To understand modern economics and money is to understand its relation to archaic [pre-modern] economics and money. But such a historical, and because historical also philosophical, approach to money is precisely what is lacking in the entire range of modern economic theory.
Excerpted from Life Against Death, 1959, "Filthy Lucre," pages 242-244.
I love how they're fighting the power with a Soul Train line dance. Like they're showing off their ultimate crossover dance moves and, stunned, the authorities have no idea what to do?! Ronald Isley, lead singer, is very frustrated because they tell him he plays his music too loud, like he's a teenager angry because his parents are trying to shut his music down. And, plus, he's pissed about "all the other bullshit going round." It's not the agitprop of the Public Enemy version but it's hotter, funkier, more undeniable as pure musical force. And it reached number 4 on the Hot 100 and was very big, naturally, in the discos. Thank God It's Disco Friday.
"It was not Karl Marx but liberal economists themselves [Adam Smith et al] who had to introduce the "communistic fiction," that is, to assume that there is one interest of society as a whole which with "an invisible hand" guides the behavior of men and produces the harmony of their conflicting interests. The difference between Marx and his forerunners was that he took the reality of the conflict [capital vs labor], as it presented itself in the society of his time , as seriously as the hypothetical fiction of harmony."
Who were these actors who ruled by their exemplary actions before the mass conformity of behavioral statistics?
"Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination towards despotism, be this despotism of a person or of majority rule; and although statistics, that is, the mathematical treatment of reality, was unknown prior to the modern age; the social phenomena which make such treatment possible-- great numbers, accounting for conformism, behaviorism, and automatism in human affairs-- were precisely those traits, which Greek self-understanding, distinguished the Persian civilization from their own."
And to which despotism the Greeks countered with democratic action in a system of direct democracy in Athens, 508-322 bce. Although, notably, the democratic response to Persian despotism was more oligarchic (rule by the few) than democratic (rule by the many). Citizenship in Athens, even in its heyday, represented 20% of the population at most; all men, no women, or slaves (as much as 1/3 of the population), nor even any non-Greeks.
Still, the democratic promise of concepts like citizenship and popular rule empowered Greeks and resonated with the Romans enough that they tried to extend these democratic principles in a Republic that lasted for four centuries. And democratic rights remain popular to this day, you can be sure, wherever dictators and corrupt oligarchs rule; generally, wherever basic human rights are absent, at the very least. Democratic ideas have inspired many reforms and revolutions since the 17th century, defining the modern age as much as science or technology.
Quotes from The Human Condition (1959)
Trump is turning to his 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort to advise him in 2024.
An investigation by a Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee into the links between Trump’s campaign and Russia determined that Manafort had shared polling data from the Trump camp with his partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, who the senators assessed was a Russian operative.
Translation: A vote for Trump is a vote for treason, a betrayal of America and selling out the country to Putin, again.
HCR, Letters from an American, March 18, 2024
And more on all that: Brian Buetler Trump Did Collusion
"Jim Jones," traditional song, 19th century; Jim Jones, found guilty by a jury in England, sent to Australia to toil in a penal colony at Botany Bay, vows revenge against the "tyrants" and "floggers" that put him in "chains."
Now it's day and night and the irons clangAnd like poor galley slavesWe toil and toil, and when we dieMust fill dishonored gravesAnd it's by and by I'll slip my chainsWell, into the bush I'll goAnd I'll join the bravest rankers thereJack Donohue and coAnd some dark night, when everythingIs silent in the townI'll shoot those tyrants one and allI'll gun the floggers downOh, I'll give the land a little shockRemember what I sayAnd they'll yet regret they've sent Jim JonesIn chains to Botany Bay
Bob Dylan "Jim Jones" (appears on Good as I Been to You, 1992)
R.B. Greaves "Always Something There To Remind Me" (1969)
“His hatred for his opponents was both stronger and less abstract than was his love for his people. That was (and remains) a distinguishing mark of the mind of every extreme nationalist.”-- Historian John Lukacs
“The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction,”-- Nazi Joseph Goebbels
Adam Gopnik on Timothy W. Ryback's Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power in 1932:
"Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader."
Of course, this is not fine. But the nation’s No. 1 problem is that millions view it as acceptable, if not desirable."
David Corn, Our Land, Mother Jones
This about covers the grinding madness of the moment with a few of my own additional dire observations to add to the fire.
While the "millions" are clearly not a majority of Americans (he's lost popular national elections twice now; thankfully) the millions includes one of the two major political parties, a commanding majority of a stolen SCOTUS, a compliant news media that thrives on his Reality TV dumpster fire theatrics, a number of red state legislatures ready to do whatever it takes to install their Fuehrer and, apparently, significant numbers of law enforcement.
(How significant? Will police unions endorse the most criminal, treasonous, violently fascist candidate for POTUS in history, again?)
This alliance is not just mystifying but terrifying. Pax Americana, with the assistance of hostile foreign dictators, is under assault from within: Racists, corporate monopolists, gun crazy nativists, and Christian nationalist know-nothings want to revive the violent white supremacy of the slave Confederacy. We are not just experiencing deaths of despair and declining lifespans in America but a significant chunk of the country clings to a fascist national death-wish.
Biden should win in a landslide, a total rejection of America's violent bigot past, re-committing the country to multicultural democracy and sustainable growth economics and a better future for all workers and all Americans.
The differences between the parties has never been starker, more clear. But this is what we're up against. See you in November.
I'm not even sure this is for real. Maybe AI? Exquisite musicianship. It's almost too perfect; too much rhythm and melody, too much musicality. Acoustic Spanish guitar player and some snappy slap rhythms as irresistible magnetic force. John H. Clarke. On Bandcamp. Will not swear by anything else they've done but this is a diamond; witty, wistful, playful, sad but irrepressibly cheerful and winning. And, full disclosure, way back when I liked a lot a Gipsy Kings album. Strummy melodic guitar and catchy tempos; Voila!
Pop homage to minimalism. The emotional sympathy of a safe space in a gritty crime drama; city lights and computer screens sputtering on and off.
For my purposes, just to establish general parameters, let’s say a rock novel is any work of fiction with popular music themes from the Rock era as a big part of the story—and I mean Rock era in the most expansive sense, Elvis to The Chronic, Blues to Krautrock, R&B to Punk, Jazz to World Music, Hiphop to Taylor Swift. It can be about musicians on stages or in shabby practice spaces, fans at festivals, record geeks at record stores, music producers in the studio, dancers at danceclubs, collector obsessives and their private collections and playlists, music peoples anywhere popular music is made and/or shared and/or consumed. No doubt there are a ridiculous number of these kind of novels I haven’t found or read yet. But Whitehead’s second novel, JHD, from almost the last century, is a clever spin on the rock novel and if you too like these kinds of stories I’m suggesting you might have some fun with it.
For starters, as relevant learning experience, Whitehead wrote a lot of rock criticism for the Village Voice and elsewhere before he started writing novels in the late ‘90s. (And, I should note, I know he is now a big Pulitzer winning novelist but actually all I know so far of his novels are his first, The Intuitionist, which was not what I’d call a rock novel, and this one, JHD, his second.)
The protagonist of JHD is a freelance magazine writer, J. Sutter, African American, who along with all his hustling freelancer pals (mostly not Black) write about music, artist profiles, records, concerts or what have you, or have in the past anyhow, and now, flush with hopes of a new freelancing gravy train at the dawn of the internet, branched out to writing gigs about anything the publishing industry is willing to pay for and promote, a civic event in the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia, for instance; a folklore festival launching a new postage stamp and celebrating the origins and myth and music and Merch of John Henry the “steel-driving man.”
The main event and best parts of JHD are J. and his scuffling freelancing journalist comrades, Dave Brown, Frenchie, One-Eye, etc, all down from NYC for the event, strategically scarfing freebie dinners, pontificating about the art of the artist profile, plotting schemes against the tyranny of their imperious publicist overlord, Lucien, and the publishing industry upon which they all precariously depend, and endlessly wisecracking about the perks and perils of the freelance writing game they're trying to hang onto. Whether press gang junkets this size, five-ten people, all from NYC, caravanning to Podunk West Virginia for pop culture stuff like the JHD festival really happens I don’t know but Whitehead’s fictionalizing the various banter that might ensue in such a scenario is goofy clever and at times hilarious.
As the story begins, arriving in small Talcott, West Virginia, J., a “junketeer,” has already lived entirely off freelance gigs, or on the publisher’s tab, cheap hotels, promotional buffets and party food, no out-of-pocket expenses, for a while and is falling into a sort of death march challenge, almost against his will, to set the record for living entirely off freelance press junkets, and, in his mind anyway defeat the freelance publishing writing machine. He is that strong, together, and focused he imagines, or wants to be, even though he experiences a near death event on his first night in town, choking on some prime rib, and the legendary “junketeer” record holder infamous to all the freelancers, making it not quite a full year, is most notorious as another hotshot writer who flied too close to the sun and ended up a heap of ash. An utter burnout and loser. So it is undoubtably not a healthy lifestyle choice but it pays you to write and how long can you endure this kind of crash course research and writing on deadlines rigor is the question? Maybe it's like a journalism boot camp that can go on forever; or in more heroic terms, in their dreams, like a doctor's residency training. Regardless, for Sutter it is an inescapable challenge.
And coincidentally a challenge not entirely unlike how long John Henry, African American laborer, could swing his hammer against a steam-drill-- i.e., against the machine. John Henry knew he was doomed to lose in the end, the machine always wins, but battles on because he can, as the ultimate test of his awesome strength as a worker and the pride he takes in that strength.
The stakes for J. and his freelancing pals are more prosaic, a smaller tragedy than the plight of labor in American history, of course, but also funnier. In one hilarious set piece the freelancers are sitting around discussing the definition and/or evolution of the feature puff piece. Capsulizing every variation on the puff piece feature written over the years into a bullseye formula. Still puzzling in the end over whether there are really three or four variations on the original form or are all the differences mere gimmicky twists on the original? In another, old timer Dave Brown goes on a long vivid druggy hippie soliloquy about the Rolling Stones at Altamont, the whole thing culminating in the death of a Black concert goer lying on the ground, murdered by Hell’s Angels hired as security for the event by the Stones, the tragic symbolism of the death, another Black martyr to the machine, a John Henry to the Rock era, near unbearable in Dave's poignant telling; or until one of the other freelancer’s breaks the ice and quips, “Yeah, I don’t know about the Stones, Dave. I’m more a Hootie and the Blowfish kind of guy, myself.”
Outside J. and Dave, most the press gang go by nicknames; One-Eye, in particular, is obsessed with seeing The List, publicist Lucien’s list of writers who are to be admitted free to promotional events, free food and drinks on the tab of the publishers, crucial to the livelihood of the freelancers, and ropes J. into a mad caper to enter Lucien’s hotel room while he’s out and find The List. To what end it isn’t clear other than One-Eye somehow thinks it will compromise or undermine Lucien’s tyranny over the freelancer’s lives. In the freelance writing-game The List, One-Eye seems to think, is the key to the machine.
There are other good parts to the novel. Whitehead imagines the hard laboring historical life of John Henry the steel driving man. And he imagines the existence of an itinerant blues performer who breaks through or at least documents on record an early version of The Ballard of John Henry. His historical accounts are convincing, the crude recording circumstances of the 1930s, gritty with blood and sweat and alcohol; a nice contrast with the kitschy folkloric vibe of the JHD festival in West Virginia but they are still side roads.
There is little dispute that the historical John Henry was an African American man, a big and strong railroad worker, but his actual life, whether in West Virginia or Alabama or elsewhere is still debated by historians. Most think the song originated out of late 19th century work songs, “hammer songs,” sang by incarcerated former slaves around the refrain “with my hammer,” and it is assumed the ballad of John Henry “the steel driving man” was generated out of that experience. The first recordings of the Ballad of John Henry or variations on the story appear in the 1920s and 1930s. In some versions he’s a railroad worker, in some a coal miner; in some Black, some white. There are many Blues and Country versions; even classical composer Aaron Copland comes up with a version of the song. On the Williamson Brothers and Curry version, from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, “Gonna Die with My Hammer in My Hand” (1927), West Virginian hillbillies tell the story of the great “steel-driving man’s” demise. Man against machine. John Henry knows he can’t win but fights to the death anyway. He’s the proud industrial worker, Black or white, as tragic hero.
There are other curious sub-stories in JHD as well. The old Harlem NY-er, also Black, a former railroad worker, who amasses one of the largest collections of folklore artifacts on John Henry, opening his home as a museum curiosity to rare and random gawkers, and his alienated daughter, Pamela, who after his death mulls over giving her dad’s collection to Talcott, WV for the JHD festival and a permanent historical exhibit. Even Whitehead’s cynical riffing on J.’s sexual affair with a publicist, Monica, who frequents, as does he, the arts world cocktail party scene back in NYC resonates with a weary sympathy for all the inescapably jaded routines of life. Both display good storytelling chops.
A rare misstep might be the gun-toting malcontent that menaces the festival. This thread feels way underdeveloped, as if Whitehead were saying, skip the details, wherever Black history or culture is being celebrated you can count on somewhere lurking nearby some violent nutjob menacing the achievement. He’s probably right but it would have been helpful to make the white supremacy, undoubtably what we’re talking about here, more legible and also might have added to the missing drama in the JHD festival parts of his story. Also, Whitehead’s allusions to ghosts, like in The Intuitionist, don’t do much for me. This is perhaps concerning because I gather the ghost stuff figures prominently in his later Pulitzer novels but I’m going to hope he eventually figures out how to make it work better than he does here.
Whatever its few shortcomings, however, I maintain John Henry Days is over all a very good rock novel about freelance journalism, John Henry folklore and music, American myth and race and the struggle of man against machines, and also in parts very funny.
"Gonna Die with My Hammer in My Hand," Williamson Brothers & Curry (1927)
Some good history on Gilded Age precedents for corporate rule today and another stark testament to the clear choice in November:
"Republicans want to extend the Trump tax cuts after their scheduled end in 2025, a plan that would cost $4 trillion over a decade even without the deeper cuts to the corporate tax rate Trump has called for if he is reelected. [And gallingly complain about deficits!] Biden has called for preserving the 2017 tax cuts only for those who make less than $400,000 a year and permitting the rest to expire. He has also called for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, which would generate more than $2 trillion."
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, March 1, 2024
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959):
The primal act of the human ego is a negative one-- not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child's body from the mother's body.
Objective dependence on parental care creates in the child a passive, dependent need to be loved, which is just the opposite of their dream of narcissistic omnipotence. Thus the institution of the family shapes human desire in two contradictory directions [need to be loved and narcissistic omnipotence], and it is the dialectic generated by this contradiction which produces what Freud calls the conflict of ambivalence.
The aim of psychoanalysis-- still unfulfilled, and still only half-conscious-- is to return our souls [sublimations] to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation.
*No doubt, Freud was a male chauvinist and often comically exaggerates win-lose binary sexual conflicts but come on psychoanalysis is the Moby Dick of modernist intellectual systems. A colossus inspiring great work in the arts, literature, philosophy and history, even some great work he might not have agreed with. Brown believes in the unity of opposites; I'm still not sure Freud really does.