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The Anarchist Position

From a new biography by robert Barsky of Noam Chomsky and his admiration for Orwell's Homage to Catalonia:

When Chomsky was in his teens he read Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” “which,” he told me in 1995, “struck me as amusing but pretty obvious”; but in his later teens he read “Homage to Catalonia” “and thought it outstanding (though he overdid the POUM role I felt, not surprisingly given where he was); it confirmed beliefs I already had about the Spanish Civil War.” “Homage to Catalonia,” Orwell’s description of the Spanish conflict, which he wrote after completing a stint as an active member of the POUM militia, is still a book to which people (including Chomsky) who are interested in successful socialist or anarchist movements refer, because it gives an accurate and moving description of a working libertarian society. The “beliefs” that it “confirmed” for the teenaged Chomsky were related to his growing conviction that libertarian societies could function and meet the needs of the individual and the collective.

There were three left-wing groups active on the scene in Barcelona during the 1930s: the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or POUM; the socialist PSUC (Partido Socialista Unificado de Catalunya), which was dominated by Stalinists; and the anarchist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores-Federacion Anarquista Iberica), which honored Rudolf Rocker as “their teacher” on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Orwell joined the POUM militia at the end of 1936 as a means of entering Spain to write newspaper articles. His description, in “Homage to Catalonia,” of the POUM line sets up an oversimplified but provocative relationship between bourgeois democracy, fascism, and capitalism:

Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers’ control. If you set up any less goal than this, you will either hand the victory to Franco, or, at best, let in Fascism by the back door. The war and the revolution are inseparable.

Orwell maintains that revolution is the only way to remove from power the oppressive business-based ruling class of the type that has dominated the West since World War II. This concept is a difficult one to grasp for those of us who have been programmed, in large measure by the mainstream press, to think that battles must involve two opposing forces — one good and one evil. World War II is often portrayed this way: the Allied side is taken to represent freedom and democracy, while fascism and Nazism are considered synonymous with totalitarian oppression. Chomsky knew early on that there were other ways to conceive of contemporary political structures. He tended to lean towards the left-libertarian interpretation of events, and concluded that neither side deserved the support of those interested in a “good society.” How “good” is the society that drops atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, or reduces German towns to rubble? Isn’t there an alternative?

This subject is still hotly debated, even among members of the libertarian left. Norman Epstein, who has been active in leftist movements for many years and who is otherwise generally sympathetic to Chomsky’s position, here dissents by taking exception to Orwell’s paraphrasing of the POUM line. He emphasizes that “fascism is not simply another name for capitalism. It is a form, and a particularly brutal one, which capitalism takes under certain historical circumstances (including today in many third world countries under the sponsorship of U.S. capital) which is different from bourgeois democracy. Someone like Chomsky is allowed to function under bourgeois democracy but not under fascism.” But we must recognize the similarities between a fascist agenda and that of the so-called democratic West if we are to understand where Chomsky is coming from in his political works, and to do so we have to engage with the anarchist position that he had begun to develop in his youth.

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Daido Moriyama Speaks

Reading is a Positive Activity

 

From 3%, an excerpt from Vilas-Matas Montao's Malady:

April 21

“I’m absolutely convinced that publishing being in the hands of businessmen is just a passing episode.”

—-Carlos Barral

Every year’s the same at around this time. The number of illiterates in this country is on the increase, but this seems to be unimportant, there are more and more Book Days and it’s up to me to explain why we have to read. Yesterday, on the radio, I was invited to explain to listeners in two seconds why they should be encouraged to read. For them literally to be encouraged, I replied. I was going to add: and at the same time to achieve the spirit’s salvation, Musil’s ideal. I didn’t say this, it struck me as excessive and also I’d have overstepped the two-second limit.

I am no longer so rigidly literature-sick. Or, rather, I begin not to understand why I must advocate reading. Let every illiterate in this country do what he wants, of course. Besides, I hate virtually the whole of humanity and I spend the day planting mental bombs against all those businessmen who publish books, those departmental managers, market directors on the wire, and economics graduates. I plant mental bombs against them and against their disciplined followers and the rest of the world in general. So I wonder why I should lend them a hand and recommend that they read books if I only wish them ill, if I only want their stupidity to grow and for them to crash, once and for all, as they travel on the train of ignorance that we all pay for, but that one day they will pay a high price for, falling into the bottomless pit of failure, taking themselves elsewhere, into a different industry. What’s more, I loathe them so much that I’d be delighted if they were obliged to read, if a perfidious decree appeared from somewhere, a drastic order to become acquainted with books, and suddenly this country’s cities turned into libraries of forced, chaotic, daft intellectual activity.

In this way the failure of these haughty illiterates’ lives would be twofold. On the one hand there would be the already in itself resounding failure of all life, to which would be added that brought about by contact with literates—nobody doubts by now that to be a writer is to tail—not to mention with books, those astonishing “extensions of memory and imagination” that we take to beaches and cause to fail, not by reading them but by burying them in an unconscious great book of sand, very different from Borges’s.

This would be my revenge for the calls to advocacy that always arrive at around this time and for the constant doubts that plague me and drive me wretchedly to say that no one can be advised to read, but also drive me to think that really, however much I don’t like it, I should advocate reading, albeit only in a stylized way by saying, for example, that there’s nothing to say, except that, without literature, life has no meaning. But, of course, I can only convince those who read of this. And the fact is many of those who read believe it’s an obligation, and they are almost more dangerous than Pico’s moles because they convey an obvious sensation of boredom, they seem not to have read that memorable statement by Montaigne: “I do nothing without joy.”

With this statement, Montaigne wished to indicate that the concept of obligatory reading is a false one. If he came across a difficult passage in a book, Montaigne left it. The point is he saw in reading a form of happiness. Like Borges, who said that a book must not require effort. Borges agreed with Montaigne, though he loved to quote Emerson, who contradicted Montaigne and, in a great essay about books, asserted that a library is a kind of magic box. The best spirits of humanity are imprisoned in this box by an enchanter, and they’re waiting for our word to come out of their silence. We have to open the book, then they awake.

That said—I wish to distance myself from any new temptation to advocacy—the company of literature is dangerous, so much so that I’m really not sure I should applaud people I value for reading a lot and getting so involved in books; you see, I wish them well, and anyone who has read Kafka, for example, is perfectly aware “how much exces­sive anxiety for nothing” (to quote Pessoa) there is in literature.

As Magris says: “Kafka was perfectly aware that literature distanced him from the territory of death and enabled him to understand life, but leaving him outside. Just as it enabled him to understand the greatness of his Jewish father, a model man, but did not exactly enable him to be like him.”

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it leaves us outside it. It’s hard, but sometimes it’s the best thing that can happen to us. Reading and writing search for life, but they can lose it precisely because they’re focused entirely on life and on the search for it.

It may be the melancholy of the evening in which I am writing, but the truth is I’m talking about an inextricable knot of good and evil, of light and shade inherent in reading and literature. All this is hard, why fool ourselves? It’s a difficulty that, according to Gombrowicz, good literature has as the product of an instinct to sharpen spiritual life. There are times when I would recommend reading to my worst enemies.

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it tells us what can be, but also what could have been. There is nothing sometimes farther away from reality than literature, which is constantly reminding us that life is like this and the world has been organized like that, but it could be otherwise. There is nothing more subversive than literature, which aims to return us to true life by exposing what real life and History smother. Magris knows this very well, he is deeply interested in what could have been, had History or human life taken another course. Anyone who’s interested in this is interested in reading. This is not advocacy. After all, there are times—like now—when I wouldn’t recommend reading even to Pico’s moles, even to my worst enemies.

And in Argentina

From Jacobin:

“One of Milei’s biggest adversaries has been journalism,” Gonzalo Sarasqueta, the director of political communications studies at Spain’s Universidad Camilo José Cela, who studies populist rhetoric in Latin America, told Jacobin. The other has been the state. “What’s better than killing two birds with one stone, taking apart the media and attacking the state?” he said of Milei’s dismantling of Télam.

The attacks against Télam fit into a broader political communication strategy of defining the enemy and setting the narrative, Sarasqueta said. “He’s fighting against singer Lali Espósito much as Donald Trump fights against Taylor Swift.”

Since Milei took office, the impact on media has been notable. Argentina’s ranking in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index has dropped by twenty-six places. In December, journalist and feminist Luciana Peker left the country after feeling threatened in Argentina. Milei has regularly demonized not only progressive and state-run media but also private outlets like Clarín and La Nación — preferring instead to use social media to broadcast his message, Sarasqueta explained.

“All the media does for him is distort the message, and this is a very Gramscian interpretation,” Sarasqueta said. “They are part of the cultural battle, and they defend interests that are against the interests of the majority of the people, of the people that Javier Milei defends.”

Télam employees worried about the long-term impacts of this strategy on the country’s press ecosystem.

Eliaschev, the Télam editor and trade unionist, noted that Télam was a key way of transmitting information from the capital to Argentina’s provinces, economically impoverished regions that overwhelmingly voted for Milei. The death by a thousand cuts strategy meant that these regions were the first to lose access to the news.

Nonetheless he remained hopeful that under a new government, Télam might be able to come back from its embers.

“The important thing to highlight is that the government did not manage to close the Télam agency, but they had to transform it,” he said. “Let’s say they managed to shrink it, but there is still a public news agency.” That, at least, is a reprieve.

National Gallery of Art July 17, 2024

We went to the National Gallery on my birthday and I got to take detail shots of larger paintings from 500 years ago. It confirmed in my brain that things really haven't changed much. Check these out.

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-The Museum

Decide, What do you Want?

Funky Irishman writes in the comments section of an editorial by Jamelle Bouie on the Roberts court on July 12, 2024:

If we could "fix" Dred Scott, then we can also fix this.

It is not a matter of what the chief justice and his cabal have done, but the question is now what are we going to do about it?

We cannot do anything unless we have a clear Liberal majority, for the House, the Senate and of course control of the White House. That is doable, and then once we have those three, we need to abandon the filibuster of the Senate in it's current form.

Then once we have established that we MUST either impeach those radical and extreme conservative justices for either abuse of power or for just lying under oath to get the appointment in the first place, and/or expand the court. (as well as expand the Congress which hasn't been done in a century).

It all starts with you the voter, and a simple question: DO you want freedom, rights and Democracy or conservative rule where you have none of the above, with loss of voting ever again in a free and fair election?

Decide.

Interview with Myself ...

Here is an interview and review of some of my jazz photography by the Jazz Journalist Association. If you enjoy photographers walking you through the context and why they were originally taken and included in the photo walk through this and the other interviews in this series are great informative views, I promise.

When We Were in Lima

In Lima we spent plenty of good times with Rafael and Ceci. I did not realize when I took these photos of Spot that he was so photogenic-almost model dog type. Anyway, look at these yourself:

Copyright-Vallejo Nocturno 2024