Brad > Recent Status Updates

"The enormous benefit of having corporate views filtered through academic, or quasi-academic, institutions not only kept the Chicago School flush with donations but, in short order, spawned the global network of right-wing think tanks that would house and feed the counter-revolution's foot soldiers worldwide."

This was a rough start, quoting the "Black Book of Communism", claiming capitalist markets aren't inherently violent, and making the standard right-"libertarian" distinction between capitalism and "corporatism" (yet again validating the Comintern's "Social fascism" line). Ugh.

But then the account of MKUltra and that monster Donald Ewen Cameron brought me back to my anti-psych roots, so, points for that.

"Privatization of state assets and the robbing of state enterprises have produced enormous wealth at the top in China...More than 90 percent of the richest 20,000 people in China are said to be 'related to senior government or Communist Party officials,' creating a whole class of millionaires and billionaire 'princelings'...land expropriated from farmers for sale to developers has enriched...local officials."

"Even the most optimistic long-run projections---in which China and India (along with other emerging economies) are able to leap to the next stage of accumulation without further class polarization and destabilization---nonetheless point to insurmountable problems of maturity, stagnation, and financialization (not to mention the overwhelming of planetary resources)."

In Quentin's "monologue":
There's the 'subplot' of a little girl appearing and silently following him through the suburbs of Boston, and how he tries to help her find her way home only to be accused of kidnapping. There's his going to Harvard out of familial duty and as a false 'escape'. It feels like the most Kafkaesque thing I've read that predates Kafka (or his wide availability in English, anyway).

From the standpoint of stylistic critique...I see what Faulkner is doing and appreciate how it would be groundbreaking in its literary milieu.

As a reader following the narrative, the chaotic flow of stream-of-consciousness with jumps between characters makes it all very disorienting.

"Social media platforms and right-wing institutions sustain the activity of a whole anti-theory knowledge economy, where entrepreneurial ideologues and influencers perform 'deep dives' on the history of woke ideology."

So the political economy of knowledge production involves actors with an interest sustained by institutions to influence discourse? I dunno man, sounds conspiratorial.

"The anecdote is the perfect rhetorical tool for conservative media. Its very form---a brief story of something happening to a specific person---opposes the logic if political correctness. It favours personal experience over structural analysis or contextual explanation. It prioritizes the life of an individual over the structure of the social group and shrinks societal issues down to single incidents."

"If their ideas managed to shape policy and opinion, then the New Right intellectual did not need to worry about attaining standards of scholarly rigour."

Adorno observed that 'television as ideology...is imposed by demonic objective spirit'...The consciousness-numbing effects commercial television reflected the functioning of a social totality that enforced commodification, standardization, and pseudo-individuality...Unlike Adorno, the Larouchites searched for the conscious manipulators.

LaRouche is a (morbidly fascinating) warning to us all.

Had this in the queue for many weeks from the library. Based on the introduction, I'd have similar critical thoughts to those I have re: Edward Said's "Orientalism", on the limits of post-structuralist discourse analysis. While acknowledging the material roots "conjuncturally", it still goes too far in treating discourse autonomously and doing textual analysis versus structure-driven historical materialism.

If [the European] left had the audacity to propose real advances beyond current capitalism, it would gain the credibility that it lacks. An audacious radical left is necessary to provide the coherence that the current piecemeal protest movements and defensive struggles still lack.

This dovetails powerfully into Vincent Bevins's retrospective on the 2010s, If We Burn.

“The fact that the Chinese project is not capitalist does not mean that it ‘is’ socialist, only that it makes it possible to advance on the long road to socialism. Nevertheless, it is also still threatened with a drift that moves it off that road and ends up with a return, pure and simple, to capitalism.”

China bashing panders to the infantile opinion found in some currents of the powerless Western 'left': If it is not the communism of the twenty-third century, it is a betrayal!...This is nothing less than a question of destroying the opportunities for an authentic emergence of a great people from the South.

Strangely Dengist from one who characterized the Soviet economy as state capitalism.

"[Articulation of reality at these three levels---peoples, nations, and states--conditions the success of transition.] It is a question of reinforcing the complementarity of the advances of the people, of the liberation of the nation, and of the achievements by the power of the state. But if contradictions between the popular agent and the state agent are allowed to develop, any advances are finally doomed."

"'Western Marxism' has ignored the decisive transformation represented by the emergence of generalized-monopoly capitalism. The intellectuals of the new Western radical left refuse to measure the decisive effects of the concentration of the oligopolies that now dominate the production system as a whole, in the same way that they dominate all political, social, cultural, and ideological life."

the contradictions of which we are speaking do their work quietly and one day the ‘stable’ structures collapse. History then enters a phase that may be described later as transitional, but which is lived as a transition toward the unknown, during which new historical subjects crystallize slowly.

On occasion, Amin transitions seamlessly between humanist/structuralist language.

I'm sympathetic to Amin's emphasis on worker-peasant alliance and highlighting systematic pauperization by capitalist agriculture, but his macro-level analysis flattens out the strata in the peasant class historically, as well as complications of class position for today's temporary agricultural workers (which includes "overqualified" professionals from the periphery---see Gabriel Allahdua's "Harvesting Freedom").

"The twenty-first century will not be America's century. It will be one of vast conflicts, and the rise of social struggles that question the ambitions of Washington and of capital. The crisis is exacerbating contradictions within the dominant classes."

- Samir Amin, June 1, 2000

Aijaz Ahmad's Introduction was a brilliant summary of Amin's critique of Eurocentric history (vindicated as even bourgeois historians of the mercantilist Mediterranean seem sometimes willing to decenter Europe's position, placing it at the fringe of a regional system--see Noel Malcolm's "Agents of Empire").

Also helpful is his contrast of Eurocentrism's geopolitical economy with Said's post-structural "Orientalism".