Notes from the Resistance

by

We are on the side of the species’ eternal Life, our enemies are on the side of eternal Death. And Life will swallow them up, by synthesizing the two terms of the antithesis within the reality of communism.–Amadeo Bordiga
 

I

The night Trump was elected, there were celebrations on the streets of Juba, South Sudan.

Orson, a thirty year-old State Department employee, groped for a word from the nauseous pit of his groin–a groin inhabited by a succubus of pure fear–and found (implausibly, for an unconscious child of the Sokal Affair) “lumpen.”

Lumpen: a Marxist word, more or less.
 

Read more

The Next President

by

Senator Schumer’s teary response on Saturday to Trump’s modified Muslim ban wasn’t namby-pamby. It felt right. Yet Bernard Avishai wasn’t wrong to point out in a piece posted last week at Talking Points Memo that Schumer (and Nancy Pelosi) aren’t made for this moment. Avishai argues Democrats must coalesce fast around figures who can appeal to voters who once supported the party.

The Democratic party, in other words, must have a clear message that speaks to the anxieties of the traditional Democratic voters it lost. And the message needs a tough, plausible messenger: a leader, or small number of united leaders, who embody—in their persons, their logic, their stories, and their demonstrated courage—integrity that advances what they are saying. If the message is right, and the messenger is authentic, you get a winning charisma.

Read more

“Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself”

by

The crew at Antidote magazine have translated this scary piece by European reporters Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus on Trump’s Big Data consultants, Cambridge Analytica.  First is re-blogging it below (though, per Antidote, we’ll take their version down if the piece, which was originally published in a mainline Swiss magazine, gets an authorized translation/launch in America). Please don’t take this repost as an endorsement of the authors’ implicit claims about the effectiveness of Big Data-mining and “psychometrics.” But we should all be alive to what’s being cooked up by numbers scum in Trump’s orbit.

Read more

The Origin of the Species

by

Emory University’s nosite.org has reblogged “Origin of the Species”—first posted here in mid-August, 2016.[1] Author Mark Dudzic wrote a brief intro for nosite, which includes post-election reflections.  You can read his update below (along with his original post and an appended editor’s note).

Read more

Into the Summer Sea

by

Bob Dylan’s nod in his Nobel prize acceptance speech to Shakespeare was in tune with Charles O’Brien’s musing on the dailiness of genius in his pre-millennial take-down of George Steiner (which is posted below).

I know I just dropped too many names on you, but please allow me to introduce one more. I was reminded of O’Brien’s music again recently when I came across a Steiner quote in the introduction to a reprint of an early work by the Marxist polymath Max Raphael. The intro’s author cited this bit of Steiner in wannabe mandarin mode–”not only the humanities, but humane and critical intelligence itself resides in the always threatened keeping of the very few”–to sum up assumptions about Mind that Raphael instinctively resisted. Like Raphael back in the day, O’Brien has always been repelled by the yen to equate humanism with prerogatives of “traditionally delimited professional circles.”

Read more

Let it Snow

by

thumbnail_Snowflakes

“We’re treating these [protesting] adolescents and Millennials like precious snowflakes,” Conway told host Sean Hannity. (11/17/2016)

Censoriousness & Solidarity

by
Laurie Stone, author most recently of My Life as an Animal, Stories (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press) thinks through her October encounter with a censorious host at Columbia University’s radio station.

Read more

Misdirected Fire

by

In the wake of the Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat in the presidential election, two Democratic operatives, Stanley B. Greenberg and Anna Greenberg, turn their attention to President Obama and ask the question “Was Obama Bad for the Democrats” (NY Times, Op Ed, December 23).  Their answer is a qualified yes.  Before I bear down on the Greenbergs for their insinuation that the Democrats went down to defeat on the presidential and congressional levels because of Obama, let me lay out their argument with editorial interruption.

Read more

Max Raphael: A Creative Life in Struggle

by

Some fight because they hate what confronts them, others because they have taken the measure of their lives and wish to give meaning to their existence. The latter are likely to struggle more persistently.  Max Raphael was a very pure example of the second type.

That’s the opening passage of John Berger’s tribute to Raphael whose Marxist scholarship and theories on the practice of art made him, in Berger’s estimation, the “greatest mind yet applied to the subject.”

Read more

Survival Pending Revolution

by

In a rare moment of stranger-than-fiction levity during jury selection in the 1970 conspiracy trial of Black Panther Party leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, defense attorney Charles Garry asked a prospective juror, “Can you take the judge’s instruction that my defendants here, Ms. Huggins and Mr. Seale, are innocent until proven guilty?”

The prospective juror replied, “I can.”

“So you know they are members of the Black Panther Party?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So what do you think of that? Do you think you can be a fair and impartial juror?”

“Well, I guess they are no different from any other motorcycle gang.”

As the courtroom erupted in laughter, the frustrated judge shouted, “Just get him out of here!”

Read more

Tale of the Tapes

by

My father, Reginald W. Major, died just over three years ago. While his passing has left me, his baby girl, with a tremendous void, l recently discovered a collection of audio tapes that we recorded over a period of years. I have found myself able to listen to him once again, getting his wisdom on political struggle, his honesty about his own shortcomings, on how he grew character and understanding, on his long view of history from the 1930’s to 2011.

Read more

Draining the Swamp

by

Remarks of Walter M. Shaub, Jr., Director, U.S. Office of Government Ethics, as prepared for delivery at 4:00 p.m. on January 11, 2017, at the Brookings Institution.

I wish circumstances were different and I didn’t feel the need to make public remarks today. You don’t hear about ethics when things are going well. You’ve been hearing a lot about ethics lately.

I need to talk about ethics today because the plan the President-elect has announced doesn’t meet the standards that his nominees are meeting and that every President in the past four decades has met.

Read more

Strategy Memo

by

OK, Meryl Streep is a wonderful actress, a very smart and eloquent lady. But I think her Golden Globes statement, while striking and eloquent, was a strategic mistake. And here’s why – because it puts style over substance, and not everybody agrees with putting down Trump’s style.

Read more

Bibliotherapy

by

Angry Young Men—today the concept in its simplicity seems quaint, almost charming. Among millennials, there’s an underground subset of young males wrecked amidst the storms of self-creation and signification. The internet is now nearly the exclusive domain of social and cultural life. For many born without memory of life before the web, there burn weird heart-fires of grievance and resentment, imbued with the alien green hue of nocturnal computer monitors. How to forge an identity out of an endless succession of ironic poses?

Read more