political universe.

The question becomes, what are Greenwald and Ball up to?

Greenwald’s Pink-Brown Alliance

Many leftists are accustomed to hearing about “red-brown” alliances, the most dreadful example captured in the slogan “After Hitler, Our Turn,” popularized by the Stalinized communist left in 1930s Germany. There was, of course, no “turn” for the left “after Hitler” because the left, then everyone else, was obliterated, literally; this being perhaps the single most important lesson learned for what happens after fascism attains state power. That slogan flowed from the equally disastrous Stalinist slogans of “socialism in one country” and “social fascism,” the former a betrayal of proletarian internationalism and the latter a refusal to distinguish between routine capitalist rule and that of a fascist dictatorship. Today there are numerous examples of some radical leftists adopting a political framework that involves much overlap with far-right and even neo-fascist movements. One has only to look at the degenerated publication of the U.S. Socialist Worker’s Party organ The Militant, or the bizarre syncretic monstrosities like Spiked Magazine and Russian “National Bolsheviks” to see such overlap. When anti-racism and anti-fascism are discarded as central principles that should guide revolutionary praxis, such alliances become possible. The term ”campist” comes to mind here, a largely anarchist critique of socialists and communists who allow their political praxis to be overly influenced by states, many of which are not on the left (e.g., Russia, Syria). Geopolitical priorities become over-determined by conflicts with the United States; “anti-imperialism” devolves into a reflexive “anti-Americanism” itself enmeshed within the priorities of those reactionary states, where they risk becoming nothing but a creature of them. Max Blumenthal and The Greyzone come to mind here. This political tendency on the left is real and needs to be countered, but what we are addressing here is different.

Together with vigilance against such developments, we need to be equally aware of “pink-brown” alliances. After all, it was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) that carried out the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibnicht in 1919. From then on the leadership of Germany’s largest worker’s party would periodically forge its own alliances with right-wing reaction which also contributed to a failure of the left to unite against Nazism. The leadership of the social democrats considered there to be no appreciable difference between Nazis and communists, a political stupidity that was epitomized in posters from the Iron Front that featured three arrows targeting the Conservative Franz von Papen, NSDAP leader Adolph Hitler and Ernst Thälmann, leader of the German Communist Party (KPD). The Iron Front was demobilized by the SPD leadership in the run-up to the Nazi ascension to power while at the same time the communists considered there to be no appreciable difference between social democrats and Nazis. Any front against Nazism — popular, united, or otherwise — became impossible.

Today’s purveyors of the “populism” thesis for understanding political power have learned nothing from history. Their attempts to forge an impossible unity between fascists and social democrats will only demobilize constituencies that cannot possibly benefit from such a project.

Greenwald thinks there is a realignment underway within the American body politic that has permanently rejiggered the familiar right-left spectrum. This realignment now pits “populists” of the right and left against the “establishment” or “insiders” of the center. Such claims are not new. They are, in fact, stock and trade of the far-right. While Greenwald doesn’t argue that all politics is now “populists” vs. “elites”, he does argue that many things can be grasped through this lens and that now is the time for leftists to forge alliances with what amount to fascists on the right. He’s wrong.

The Dead Center

For all his radicalism, Greenwald is committed to liberal, constitutional, democracy as he understands it. The problem he faces, and it is the same for everyone in the “dead center,” is that the ground underneath him is shifting, although not in the ways he thinks. Greenwald outlines what he thinks has changed in American politics over the past few years and how his political analysis accounts for that change:

“What all of this illustrates to me is that while there are some political debates that are still best understood by Republican vs. Democrat, or left vs. right — things like social issues, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ rights, crucial political issues to be sure–and more substantive policies such as the environment and climate where there are still differences (meaningful ones) that are understood best by the division between Republican vs. Democrat, there are numerous issues where the establishment wings of the Democrat and Republican parties have more in common with one another than they do with the populist wings of either party; where left-wing populists have more in common with right-wing populists than they do with what has long appeared to be their closer allies in each party. And what this illustrates is that while some politics is still best understood and Republican vs. Democrat, much of it is not. Much of it is better understood as pro-establishment vs. anti-establishment, insider vs. outsider.”

Here Greenwald doesn’t use a race-class-gender framework to guide his analysis of political struggle, and it shows. This leaves him susceptible to pitchfork and torch rightists like Tucker Carlson. The American far-right has always framed their politics as “anti-establishment” and “outsider vs insider” but there should be an unbridgeable gulf between what they mean and what we mean by those terms. Greenwald thinks otherwise.

“… Is it the case that the views of right-wing populists on immigration, on race, and on other issues that are so pernicious and odious and anathema to left-wing populists that working with them ought to be morally impermissible? If that is the case, the question becomes: Number one, how is the left-wing ever going to implement its agenda or even attract converts if it refuses to engage constructively with [them and instead] scream at them and call them Nazis and fascists and racists but actually engage with them and try and find common ground? And it leads to the [second] question: Why is it that the pernicious views of the populist right render them off-limits for engaging with them in any kind of constructive or issue by issue alliances or coalition but that the hideous and horrendous views of the corporatist and imperialist democrats doing regime change wars in other countries, serving the interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley at the expense of workers–why are those hideous views that so many Democrats have [not off limits]?”

No. 1: These “populist” Republicans Greenwald is so enamored with are pockmarked by pathological fetishes for private property, racism, and fascism. If it waddles like a pig, oinks like a pig, and roots like a pig, it is probably a pig. Stop calling it a duck.

No. 2 The left will never implement its agenda through congress. We fight for a revolution, not a bill.

No. 3. Both fascists and capitalists are our mortal enemies. Greenwald is trying to render what is a structural deformation of the American political system into a moral failure practiced by progressives: a double standard for which he offers the opposite as a solution. The corporate Democrats are worse! It’s lesser evilism in reverse. But Greenwald knows the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and therefore prefers to make alliances with the business class. Only someone who doesn’t understand this would be vexed by the altogether routine and inflexible pro-corporate policies and legislation favored by Democratic party elites. Congressional politics is generally limited to disagreements among capitalists that are structured to exclude arguments put forward by movements that challenge this. See: Sanders Campaign for president 2016, 2020. The only question is why someone would continue to try and make a “dirty break” with the Democratic Party so as to smuggle in democratic socialism. That will have to wait for another time.

It is also important to point out that what Greenwald calls “right-wing populism” is really an American hybrid of libertarianism and Christian nationalism. It is the worship of private property and the Cross wrapped up in the American flag. These two ideologies constitute the most important pipelines that convey raw political material to a more toxic refinery called 21st Century fascism. The most dynamic center of gravity for this emerging fascism is precisely what Greenwald thinks is “right-wing populism”. It is right-wing, but it is in no sense an expression of “the people.” For example, Peter Thiel is by no stretch of the imagination a “populist”; he’s a powerful tech billionaire inspired by ubermensch, dark enlightenment elitism. He believes capitalism and democracy are antithetical, and that the former should vanquish the latter. Yet Thiel is an important, even central, figure within the “populist” firmament. If that’s the case, then how can one argue for tactical alliances with that political tendency? So too with Rand Paul, the Senator who has repeatedly opposed anti-lynching legislation. Paul is a tea party libertarian — a crypto-fascist by any other name. Wouldn’t such an alliance be predicated on a rupture with other constituencies (immigrants, Black people, undocumented workers) because their very existence is at stake? Yes, it would.

Greenwald always uses the term “populism” in ways to favorably contrast it with “establishment” centrism. What he won’t acknowledge is that the term has its roots, and not a small amount of limbs and branches, within Cold War sociology and political science and the singular contention that all politics can be understood as an eternal contest between democracy, on the one hand, and totalitarianism, on the other. This political tradition argues that democracy is fundamentally compatible with capitalism; fascism, anarchism, and communism are not. There is no anti-capitalist option according to these precepts, only a defense of liberal democracy (capitalist democracy) through a never-ending war against “extremism.” A major problem with that framework is that by excluding left options to capitalism, the “anti-totalitarians” will often turn to right-wing authoritarians or outright fascists to solve the recurring problems that capitalism generates. They routinely sacrifice democracy and equality in favor of private property and inequality. While Jeanne Kirkpatrick articulated this best from the conservative right as a distinction between “totalitarian regimes” vs. “authoritarian regimes” and a marked preference for the latter, most Democrats sing the same song, if in a different key. When Greenwald argues that right and left “populists” need to work together he’s arguing against that long political tradition of corporate centrism, but in favor of alliances with fascism. His break with centrist orthodoxy, with the iron-clad hold of the two all-but indistinguishable parties run by and for the ruling class, is to appease the far-right in the interests of strengthening the liberal center. His alternative to the domination of the two capitalist parties is to empower the most reactionary, noxious elements of one in the hopes of stabilizing the ship of state. It won’t work and besides, we want to sink it.

“Populism” here is a term used by centrists as a cudgel against “extremists” of any political stripe. The term has no claim whatsoever to any analytical legitimacy and wherever one observes its use, be wary. There was, of course, a “populist movement” during the late 19th Century, but it has little if anything to do with either contemporary scholars who use the term as a weapon in defense of capitalist democracy, and even less with that vast cornucopia of political groups that have adopted it worldwide. The seminal text on the term is by Marco D’Eramo, in New Left Review (July-August 2013, No. 82) “Populism and the New Oligarchy.”

The Pitchfork and Torch Crowd

In discussing Tucker Carlson, Greenwald makes the laughable claim that it is often only Carlson who is willing to attack corporate Democrats.   Greenwald plays an excerpt of a Carlson show where he rails against “banking” and “foreign wars,” “the private equity model” and “a ruling class”. This Greenwald believes to be a “questioning the fundamentals of capitalism” one can’t find elsewhere. But white nationalists and Christian Patriots would agree with these descriptions of ruling class power; they just believe such power is Jewish and arrayed against white people. Greenwald is too smart to be unaware of this fact; therefore he just dismisses it. He doesn’t think it’s relevant. But it is. His appearances on Carlson’s show are loathsome. Greenwald deliberately misrepresents Carlson’s “populism” by white-washing it; downplaying or disregarding altogether the vicious anti-Black racism that is a core value of all white nationalists. Greenwald also describes Carlson as an important voice against “regime change” in Syria, Iran and Venezuela. He apparently regards Carlson as an anti-imperialist, a complete denigration of the term Lenin developed a century ago. Of course all of this debate about American power abroad amounts to nothing more than counterposing the boots on the ground option vs. the Qassem Suleimani option; it is an argument among capitalists about how best to exercise that power abroad, not dismantle it. What Carlson articulates flows from the perceived interests of the one unit of analysis that for him rises above all else: the (white) nation. Carlson is best understood within this political tradition, and as such his brand of politics is beyond the pale because it implies the jettisoning of any meaningful antiracist praxis.

Robinson correctly points out that both Greenwald and Ball exaggerate areas of agreement between “populisms” to suit their argument, noting that in actuality such overlap is virtually non-existent. Greenwald, ever the attorney, then tries to pigeon-hold Robinson into supporting “cooperation on principle.” Robinson responds that on principle, yes, there can be cooperation; but it doesn’t matter because they are “on principle” too radically different. Our principles don’t overlap enough with theirs to justify cooperation. Rand Paul, Robinson correctly asserts, is not a “populist” but a “tea party libertarian”.

I find it remarkable that at this juncture of the podcast there is only mention of Black Lives Matter in relation to right-wing calls to invoke the Insurrection Act to crush the rebellion. Libertarians might well signal opposition to the state using the military to quell dissent, only to prefer cops, III Percent militias, and Oath Keepers do it instead. The three podcast presenters here evince no real apprehension of what is happening on the streets; they seem disconnected from the powerful protests underway and the attendant reinterpretations of social reality that go with them. This powerful multi-racial, poor and working class social movement is a threat to both traditional capitalist political control (liberal and conservative) as well as far-right alternatives to that consensus. A pink-brown alliance would serve to short-circuit our most advanced revolutionary forces and assist the capitalist state as it faces what could be a genuine existential crisis.

Greenwald gives Trump’s anti-NAFTA and anti-WTO political stances both too much and too little weight. He ascribes far too much importance for these policy stances as somehow “pro-union” or “pro-worker” and not near enough to the core constituencies Trump seeks to mobilize through them: white workers (Steel workers, cops, prison guards, etc.) For example, with prison and cop unions, Trump is not trying to gut them; he counts on them for support. Trump’s pro-union bonafides always run through his anti-Black racism, which is as a central a precept within his worldview. When we are crying for defunding and abolition, he is doubling down on Back the Blue. Our problem is with the existence of those unions and their role in anti-Black racism and generalized repression. Those white workers are not “duped” into supporting Trump, he is fighting for their real interests as they understand them. We have to dismantle those interests, not find ways to accommodate them. It will do us no good to deny agency to right-wingers; they know who butters their bread.

Greenwald cites Missouri Senator Josh Hawley as someone ‘genuinely’ committed to challenging corporate power. This hagiography of Hawley is only possible by stripping his right-wing, libertarian, Christian worldview from the individual legislation that he does or doesn’t support and ignoring the pipeline to fascism within which it all flows. Greenwald is intent on distinguishing between authentic and ersatz populists, then between right-wing populism and (classical) fascism. Robinson chimes in on the distortion of Rand Paul:

“Wait. If Rand Paul is a part of this…[then] the whole premise that…right-wing populism is a kind of combination of left economics and social conservatism just falls apart completely, because Rand Paul is a radical free market libertarian.” In other words there is no “economic populism” to work with there. As usual, one needs to add that he’s a fucking racist.

Greenwald believes that this “right-wing populism” represents a “serious ideological rift” within the Republican Party and conservatism in general and that this division can be capitalized on. Robinson thinks it is politics as usual — both are wrong. There is a rift within the Republican Party between corporate conservatives and a growing fascist wing. That divide can be capitalized on by attacking both and developing our movement but no element should be opportunistically engaged with. At least not without dire consequences for a revolutionary movement of the left.

Krystal Ball’s contribution to the debate revolves around more distinctions without differences: between leaders and a base, racists and non-racists, left economics and right culture. Ball states she is in favor of a multi-racial, working class coalition and is a social democrat. I take her at her word, and therein lies the problem.

Ball argues that too many Democrats are influenced by neo-liberalism and “identity” politics and hold up “representation” alone to keep their coalition active. The policies and legislation they support do not offer substantive change. For corporate and imperialist Democrats it is most important to keep the multi-racial working class in line following the dictates of Wall street and Silicon Valley. You will get no argument from me here, either.

Likewise her description of Trump deliberately fanning “white racial anxiety” as a continuation of the Southern Strategy from the Nixon years, geared toward keeping large segments of the white working class in the GOP tent where it does the bidding of their corporate masters, is also spot on.

It is in her prescription for addressing that division where we find the same intractable problem as that of Greenwald. How do we get them together? They ask. Why the fuck is that even a question? I respond. I don’t want to find common ground. To Ball there is the approach of the traditional, socialist left which she describes as “shunning and condemning” vs. that exemplified by her program, which is “debating and engaging.” Then she conflates our opposition to working with the far-right with that of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment. Ball makes the argument that the flip-side to leftist dismissal of poor whites is Mitt Romney’s “47% of the people will never support Republicans” elitist gotcha audible. Ball is arguing that there is a virtuous, populist (white) middle caught in between a crafty and comfortable corporate elite on the one hand and an out of touch, elitist, Bernie-bro group of professors who harbor disdain for poor whites on the other. The elitist leftists dupe people into hating racists and not capitalists. This, combined with platitudinous appeals to “honest dialogue” and straw-man denunciations of claims that all Trump supporters are Nazis, dovetails quite nicely with what I describe as the motor of fascism: that eternal struggle against ungrateful, cosmopolitan elites above and unworthy, racialized, parasitic masses below. The fire they are playing with here is the MARS (Middle American Radicals); it will burn all of us we don’t put it out. It is presently white hot and smoldering, even flaring up in places. Greenwald and Ball are playing directly into it.

Conclusion

At the very end of the podcast there is a brief discussion between Greenwald and Ball about “race.” Greenwald seeks to draw an analogy between Black civil rights and LGBTQ struggles. The passage, both breathtaking in its liberal naiveté and cringe-worthy in its historical illiteracy is worth quoting in full:

“As you mentioned, this is an amazing moment. Some incredibly significant shifts [are underway]: rapid, radical shifts in how people think about policing, how people think about race…One of the things I would compare it to is the very radical and abrupt and positive progress that was made in the course of a couple decades on how people think about same sex couples and gay rights and [how] that happened not because people were called bigots and homophobes enough times or because their churches were invaded violently enough but because just through humanitarian interaction; of people seeing that gay men and gay women weren’t these predators outside playgrounds but were their neighbors and their teachers and their relatives and their children did they start to break down those barriers that had been erected for them about how to think of their fellow gay citizens and that made them much more accepting and I think that that kind of human interaction and human engagement is always a prerequisite for finding common ground.”

He actually said “radical and abrupt and positive progress…in the course of a couple decades”. This is the pink-washing pablum issued forth by HR departments and the Human Rights Campaign as applied to Black liberation. Here, Greenwald does a triple disservice. First, his notion of LGBTQ+ rights having been won through increments accumulated over time as a feature of a generalized “progress” is an affront to all those radical activists in ACT-UP, among many others, who died for those rights in very militant ways. Secondly, the notion that such incremental progress is analogous to what is underway with the current Black uprising is painfully off base. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Greenwald does not believe it possible that those same rights “incrementally” won could be summarily stripped away.  Like most liberals Greenwald believes such rights, once won as a matter of capitalist modernity, are not subject to a radical and abrupt reversal. They are.

Making common cause with fascists is precisely the kind of political suicide that makes such a catastrophic reversal of rights not only possible, but probable.

END

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Toppling the Stephen King Monument into ‘Castle Rock River’.

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Essay, Rant

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Ava DuVernay, Black Lives Matter, Game of Thrones, George Floyd, Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino Defense, Racism and Fiction, Selma, Stephen King, The Magical Negro, The Shining, The Stand, Third Reconstruction

 

Stephen King and Racism

 

Last January Stephen King was criticized for comments he made about voting for the Academy Awards, something he is apparently entitled to do as a member of that august body. “For me, the diversity issue — as it applies to individual actors and directors, anyway — did not come up…That said, I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong” he tweeted.

Well, Stephen King is anything if not consistent. From what I can gather his literary output reflects no concern whatsoever with ‘diversity’ other than as a license to express forms of racism so extreme they might shame a klansman.

Ava DuVernay, director of the 2015 film Selma (not nominated by the Academy for best director) described King’s comments above as “backward and ignorant.” I think that’s being charitable. Even by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s King’s novels have always trafficked in what can only be described as gratuitous bigotry. So why have his works always been so popular? How is it that so much of King’s work challenges even the Urban Dictionary in depravity and yet still rakes in millions of avid readers and millions of dollars? Why does he leaven so much of his writing with grotesque stereotypes?

The common defense takes the form of a non-denial denial, insisting that because what King writes is horror it should shock and sicken; nothing shocks and sickens like racism so that’s why there is so much of it in his novels. Implied here is that he uses such bigotries in a constructive manner; they serve a larger, more edifying purpose, or so the argument goes. But this is really the Tarantino defense: it’s just plot and character development, nothing more. The problem here is that so much bigotry in King’s novels so obviously serves no purpose. It is gratuitous; which is to say unneeded and unwarranted, therefore casual bigotries that do not forward plot or character development, or, at least go far beyond such development. There is just no way to excuse or explain away the naked racism peppered throughout King’s oeuvre (we will get to examples below).

 

So as to undermine the Tarantino defense, I’m going to quote a couple characters from a Tarantino film. Upholding King’s legacy sans his bigotry amounts to the position that John Travolta stakes out regarding eating bacon in Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. You know the scene. Samuel L. Jackson holds that “Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I don’t eat nothing that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces.” Travolta counters, “How about a dog? A dog eats its own feces.”  Jackson quips, “I don’t eat dog either.” To which Travolta asks whether Jackson considers dogs a filthy animal. Jackson says a dog’s “got personality. Personality goes a long way.” Travolta counters, “by that rationale if a pig had a better personality it would cease to be a filthy animal.” Jackson famously responds, “We would have to be talking about one charming motherfucking pig!”

King’s writing is as that pig wallowing in its own shit; don’t eat the bacon.

Regardless of how one answers these questions, King’s comments should come as no surprise, as his output betrays an unbearable whiteness of being, something that remains pervasive within elite and popular culture. And in this sense, no matter how charming it may be, a pig is still a filthy animal. (That there is a literary device. For what it’s worth, I consider pigs adorable).

Do you need some evidence as to rank racism in Stephen King novels? In the unfortunately titled “Stephen King Needs More Black Friends” (Scott Woods, Medium, January 15, 2020) the image of Black people in the ‘Stephen King Universe’ is made clear. And mind you, this recounting is from a fan:

King writes almost all of his Black characters, magical or otherwise, in problematic ways. When they are not magical they are horrendous stereotypes: dope fiends and brutes (The Stand), jive-talking thugs (End of Watch), and worse (the short story “Dedication”). More, King’s characters never happen to be Black; he intentionally makes it clear that they are Black from the outset, usually with jaw-droppingly offensive descriptions: Mother Abigail in The Stand is “coal-black” and further described as looking like an “old black Everglades alligator.” The Black junta of The Stand are also Black, “huge,” nude (save for a loincloth, so sexualized to boot) and actively murdering White people with intent. The chief villain in The Running Man is a game show producer named Dan Killian who is “minstrel show” Black. The Green Mile’s John Coffey is hit with a litany of racist descriptors, including “monkey,” “big mutt,” and “big boy.” Some of these are character embellishments, insults provided through the mouths of virulently racist characters — aka the Tarantino Defense. But some of them come from the universal narrator of a given story.

Getting a bit more granular, this is from my essay “King vs. Kubrick” (Mozzochi.wordpress.com, January 22, 2019) where I compare King’s The Shining to Kubrick’s The Shining:

What the Ghosts Represent:

Book: All the ghosts are evil; all desire to continue their evil deeds–marital infidelity, gangsterism, murder, as a manifestation of their “single group intelligence”. The source of this evil is not institutional, structural, historical, political or otherwise outside of the individual. It is located within us, in our denial of the possessive individualism at the heart of the bourgeois family.

Movie: The source of evil is the hotel itself, which cannot be separated from its history, in part erected on the bones of indigenous peoples. It is rabidly racist and demands absolute servility on the part of inferiors, most pointedly workers and their families.

Racist, Homophobic, Classist or Misogynist Scenes That Contribute To Plot Or Character Development.

Book: None

Movie: Grady calls Dick Hallorran a “nigger” in the all important restroom scene. Elsewhere Jack says, “just a little problem with the old sperm bank upstairs. Nothing I can’t handle, though.” That’s about it. Sparing, short and devastating. But Kubrick doesn’t wallow in it as King does–as a teenager expressing unfiltered repressed emotions.

Gratuitous Racist, Homophobic, Classist or Misogynist Scenes That Don’t Contribute To Plot Or Character Development.

Book: an endless parade of cringe worthy and vicarious bigotries apparently pleasurable for some people to read. Emblematic is where King has a young Dick Hallorran fire a “Nigger Chaser” firework (bottle rocket) at a wasps nest. This makes no sense even on its own terms.

Movie: None

From Ben Goldstein, “Stephen King’s The Stand is Bloated, Racist and (Somehow) Still a Masterpiece” (Medium, May 10, 2015). Again, this is from a fan:

King didn’t invent the Magical Negro literary trope, but he’s spent much of his career coasting on it. Consider the psychic hotel caretaker Dick Hallorann in The Shining, who comes back to rescue Danny Torrance when Jack loses his mind. Or the hulking and simple-minded John Coffey of The Green Mile, who heals the innocent by absorbing their pain, and dies as a savior figure.

In The Stand, we’re presented with Mother Abigail Freemantle, a religiously devout beacon of benevolence…” Within the entire Boulder Free Zone community — which eventually numbers in the thousands — Mother Abigail is the only person who is described as black. That’s right, kids: Stephen King’s utopic Free Zone society contains exactly one (1) black person. Other than that, the Free Zone is a diverse tapestry, featuring white people from Maine, white people from Texas, white people from New York, and white people from Ohio.

Of course there are other black people in The Stand. You’ve got the jive-talkin’ Rat Man, who’s so creepy that even the nymphomaniac Julie Lawry wont fuck him. There’s Richard Hoggins, the young black drug addict from Detroit mentioned in the “second epidemic” section. (“He had been addicted to the fine white powder he called ‘hehrawn’ for the last five years.”) Hoggins breaks into a drug dealer’s house after the Captain Trips virus kills everyone and OD’s on the stash he discovers there. “No great loss,” King writes directly afterwards. But wait, it gets worse. I regretfully present the beginning of the aforementioned “black junta” scene:

Huge black men wearing loincloths! “Amazingly even and white teeth in his coal-black face”! Oh man, Steve, what are you doing here? And let’s not forget the “brown, smooth skinned” band of spear-carrying natives that Flagg encounters at the very end of the book. Savages. They don’t speak jive, but that’s only because they don’t speak English at all.”

…Every notable black character in King’s novels — Hallorann, Coffey, Mother Abigail, Mike Hanlon in It, Susannah Dean in The Dark Tower: Song of Susannah, Nan Melda in Duma Key, etc. — is referred to as a “nigger” at some point by another character. Usually, this is meant to signify villainy or ignorance in the character using the word. But you’d think a writer with as expansive an imagination as King would find different ways to make that point.”

No, I wouldn’t. It’s the liberal version of the unfiltered bile Trump spews. And again, the above is from Stephen King fandom. I’m not a fan of Stephen King. But I am a fan of tearing down monuments that glorify inequality, racism and reaction.

King’s comments about diversity and the Academy Awards above are classic meritocratic nonsense–the real ‘virtue signaling’ we hear so much about–that practiced by business elites, cultural influencers and celebrities designed to remind us how talented they are and how in awe we should be of that talent and the money and power it commands. Much of this ‘race blind’ and ‘post-racial’ narrative nonsense gets packaged with brutal class war attacks against the poor and vulnerable.

King stands in this artistic and political tradition, one that is thankfully under assault by antiracists everywhere. See that Robert E. Lee statue being taken down? How about the confederate flag being banned at NASCAR? Remarkable. But such atrocity exhibitions extend beyond statues and flags, to art and entertainment and government policy that goes from The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind through The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (aka The Moynihan Report) onwards through King’s The Stand and The Shining and Game of Thrones, which I have described elsewhere as a “blood and soil zombie soap opera that utilizes medieval fantasy conventions.”

This tradition needs to be hog-tied, pulled down and tossed into a river, just like those confederate statues.

King is not exceptional in this regard; but he is an exceptionally rich and prolific scribbler whose work should be a focus of criticism during this amazing period of resistance, rebellion and (dare we say it) revolution. Might we be in the midst of a Third Reconstruction in America? If we are, I expect this sacred cow to be sacrificed forthwith. For if we are in a Third Reconstruction, then how could we ever accept as penance King’s frequent twitter attacks on the psychotic flaming Cheeto? Or anyone’s, for that matter? That’s a bar set so low that a hedge fund vampire like Mitt Romney can step over it and march in a protest for George Floyd without a public shaming such as that endured the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey. That just won’t do.

Isn’t it past time we chucked the Stephen King monument into the Castle Rock River?

END

 

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Reporter or Emoter?

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Essay, Rant

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Democracy Now!, Fourth Estate, George Floyd Protests, Racist Cops, Redfish, Reporter or Emoter?, Unicorn Riot

 

Reporter of Emoter?

 

As protests over the murder of George Floyd continue across the country there are fresh debates among radicals about the best methods for social protest. I am in favor of a concept known as “diversity of tactics”, a set of ideas that accepts a wide range of activity from non violent civil disobedience to militant, and sometimes violent, direct action. Different situations require different means of resistance, rebellion and hopefully, revolution. When it comes to getting the knee off of the neck of Black people, ‘by whatever means necessary’ means all of those tactics. Over the past few days I’ve been fortunate enough to have been present at very militant actions in the San Francisco bay area. Like you, I’m sure, I’ve also been watching other protests across the country. And, like you, I’ve noticed that news coverage of these protests, be they passive or aggressive, tends to be somewhat frustrating. No, that’s not quite right. News coverage is abominable, a disgrace to the fourth estate. That’s better.

Now we all know that the mainstream media–fake and real news included–promotes unquestioning sycophants and only occasionally breaks free from self-imposed blinders to actually report on anything of value. So we don’t expect much coverage of militant resistance to the murder of Black people to be very accurate or informative. But still, even Noam Chomsky will argue that there is a nominally free press in the United States, however much this fourth estate is also complicit in manufacturing consent. But I’ve got to tell you, I’m not sure how free that free press is anymore. When covering these uprisings virtually every mainstream (and not a few alternative) reporters somehow feel it a necessary and good thing to whinge. You know what that is–when someone’s mouth is moving and they are complaining in a persistent and peevish or irritating way such that they end up not really saying anything of value at all. To this whinging is inevitably added moralizing. These guardians of the intolerable status quo not only complain about the inconvenience of their beloved Whole Foods being emptied of merchandise, they describe such activity as inherently wrong, even evil. You know what I’m talking about. In this case such reporters aren’t reporting so much as emoting.

This raises a question. Isn’t a basic function of the fourth estate to report? Shouldn’t that reporting include, if not be limited to, Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? How is it that every dip-shit with a microphone suddenly feels empowered to tell us, in cringeworthy and excruciating detail, how they feel about everything? What their opinion is? Perhaps an answer lies in the fact that reporters have become celebrities and thereby entitled to inflict their singular pathologies on us. Oh, I know. I can just choose not to watch and listen. But that’s not true, is it? If I want actual reporting that informs I have no real choice but to watch and listen to these narcissists because between Unicorn Riot, Redfish, and Democracy Now! there isn’t enough reporting. Our alternative media can’t get everywhere all the time. And whinging even intrudes on these platforms.

One can debate the effectiveness of marching in the streets and fighting cops at barricades so as to hold those streets, but we should all agree that plaintive cries for state and corporate power to “do better” are absurd. We need something more, and different. And look here! When comparing and contrasting previous uprisings (1969, 1992, 2014-15) with todays rebellions, isn’t it rather remarkable that so much direct expropriation is now centered not in ghettos and barrios, but on Rodeo Drive and Beverly Hills (LA), Union Square and Emeryville (Bay Area)? To me there seems to be a clear break with the dominant narrative about ‘senseless rage’ and self defeating masochism that poor and working people inflict upon themselves when they ‘riot’ and ‘loot’. But you wouldn’t know it from most reporters–they are too busy crying about people blocking traffic and how ‘mom and pop’ businesses like Target and Chase Bank are being needlessly attacked.

I haven’t found a single television report that isn’t saturated with these disgusting displays of shock and awe larded with denunciations of property damage and resistance to cops in our streets. A recent example is instructive here. I just watched a reporter and camera person covering some people engaged in expropriation at a Whole Foods in Santa Monica, California. The reporter was whinging ad nauseam and speculating wildly about how the “looters” must be “outsiders”. Then, the camera person purposefully focused on the license plate of a car being used to load liberated merchandise. The crowd noticed this and chased these “emoters” off. When one of these august members of the fourth estate gets killed, we will remember that they took sides and joined the battle–on the wrong side. They won’t be whinging then, because they weren’t actually reporting–they were being cops with press credentials.

END

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If You Insist on Driving in San Francisco

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Essay, Rant

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Big Tech, Das Kapital, Fisherman's Warf, Golden Gate Bridge, Isaac Asimov, San Francisco Homeless, Snob Hill, SoMa, Suicide deterrent system, Waymo

OccupyICE_Gehrke_ICE2June_28_2018_web

If you are a tourist, just don’t drive in the city. Don’t even consider it. This is the most unforgiving and forbidding, bat shit crazy city to drive in throughout the entire United States. Oakland is a close second, with the crappiest roads in the country, but nothing beats San Francisco’s hybrid transportation hell with its one-way, dilapidated streets, steep, winding hills, constant construction, horrific traffic and the most aggressive pedestrians and bicycle riders on the planet.  If you must travel to San Francisco–and we prefer you did not–don’t drive a car. If, however you insist on doing so, here are some vehicular pastimes that beat the crushing stupidity and corporate mendacity of those tourist traps like Fisherman’s Wharf and The Embarcadero. You might as well learn something from your intransigence.

If you are not above indulging in a bit of schadenfreude proceed to Washington and Jefferson streets where they cross Snob Hill east-west and west-east. Both streets are one way and are cable car equipped. The cable cars, long since abandoned as a means of proletarian conveyance, now cater exclusively to that most despicable of social creatures, the tourist.  Get your video ready. Note that in place of four-stop-sign intersections the cable car is granted the right-of-way, making for two-stop-sign intersections, something unexpected and counterintuitive to anyone unfamiliar with San Franscisco’s insane transportation environment. You will watch as driver after driver stops when they ought not to stop, and do not stop when they should. This, despite the prominently posted signs north and south that read Cross Traffic Does Not Stop. It makes no difference, as no-one reads a sign posted below a stop sign, unless it is for a yard sale; but it does make for constant near catastrophes, and the occasional full-on crash. Hours of enjoyment here, much superior to those creepy mobs lined up outside the Full House house, which is not the house at all, merely the exterior that formed a shot for the show. Besides, sitcoms with laugh tracks are the television equivalent of easy listening muzak.

Americans are congenitally allergic to Round-a-bouts. San Francisco is no exception. The Round-a-bout at 8th and Townsend is a shit show worthy of a Three Stooges skit. The physical comedy of vehicles, bicycles, scoots and scooters, skateboarders and pedestrians all aggressively competing for the right-of-way through a circle whose logic escapes everyone is perfectly emblematic of the future Big Tech has in store for us. And this is ground zero of Big Tech in San Francisco, with the offices of Adobe and Air BnB yards from the chaos. They have figured it all out, you see, because an algorithm can never be wrong (only the person who programmed it) therefore everything that derives from the algorithm is right and good. Now comes the pesky Round-a-bout and the many nuanced social cues and codes and all that other stuff that escapes the ironclad logic of the Bit. The logic of the Round-a-bout is straight forward and simple, yet flouted by practically everyone: if you are in, you have the right of way. If you are out, watch out. Exceptions, as always, are pedestrians and bicycles. The point system is always in effect, which is my way of saying Big Tech is Big Stupid.

Set aside time in your itinerary for the onramp to the Bay Bridge at 1st and Harrison and the neighborhood known as SoMa (South of Market). Deeply ensconced within this cradle of plutocracy is the leaning Millennium Tower (fall over already) and the worlds most posh freeway entrance. While you are there let them know we are coming with pitchforks and molotov cocktails, and a particular emphasis on those $5,000-a-month doggy day cares. During rush hour (5am-10pm everyday) watch for Lamborghinis with a right-of-way my Toyota just doesn’t have. They will cheat through that bike lane while pretending to ignore horns blaring around them then park right in the middle of the fucking intersection, stopping traffic in all directions. Taking their time, they will pretend to have misinterpreted the giant sign that reads “Do Not Block Intersection” and the civil code cited below it. Milkshakes are in order.

While not particular to San Francisco, the mantra Look, Signal, (then) Pull out should always apply. Don’t do the opposite–pull out, signal and look as an after thought. Doing the opposite means you will ram your vehicle into mine and I will be forced to exit my vehicle and beat you about the head with a copy of Das Kapital. This elementary principle, so simple and unambiguous, so very difficult to misinterpret, is unobserved everywhere. There is a phrase for doing otherwise: aggressive stupidity.

Don’t stick your phone, much less your iPad, into the middle of your front windshield. Are you daft? You will not be able to take out that Salesforce executive without backing up to finish the job. Furthermore, while you may be able to track your progress through that gps navigation program, you won’t get wherever it is you are going because you will have hit something you ought not to have hit along the way. Those large spaces at the front and sides of your vehicle called windows are transparent for a reason–so you can see through them.

Autonomous vehicles in training are legitimate targets for milkshaking and the old Issac Asimov I Robot conundrum: roll a baby carriage from one direction and an elderly person from another directly in front of the Waymo vehicle and force it to make a decision, thereby exposing bias at work in the algorithm. If it chooses to run over the baby, autonomous vehicles are baby killers; if it chooses the elderly person, it is guilty of geronticide. If it stops altogether, get your milkshake ready.

Two noteworthy tidbits of trivia to keep in mind about the Golden Gate Bridge. First, is that it was Iron workers who died building it and should be honored for it. Architects and engineers can fuck off. Second, the suicide deterrent system currently being installed on both sides of the bridge to the tune of $240 million is emblematic of the priorities of San Francisco’s city leaders. It is far more important to obstruct people trying to die with dignity, and perhaps a bit of notoriety, than do anything about the homeless crisis–which is not a crisis of too few homes available for too many people, but that of the 100,000 empty homes that the wealthy indolent and real estate industry purposefully leave uninhabited. That’s right 100,000 empty fucking homes. Occupation and expropriation are the only solution here.

The Tenderloin District is the last bastion of lumpen proletariat resistance in the entire city. Drive careful through there because God’s children are selling the dope all those Big Tech twits need to make it through their twenty-hour work days while they pray to the crack in the wallet of a Tech billionaire. That’s right, San Francisco’s African-American population has contracted by almost half in the past twenty years, which makes driving through The Tenderloin, Bayview and Hunter’s Point neighborhoods the rough equivalent of visiting a concentration camp or Indian reservation. You are witnessing a program of urban genocide carried out under the banner of Big Tech. So remember, with every  floor of a shiny new office building, a tent city is erected in its shadow.

Welcome to the City on the Hill.

END

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Occam’s Razor Applied

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Rant

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history repeats itself, ICE, Norman Podhoretz, red diaper baby, Willem Van Spronsen

willem-van-spronsen-rest-in-power

 

Here’s something you have probably heard before: As we grow older we become more conservative in our politics because maturation implies moderation. Within every young anarchist or communist is a reactionary just waiting to emerge.

This assertion is often presented as a value-neutral descriptive that merely reflects a principle of human sociality beyond all politics. Quite the opposite is true, as the assertion contains within it a hidden prescriptive: implied is that one should become more reasonable with advanced age and ‘grow up’ by tossing aside youthful excesses, like political radicalism, in favor of capital accumulation, the responsibilities of ‘raising’ a family, and the moderation in all things that this apparently entails. This is often framed as natural, something that just happens because that’s just the way the world is. This is almost always the way this concept is wielded. There are endless variations of this meaningless mantra and they often begin with a red diaper baby and end up with someone like Norman Podhoretz. The trajectory is everything–one doesn’t ever go from right to left, always from left to right.

Together with that other old canard, history repeats itself, these two maxims serve to paralyze thought and action.

Using Occam’s Razor we can make a very different assertion: Older people appear more conservative not because they mature in their beliefs, nor because reactionary values are ‘natural’ or inevitable, but because rich assholes live longer–much longer–than the rest of us.

Furthermore most rich people have more conservative values than the rest of us because they began with wealth and power they want to conserve; then, when they get older, they are proportionately more of any given population than when they began their incessant exploitation of us. As inequality kills us quicker, their social footprint–financial, electoral, golf–becomes that much greater. As we die in greater numbers more quickly than they do, they accumulate more wealth and power as they grow older. They don’t become wise with old age; they defend that which they have stolen with greater zeal. It just appears to be the case that the older people get the more right wing they become, when in fact there are just more right wing assholes because they live longer.

What a shame.

It would seem a simple corrective to begin reversing this trend; if need be by taking some of them with us.

Willem Van Spronsen, the 69-year young anarchist who went down fighting ICE with firearms and molotov cocktails is living proof of my argument. Honor his contribution accordingly.

 

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The Tyranny of Adverbs and Twits.

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Essay, Rant

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Antifascism, Bong Joon-Ho, Donald Trump, fascism, Google engineer, Instagag, Jeffrey Epstein, Noam Chomsky, Obama, Snapcrap, Snowpiercer, Zizek

 

Literally used now more than ever.

4130c931b9b46b611e2f876a70b1b1c8ac06ba6b.png

 

Way back in 2012, Joe Biden was criticized for using the adverb ‘literally’ nine times in one speech. How quaint. I recently listened to a level 5 Google engineer use it nine times in the space of two minutes.

This particular soulless quant had another annoying habit: He would begin every other sentence by restating my name, “Jonathan, I understand what you are saying…” If such feigned familiarity is coupled with a light touch on the arm, I feel free to reach for a knife. Most people who do this are trying to overcome skepticism and inculcate credulity. As a mnemonic device, it is annoying at best; more often it is cloying and insincere and a sure sign to distrust, even despise someone.

Honestly? Like. Literally. Actually.

While I don’t miss Obama much, I do miss his particular elocution, that patient, preternaturally calm, baritone voice and the halting ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ that stitched together his verbal output. By today’s standards, those pauses are pleasant by comparison. They don’t have any pretense; they are space fillers that allow him to think. While I have many disagreements with what he said, I could always understand it. He was thoughtful and nuanced to a fault; dithering on the golf course while fascism made a comeback. But in this he was not alone, nor particularly exceptional. Plenty of socialists, for instance practically the entire seven-year history of Jacobin Magazine and Blog, join him in this regard. But back to those adverbs.

With Trump, it is as though every wealthy, entitled, and neurotic teenager has suddenly been given carte blanche to release their own unfiltered insanity. While I think the parallels here can be overstated (Trump as a teenager) there is still something to it. Will Trump bomb Iran or just berate the housekeeper? Will he begin in earnest the rounding up of undocumented families or just do a stint in rehab?

His verbal diarrhea is pockmarked with superlatives such as ‘winner’, ‘terrific’, ‘tremendous’ and of course, ‘great’ and ‘greatest’. It’s as though his mother, or au pair, never stopped telling him how special he was, even when he was caught eviscerating the neighbor’s cat. Good boy.

If Trump were a pornography category it would be ass-to-mouth, mouth-to-ass, with all those A-list ruling class enablers from both political parties, across every imaginable capitalist enterprise, sucking and fucking to form one giant, unending, gangrenous human centipede, just like the horror film. Jeffrey Epstein is in there somewhere.

Today it seems that adverbs, and certain nasty ones, in particular, have mounted an attack upon the nonviolence of ums and ahs, completing a scorched earth assault on the quiet dignity of anodyne place fillers so as to replace them with crutch words that, whether used correctly or incorrectly, amount to obfuscation and disorganization–i.e., bullshit. These lexical tics impulsively resorted to by the verbally disabled add emphasis where none is needed, assert drama where there is only triviality, state the obvious rather than the nuanced, and (my favorite) suggest strongly that everything said beforehand was a lie (honestly?…). The standard Trump teenage verbal diarrhea disaster asserts a recklessness with meaning that can only be regarded as aggressive stupidity. This is the hallmark of the powerful, the invulnerable, the masters of the universe who say and do as they please without repercussions, and is the hidden in plain view secret behind Trump’s attraction to some people. We have heard it again and again: Trump ‘says out loud what we can only think to ourselves’. My own take on this is that Trump says out loud, in ways some people would never even hazard, the despicable ideas that belong in the basement. They generally stay there because someone will kick your fucking ass if you say them out loud elsewhere, which is as it should be, but, alas is no longer.

The terrifying ephemeral nature of Twitter is the dominant mode of communication for this viral and noxious hate speech. But together with the sheer hatred and assault of such verbiage, there is something else underway: where everything is equally dramatic, nothing is important. Aside from links to longer written work, this platform, like instagag and snapcrap is useless for leftists. The ‘twit’ in Twitter is there for a reason. Those who are prolific in these mediums are the same shallow dipshits who prosecute juvenile intra-leftist fights. Tankies vs. insurrectionists, statists vs. anarchists, etc.

No complex thoughts or arguments are possible here, only half-ass hashtags, silly memes, and depraved gossip. Chomsky once remarked that in order to engage an audience about ideas which break with orthodoxy one must spend some time setting the groundwork to do so–you need at least 15-30 minutes to tear down presumptions that prohibit ‘out of the box’ thinking. If you are not afforded the opportunity to do this you sound insane. This fact alone means the instant ambush culture of social media and the talking heads that wallow in cultish Marxisant Zizekian nonsense ensures no such thinking is possible within such a format. Zizek and his ilk thrive there because they are full of shit. That’s why Chomsky didn’t go on cable news programs or engage in celebrity debates. Chomsky has all the more integrity because of that. More leftists, certain antifascists, in particular, need a reminder on this point. Otherwise, you are just engaging in a debate on their terms. The only corrective to this sorry state of affairs is aptly provided in the wonderful allegory of revolution that is the film Snowpiercer, by Bong Joon-Ho. If you get to the front of the train, don’t listen to the conductor, don’t even allow him to talk–cut his tongue out and remember: Kronole is a bomb, you idiot!

This is why it is largely pointless to troll celebrities and engage in the shadow boxing preferred liberals and conservatives. The questions determine the parameters of possible answers. Liberals and conservatives, establishment types, and pols consumed with issues and policies are congenitally allergic to our thinking and action. Are they concentration camps? Is Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite? Was Brett Kavanaugh qualified for the Supreme Court? Is there a U.S. presidential candidate other than Bernie Sanders worth two shits? Did Jeffrey Epstein receive preferential treatment for his predations? If you debate these questions, you have lost before you begin because there is no debate. To debate what is obvious is the death of debate. It is to die a dithering death, full of thoughtfulness and nuance, that amounts to nothing. It won’t stop fascism or overcome capitalism. Enough already. Try a long-form essay, FFS, and mind your adverbs

END

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Here Fascism, There Fascism, Everywhere Fascism

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Book Review, Rant

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To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism. By Rob Riemen. W.W. Norton and Company. 2018

Just because a verbose twit decries ‘fascism’ doesn’t mean said scribbler is onto something. If, while pointing at a chair, someone screams ‘fascism!’ we would look askance and wonder about their mental state.

So it is with this pulp fiction.

The problem appears immediately, in the opening sentences. Having ‘courageously’ announced the return of fascism way back in 2010, Riemen, all too comfortable writing about himself, assumes the role of reluctant soothsayer, only to be dismissed by his fellow patrician academics.

He told you, but you refused to listen. ‘You’ are that most reasonable and cautious of thinkers, steeped in the eternal values of liberal democracy, perhaps a fellow at The Nexus Institute or the Templeton Foundation, which seems to mine similar philosophical terrain. A liberal, a conservative, a neo-this or neo-that, perhaps even a ‘progressive’.

Of course what Reimen considers to be fascism is so elastic and untethered from reality as to be an hallucination. If a brute of any political persuasion were to vomit in his precious ivory tower, staining the parchment rolls of wisdom poured over by so many serious thinkers, the sulphur pits could not be far behind. But he was ignored not because his colleagues failed to grasp the reemergence of fascism in the 21st century–an indisputable fact about which there is now little argument–but because they didn’t give a shit. Riemen’s account of fascism is so preposterous as to lend credence to their dismissal, which says a lot, I suppose.

This bit of nauseating self congratulation is quickly followed by laughable cautionary tales about why ‘civilizations’ self destruct. In short: Elites fall prey to their own hubris, their aggressive stupidity opening the door to the passions and naïveté of the masses, which is the real problem here, and far worse than ruling class shortsightedness.

Ruling elites get too greedy and self absorbed–go all Caligula–mindlessly following the pagan shock and awe of an amoral capitalism, and thereby undermine the natural order of things, which depends upon the endless interpretations of philosophers such as Reimen. Not change that order of things, mind you, but explain it. The problem is in the style of elite rule, rather than the rule itself. Here fascism is just another variant of anything that challenges the status quo, which is eternal.

Artists and philosophers are seen as repositories of the values that humanize capitalism, and are counterposed to technocrats and economists.

But capitalism cannot be humanized, only overthrown.

Besides, the fight against fascism proceeds not through the words and ideas of so many scholars and celebrities, but through the class struggle, the true motive force of history.

Elite rule, in today’s world, as that of old, involves brutal and unrelenting exploitation and domination. This is the hidden source of the reappearance of fascism as an exit strategy from the contradictions of capitalism. To ignore this means misunderstanding fascism and thereby being helpless to thwart it.

This is why the philosopher above, and many of his colleagues alike, will end up aiding it. Most of these sophisticates will find their way back to supporting this 21st century fascism (still in early development) precisely because they cannot see their own ideas and the institutions that sustain them as enablers of that same actually existing fascism–to use a turn of phrase. They are faux antifascists, their ideas, floating in a rarified atmosphere of abstract metaphysical absurdity, should be ridiculed, their institutions allowed to rot from within so we can immolate their edifices and warm ourselves by the embers. If your idea of a popular front is so anemic as to include such monstrous stupidities in its theoretical formulation, you have already surrendered.

What’s at stake here is, again, the definition of fascism, so important to the task of defeating it.

I haven’t included any direct quotes from To Fight Against…I don’t want to imply that there is something there with which one should engage. There isn’t.

END

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Trump and the Ruling Class

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Essay, Fiction, Rant

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Alan Gisburg, Boots Riley, capitalism, Das Kapital, David Rockefeller, deus ex machina, Donald Trump, fascism, Hip Hop, JP Getty, Karl Marx, Miles Davis, Sorry to Bother You, the Coup, Tupac Shakur

Marx and Trump

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States was an epic shitting-of-the-bed with no parallel in American election history. The first, most important point to be made about this is that our corporate and political elites made that bed; we need to make sure they must now lie in it. When they blather about Russians stealing the election or the deplorable nature of the white working class, force-feed them the truth. It was their hubris that fertilized a garden overrun with weeds that produced the superbug that is Trump.

According to virtually all prognosticators, once the Sanders ‘political revolution’ was dispatched the Unfiltered Orange Sociopath would surely lose, and the ship of state, with another captain Clinton at the helm, would continue on course. Only two newspapers with circulations above 100,000 endorsed Trump for President, while all other major media formats, excluding Fox News, and only after the primaries, either dismissed his candidacy with a shrug or actively campaigned against him. He was not from the establishment. He was not the first choice of the ‘smart money’. He wasn’t their 20th choice. He was not one of them. Trump arose from a social movement he did not create within conditions, not of his making. He is more an expression of those developments–riding the wave, so to speak–rather than the wave itself. What produced that wave is most certainly a generalized crisis within capitalism and its ruling ideology, neoliberalism. But the wave is now large enough that it drives that crisis as much as it is a product of it. It’s important to call that wave what it is: white nationalism or the American form of fascism.

If what happened on November 8, 2016, is best understood as a sharp departure from an otherwise healthy and democratic political culture, then the solution might plausibly be a restoration of democratic norms. But what took place was not a departure from the norm, but a logical outcome of that norm. What they call ‘progress’ will always invite the eternal return of fascism. What transpired was not a coup, a ‘stolen’ election, or an excess of American democracy that, if you listen closely, certain bloodless technocrats now argue requires an enlightened despotism as a corrective. This is, of course, how everyone from conservatives to progressives views things: Everything was more or less fine until–WHAM!–the impossible came to pass. The solution is to boot the bigot out of office, fix the damage and move on. But the problem is much more than that and much worse. Even Bernie Sanders can’t fix it now.

On this question of fascism and Trump, much of the socialist left is mistaken in other ways. For instance, a rendering of Trump’s triumph as the ‘rotten fruit of the ruling class’ correctly locates the general responsibility for the world of shit that we live in with the rich and powerful, but it cannot explain two things about that world: first, Trump’s contradictory relationship to that ruling class and, second, his ability to command support from millions of (white) people manifestly not from that ruling class.

To understand how what happened came about and what, more than two harrowing years later, can be done in response, requires an understanding of Trump’s appeal, especially that ‘authenticity’ so often associated with his “saying out loud what some people only dare to think”. Part of what that something amounts to is the genuinely contradictory relationship he has with established centers of economic and political power–what we anarchists and communists call the ruling class. He is from their family but in their eyes, he has always been and will always be something of an embarrassment. They will never fully accept him, something that is, oddly enough, part of his strength. Trump was always invited to the party, but the hosts secretly hoped he wouldn’t show up. If he did appear, everyone would cringe, but they would not kick him out. Why is that? What is it about Trump that makes him a social outcast, yet a fixture at the same time? And why do certain people turn to a billionaire in order to punish a ruling class?

Sometimes wisdom can be found in unlikely places. The nooks and crannies of oppositional subcultures sometimes become the interstices that make history. It took Marx’s body of work decades to marinate before becoming a set of ideas followed by millions across the planet; but those ideas started on the fringe, within spaces in between what is and what could be. If we want to understand Trump and fascism here’s a source from the recent past that sheds important light on a particular dynamic of Trump’s ascendency and its relationship to fascism. Set aside that academic article, that peer-reviewed journal, the latest tweet from that celebrity intellectual. For the moment dispense with those shopworn terms: ‘populism’, ‘authoritarianism’, ‘monopoly capital’, and ‘privilege’.

Listen to some rap and read the lyrics.

The Oakland-based Hip Hop band The Coup released an album in 1994 called Genocide and Juice. It is my favorite work of art in that musical genre and is to hip hop what Alan Ginsberg’s Howl is to poetry, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue is to Jazz, or Marx’s Das Kapital is to socialist theory. It is remarkable in many ways and anticipates band member Boots Riley’s film, Sorry to Bother You, released to critical acclaim last year. I will focus on two songs, “Fat Cats, Bigga Fish” and “Free Stylin at the Fortune 500 Club”. If you can, listen to these two songs and follow along with the lyrics. And remember, all of this was created prior to 1994. Apologies in advance for any lyrics that are incorrect.

“Fat Cats, Bigga Fish”

Well, now haha, what have we here?

Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce
Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce

It’s almost ten o clock, see I got a ball of lint for property
So I slide my beenie hat on sloppily
And promenade out to take up a collection
I got game like I read the directions
I’m wishing that I had an automobile
As I feel the cold wind rush past
But let me state that I am a hustler for real
So you know I got the stolen bus pass

Just as the bus pulls up and I step to the rear
This ole lady looks like she drank a forty of fear
I see my old-school partner, said his brother got popped                                       pay my respects, “Can you ring the bell?” We came to my stop
The street light reflects off the piss on the ground
Which reflects off the hamburger sign as it turns round
Which reflects off the chrome of the BMW
Which reflects off the fact that I’m broke
Now, what the fuck is new?
I need loot, I spot the motherfucka in the tweed suit
And I’m on his ass quicker than a kick from a grease boot
Eased up slow and discreet
Could tell he was suspicious by the way he slid his feet
Didn’t wanna fuck up, the come on,
So I smiled with my eyes, said: “Hey, how’s it hanging guy?”
Bumped into his shoulder, but he passed with no reaction
Damn this motherfucka had hella of Andrew Jacksons!
I’m a thief or pickpocket, give a fuck what you call it
Used to call ’em fat cats, now I just call them wallets                                        Getting federal, ain’t just a klepto
Master card or visa? I gladly accept those Sneaky motherfucka with a scam, know how to pull it
Got a mirror in my pocket but that won’t stop no bullets
Story just begun but you already know
Ain’t no need to get down, shit, I’m already low

Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce
Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce

My footsteps echo in the darkness
My teeth clenched tight like a fist in the cold sharp mist
I look down and I hear my stomach growling
Step to Burger King to attack it like a Shaolin
I never pay for shit that I can get by doing dirt
Linger up to the girl cashier and start to flirt
All up in her face and her breath was like murder
Damn the shit I do for a free hamburger

“Well, you got my number, you gonna call me tonight?”
“It depends…is them burgers attached to a price?”                                                “Sorry, sorry, I’m just kidding, I’m a call you, write you love letters…”
“It’s all good…”                                                                                                           “Thanks for the burgers…um, hook me up with a Dr. Pepper?”
“That’s cool you want some ice?”
“Yeah, and some fries will be hella nice!”
“Damn, my manager’s coming, play it off, okay? Have a nice day!”
“I’m up outta here anyway”

I use peoples before they use me
‘Cuz you could get got by an Uzi over an OZ.
That’s what an OG told me
Gots to find someplace warm and cozy to eat the vittles that I just got
Came to an underground parking lot
This place is good as any, fuck, it’s all good
Walked in, found a car, hopped up on the hood

Ate my burger, threw back my cola
Somebody said, “Hey!” It was a rent-a-pig, I thought it was a roller
“Want me to call the cops?” I don’t want them to see me
Looked down and saw that I was sitting on a Lamborghini
It was Rolls, Ferraris and Jags by the dozen
A building door opened…Damn, it was my cousin!
Getting off a work, dressed up, no lie                                                     Tux, cumberbund, and a black bow tie
I was like hey, “Who is it?” “Me”
“Oh, what’s up man, I just quit this company
They hella racist and the pay was too low,”
I said, “Right, what’s was up in there though?”
“A party with rich motherfuckas, I don’t know the situation
I know they got cabbage, owning corporations
IBM, Chrysler, and shit is what they said”

Just then a light bulb went off in my head
They be thinking all black folks is resembling
“Gimme your tux and I’ll do some pocket swindling”
Fit to change in the bathroom and I freeze off my nuts
Let’s take a short break while I get into this tux
Alright, I’m ready

Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce
Come with it
Get down, get down, get down 2ce

Fresh dressed like a million bucks
I be the fliest muthafucka in an afro and a tux
My arm is at a right angle, up, silver tray in my hand
“May I interest you in some caviar, ma’am?”
My eyes shoot ’round the room there and here
Noticing the diamonds in the chandelier
Background Barry Manilow, Copacabana
And a strong-ass scent of stogies from Havana

Wasn’t no place where a brother might’ve been
Snobby ole ladies drinking champagne with rich white men
All right, then let’s begin this
Nights like this is good for business
Five minutes in the mix, noticed several different cliques
Talking, giggling and shit
With one motherfucka in betwixt
And everybody else jacking it, throttling

Found out later he owns Coca Cola bottling
Talking to a black man whose confused
Looking hella bougie, ass all tight and seditty
Recognized him as the mayor of my city
Who treats young black man like frank nitty
Mr. Coke said to Mr. Mayor, “You know we got a process like
Ice-T’s hair, we put up the funds for your election campaign
And oh, um, waiter can you bring the champagne?”

“Our real estate firm says opportunity is arising
To make some condos out of low-income housing
Immediately, we need some media heat
To say the gangs run the street and then we bring in the police
harass and beat everybody till they look inebriated
When we buy the land, motherfuckas will appreciate it
Don’t worry about the Urban League or Jesse Jackson
My man that owns Marlboro, donated a fat sum”

That’s when I step back some to contemplate what few know
Sat down, wrestled with my thoughts like a Sumo
Ain’t no one player that could beat this lunacy
Ain’t no hustler on the street could do a whole community
This is how deep shit can get
It reads macaroni on my birth certificate
Puddin-Tang is my middle name but I can’t hang
I’m getting hustled only knowing half the game
Shit how the fuck do I get out of this place?

——

Our protagonist is broke, hungry, and without transportation, while also a poet, a pickpocket, a thief, and a flirt. He’s also not a worker, at least not in the formal economy but his epiphany is dependent on posing as a worker. In other words, understanding the deus ex machina of capitalism requires the vantage point of a worker. And yet when he poses as a worker he doesn’t so much as to gain access to a point of production, as to a locus of social reproduction, the leisure activities of the ruling class, where the ‘art of the deal’ really takes place out of the prying eyes of the public.

To rich white people, all Black people look the same (“resembling”) which gives our protagonist the opportunity to infiltrate their posh gathering so as to pick some pockets. But what he overhears is shocking, and I don’t think this guy is shocked by much. The hustler, knowing but “half the game” is being hustled. The analogy here, between the hustle of the street and the hustle of capitalist exploitation and domination, posits a world where there is no in-between–you are either a pimp, a John or a ho. There is no way to act ethically within a capitalist system short of overthrowing that system; no way to be right with the world until those categories are utterly obliterated.

That’s as profound and accurate a portrayal of the exploitation and domination of capitalism as I have ever read. Here, in searing terms is the carceral state and gentrification, racism and urban pacification, the two-party system and elite command and control together with a breathtaking cynicism. It also upholds the humanity of a petty thief without romanticizing it and demonstrates how it is possible, and desirable, for that person to become a radical. There is no direct or easy path from “using people before they use me” to “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. But the possibility is there, it just needs a kickstart and guidance.

The revelation that corporate and political power is a hustle, but on a scale so vast as to be hidden in plain sight, forces us to “wrestle” with our thoughts. It challenges seemingly sacred convictions about the meritocratic principle, that competition leads to opportunity and the common good. But the reality is that a fair playing field is nowhere, to climb the ladder is to place one’s foot on a rung that is someone’s head. The song’s emphasis on an epiphany experienced by a member of the so-called ‘lumpenproletariat’, or Black underclass, challenges those sneering socialists who consider this consciousness-raising on the part of ‘criminal classes’ virtually impossible. I don’t. I think it’s essential to our collective struggle. In a world increasingly characterized by the deterritorialized nature of the gig economy, we need to theorize a terrain of rupture with capitalism at points other than those, strictly speaking, of production.

“Free Stylin at the Fortune 500 Club”

The first line of the next song is our protagonist leaving the party:
“Fuck no, I ain’t got no Grey Poupon!”
Our hero is replaced by the patter of a socialite in conversation with David Rockefeller.
[Socialite] Well anyway, I said, “That’s no burglar! That’s my butler!”
Mr. Rockefeller, let me in on the gossip
I heard you and Mr. Getty are getting into rap music or something?
[Rockefeller] Yes, we have this thing we do with our voices
We sing like authentic rappers.
[Socialite] Oh! David, you must do it for us!

[Rockefeller] Well if they could make this music more funky…
Let me see if I can get my voice like those rappers. Ahem. Ahem.
Here we go.

“Well, if you’re blind as Helen Keller
You could see I’m David Rockefeller
So much cash up in my bathroom it’s a Ready-Teller
I’m outrageous, I work in stages, like syphilis
But no need for prophylactics
I’ma up you on some mean old mac shit
Ain’t buff, but my green gots amino acid
Keep my hoes in check, no rebellions
If your ass occur, shit
It wouldn’t be the first time I done made a massacre
Nigga please, how you figure these
Motherfuckers like me got stocks bonds and securities
No impurities, straight Anglo-Saxon
When my family got they sex on
Don’t let me get my flex on, do some gangster shit
Make the army go to war for Exxon
Long as the money flow, I be making dough
Welcome to my little pimp school
How you gonna beat me at this game? I make the rules
Flash a little cash, make you think you got class
But you really selling ass and ho keep off my grass
Less you cutting it, see I’m running shit
Trick all y’all motherfuckas is simps
I’m just a pimp”
Chorus
[Socialite] That is so cute! John Paul, why don’t you entertain us with something as well?
[Getty] Well, what should I do?
[Socialite] Why don’t you rap for us?
[Getty] No, I…
[Rockefeller] Come on, old boy, I did mine!
[Socialite] It’s so, tribal!
[Getty] Very well, then.
[Socialite] Oh goody!
[Getty] But, hold my martini, I have to do those hand gestures.
We will begin at the commencement of the next measure.
Now get ready, I’m J.P. Getty
I am tearing shit up like confetti
My money last longer than Eveready
Ain’t nothing petty about cash I never lose
This is just like the stroll
But the hoes don’t choose, I choose you
No voodoo can hoo-doo you
From getting treated like a piece of ol’ booboo who
Do you think want those niggas that don’t turn tricks?
The loco ho in ’94 is getting 86ed
And all about those rebellions, and riots and mishaps
I got the po po’s for their daily pimp slap
The motherfucker gangsta, rolling Fleetwood Caddy
I’m that mack ass already pimped his daddy
Lay you out like linoleum floors
I’m getting rich off petroleum wars
Controlling you whores, making you eat Top Ramen
While I eat shrimp, y’all motherfuckas is simps
I’m just a pimp
Chorus
[Socialite] Oh no, here he comes! Oh, don’t look at him!
[Trump] Are you fellows rapping? I can do that Reggie, uh, ah reggae type of thing…You know, one, two, three…
[Socialite] Well actually, we were just leaving…
[Trump] I am Trump, Trump check out the cash in my trunk
Trump, Trump check out the cash in my trunk
I am Donald Trump me think you mighta heard about me
How me last wife Ivana come and catch me money
She want all, she want this, she want that, of fun
X amount of this like just like the gap hear me
Hol’ up your hand if you love the money
Hol’ up your hand if you love punanny
Gun pon mi side mi afi kill somebody
Because the money inna mi trunk dem wan fi come tek see.

Trump’s inside/outside status is captured perfectly by Riley through his representation as a reggae-rapper, something I gather was anathema to hip hop during the 1990s. The first two rappers in the song were meant to represent the then-emerging feud between east coast and west coast rap traditions,  memorialized through the mortal conflict between Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Rockefeller is the east coast, J.P. Getty west coast. Trump is the outlier. There was no reggae-rap. That just wasn’t done. Perhaps this is still so today, I’m not an expert on hip-hop.

In any case, the rendering of corporate bosses and their political lackeys as pimps playing a cynical and profitable game is brilliant. ‘Punnany’, by the way, is slang for vagina, a further foreshadowing of Trump’s misogynistic ‘pussy-grabbing’.

Trump is clearly an embarrassment but he’s still at the party. Begrudging acceptance is still acceptance. We are never at the party unless we have a tray in our hands. At that time Trump was a millionaire, but not a member of the ruling class in good standing, just as the interloper in the song above is at the party, but not entirely welcome. So it is today. This dynamic, captured so well in the song above, also highlights a facet of fascism that is essential to understanding it and therefore fighting it effectively. Fascism, in its classical, Cold War and 21st-century versions always involves a fight above and below and from a relatively independent, or semi-autonomous, racist, and nationalist mobilization of large segments of a population. A fascist movement in formation cannot be understood exclusively through the prism of class, although it cannot be apprehended without it, either. Fascists fight ungrateful elites above and unworthy black and brown hordes below. That fight above is not disingenuous, either. All so-called ‘issues’ and ‘policies’ (trade wars, immigration, Supreme Court nominees, corporate power, etc.) need a theoretical framework that includes this element within the definition of fascism. Otherwise, it is lost.

As fascism contends for state power it becomes more than a product of capitalist crisis; it becomes the crisis itself.

The (often) missing element of socialist analyses of fascism is precisely a recognition of the relatively independent nature of fascism as a social movement. The second missing element is an understanding of an eliminationist form of racism that undergirds and binds together otherwise disparate factions into a social movement.

Trump follows, he doesn’t lead. Another way of stating this is that he is a symptom of a much deeper and entrenched problem: the slow, long term yet quickening growth of fascism throughout North America and Europe. Here, where I live, its particular expression is American white nationalism. It takes other forms elsewhere, but the family tree from which all variations descend can be identified and then fought.

The nature of fascism cannot be captured through attitudinal surveys, marketing pitches and polling preferences. Therefore, fascism can never be substantively defeated at the ballot box alone. Emasculate him through constitutional checks and balances, harass him with deep state democrats, impeach him, or defeat him during the 2020 elections–it will not be enough and will only serve to deepen the rot. Fascism is more than a form of authoritarianism counterposed to liberal democracy. If your frame of reference for fascism is bookended by these two concepts–authoritarianism and liberal democracy–as most conventional frameworks are, you will misunderstand it and be hapless to stop it. Only leftists have the theoretical framework to understand this, if only they would use it.

A defeat as epic as that of 2016 has produced precious little soul searching or self reflection. Instead, the tenuous and brittle state of neoliberal ideology has produced a default explanation for defeat that has settled on theft. Liberals and (neo) conservatives were predictably apoplectic about the Orange sociopath ‘stealing’ their election. Their wrath was directed outward, toward a mostly imagined conspiracy of a resurrected KGB that, whatever its influence on the 2016 Presidential election in no way whatsoever represented a significant deviation from the constant interference practiced by all states against one another as a matter of bourgeois routine since time immemorial. Besides, the United States is the undisputed world heavy weight grand champion of sovereign interference. Regime change is, after all, a particularly aggressive form of electoral interference that both Russia and the U.S. practice practically everywhere. The wrath of disenfranchised elites was directed internally, as well, at those ungrateful ‘deplorables’, a handful of utopian Jill Stein supporters, and of course the millions of us who said ‘fuck you’ to both parties. Their own complicity–either through deliberate policy, as with Obama’s deportation of 2.5 million souls and Clinton’s reminder that Honduran children may have crossed our border but they didn’t get to stay, or a whoopsie such as neglecting to campaign in Wisconsin–is always rendered as a mistake to be corrected, a flaw to be remedied, a wrinkle to be ironed out, rather than something irredeemable at the core of their rule and the values that justify it. But their rule is irredeemable. This ruling class sips champagne while gazing over infinity pools of conspicuous consumption. When they fuck up, it is by definition our fault. Everything is our fault. They are gods. We are mortals. So, what do we do with gods? Hold their heads underwater until the bubbles stop and be sure that there are fascists at the bottom of that pool drowning with them.

END

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