To estrange, in one of its more archaic senses, means “To render alien; to regard or treat as alien; to sever from a community; to remove (possessions, subjects) from the ownership or dominion of any one.” It’s a time-honored political tactic, this rhetorical estrangement. In a nationalistic environment, it works wonders. Egyptian state television [...]]]>

To estrange, in one of its more archaic senses, means “To render alien; to regard or treat as alien; to sever from a community; to remove (possessions, subjects) from the ownership or dominion of any one.” It’s a time-honored political tactic, this rhetorical estrangement. In a nationalistic environment, it works wonders. Egyptian state television whipped up violence against Tahrir Square by accusing demonstrators of acting under the orders of foreign provocateurs who, according to the fantasy version of events, had suborned Cairo’s hapless populace with that most delicious of bribes—KFC. For years, the Cuban government has stifled dissent by appealing to patriotic sentiment; any critic of the government must be an agent of Tío Sam. (It doesn’t help matters, of course, that the US has a sordid history of violent interference in Cuba. But that’s a story for another time.) And US political culture is no different. To accuse one’s opponents of anti-Americanism is as American as. . . never mind.

As early as the so-called Revolution of 1800, the Federalists started slinging mud, accusing Thomas Jefferson, one of the principal drafters of the Declaration of Independence, of being un-American. Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life includes examples of these attacks:

It was in France, where he resided nearly seven years, and until the revolution had made some progress, that his disposition to theory, and his skepticism in religion, morals, and government, acquired full strength and vigor. . . . Mr. Jefferson is known to be a theorist in politics, as well as in philosophy and morals. He is a philosophe in the modern French sense of the word. (149)

It would be exhausting to chronicle the number of times the “anti-American” canard has been trotted out since 1800. The HUAC hearings and McCarthyism are perhaps the most well-known moments. While the intensity has subsided since the end of the Cold War, it would be a mistake to think that the tactic has exhausted itself. What is the “birther” phenomenon if not a particularly irrationalist manifestation of estrangement? The ploy has been used so often, and to such great effect, that a culturalist understanding of politics now prevails, not only on the far right, where Breivik-like minds ruminate on the dangers of “Islamisation” and “cultural Marxism,” but also among liberal demonstrators at the Occupy Wall Street encampments, who insist (despite all the historical evidence to the contrary) that police violence is un-American.

It’s no surprise, then, that conservative politicians are pulling the well-worn brush out of the toolshed and attempting to paint Occupy Wall Street as some sort of foreign invasion. Peter King has somehow found the time amidst his ceaseless fight against his own imagination (where sharia lurks beneath every hijab) to denounce protesters as anti-American anarchists. Presidential candidate Herman Cain chimes in. Fox News fumbles its way towards an astro-turfing campaign—”the 53 percent”— which depends, in large measure, on distinguishing between the noble taxpayer’s “traditional American view of the world” and the “continental European mindset” of Occupy Wall Street’s shiftless protesters, who take no personal responsibility for their well-being, preferring to blame “institutions.”

To explore this “traditional American” worldview, it might be useful to inquire with a member of the Revolutionary Generation. William Manning was a successful New England farmer who, in 1775, took up arms against the British. He took part in the Siege of Boston during the initial phase of the Revolutionary War. Surely such a patriot would harbor no “European” biases against the wealthy and their institutions? Surely an American Hero™ such as this would avoid divisive rhetoric about the 99 percent?

In the swet of thy face shall thou git thy bread untill thou return to the ground, is the erivarsable sentance of Heaven on Man for his rebellion. To be sentanced to hard Labour dureing life is very unplesent to humane Nature. Their is a grate avartion to it purceivable in all men—yet it is absolutly nesecary that a large majority of the world should labor, or we could not subsist. For Labour is the soul parrant of all property — the land yealdeth nothing without it, & their is no food, clothing, shelter, vessel, or any nesecary of life but what costs Labour & is generally esteemed valuable according to the Labour it costs. Therefore no person can posess property without labouring, unless he git it by force or craft, fraud or fortun out of the earnings of others.

[. . .]

On the other hand the Labourer being contious that it is Labour that seports the hole, & that the more there is that live without Labour & the higher they live or the grater their salleryes & fees are, so much the harder he must work, or the shorter he must live, this makes the Labourer watch the other with a jelous eye & often has reason to complain of real impositions. But before I Proseed to shew how the few & many differ in money matters I will give a short description of what Money is.

Money is not property of itself but ondly the Representitive of property. Silver & Gold is not so valuable as Iron & Steel for real use, but receives all its value from the use that is made of it as a medium of trade. Money is simply this—a thing of lighter carrage than property that has an established value set upon it eyther by law or general Consent, For Instance, if a doller or a peace of paper, or a chip, would pass throughout a nation or the world for a burshel of corne or any other property to the value of said corne, then it would be the representitive of so much property.

Also Money is a thing that will go where it will fetch the most as naturally as water runs down hill, for the posessor will give it whare it will fetch the most. Also when their is an addition to the quantity or an extrodinary use of barter & credit in commerce the prices of property will rise. On the other hand if Credit is ruened & the medium made scarser the price of all kinds of property will fall in proportion. Here lays the grate shuffel betwen the few & many. As the interests & incomes of the few lays cheifly in money at interest, rents, salaryes, & fees that are fixed on the nominal value of money, they are interested in haveing mony scarse & the price of labour & produce as low as possable. For instance if the prices of labour & produce should fall one halfe it would be just the same to the few as if their rents fees & salleryes ware doubled, all which they would git out of the many. Besides the fall of Labour and produce & scarsety of money always brings the many Into distress & compels them into a state of dependance on the few for favours & assistance in a thousand ways.

[. . .]

The Reasons why a free government has always failed is from the unreasonable demands & desires of the few. They cant bare to be on a leavel with their fellow cretures, or submit to the determinations of a Lejeslature whare (as they call it) the Swinish Multitude are fairly represented, but sicken at the eydea, & are ever hankering & striving after Monerca or Aristocracy whare the people have nothing to do in maters of government but to seport the few in luxery & idleness.

For these & many other reasons a large majority of those that live without Labour are ever opposed to the prinsaples & operation of a free Government, & though the hole of them do not amount to one eighth part of the people, yet by their combinations, arts & skeems have always made out to destroy it soner or later [. . .]

Manning’s text, worth reading in its entirety, is called “The Key of Libberty.” It’s an incredible piece of progressive populism from a yeoman farmer with barely any formal education. Manning’s intuitive grasp of economics and politics would shame any of today’s faux-populist pundits, who would have no choice but to reach for the old standby, the anti-American label, which they would apply to Manning for daring to foment class war with inflammatory terms like “the many” and “the few.”

Finally, a different set of historical circumstances reveals the absurdity of most claims to the title of “real American.”

Manuel Moreno Fraginals was a Cuban historian. Along with scholars like Walterio Carbonell, he belongs to a radical strain of historiography that found itself at odds with both the pre-1959 dictatorship and the Castro regime. Moreno Fraginals was exiled twice: from 1956–1959 and again after 1994. Like novelist Jesús Díaz, he became increasingly critical [...]]]>

Manuel Moreno Fraginals was a Cuban historian. Along with scholars like Walterio Carbonell, he belongs to a radical strain of historiography that found itself at odds with both the pre-1959 dictatorship and the Castro regime. Moreno Fraginals was exiled twice: from 1956–1959 and again after 1994. Like novelist Jesús Díaz, he became increasingly critical of the Cuban government during the economic crisis of the 1990s. Also like Díaz, he was a radical thinker whose heterodox Marxism placed him in the crosshairs of the dialectical materialist orthodoxy. Unlike the main body of revolutionary scholars, for whom Marx’s statement “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” was reduced to “history = class struggle,” Moreno Fraginals always insisted on dealing with the problem of race. His work on Cuban sugar mills, El ingenio, is one of the most compelling analyses of slavery and the plantation economy in any language.

The following text is a translation of his note “¿Abolición o desintegración?”, a reflection on the collapse of the slave economy in Cuba. For the most part, I’ve tried to retain his unvarnished style. Moreno Fraginals often criticized his fellow historians for being wordy and boring, among other things. I disagree with a few of his assertions, most notably that slave labor produced surplus value, but I think the text is genuinely interesting and potentially helpful for thinking about how one social form (mode of production) is sublated (aufgehoben), unfolding into another. A useful exercise for those involved in crisis theory.

Abolition or Disintegration?

A Few Questions about the Centennial

1980 marked the hundred-year anniversary of the colonial law to abolish slavery in Cuba. In Puerto Rico a similar centennial had already been celebrated in 1973 because, although both islands were Spanish colonies, abolition was enforced first in Puerto Rico. It’s a centennial that invites study rather than celebration. We say this because it’s strange to commemorate the anniversary of a law that was neither the first one to abolish slavery in Cuba nor what ultimately destroyed the institution.

Unfortunately, very little has been written about the history of slavery in Cuba. Regardless, using current research—done in Cuba and abroad—one can arrive at certain conclusions about this “anomalous” institution, as Karl Marx would certainly label it. There is plenty of evidence that the enslavement of black Africans and their descendants on American plantations was a system of labor that, from a humane perspective, was barbaric and even criminal, but was economically profitable for the exploiting class. Its extremely high profits drove its expansion and development to the point of uprooting between 9 and 12 million people (according to the most conservative calculations) from the African continent.

Slavery’s profitability was possible within a set of conditions clearly present, for example, in the 18th-century English and French Antilles and in late-19th-century Cuba. But socioeconomic conditions change over time, and slavery, which was rational and profitable from the standpoint of colonial exploitation, began to create a set of insoluble contradictions that made it irrational and ruinous even for the exploiting class itself. This long process led to slavery’s disintegration and, finally, to its disappearance.

Plantation slavery was familiar to Cubans during the time of colonization, but its heyday began toward the end of the 18th century. Several of the characteristics that distinguish Cuban slavery from that of the English and French Antilles became evident at that time. Let’s examine some of these differentiations. The free introduction of African slaves into Cuba began in 1790, but the slave trade was banned by Denmark in 1802, England in 1808, Sweden in 1813, Holland and France in 1814, and by Spain in 1820. This meant that the greatest development of Cuban slavery took place while European countries unleashed an intense campaign against this kind of human commerce. This caused more slaves to enter Cuba as “contraband” than legally.

It’s true that this contraband was usually permitted by the Spanish colonial authorities, who benefited from it and even participated directly. But this doesn’t change the fact that slave traffic to Cuba during the 19th century confronted greater challenges than those faced by the English and French colonies in the previous century. The difficulties of the slave passage, the cost of bribes, and many other factors contributed to a rapid rise in the price of slaves, which increased fivefold over half a century (1810–1860).

And since all this happened amid an unprecedented European technological revolution and the rise of workers’ movements, the high cost of slaves as commodities was joined by the evidence that slavery was a brake on the modern development of the means of production. Likewise, every year it became clearer that slavery was a moral crime.

In Cuban cities, especially Havana, slavery had special characteristics. For example, the first major Cuban census, undertaken in 1774, records a free black population greater than 30,000. In 1862, free blacks numbered 221,417, of which 53% lived in cities; it was a predominantly urban population even though it maintained an influential presence on ranches, tobacco plantations, and farms. This free black population continued to grow and became a large, marginal mass that a achieved a degree of economic development in several important sectors, despite all the discrimination and exploitation. It was able to monopolize a large portion of the island’s artisanal activity: they were tailors, cobblers, and musicians in addition to carters, stevedores, coachmen, etc. During the 18th century and part of the 19th, many of them had won their freedom by providing important military services. Along with the free blacks, battalions of pardos and morenos were organized—their exploits in battle are famous.

Among this black population were many who had purchased their freedom with their own labor. As far back as the 17th century, urban slaveowners had discovered that one of the most profitable and safe forms of exploitation was to rent their slaves out as day laborers, which guaranteed a monthly cash income without the burden of labor or investment falling on the slaveowner. And at the end of a period of five to ten years, the slaveowner would recover his initial investment when the rent-earning slave purchased his liberty.

It’s obvious that the great mass of free blacks in Cuban cities during slavery’s apogee didn’t owe its freedom to the owners’ beneficence (as slavery and colonialism’s panegyrists claim). Rather, it existed because of the specific characteristics of a highly profitable form of exploitation. But it’s a fact that these free blacks were a very important factor in the disintegration of slavery in the cities. They had extensive communication with the slaves and they taught them about legal resources that provided protection from certain levels of super-exploitation and cruelty. Either directly or through the “councils” (cabildos), they helped slaves buy their freedom by making cash or work available to them.

By the 1860s, Havana was witness to the unique spectacle of a slave society in which slaves lived independently of their masters, in rented houses or extensions, working for themselves and sometimes running small businesses with employees who might be free blacks, slaves, or whites. These weren’t isolated cases: the 1860 census reveals that 34% of Havana’s adult black male slaves lived independently.

Thousands of urban slaves, and many in rural areas, earned a wage. However, despite what some historians say, a slave with a wage is not an indication of slavery’s benevolence, but of its disintegration. It shows that brute force, upon which typical slavery rests, is being replaced by the economic coercion upon which capitalist exploitation depends.

In sugar mills and coffee fields the situation was different. The extremely low fertility rates among enslaved women, the high proportion of men to women, the high mortality rate, etc. caused the continuous decline of the slave population in the sugar mills. To avoid this decline it was necessary to buy slaves annually to replace the deceased. Another way was to balance the sexes, improve living conditions, provide economic stimuli similar to a wage, etc. In Cuba the latter system was given the pompous title of “the good treatment.”

Sugar mill owners who employed the old system of exploitation, buying new slaves every year to replace the ones consumed by work, found that slaves cost more each time, but produced the same amount. Additionally, the basic system of labor grounded exclusively on brute force made it impossible to apply new technologies to increase productivity. The inability to modernize clashed with the capitalist law of constant revolution of the means of production. Productivity fell, production costs rose, the price of sugar fell, the technical disparity grew. . .

Those who practiced “the good treatment” created economic stimuli among the slaves; in the long run these were indistinguishable from a salary. They gave slaves land to cultivate and then purchased the produce and livestock. They lowered the mortality rate, raised the birth rate and average life expectancy, and achieved notable progress in modernization. Technical advances shortened the harvest time and increased idle time proportionally. The changing demographic indices increased the number of children born. These were too young to work and had to be clothed and fed. The number of unproductive elderly slaves who had to be supported also increased. As the harvest time—the period of maximum exploitation and surplus-value extraction—became shorter, the underutilization of slaves became more obvious, producing an internal crisis that was aggravated by the external factors already examined. This accelerated slavery’s process of disintegration. A modern, capitalist economy was impossible with slavery! Other forms of exploitation were sought, and 150,000 Chinese came to Cuba during the 19th century.

Cuban sugar mills in the 1860s and 1870s reveal the slave regime’s disintegration, which was much more perceptible in the eastern provinces. Sometimes systems were superimposed in a single mill, with some slaves working under the threat of physical coercion, others received wages, and still others were rented at a different price and were treated differently. And there were also Chinese under contract, and blacks and whites on salary or doing single-payment jobs or piecework. This chaos is the typical expression of disintegration.

But this process isn’t determined merely by these internal socioeconomic conditions, nor by external economic or moral pressures. It’s also a function of the constant defiance of the slaves, seen in uprisings, escapes, suicides, sabotage, and work done poorly or reluctantly. Slavery’s coup de grace was finally dealt by the anticolonial struggle, which couldn’t succeed without abolition.

At the beginning of the Ten Years’ War, the conservative wing of the insurgents took great pains to avoid proclaiming the full emancipation of slaves. The Guámiro Constitution declared slavery abolished, but it instituted a transitional system (the regulation of freed slaves) similar to the patronage system established by the 1880 colonial law. Nevertheless, the reality of the independence struggle radicalized the revolution. In 1870, the Spanish colonial government was forced to impose the first law of emancipation, which “freed” slaves younger than 11 and older than 60. The law liberated slave owners from the economic burden of unproductive laborers.

Finally, the first law of total emancipation, which recognized the right of freed slaves to enjoy all civil and political rights, was Carlos Manuel de Céspedes’ glorious declaration on December 25, 1870. Within the territory of Cuba Libre, this meant effectual abolition.

The 1880 colonial law did not end slavery. It simply managed its inexorable extinction, caused by economic contradictions and the strength of the revolutionary fighters. It was a conservative colonial law that attempted to prolong the life of an institution whose time had definitely come.

Roth’s novel, written in the years following 9/11, made a splash as critics drew parallels between the plot–Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 election and America begins a process of Nazification, including pogroms–and the Bush administration’s War on Terror.

Reviewers like J.M. Coetzee (full article paywalled) and Frank Rich, after ritually warding off such allegorical [...]]]> The Plot Against America&rft.source=Jonathan Dettman&rft.date=2011-01-28&rft.identifier=http://www.jonathandettman.net/philip-roth-the-plot-against-america&rft.language=English&rft.aulast=&rft.aufirst=&rft.subject=Blog Posts&rft.subject=Most Read">

Roth’s novel, written in the years following 9/11, made a splash as critics drew parallels between the plot–Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 election and America begins a process of Nazification, including pogroms–and the Bush administration’s War on Terror.

Reviewers like J.M. Coetzee (full article paywalled) and Frank Rich, after ritually warding off such allegorical interpretations, nevertheless use them to frame their own readings.

Another reviewer goes so far as to say that “it’s essential to read this novel as soon as possible to fit it in its proper context.” Its context, though, isn’t quite so narrow as that.

The Plot Against America isn’t a true historical novel, even if we ignore the fact that its history is counterfactual. It makes no real attempt to display the complexities of the American political landscape in the early 1940s. I found myself wondering (as did this reviewer) where are the communists? I thought in particular of the presence of the Frankfurt School on Morningside Heights. Certainly such a group, along with other prominent New York intellectuals (not to mention organized labor and anarchists), would have played a role in a struggle against fascism.

Such historical complications are avoided, though, in order to remain faithful to the perspective of the narrator, who experienced these events as small boy for whom America must indeed have seemed to be a vast and hostile expanse beyond the limits of the New York metropolitan area.

The narrator, also called Philip Roth, recalls a fairly idyllic childhood suddenly invaded by fear as FDR unexpectedly fails to win his bid for a third term. The high-flying and Nazi-sympathizing Charles Lindbergh emerges as a charismatic, if laconic, leader and initiates a distinctly American version of the Final Solution.

Roth’s prose is consistently understated, almost flat. Rather than relying on rhetorical fireworks or “creative writing,” the author lets the plot do the heavy lifting. The magisterial moments, when they do come, strike the reader with great emotional force, as in the “Where is Lindbergh” speech, in which “the red-faced La Guardia readies the assembled mourners for the climactic appearance of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Even in the moments when the prose is less muted, it remains rather clipped, tightly wound like the voiceovers of WWII-era newsreels. Page after page, the no-frills narration, meticulous but never florid in its attention to detail, confronts the reader who, lulled into complacency by the story’s rhythm and relentless forward motion, is stunned by the irruption of a figure which crystallizes the accumulated events into a synthetic image:

It’s so heartbreaking, violence, when it’s in a house–like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.

Here Roth mobilizes an instance of the unheimlich by shattering the homely image of domesticity. A world, once familiar, is torn asunder, not by external forces, but by the violence it always contained. This is an organic violence, nourished in the bosom of the hearth; it is not the violence of reaction to the other.

This is why readings of The Plot Against America as an allegory of the War on Terror miss the mark. Even if Roth drew inspiration from the vengeful nationalism of the George W. Bush years, the novel exceeds its immediate context. Here’s an important passage:

The trip out had taken just over twenty-four hours, but the one back took three time as long because of the many times they had to stop for Seldon to vomit by the side of the road or to pull down his pants and squat in a ditch, and because, in just a twenty-mile radius of Charleston, West Virginia (where they went round in circles, hopelessly lost, instead of proceeding east and north toward Maryland), the car broke down on six separate occasions in little over a day: once in the midst of the railroad tracks, power lines and massive conveyors of Alloy, a town of two hundred where enormous mounds of ore and silica surrounded the factory building of the Electro-Metallurgical Company plant; once in the nearby little town of Boomer, where flames from the coke ovens reached so high my father, standing after sundown in the middle of the unlighted street, could read (or misread) the road map by the incandescence; once in Belle, yet another of those tiny, hellish industrial hamlets, where the fumes from the Du Pont ammonia plant almost knocked them flat when they got out of the car to lift the hood and try to figure out what was wrong; again in South Charleston, the city that looked to Seldon like “a monster” because of the steam and the smoke wreathing the freight yards and the warehouses and the long dark roofs of the soot-blackened factories; and twice on the very outskirts of the state-capital, Charleston. There, around midnight, in order to call a tow truck, my father had to cross a railroad embankment on foot and then descend a hill of junk to a bridge that spanned a river lined with coal barges and dredging barges and tugboats to go looking for a riverfront dive with a pay phone, meanwhile leaving the two boys alone together in the car just across the river road from an endless jumble of a plant–sheds and shanties, sheet-iron buildings and open coal cars, cranes and loading booms and steel-frame towers, electric ovens and roaring forges, squat storage tanks and high cyclone fences–a plant that was, if you believed the sign the size of a billboard, “The World’s Biggest Manufacturer of Axes, Hatchets, and Scythes.”

The passage describes part of a rescue journey into America’s heartland, up to this point depicted as a pastoral landscape, in stark contrast to the urban areas in the Northeast (Newark, New York) where the Jews’ numbers afford them some security. The enumeration of industrial artefacts eliminates the distinction, tearing down the confining, yet protective walls of the ghetto, just as the irruption of violence into the home violates its status as refuge from the world. The passage also has a corrosive effect on all the carefully constructed, subtle comparisons to Old World anti-Semitism that Roth establishes throughout the narrative. These references allow the reader to imagine the ever-present possibility of atavistic, anti-Semitic violence as a kind of universal rural primitivism born of ignorance and superstition, as in blood libel, a reference Roth uses more than once in the novel.

The authentic horror is found in the “factory brimming with sharpened blades” that drives young Seldon mad. The axes, hatchets, and scythes of an incensed peasantry are now mass-produced in an industrial process, just as anti-Semitism has been transformed, in the modern era, into a quasi-automatic reaction rooted in the abstract (and negatively coded) dimensions of capitalist society (see Moishe Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century”). Beyond the eerie plausibility of the novel’s plot (the almost-Nazification of America), with its dilemmas of assimilation and identity, clarity and paranoia, lies the terrible union of a barbaric “nature” and technical progress, as hideous as a forest of chimneys or, alternatively, chimneys at the edge of a birch forest.

[Update: 10/15/2011 – I'm no longer maintaining the paper.li example site. So, while still functional, it may be out of date.]

There are plenty of blogs and news sites online, so why build your own newspaper? Most of us probably don’t need to, but some bloggers or educators might find it useful to have [...]]]>

[Update: 10/15/2011 – I'm no longer maintaining the paper.li example site. So, while still functional, it may be out of date.]

There are plenty of blogs and news sites online, so why build your own newspaper? Most of us probably don’t need to, but some bloggers or educators might find it useful to have a centralized, up-to-the-minute repository of news or discussion on a narrower topic than most websites or blogs offer. Teachers could incorporate such a webpage in a number of ways—as a research aide for students, as a discussion starter, or as a way to collect and visualize student comments posted to Twitter or blogs.

There are already different ways of aggregating information on the web: newsreaders, Twitter lists, blogrolls, and even old-fashioned directories. But not all of these offer the simplicity and easy, one-link sharing of paper.li, a service that automatically turns links in a Twitter stream into a newspaper.

As an experiment, I created my own online paper for news about Cuba. In this post I’ll outline the basic steps for creating your own.

3 Easy Steps

1) Sign up for paper.li.

You must link to a Twitter account to register and sign in. The account you link to paper.li can be different from the account(s) you wish to aggregate in your newspaper.

2) Choose a type of stream.

Currently, paper.li only pulls data from Twitter. However, there are three kinds of Twitter streams to choose from: a) user accounts; b) hashtags (label); c) and Twitter lists. I chose to stream a list because I wanted to aggregate data from more than one source and to have more direct control over the paper’s content. It’s tempting to use the hashtag option for a single-topic paper, but Twitter users know that not everything that goes out with a given hashtag is worth reading, or even on topic. For example, the #cuba hashtag might give me news about Cuba, but it also would likely include gossip about Cuba Gooding Jr. or details about someone’s vacation plans. Also, streaming from a Twitter list that I created allows me to curate that list. See the advanced section below for how to set up your own list.

3) Create the Paper

Enter the username, hashtag or list name that you want to stream and click the big green “Create” button. It’s that easy. You’re done. Save the URL for your paper and spread the word.

Advanced Steps for Streaming Lists

Create Your Own Twitter List

This is easy. Log in via Twitter’s web interface. On the Home screen, you’ll see a section called “Lists” in the right-hand column. Click “New list.” Give your list a name and make sure it’s public. Now you can add Twitter users to your list by using the “List” drop-down menu on each user’s profile page. Check the box next to the name of your list. Your paper.li newspaper will use the links posted by all the list’s members.

Get Content from Sources other than Twitter

This is a bit more complicated, but still relatively simple. It involves creating an aggregate RSS feed (i.e. multiple feeds in one) and publishing that feed into an account on your Twitter list.

I used Yahoo! Pipes (requires registration) to build my aggregate feed. This entails virtually no technical prowess. If you can build a stack of Legos, you can combine RSS feeds.

First, you’ll want to identify the websites or blogs you want to include and find the URL for their RSS feeds. Because many sites don’t publish visible links to their feeds, this isn’t always as easy as it should be. Below is a short video tutorial on finding these URLs.

Once you’ve identified the feed URLs, you’ll want to enter them into the “Fetch Feed” module in Yahoo! Pipes. You can clone my Pipe, or create your own from scratch. Just drag a “Fetch Feed” box from the left-hand column into the main drafting area. The image below shows my Pipe.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

It consists of only two modules: 1) “Fetch Feed,” with the RSS links listed in the content fields, and 2) the “Pipe Output” module. If the Pipe is working properly, clicking on the Pipe Output box should render results in the debugging section at the base of the page. There you can see which blog posts and news items are flowing through the Pipe. Give your Pipe a name and save it.

If your Pipe is working, return to your main screen by clicking “Back to My Pipes.” Choose the Pipe you’ve just named, then right-click “Get as RSS.” Copy the link address. This is the link to your new RSS feed combining the multiple feeds you want to add to your paper.li newspaper via your Twitter list.

Publish Your Feed

The next step is to publish the feed to a Twitter account. You can use your existing account, but I recommend setting up a dedicated one. There are a few ways to publish your feed to Twitter. I’ve tried two: Twitterfeed and Feedburner. Both of these allow automatic updates to a Twitter account. Feedburner seems to update more often, so I’ll give a brief step-by-step guide to using it to link to Twitter.

1) Login to Feedburner. If you have a Google account you won’t need a separate registration.

2) Enter your aggregate feed URL (the link to your Yahoo! Pipe output) into the big box and click “Next” to burn your feed.

3) Modify the feed title and URL to your taste. Click “Next.”

4) Go to “Feed Management,” then “Publicize.” Using the “Socialize” service, you can publish to Twitter. Add the Twitter account you want to publish to, and adjust the output format (optional).

5) Activate the service. Feedburner should now be publishing to the Twitter account you designated. There may be a delay, depending on the feed content and output settings. Don’t forget to follow the Twitter account with the list you’ve used to create your newspaper.

(De)limitations

Paper.li offers a very easy and fairly attractive way to publish a Twitter stream to a webpage in newspaper format. It’s main drawbacks are the inability to publish content from sites or services other than Twitter (although this can be remedied via the process outlined above), and its lack of customizability. The ability to alter page design and layout, along with a way to prioritize or rank content, would turn paper.li into a much more useful and powerful tool, allowing non-programmers (the vast majority of bloggers and teachers) to easily create automated, crowd-sourced publications. For an interesting example of what such a publication might look like, check out Digital Humanities Now. I envision using these tools to aggregate student responses and feedback in my courses, but there are certainly numerous other possibilities.

Hoy es Cinco de Mayo, pero dudo que los mexicanos en el estado de Arizona tengan ganas de festejar, ya que la gobernadora del estado acaba de firmar una ley que institucionaliza el racismo. No hay duda que la ley es fundamentalmente racista, ya que depende de criterios raciales para identificar y reprimir una [...]]]>

Hoy es Cinco de Mayo, pero dudo que los mexicanos en el estado de Arizona tengan ganas de festejar, ya que la gobernadora del estado acaba de firmar una ley que institucionaliza el racismo. No hay duda que la ley es fundamentalmente racista, ya que depende de criterios raciales para identificar y reprimir una clase de personas de una etnia en particular. Ha habido en Arizona otros casos de represión y hasta de deportación (los famosos secuestros de mineros en Jerome y en Bisby, por ejemplo), pero la codificación legal de lo que antes era llevado a cabo por actores privados (aunque casi siempre con la colaboración o la aprobación tácita del estado) parece ser algo nuevo y diferente.

Me pregunto si esta legalización de la discriminación racial (o criminalización de una raza) no tendrá otras causas que no sean el racismo. Es decir, es innegable que SB1070 responde a impulsos racistas y que hasta los patrocinadores de la ley tienen vínculos a grupos supremacistas. Ya Rachel Maddow nos los ha enseñado. Pero no debemos perder de vista que hay factores económicos que están en juego.

La crisis económica que vivimos engendra una radicalización de las medidas de austeridad preferidas por el neoliberalismo. Desde finales de la década del 60, el capitalismo se enfrenta a una crisis de valorización. De esa crisis surgió el neoliberalismo, como respuesta a la necesidad (absoluta, desde la perspectiva de la valorización) de subvencionar los circuitos del capital con fondos pirateados del sector público (así disminuyendo la parte de plusvalía destinada a la reproducción social) y de eliminar las últimas restricciones, tanto al libre movimiento del capital a través de fronteras, como a la especulación, ya que la falta de valorización real tuvo que ser compensada por el crecimiento desmedido del capital ficticio, o sea, el crédito. De ahí las burbujas financieras que ahora son parte de la “naturaleza” de la economía actual.

Por una parte, entonces, la fluidez del capital, cada vez más necesaria, requiere una fluidez de la fuerza de trabajo. No es casual que el número de inmigrantes que cruza nuestra frontera sureña haya aumentado desde el inicio de NAFTA, pacto neoliberal que empobreció aun más a las zonas campesinas de México. Las medidas de seguridad en pos del 11-9 han canalizado el flujo de migrantes en Arizona, que se ha convertido en zona álgida del debate inmigratorio, con la aparición de toda clase de vigilante, patriota e ignorante en el Desierto de Sonora. Pero, por otra parte, el neoliberalismo, con su lema de “siempre privatizar,” va reduciendo servicios públicos en nombre de la eficiencia. En realidad, esos servicios tienen que desaparecer para que las corporaciones puedan seguir recibiendo respiración artificial en forma de subvenciones.

Mientras haya gente necesitada de servicios públicos de salud, transporte, etc., recortar esos servicios parece una medida sumamente cruel. Pero todo cambia si esa gente, o una parte de ella, es “ilegal.” Ahora no es el estado que abandona a unos seres humanos cuyo apoyo laboral fue solicitado por el mismo estado y las empresas asentadas allí, sino que los pobres trabajadores ya son unos parásitos que impiden los recortes (lamentables, pero inevitables según el oráculo mercado) y que empobrecen a los “legítimos” residentes del estado, quitándoles el trabajo, congestionando las calles. O sea, se les atribuye a los inmigrantes toda clase de males, en una réplica americana del antisemitismo. Y en cuanto a los residentes “legítimos,” entre ellos (los indígenas) el desempleo sobrepasa el 50%, en buenos tiempos y malos, y nadie ha reclamado sus derechos.

Así el neoliberalismo, presto siempre a socorrer la valorización capitalista pero nunca a un ser humano, coacciona los sentimientos racistas de los residentes blancos (quienes deben de ponerse al lado de los inmigrantes latinos) para poder dar el coup de grace a partes significativas del sector público que mantiene a flote a todos en esta época de desempleo y sueldos estancados. El cinismo no tiene límites, pero la estrategia es eficaz: contar con que el odio racial trasciende el interés común que todos deben tener en mantener lo social–la salud, la educación, los centros comunitarios, las infraestructuras y hasta la posibilidad de reproducir nuestra existencia en generaciones futuras–frente a lo antisocial, el capital.

After much delay, I’ve read Christopher Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. I have a lot of good things to say about the book, and I consider it, along with Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination, to be among the best supplementary readings to Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse. For pedagogical purposes, it [...]]]>

After much delay, I’ve read Christopher Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. I have a lot of good things to say about the book, and I consider it, along with Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination, to be among the best supplementary readings to Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse. For pedagogical purposes, it might even have some advantages over Postone’s work. Appreciative gestures aside, I’ll briefly point out what I see as a fundamental flaw in the logical development of Arthur’s New Dialectic. It concerns his interpretation of abstract labor.

Arthur considers the question of why living labor and not, say, machine-power, contains the secret to valorization. “Why is ‘labouring’ different from ‘machining’?” (53). Arthur, correctly to my mind, challenges the “obvious” answer to the question, namely, that labor posits its own ends, by pointing out that labor’s ends are co-opted by capital, according to whose logic the ends (use values) become merely means to value as end in itself. In this respect, the extent to which labor-power differs from machine-power becomes unclear. In his attempt to answer this question, Arthur goes on to describe the peculiar nature of labor-power qua commodity: it’s not a commodity at all in the sense that wages are not tied, in the last instance, to its value. In other words, labor-power, unlike the commodity, does not instantiate value, i.e. socially necessary labor-time. Since the “value” of labor-power is not determined by it’s conditions of production, but instead by “class struggle in the context of the historically given level of ‘subsistence’” (53), Arthur concludes that labor is “a use value which is itself inherently at odds with its social determination as a moment of capital” (Ibid.). Here is where we must begin some important hair-splitting.

Arthur goes on to claim that “capital can constitute itself only in a contradictory way, through employing an agent that resists its use for alien purposes” (Ibid.). However true this may be for laborers themselves, it’s unclear that labor really confronts capital as its alien “other.” Slaves, for instance, resist their “use for alien purposes,” often in a more forceful and direct way than wage laborers do, when the latter resist at all. It is well known that societies based on slave labor are not capitalist, not value-producing societies, so coercion itself (described by Arthur as a “bending of the will” somehow different than the breaking of the will), however prevalent in the objective relations between labor and capital, cannot be at the heart of value production. This is a subtle point, because coercion does exist. Perhaps it’s better to simply state that the compulsion exerted by capital doesn’t consist exclusively in the labor–capital relation. Rather, it’s an objective, social compulsion that affects the laboring and capitalist classes alike. Even as he concurs with Marx’s claim that the subject of production is capital itself, Arthur balks, as do most Marxists, at the full implications of this claim.

As I’ve tried to show, in his effort to distinguish living labor from machine power, Arthur falls back onto the idea that he began to dispute: that labor’s essence lies in a teleological positing of will. Arthur must assert capital’s ability to usurp the agency of workers, but can’t bring himself to make the claim that this agency is rendered entirely null. The point that must be made, and held fast to, is that in the valorization process subjective intentions are irrelevant; “they do this without being aware of it” (Marx). In his zeal to endow labor with agency, Arthur is forced to assert a kind of “residual ‘subjectivity’” or “definite recalcitrance to being ‘exploited’.” The problem with asserting this vestigial subjectivity is that labor is always already subjectivity subsumed. Only by not working does the worker avoid her agency being co-opted by capital. In describing this recalcitrance that he must insist upon in order to continue asserting that the proletariat is capital’s gravedigger, Arthur claims that labor productivity is always contestable and therefore incalculable in advance. This seems to contradict Marx: the rate of exploitation is precisely calculable. Indeed, the capitalist depends upon his ability to calculate it. While it is true that workers can contest the rate of exploitation through stoppage, strikes, etc., in reality these instances of class struggle represent the emergence of “natural laws of the modern mode of production” (Marx). That is, there is a certain dynamic equilibrium between the rate of exploitation and the cost of the worker’s reconstitution as such, viz. as labor-power. More importantly, none of labor’s intransigence alters the basic reality of commodity-producing society: that people are compelled to sell their multifarious productive activities, rendered commensurable and quantifiable by an abstraction called labor-time, in order to obtain vital necessities. All historical attempts to overcome this reality via the “dictatorship of the proletariat” have failed. Objections to this categorical denial of workers’ ability to shake off the chains of capital will no doubt point to Marx’s own labor activism. But what may have still seemed (or even been) possible in the 19th century is arguably no longer possible today, given capital’s own historical development. To deny this development is to ignore the visible mutations of commodity-producing society and to also deny the possible for capital to generate its own internal historical dynamic.

This lapse into traditional, labor-centric Marxism, with its need to affirm proletarian subjectivity, is quite curious, given that Arthur himself gives a lucid exposition of capital qua Hegelian absolute, or Universal Subject. This seems related to Arthur’s vision of capital as a systemic dialectic. Arthur describes a systemic dialectic as purely logical, as opposed to a historical dialectic in which causality takes pride of place. In other words, Arthur views capital as a synchronic totality.

The system comprises a set of categories expressing the forms and relations embedded within the totality, its ‘moments’. Since all ‘moments’ of the whole exist synchronically all movement must pertain to their reciprocal support and development. While this motion implies that moments become effective successively, the movement winds back into itself to form a circuit of reproduction of these moments by each other. (64)

As a purely systemic dialectic, capital is self-contained and self-perpetuating. Insofar as contradictions appear, they are eventually resolved as opposing ‘moments’ of the total movement. Capital is understood here as a kind of perpetual-motion machine, whose stoppage would require outside intervention; to overthrow it requires an alien (not immanent) agent to overthrow it. Hence the insistence that labor is alien to capital, when in reality labor is posited by capital as its other, in which case labor’s otherness isn’t the same as the sort of alienness that would allow its messianic appearance as deus ex machina. Even to the extent that Marx himself viewed proletarian labor as the gravedigger of capital, he saw it as having been generated by capital itself, not as an outside force. Arthur wants labor to exist both inside and outside capital, as both a moment of the systemic totality and external other.

Arthur’s systemic dialectic presents us with the spiral form of value in motion, grounded in a historically indeterminate, ungrounded labor. The hypnotic movement of his purely systematic dialectic rotates in place on the axis of eternal labor, creating the impression that if only labor would refuse to be incorporated into value production that all would be well. But this is not a matter of refusal; labor cannot be decoupled from value. As Arthur himself states, capital (value in motion) is the subject of this dialectical movement. “In capitalist commodity production there is an inversion of subject and object in that the real subject of the process is capital” (47). Capital posits labor as its presupposition and negative ground. The “negation of the negation” cannot arise from any subjective negation on the part of workers as workers, since they have been posited as such by capital. Rather, the negation of the negation must entail the abolition of labor.

Labor relates to capital as a moment of the totality, not as its extrinsic other. The really outré idea (Postone’s) is that labor itself has historical specificity. This implies several things. First, as Postone explains, the overthrow of capital will not entail labor’s realization but rather its abolition. Second, if labor is specific to capital, then it cannot be transhistoricized as the “metabolic interaction between man and nature” (Marx) or understood as the primary motor of History. As Marx scholar N. Pepperell points out in a recent blog post, the historical emergence of capital has less to do with the intrinsic laws of the commodity form than with a monstrous convergence of factors immanent to European feudalism. This “Devil’s dialectic,” which is no dialectic at all in either the historical or systemic sense, set capital in motion. Likewise, one must look to factors immanent to capitalism (e.g. capital’s drive towards greater efficiency and productivity, which leads to the increasing obsolescence of it’s own labor-substance) to grasp both the possibility for transcending commodity-producing society and for glimpsing the outlines of what might follow.

Given the current economic crisis (which may be terminal) and the very real possibility of social breakdown, it is dangerous to continue to treat the problem of overcoming capital as if it were simply a matter of will. If building a better society is understood primarily as a voluntarist enterprise, it seems just as likely that society will slowly devolve into a Hobbesian realm inhabited by Nietzschean survivalists as that anything better will emerge. Anselm Jappe considers this very thing in an essay in Revue Lignes. Readers of French should take a look.

A tumultuous Fall term at California’s universities promises to give way to a new year of struggle in which tensions and divisions will only increase. There are as many ways to describe this conflict as there are students, but its basic contours are shaped by an economic system that demands a continuous and ever-increasing [...]]]>

A tumultuous Fall term at California’s universities promises to give way to a new year of struggle in which tensions and divisions will only increase. There are as many ways to describe this conflict as there are students, but its basic contours are shaped by an economic system that demands a continuous and ever-increasing input of work and that, in return, concedes ever fewer tangible benefits, which can often only be wrested from the swirling vortex of value-accumulation via credit, obtained at the cost of…future work. The university student has, at least for the past two decades, faced a basic and worsening dilemma: given her dismal economic prospects, now and in the future, she must choose between working now for a pittance or deferring her labor to some later date that might offer her minimally better odds at a living wage, but at the cost of massive debt accumulation that will likely negate whatever salarial advantage her degree grants her. This situation has become increasingly worse of late, as rising costs (of living and tuition) far outstrip incremental gains in wages. Upon graduating from high school (if lucky enough, wealthy enough, or white enough to do so), young adults are faced with a miserable choice between seeking their fortune in a diminished labor market or obtaining an advanced credential that may qualify them for a more privileged sector of the same narrow and impoverished market where they must scramble frantically to auction off their ‘skills.’ Those who have chosen the latter option and walked through the doors of the casino of higher education (many pay, few win) face odds that steepen with every passing minute. Tuition and fees spiral ever higher; time-to-degree increases apace. Debt accumulates and the pressure to get ‘the job’ mounts. Most students work nearly full time to pay the bills while in school. As the anonymously-written “Communiqué from an Absent Future” aptly states: “We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have.”

It is in this desperate context of debt, study, work, and uncertainty about the future that fee increases and salary cuts impact the students of California and the world. Every fee increase elicits a number of possible responses that can ultimately be reduced to two basic options: acquiescence or resistance. In some cases, out of inability or refusal to pay, students must abandon their studies and continue their resistance or submission to domination beyond the confines of the university. These comments are addressed to the students who remain.

Students face an uncomfortable choice: they can submit to the fee increases (which never stop increasing) or they can resist them. The reason this choice is uncomfortable is that it isn’t the kind of simple choice we are used to. It’s not a neat binary: McCain or Obama, ‘for here’ or ‘to go,’ Engineering or Psychology. It requires more than pressing a button on a Facebook poll or filling in a Scantron bubble. This is because the choice is not presented as a choice at all. The budget cuts and mismanagement, with their accompanying fee hikes and program eliminations are not presented as one option among several; they are presented as the way things are. Student input in these decisions is limited to a symbolic vote by the UC student regent, who recently demonstrated his courage by refusing to vote either for or against the 32% fee increase. The rest of us don’t have the luxury of abstention, however. We can either passively assent, or we can resist.

Resistance requires action, but this takes many forms, in part (and happily) because no ‘official’ channel of opposition exists. Sure, there are occasional polls whence easily manipulable statistics are derived, public fora which are open to five minutes of politely-worded questions from persons designated in advance, not to mention the ever-present possibility of sending a little email off to the spam folder of your state legislator. The belief that any of these ‘democratic’ processes has any influence on those who decide to raise fees and eliminate jobs is part of the logic of the spectacle, according to which ‘democracy’ is the free selection of preordained options. The university administration, in whom something like a class consciousness can be seen at work, is unified in presenting these false avenues as the only legitimate form of dissent. Protests are quickly denounced as criminal, destructive, and even as terrorism. The administration makes varied (sometimes clumsy, sometimes ingenious) attempts to divide students, even to the point of claiming that they arrest protestors out of a duty to protect the majority of students who are not protesting. That a majority of students are not protesting is certainly true enough, and perhaps regrettable, but it’s unclear why they need administrative protection. Have protestors attacked other students? Or is the administration protecting students’ right to pay an additional 32% in fees?

Only students’ passivity meets the criteria of authorized ‘dissent.’ Only students’ passivity allows the administration to appear benevolent. Every protest action has been met with police presence, persecution or arrests. Only action reveals clearly the lines between students, workers, and those who support them, and the apparatchiki who maintain the status quo with intimidation and force. Only action demonstrates the difference between students who resist and students who resist doing so out of fear, apathy or secret solidarity with the system. There are many who refuse to leave the roulette table lest they lose their chance at winning. But the ball on the wheel is, in fact, a bullet in the cylinder, and for every winner there is a loser. For every college graduate who obtains the golden parachute there is another who succumbs to debt, and there are many more who never make it through the casino doors. Those who cling to student life, refusing to rebel against it and what it represents, are often the most vociferous in their denunciation of the protestors. The protests, loud and indecorous, clash with the sensibilities of those who prefer to be lulled by the easy, false choices of the game, whose ludic nature has long since faded into a dull, compulsory and endless series of selections: red or black, hit or stay, call or fold. Make no mistake, these students’ passivity masks their hostility toward those who refuse to play the game any longer. The same students who now troll internet message boards to insult the protesters–many of whom, despite being portrayed by idiots as spoiled children, have made huge personal sacrifices to fight the callous dicta of administrators and lawmakers–are the same ones who will, in future confrontations, attack their fellow students alongside police. Students in the movement should harbor no illusions about the goodwill of those who claim to be part of the ‘silent majority,’ nor should they underestimate their unpopularity among anti-intellectuals who despise students merely for being what they themselves are not.

My statements here are intended as a call to action. This call is not coercive–from each, according to his (or her) ability. Our personal, economic, and physical situations are as diverse as we are. (I would not recommend, for instance, that an AB 540 student engage in civil disobedience or other actions which could provoke arrest.) Everyone has something to contribute, however. But this call is an injunction; it requires action or its opposite; it requires one to choose a side.

Solidarity is a fragile thing among students, especially in a university system as diverse as California’s. There are many divisive forces at work, besides those created by admins and cops. There are serious doctrinal differences among the protesters, as is to be expected of a movement that includes Marxists, anarchists, liberals, conservatives, queers, European Americans and students of color. No doubt some of these divisions will become permanent; in a fluid situation today’s friend may be tomorrow’s enemy. These fractures don’t mean, necessarily, the failure of the movement. Any movement worthy of the name contains internal tensions. In the end, though, the basic division will remain–between those who internalize oppression, forcing themselves to live within this form of society and to study in an increasingly corporate university, and those who refuse to acquiesce to this damaged life.

In the immortal words of Geddy Lee, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

Towards the end of summer I stumbled upon a gem of a book. Kepa Artaraz’ Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959 documents the reciprocal—often symbiotic—relationship between the Cuban Revolution and the loosely-knit New Left formations that arose in Britain, France and the United States during the late 50s and early 60s. Artaraz outlines a [...]]]>

Towards the end of summer I stumbled upon a gem of a book. Kepa Artaraz’ Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959 documents the reciprocal—often symbiotic—relationship between the Cuban Revolution and the loosely-knit New Left formations that arose in Britain, France and the United States during the late 50s and early 60s. Artaraz outlines a broad, yet coherent view of the New Left as a movement characterized by its rejection of traditional communist parties, too invested in the Soviet Union and its Stalinist orthodoxy, and by its identification of Third-World nationalist and “anti-imperialist” movements as the locus of revolutionary, anticapitalist struggle. Cuba, as the leading example of anti-imperialist nationalism, came to occupy a central, defining position in the New Left’s conception of the Third World. Likewise, the figure of Ernesto “Che” Guevera became synonymous with the notion of the “committed intellectual,” another key concept of the New Left. “Thus, the New Left can be understood to be a metaphor for a form of committed intellectual that belonged to the 1960s, whereas Cuba acted as a specific example of the Third World—a concept crucial to the definition of the New Left” (57).

The documental work that traces this reciprocity of influence is too rich and detailed to summarize here. Two examples, however, are worth mentioning: that of Sartre and the evolution of his understanding of the intellectual, and that of the Cuban journal Pensamiento Crítico, whose pages illustrate the considerable influence the international New Left had on Cuban theorists in the Revolution’s early years.
Artaraz glosses several New Left theories of the intellectual, citing thinkers like Gramsci, Marcuse, and Althusser. Sartre, however, occupies a key position among these thinkers, not least because he maintained close ties to Cuba. Artaraz reveals that Sartre’s attempt to maintain the individual freedom of the intellectual while simultaneously asserting the possibility for the latter’s solidarity with the masses, or universal class, was ultimately acknowledged to be a failure. In the wake of May 68, Sartre took an increasingly anti-intellectual position as he came to believe that the classical intellectual was inherently elitist and incapable of committment to the masses. “From this moment on,” says Artaraz, “the road was open to a denial of one’s own intellectuality” (157). This trajectory from a position of intellectual solidarity with the revolutionary class (however defined) to one of overt disidentification with anything that reeked of elitist or academic erudition, finds its parallel in the events that unfolded during the first decade of revolution in Cuba.

During the exuberant years after the fall of Batista, artistic avant-gardes thought of themselves as the cultural and aesthetic counterpart of the revolutionary avant-garde; groups like Carlos Franqui and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Lunes de Revolución sought to transform art as radically as Castro, Guevara, and assorted barbudos were transforming society and politics. The euphoria of what the artists supposed was unlimited intellectual freedom was soon replaced by growing apprehension as functionaries in Cuba’s nascent state cultural apparatus began to proscribe works as “counter-revolutionary.” The banning of the documentary P.M., the closure of Lunes, and Castro’s famous “Words to the Intellectuals” led, finally, to the outright oppression of dissident artists and intellectuals culminating in the international scandal of the Padilla affair, with its grand spectacle of intellectual self-hatred and self-censure. By this time (1968), Cuba was nearing its rapprochement with the Soviet Union, patching up relations that had soured in the fallout from the October Missile Crisis.

As Artaraz summarizes, “[n]owhere was the transition from a Sartrean model of intellectual to a Marxist one more evident than in Cuba. The Cuban example exemplified a move from the first few years of the Revolution, dominated intellectually by a self-appointed group of young writers in Lunes de Revolución who radicalized at the same pace as the Revolution itself, to one that secured ideological control in the hands of the Party” (167). This movement, exemplified by Sartre’s theoretical shift and by the fossilization of the Cuban cultural sphere in the 60s, can also be seen in the fate of the journal Pensamiento Crítico, which Artaraz outlines admirably well.

Pensamiento Crítico (1967-71) was a publication of the University of Havana’s Philosophy Department, which was then dominated by a group of young scholars who had emerged from the Raúl Cepera Bonilla School of Revolutionary Instruction, formed in the early 60s to prepare lecturers in Marxism. Artaraz explains that these scholars had a “particular affinity with the European New Left” (39). The Department of Philosophy’s initial course offerings on Soviet-style dialectical materialism were soon replaced by a more eclectic “History of Marxist Thought” that included readings from Marx, Lenin, Lukács, Althusser and Sweezy, as well as “third-world” theorists like Frantz Fanon and Andre Gunder Frank. The university philosophers were even able to emerge victorious from an ideological battle with the more dogmatically orthodox Marxists who ran the Schools of Revolutionary Instruction, and who favored Soviet pedagogy over a more historically situated approach to Marxian theory.

In its first years, Pensamiento Crítico maintained an active correspondence with such New Left publications as Partisans, New Left Review, and Monthly Review, to name only the most recognizable. Gradually, though, even this most heterodox of publications was influenced by the growing climate of anti-intellectualism. As early as 1968, calls from the pages of Revolución y cultura to erase the distinction between armed struggle and intellectual struggle were denounced vehemently by many of the same scholars who, from their position in the Department of Philosophy, considered themselves the intellectual vanguard of the Revolution. Even among this group (which included renowned novelist Jesús Díaz), the same kind of guilty conscience that had plagued Sartre was at work. As Artaraz explains, “as in other historical examples of the relationship between power and intellect, the completeness of the intellectual-guerrilla remained paramount in Cuba where a sense of inferiority was pervasive in this generation as they accepted their secondary role to the ‘real vanguard’ embodied in Castro and Guevara” (172).

[As an aside, I should mention that this kind of deference to “real” revolutionary struggle has characterized much of Latin American studies in the North American academy. Scholars have had a decades-long obsession with testimonio as, supposedly, an anti-literary and authentically popular genre, unmediated by intellectual intervention. Recently, John Beverley has attacked Marxist-influenced theorists like Beatriz Sarlo for a “neo-conservative” preference for theoretical analyses of repression over more visceral, first-person accounts. Such attitudes may have their origins in the demise of the New Left: as a displacement of the anti-intellectual sentiments brought about by its failure to adequately account for solidarity (or lack thereof) between the masses and the intelligentsia, and as a reactionary defense of the “third-world” revolutionary subject that the New Left itself came to abandon.]

In the wake of the death of both Guevara and foquismo and the definitive rift between Western Marxists and the Soviet Union caused by the invasion of Prague, Pensamiento Crítico began to publish fewer and fewer contributions from the international New Left, and eventually reverted to an ortho-Marxist stance. The journal was terminated in 1971 and the Philosophy Department was reformed along lines more compatible with Cuba’s renewed ties to the USSR.

In sum, Artaraz traces the New Left’s trajectory as a rebellion against traditional communist parties and the role of pamphleteer generally assigned to intellectuals in these workerist organs. Heterodox theories of intellectual praxis and non-proletarian revolutionary subjects emerged, only to revert to more traditional, Leninist approaches to political engagement. The really novel contribution of Artaraz’ book is to show, quite clearly, how the Cuban experience informed the trajectory of the New Left. As Cuba itself moved to a more orthodox, working-class politics, so did the New Left.

Artaraz’ book illustrates a certain dilemma that exists for leftist intellectuals: how to speak approvingly of the New Left’s opposition to Soviet authoritarianism while simultaneously affirming (albeit tacitly) the return to the worker-centered revolutionary politics that underpinned the whole Soviet project? Artaraz, like many others, looks to recent developments in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America for inspiration. Despite the failure of third-world revolutionary movements and their attendant intellectuels engagés (which, according to Artaraz, “could not have possibly been otherwise” [173]), Latin America, at least, is still looked to as the site of alter-globalization and new proletarian formations. Fernando Ignacio Leiva’s Latin American Neostructuralism gives the lie to this kind of wishful thinking, showing how neostructuralism’s preferability to neoliberal regimes of accumulation depends largely on a discursive erasure of its own coercive violence.

Finally, an understanding of the New Left’s identification with the kind of warrior–intellectual synthesis embodied by Guevara qua third-world revolutionary as an alternative to workerist party politics leaves out the fact that Guevara’s politics, too, were labor-centric. A reading of El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba makes it clear that, for Guevara, social transformation would be catalyzed by work based on moral incentives. Although the New Left distanced itself from party-driven politics, it could never sufficiently distance itself from an understanding of the revolutionary subject as an identity-based (and, ultimately, class-based) grouping. To replace the Third World as the privileged site of emancipatory struggle with, say, the Global South, or the industrial proletariat with service laborers or other non-traditional (domestic or sex) workers, simply misses the point: that the New Left distanced itself from traditional working-class parties, not only to break with Stalinism, but because workerist politics had entered a very real crisis. Since the 60s, if not earlier, organized labor has ceased to be a viable counterweight to capital, even in appearance. What Artaraz describes as the New Left’s reversion to a labor-centric anticapitalism coincided with its decline as a political force. I would argue that what is needed now is not a theory of emancipatory praxis in which labor and third-world marginality somehow coincide. In other words, if we are to revive anything from the 60s, it shouldn’t be the New Left or the belief in the inherently revolutionary character of Latin America. Rather, we might benefit from an examination of a central figure (and one not typically thought of as part of the New Left) in one of the most tumultuous events of that decade, Guy Debord. Likewise, it now seems appropriate to ask whether (abstract) labor can emancipate us from the social bondage it perpetuates.

In a now-familiar series of events, the collapse of the housing finance bubble in 2008 led to what is generally considered the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In California, the recession has meant drastic losses in both state revenue (based primarily on personal income and sales taxes) and local [...]]]>

In a now-familiar series of events, the collapse of the housing finance bubble in 2008 led to what is generally considered the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In California, the recession has meant drastic losses in both state revenue (based primarily on personal income and sales taxes) and local revenue (based partially on property and other taxes). Some municipalities, which have a greater ability to raise user fees or surcharges to partially compensate for the loss of tax revenue, have been able to adjust to the economic downturn better than the state itself, whose tax provisions require voters’ approval in order to be altered. The inflexibility of the state’s tax code and its excessive reliance on personal income tax (due to cuts in property taxes implemented in 1978) have combined to make California extremely vulnerable to a recession.

One of the myths perpetuated by media is that California is a ‘welfare state’ with high taxes and that its budget crisis was precipitated by excessive government spending on education and social services. In fact, California’s personal income tax is below average for industrial states, its per-pupil spending for K-12 education is 47th in the country, funding for the University of California system has decreased by 40% since 1990, and uninsured children are being dropped from state health programs.

Much political hay has been made of California’s budget crisis. The state’s economic problems are not unique, however. They have only been exposed somewhat earlier than in other places, due to the state’s tax structure and legislative gridlock. As the world’s seventh-largest economy goes, so goes the nation.

In reality, California’s problems stem from a much broader trend. Since the late 60s, the global economy has undergone massive transformations, often subsumed under labels like globalization, deindustrialization, or post-Fordism. One interpretation of these transformations is that they respond to an underlying crisis of value, in which the efficiency of productive labor has developed to the point that the profitability of commodity production in general can no longer be sustained. Whatever the case may be, the global economy has grown increasingly dependent on speculative bubbles to create the illusion of growth. As the events of the past year have shown, this sort of fictional economic expansion does not lend itself to stability.

The University of California’s response to the current crisis has largely mirrored that of governments around the world, with an important difference. States can disguise the nature of their ‘stimulus packages’ by printing money or promissory notes to increase cash flow to moribund financial institutions. The real impact of these stimuli is thus deferred, and will appear sometime in the future in the form of higher taxes or runaway inflation. Unlike national governments, a university cannot set monetary policy and must simply adjust to the crisis by firing employees, slashing wages, cutting programs, and raising fees. Just as the UC system has inherited California’s budget crisis, it inherits many of its methods of dealing with decreased revenue.

The University of California has other revenue streams. A direct result of the state of California’s disinvestment in its public universities has been the privatization of higher education. Some campuses, especially the medical centers, receive considerable funding from industry. But corporate funding is no substitute for California’s commitment to providing quality post-secondary education to its residents. It favors certain disciplines (it’s hard to imagine Raytheon funding Berkeley’s English Department) and cannot hope to offset the decline in state support. Likewise, astronomical fee increases for students cannot prevent the inevitable decline in educational quality. Universities in dystopian, neoliberal Texas are already salivating at the thought of attracting top-notch faculty otherwise destined for UC. If the trend of privatization continues, the University of California will be public in name only.

The University of California Office of the President, in concert with the Regents and Governor Schwarzenegger, instead of attempting to reverse these damaging trends, have tried to accelerate them. By portraying a crisis that has been decades in the making and is the result of a policy of progressive defunding of California’s institutions of higher learning as an emergency, the board of Regents granted President Yudof ‘emergency powers’ to impose cuts without normal oversight procedures. UC faculty are now mobilizing against these administrative maneuvers which pay lip service to the ideal of shared governance while laying bare their fundamental fiction. With what remains of their illusory autonomy, professors are beginning to resist privatization, which has gone a bridge too far.

http://ucfacultywalkout.com/

Graduate students, under union protection and not directly affected by the imposed furloughs, are nevertheless organizing in support of the faculty walkout, scheduled for 24 September. We have already begun to see our funding move upstream to administrative units to protect the vested interests of managers in a process that employs accounting arcana to cloak the looting. We have seen the MENE, TEKEL, PERES appear before us as President Yudof promises to perpetuate budget cuts beyond the current academic year. We are forming a coalition, composed of students, faculty, and both union and non-union workers, to oppose the UC crisis administration. This coalition transcends mere class and labor interests and seeks to draw attention to the gaping abyss between economic pragmatism and the needs and desires of people. We must exhibit absolute intransigence in the face of the budgetary logic of the crisis managers.

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Davis Grads: There will be an assembly in Voorhies 126, Monday 9/14 @ 6p

We write because we’re concerned about the destructive cuts that the UC administration has begun to implement in response to declining state funding. Our experience of these cuts is various, as their application is diffuse. Some of us have lost teaching positions, or face steep pay cuts; some of us have lost fellowships; some of us are simply uncertain, and worry we too may soon face like losses; some of us see the wolves at the door. We all share concerns about what this means for our future prospects. The threat to our livelihoods—along with the livelihoods of undergraduates, faculty and staff—is equally real for all of us.

In this threat we face a crisis both real and artificial: real in that the severe recession and the regressive California tax structure has meant an $813 million drop in state funding; artificial in the sense that furloughs and layoffs for faculty and staff, as well as increases to undergraduate tuition and fee hikes—all mandated by UCOP and the Board of Regents—vastly exceed the $813 million shortfall. This is the case even as undisclosed and unrestricted funds remain allocated to revenue-generating wings of the university. The issues are many and complex, but depend upon a principal confusion: The state fiscal crisis and the “state of emergency” declared for UC are not one and the same.

These cuts announce an appalling retreat by the administration from the 1960 California Master Plan and its vision of tuition-free education for all Californians. The state of emergency declared by the Regents signals a drastic re-imagining of the mission of the University, under cover of a real economic crisis. The drive to privatize the University of California is an attempt to shift state costs of education and job training directly onto the shoulders of students and their families.

As graduate students, we are curiously positioned in this state of affairs. Currently staff, undergraduates, and faculty bear the brunt of cuts and job losses. It is clear, however, that as departmental budgets are slashed, faculty and lecturers released, staff laid off, and undergraduate tuition increased while enrollments are decreased, the precarious positions we occupy are being made less way-stations for us than permanent realities for everyone in the UC system. As a result graduate students systemwide have begun organizing in concert with faculty, staff, and undergraduate groups, to protest decisions made by the administration in our absence.

They made the crisis—as political as it is economic. We make the University.

Major collective actions are already being planned for the first day of classes: On September 24, UC faculty are planning a systemwide walkout, in solidarity with 12,000 UPTE represented employees who will strike that day. As TAs we can legally honor UPTE’s picket lines by refusing to teach on that day and by joining all workers, including faculty, in their protest actions. Graduate students at UCB and UCSC have already joined together to support this joint faculty and union action.

Never before have staff, undergraduates, graduate students, lecturers and faculty joined ranks to stand for the rights of all to education and decent treatment in the workplace. The crisis we face is already a major moment in the history of the University of California: The only question is what we make of it.

If you want to be involved, but can’t make this meeting, please send an e-mail to tckreiner@ucdavis.edu or jondettman@ucdavis.edu.

Sincerely,

The Organizing Committee

El texto que sigue fue parte de una respuesta a una de las preguntas de mi examen de candidatura, en la que se me pidió identificar y analizar el poema “El cisne” de Delmira Agustini, situándolo dentro de la tradición literaria de su época. La falta de referencias exactas remite a las circunstancias del [...]]]>

El texto que sigue fue parte de una respuesta a una de las preguntas de mi examen de candidatura, en la que se me pidió identificar y analizar el poema “El cisne” de Delmira Agustini, situándolo dentro de la tradición literaria de su época. La falta de referencias exactas remite a las circunstancias del examen.

***

“El cisne” de Delmira Agustini se considera un texto subversivo respecto a la tradición modernista en la que la poeta uruguaya buscaba insertarse. Agustini es asociada a veces con Gabriela Mistral, Juana de Ibarbourou y Alfonsina Storni, otras poetas que la crítica ha denominado “postmodernas.” Estas poetas, aunque muy diversas entre sí, comparten las circunstancias de ser mujeres en un mundo poético dominado por los hombres y por no encajar, por ésa y otras razones, ni en el modernismo ni en las vanguardias que vinieron después. Agustini, por ejemplo, aunque es, quizás, la más modernista de las poetas mencionadas, no suele incluirse en el canon modernista, en parte porque era muy joven, incluso con respecto a la llamada segunda generación modernistas. Storni, por su parte, aunque era muy leída, no encontró un espacio propio en el mundo literario argentino porque no se conformó con la estética dominante del momento. En aquel entonce prevalecían las ideas de Girondo, Borges y Ocampo. Borges, con su proclividad vanguardista a hacer declaraciones en contra de otros escritores, describió la poesía de Storni como “chillonería de comadrita” por su sentimentalismo, su tono a veces estridente y sus claras posiciones ideológicas. Afortunadamente, no toda la crítica está de acuerdo con Borges, y algunos críticos han insertado a Storni en una tradición muy importante de literatura femenina contestataria con raíces en el famoso “Hombres necios que acusáis…” de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Refiriéndome más específicamente a Delmira Agustini, hubo una tendencia muy marcada a representarla como una niña, tanto por su joven edad como por un cierto paternalismo por parte de la crítica. Estoy seguro de que se podría llevar a cabo una rica investigación psicológica de la crítica de la época; la yuxtaposición de la imagen infantilizada de la poeta niña con sus versos muchas veces eróticos de mucho en qué pensar. Hay que reconocer que fue Emir Rodríguez Monegal uno de los primeros en señalar el constante “aniñamiento” de Agustini. Su análisis de la crítica temprana de la poesía de la uruguaya tiene el mérito de aclarar que la imagen de niña no era tan sólo obra de la crítica, sino que también fue cultivada por la poeta misma, como estrategia de enmascaramiento que le permitía enfrentar tanto un mundo que no la aceptaba como una poeta seria como una madre dominante e inestable. Que Rodríguez Monegal la convierte luego en otro tópico modernista, la mujer fatal, o pitonisa, que se escondía tras una fachada infantil, no reduce la importancia de su hallazgo.

Tras este descubrimiento, Sylvia Molloy ha podido descifrar un importante intercambio de cartas que Agustini sostuvo con Rubén Darío. Siendo gran admiradora del poeta nicaragüense, Agustini le mandó una carta, no como fan, sino como poeta que luchaba con problemas artísticos. Lo que Agustini buscaba eran consejos de un colega mayor sobre cómo sobreponerse a la angustia de fallar (como todo poeta) en el intento de trasladar los sentimientos a la página escrita. Lo que Darío le mandó como respuesta fue una carta en la que le dijo a Agustini que se tranquilizara, y que contenía la condescendiente aseveración que las mujeres poetas no sabían sentir el peso del genio encima de sus hombros. La segunda carta de Agustini es de tono más ligero, aparentemente inocente, pero contiene una burla del paternalismo de Darío. Agustini se describe a sí misma como una niña; eufórica al recibir la respuesta del Maestro, se había sentado con una muñeca y un dulce para leer la carta en su cama, rodeada de ositos de peluche, o algo así. Esto permite ver que había “cuentas pendientes” entre Darío y Agustini (por lo menos desde la perspectiva de ésta última), lo cual hace posible leer algunos de los poemas posteriores de Agustini a contrapelo de la estética modernista. Trataré de señalar algunos ejemplos de esto en “El cisne.”

En cuanto a su forma y su lenguaje, “El cisne” sigue muchas de las convenciones modernistas. Hay una atención al metro y a la sonoridad o musicalidad de los versos. El cisne es un motivo típico, reincorporado a la poesía moderna por los simbolistas. En la primera estrofa aparece una metáfora compuesta que puede considerarse típica también del simbolismo y que enmarca la lectura del resto del poema: ojo/lago/espejo/página. Esta metáfora asocia el lago con la lectura, la palabra escrita y la autocontemplación o autoexpresión. La siguiente estrofa enlaza la última palabra de la primera para construir la metáfora pensamiento/flor/alma/cisne. Así se establece que el lago/la poesía es donde habita el cisne/el espíritu (utilizo “espíritu” aquí en el sentido alemán–Geist–que puede significar tanto alma como pensamiento o intelecto).

Lo que sigue es una transformación parcial del cisne, que aparece con atributos humanos (“pupilas humanas”, “filtros dos veces humanos”, etc.). Esta humanización del cisne ya subvierte los códigos parnasianos, según los cuales el cisne representaría el ideal puro de la belleza, la poesía o la divinidad (como en el mito de Leda). Luego presenciamos la erotización del cisne, ora con el color rojo, ora con el uso de símbolos fálicos (“pico quemante”). Finalmente, el cisne y la voz poética se copulan en una escena que rompe con las representaciones contemplativas de la escena de Leda y el cisne (como la que escribió Darío). En vez de ser un mero observador pasivo, la voz poética es un sujeto activo que participa del sexo. De cierto modo, también el cisne deja de ser el típico representante de la sexualidad masculina que suele verterse en la hembra, pues ése recibe su color y su substancia del deseo femenino. En el código modernista, las mujeres son siempre pasivas, cuando no medio muertas como las enfermizas mujeres prerrafaelitas. “El cisne” invierte la típica relación binaria macho/hembra, otorgándole el papel activo a la mujer.

Asimismo, es posible leer el poema de una manera que trasciende por completo esa relación binaria. Al final del poema, el cisne y la voz poética quedan claramente demarcados por la diferencia de color (“¡El cisne asusta, de rojo, / y yo, de blanca, doy miedo!). Pero si entendemos el cisne de la forma aludida, como una representación del pensamiento o del espíritu de la poeta, es posible ver el poema como una fantasía autoerótica: el espejo del lago (el poema) refleja el sentimiento de la poeta. En este círculo cerrado la voz poética se autosatisface. Aunque tenga que escribir “al margen del lago claro”, o sea, fuera del canon modernista, la poeta es autosuficiente. De este modo, “El cisne” contrapone el autoeroticismo femenino al voyeurismo masculino preferido por los modernistas y, especialmente, por Darío en su poema sobre Leda.

En uno de sus poemas llamado “Nocturno”, Agustini es aun más explícita sobre su intención de subvertir los códigos modernistas. En ese poema, la voz poética asume la corporalidad de un cisne y rompe violentamente en un típico tableau modernista: el lago cristalino bajo las estrellas. El cisne cruza el lago, manchando su pureza con un rastro de sangre–imputando de nuevo el color rojo al cisne, normalmente níveo–que contamina la puesta en escena tranquila.

El cisne

Pupila azul de mi parque
es el sensitivo espejo
de un lago claro, muy claro!…
Tan claro que a veces creo
que en su cristalina página
se imprime mi pensamiento.

Flor del aire, flor del agua,
alma del lago es un cisne
con dos pupilas humanas,
grave y gentil como un príncipe;
alas lirio, remos rosa…
Pico en fuego, cuello triste
y orgulloso, y la blancura
y la suavidad de un cisne…

El ave cándida y grave
tiene un maléfico encanto;
clavel vestido de lirio,
trasciende a llama y milagro!…
Sus alas blancas me turban
como dos cálidos brazos;

ningunos labios ardieron
como su pico en mis manos;
ninguna testa ha caído
tan lánguida en mi regazo;

ninguna carne tan viva
he padecido o gozado:
viborean en sus venas
filtros dos veces humanos!

Del rubí de la lujuria
su testa está coronada:
y va arrastrando el deseo
en una cauda rosada…

Agua le doy en mis manos
y él parece beber fuego,
y yo parezco ofrecerle
todo el vaso de mi cuerpo…

Y vive tanto en mis sueños,
Y ahonda tanto en mi carne,
que a veces pienso si el cisne
con sus dos alas fugaces,

sus raros ojos humanos
y el rojo pico quemante,
es solo un cosne en mi lago
o es en mi vida un amante…

Al margen del lago claro
yo le interrogo en silencio…
y el silencio es una rosa
sobre su pico de fuego…
Pero en su carne me habla
y yo en mi carne le entiendo.

-A veces ¡toda! soy alma;
y a veces ¡toda! soy cuerpo.-
Hunde el pico en mi regazo
y se queda como muerto…

Y en la cristalina página,
en el sensitivo espejo
del algo que algunas veces
refleja mi pensamiento,
¡el cisne asusta, de rojo,
y yo, de blanca, doy miedo!

Nocturno

Engarzado en la noche el lago de tu alma,
diríase una tela de cristal y de calma
tramada por las grandes arañas del desvelo.

Nata de agua lustral en vaso de alabastros;
espejo de pureza que abrillantas los astros
y reflejas la cima de la Vida en un cielo…
Yo soy el cisne errante de los sangrientos rastros,
voy manchando los lagos y remontando el vuelo.