Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Richard Serra (1938 - 2024)

Richard Serra at the Detroit Institute of Arts, October 28, 1982. (Photo: Vince Carducci)

RIP sculptor Richard Serra. One of my first pieces as an art writer was on Serra, who had come to the Detroit Institute of Art in the 1980s after they had acquired one of his sculptures, Mozarabe, currently installed in the sculpture garden at College for Creative Studies. I got the assignment and was working at my day job when I got a call at my desk. The voice on the other end said, "This is Richard Serra. Do I know you?" I told him that I was assigned to cover his lecture for Detroit Focus Quarterly, the publication of the nonprofit arts space I was associated with. We agreed to meet at the museum before his lecture where we had a conversation. He invited me to be his guest at the patron dinner being held in conjunction with the lecture. I hadn't been to one of those things at that point and declined, not only out of anxiety but because my grandfather was in the hospital and I needed to see him before visiting hours ended. (Click here for a PDF of the article, and remember I was pretty much just a kid when I wrote it.)

Many years later, when I was living in New York and working on my MA at The New School, I went to his opening at Gagosian Gallery, which was kind of a coming out party for the New York art world after September 11. Serra's show had been postponed as his studio was in the frozen zone of lower Manhattan in the wake of the World Trade Center attack and he was unable to move his sculpture that was supposed to be part of the exhibition. The opening was over the top. There was a cornucopia of food and drink, something New York galleries rarely did especially when it came to the great unwashed. Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg were there as was Gwyneth Paltrow. The artist Alfred Leslie was also having a show in Chelsea a couple of blocks away and he ditched his own opening to attend the Serra event. I literally ran into Julian Schabel coming out of one of the sculptures. (I made him say "Hi" first 😉) I wrote about the show for Sculpture Magazine (September 2004, pp 72-73), a pretty decent piece of writing if I have to say so myself. (Click here for a PDF of the article.)

I love his work and was fortunate to have one of his prints in my office when I was a corporate exec.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

The Street Portraits of Carlos Diaz

Photographer Carlos Diaz approached me a while back about writing something for a show he was mounting at the Detroit Historical Museum of images he took in 1984 during the Detroit Tigers run up to winning that year's World Series Pennant. I've known Carlos for many years, almost back to when he first started teaching at College for Creative Studies 40 years ago. In 1991, I wrote a review for Detroit Focus Quarterly of an installation he did at the Pontiac Creative Art Center called The Unemployed Auto Worker. I also included it in an exhibition I curated that year at Buckham Fine Arts Project in Flint. (The other artists in the show were Robert Bielat and Lynne Avadenka.) I like to rib Carlos about that review as it was initially pitched to Artforum when I was doing reviews from Detroit for them. The review focused on issues of class raised in Carlos's installation, which went against the grain of so much contemporary art of the period that foregrounded identity politics, as it continues to do. The Artforum reviews editor sat on the piece for months until he declared it "stale" and therefore too far past its prime to be published. That seemed like bullshit to me, having waited similar periods for reviews to see the light of day at Artforum, Art in America, and other art magazines I had written for. The editor sidestepped the issue of class in our conversation, but coincidentally my career at Artforum ended after that. At any rate, below is the essay I wrote for the Detroit Historical Museum exhibition, which is on view until November 17, 2024. I thank Carlos for the opportunity to do this piece and for permission to reproduce his work. (All images Ⓒ Carlos Diaz.)

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Carlos Diaz, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A Professor Emeritus of Photography at College for Creative Studies, Carlos Diaz has focused his lens on the world around him for more than four decades. In addition to a sustained and distinguished career as a practitioner, with many exhibitions and inclusion in museum collections to his name, he has mentored several generations of students onto professional success, many to national acclaim. The photographs in this exhibition were taken in the fall of 1984 when a young Diaz, not long out of graduate school at University of Michigan, obtained his first full-time teaching job and relocated to Hamtramck. The setting for these images was the three home games played by the Detroit Tigers in pursuit of the World Series Championship, which they won. The Tiger baseball season of that year was a galvanizing one for the city, not unlike this past fall and winter with the Detroit Lions nearly clinching the NFC Championship and a first-time trip to the Super Bowl.

An abiding concern for Diaz has been what he terms his “interest in the fluidity of history and memory, the connections between people and place.” The relationship between photography and memory is one often considered in the literature on the medium and with the fortieth anniversary of the Tigers’ triumph, the photographs in this exhibition provide an apt occasion to reflect on the connection.

In talking about his work, Diaz speaks of the moment early on in his development when he first saw the work of Diane Arbus, whose photographs often surveyed the margins of society. With that encounter, he recognized that photography could be more than documentary. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” Arbus once observed, a comment about all that we don’t know about the subject of an image beyond what is visible within the frame. In the mid-1980s, Diaz explored this notion in a series titled “Unknown Landmarks,” where he went around the city with an 8x10 view camera searching locations and taking time to frame and consciously photograph otherwise mundane locations to question what might constitute the significant places and events we choose to remember, and more important those that are chosen to be memorialized from an official perspective.

One of those images, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984, is in this exhibition. It depicts Tiger Stadium just visible behind a commercial building in the background, with an alleyway between two Corktown houses in the foreground leading the eye to it. It is significant that Diaz used the medieval Latin spelling of “colosseum” in the title, connecting the now-gone ballpark in Detroit with the famous ruin in ancient Rome. The image evokes memories of spectacles – past and present – that have always been part of the public consciousness, fables of legendary contestants, victories and defeats, and the joys and disappointments of spectators, and the ultimate transience of those events and experiences, destined to be replayed again and again in different forms and different places and times.

Street photography, the genre of which Diaz’s 1984 Tigers World Series portraits are a part, seeks to capture chance encounters, typically in public places, rendered as “perfect moments.” It differs from documentary photography, which often operates with a predetermined message as in Jacob Riis’s late 19th-century photographs of the squalid conditions of the inhabitants of tenements in New York City in How the Other Half Lives. It is similarly distinct from photojournalism, which also tends to work in public places but with the intent of capturing perfect moments in the form of newsworthy events. For photojournalism, a perfect moment in October 1984 was Tigers right fielder Kirk Gibson swatting his World Series clinching home run in game 5. And yet, street photography can never be entirely free of the medium’s traditional documentary foundation as what Susan Sontag, in her famous book On Photography, terms “a trace, something stenciled directly off the real.”

In Diaz’s street photographs, it’s often the incidental that constitutes the perfect moment, details that evoke collective memory that may or may not have become part of “official” history. In a photograph in which the ballpark figures prominently, there is a billboard on the right promoting radio personality Dick Purtan, who was once one of America’s top on-air celebrities and who just a few years before had moved from his longtime spot in AM radio to the easy-listening format of “Cozy FM.” Still living, Purtan retired from the public airwaves in 2010. To the left is an ad for the Detroit People Mover, which had begun construction the year before and began service in 1987. Rendered idealistically in the ad, the Detroit People Mover promised to be a solution, if admittedly modest, to the city’s public transit woes, still yet to be satisfactorily resolved.

Carlos Diaz, Cap, Button, and Bumper Sticker Vendor, Detroit Tigers Stadium, 1984 World Series, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A major aspect of the moment captured by Diaz’s World Series photographs is the carnivalesque atmosphere that surrounded the ballpark on game days, when the intersection of Michigan and Trumbull and the surrounding neighborhoods bustled with activity. Conspicuous among the people Diaz photographed are vendors hawking their wares, including popcorn, peanuts, and other food items at prices that were likely lower than similar items available inside the ballpark, as well as a variety of Tigers-branded merchandise, all of it undoubtedly unauthorized by the team’s management. There is a photograph that focuses on a makeshift parking lot, one of many that would pop up for home games, providing locals an opportunity to take in a little cash off sports fans on their way to the stadium visible in the background. These images reflect a spirit of do-it-yourself entrepreneurialism that once ruled on the streets around the stadium.

Carlos Diaz, Detroit Tigers Fan, 1984.

And then there are the fans. A notable image captures a fan blowing a hunting horn and wearing a batting helmet; he holds up a makeshift placard that reads “Trammel, Morris, MVPs” with another, “Tigers Win Debate,” strapped around his neck. (Tigers shortstop Alan Trammel and pitcher Jack Morris were inducted together into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018.) Another depicts a crew of three self-assured adolescent boys striking a pose, arms folded, looking straight into the camera, wearing matching caps with “The A-Team” printed across the crown.

In this age of the ubiquitous selfie, the perfect moment appears to be not an appreciation of an event but the tagging of one’s presence for which the event serves merely as a backdrop. With this series of photographs, Carlos Diaz turned his camera away from himself to bear witness to some perfect moments of a few glory days gone by.

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Shane MacGowan (1957-2023)

Shane MacGowan, Moscow, 2010 (Image: Redageg, CC-BY-SA 3.0)


Shane MacGowan, genius bard of Éire, has died at the age of 65. When my daughter was an undergrad at U-M, I took her to see the Pogues. MacGowan passed out after the third song and the band carried on nonetheless. Not long after that show, the band got together and kicked MacGowan out. He later did a couple of solo records, the first of which, The Snake, I reviewed for New Art Examiner. Below is the text of that review, published in the November 1995 issue. Go raibh suaimhneas síoraí air ("Eternal peace be upon him.")
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The Snake
Shane MacGowan and the Popes
ZTT/Warner Bros Records, 1994
 
Reviewed by: Vincent Carducci
New Art Examiner, November 1995 
 
On a tour of North America several years back, Dublin poet Michael O'Siadhail spoke of what he termed the "mythic homeland" of the Irish. Drawn in images from the western provincescraggy, windswept coast­lines and dewy, bucolic farmlandsthis pastoral dissimulates the harsher realities of present-day Ireland: a nation struggling to maintain its identity in the face of the hegemony of the European Economic Community; a place of political "troubles" in its war-­torn north and economic impover­ishment in its urbanized east.

Both at home and abroad, the Irish have served for centuries as the orig­inal Other of the Anglo-Saxon; and the stereotypes with (dis)respect to themprofligacy, drunkenness, bel­ligerence, etc.have permeated the master narrative of the English-speaking peoples. Following a logic similar to that of critic Brian O'Doherty, who as an artist assumed the identity Patrick Ireland to rebuke WASP prejudice and protest British occupation in Ulster, several musicians of Irish descent formed a group they called Pogue Mahone (Gaelic for "kiss my arse"), which embraced a semiotics born of prejudice as their political riposte. The Pogues, as they came to be known, and in particular frontman Shane MacGowan, spliced elements of the Gaelic tradition onto the present in order to deconstruct the banality of bourgeois refinement and register a counterhistory of life at the margins of the Empire.

 

With this new disc, MacGowan indisputably establishes who was the driving force of the Pogues' project. Finally given the boot by other members of the band because of his inability to adapt to the stric­tures of the concert-hall grind, MacGowan returnsnot in recovery, never having been in denial, which is to say about as close to existential authenticity as it getswith a new motley crew (including Sinead O'Con­nor and Johnny Depp) to continue reconfiguring the mythic homeland of the Gael in the Postmodern world.

 

As with his previous recordings, MacGowan eclectically fashions old and new, original and appropriated, into a palimpsest of sound. Selections on The Snake from the Irish folk tradition include the paean to drink "Nancy Whiskey" and rebel songs "Roddy McCorley" and "The Rising of the Moon." The originals and a cover of "Her Father Didn't Like Me Anyway" further reveal what Jean-Francois Lyotard terms the "minor narratives" of the disenfranchised and the demimonde. 

 

With a rockier feel than earlier efforts, brought about by a more prominent use of electric guitar and full drum kit, The Snake celebrates MacGowan as an exemplary "autochthon" (defined by Deleuze and Guattari as "the native who can speak to the experience as lived"), cussing and fighting, guzzling poitín, and clinging firmly to the Auld Sod against the impending tide of deracination of the self, threatened by an increasingly mobile and elusive global elite, which administers its new power from nodes on the Information Superhighway.

# # #

 

 

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

LL Bean Double-Coding

I got the new LL Bean Summer Men's catalog in the mail recently and had to do a double take. At a quick glance, it appeared to portray an interracial gay couple holding hands and walking their dog on the beach. A closer look showed that the two men were actually walking side by side with their hands appearing to "accidentally" overlap. Ironically, Leon Leonwood Bean's granddaughter Linda Lorraine Bean is a virulent anti-LGBTQ-rights activist, having used her inheritance and political influence to support campaigns to overturn laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination based on gender and/or sexual orientation. Love the tag line: "Feel Great Out There"




Thursday, January 26, 2023

Grace Lee Boggs's Next American Revolution

In 2011, I wrote of review of Grace Lee Boggs's book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, for the current events blog Deliberately Considered, published by my New School dissertation advisor Jeffrey Goldfarb. The blog is no longer active, having morphed into the New School e-pub Public Seminar, which Jeff also founded. I have been co-teaching a class at University of Michigan titled "The Egalitarian Metropolis," which uses Detroit as a case study as part of an urban humanities project. As one might imagine, Grace is an important thinker whose work is relevant to our discussions. The book was published before the 2013 Detroit bankruptcy and the city's subsequent recuperation under the reinvigorated forces of capital. But I wanted to reproduce my review, with a couple of minor corrections, for the record. (Click here to read the original post on Deliberately Considered.) I also reproduce a video of Grace in conversation with world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, which took place in 2010 at the US Social Forum in Detroit.

Grace Lee Boggs has taken part in just about every progressive movement in modern America – civil rights, labor organizing, women’s rights, global justice, and more. At 95 and now often confined to a wheel chair, the Detroit-based activist and visionary shows no signs of slowing down, at least intellectually. Her new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century sets out her ideas for making real that other world the slogans tell us is possible. Indeed, based on her experience as recounted in her book, that world is already happening and in some of the most seemingly unlikely of places.

Along with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, Boggs was a founder of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a theoretical perspective within the American left that in the 1940s identified the Soviet Union under Stalin as constituting an example of state capitalism, i.e., a system in which the state functions in essence like a gigantic corporation, therefore keeping conventional capitalist relations of production and labor alienation intact. (By contrast, the then prevailing Trotskyite view labeled it a “bureaucratic collective,” a new form of political economic organization that while not purely capitalist was not strictly speaking socialist either.) The Johnson-Forest Tendency is also identified with the emergence of Marxist humanism, which takes its inspiration from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, several essays of which Boggs, who holds a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, was among the first to translate into English. Today the bottom-up orientation of the Johnsonite view lives on most closely in autonomism. And indeed, autonomist leading light Antonio Negri’s co-author Michael Hardt blurbed the book’s dust jacket as did Robin D. G. Kelly and Immanuel Wallerstein.

Boggs, the daughter of early twentieth-century Chinese immigrants, begins by setting out the problem and the opportunity for those of us living in the end times, that is, in the wake of the Apocalypse of the modern capitalist world-system that was the 2008 economic meltdown. And there are arguably few better places in the Western world from which to view the devastation than postindustrial Detroit. Yet, Boggs argues, “the D,” as it is known especially to the young folk now that the “motor” of the Motor City has run out of gas, isn’t a site of despair but of hope.

From the abandoned zones of modernity new forms of life have sprung up: urban farming in the shadows of factory ruins, a system of solidarity economics where big box retailers fear to tread, and grassroots arts movements that stress community participation and the development of a new image ecology in place of the ideological emptiness of solipsistic modernist aesthetics. All of this activity is informed by what Ezio Manzini of the international consortium Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) calls “cosmopolitan localism.”

“Living in the margins of the postindustrial capitalist order, we in Detroit are faced with a stark choice of how to devote ourselves to struggle,” Boggs writes. Rather than remediate a deteriorating system, Boggs sets out ideas for starting anew. In addition to local supply chains of food and other goods and services, a radical rethinking of education is in order. The system currently in place is obsolete, she asserts, having been designed to train young people to become willing cogs in a social, economic, and political machine that no longer functions. Taking a cue from one of her philosophical influences, John Dewey, Boggs proposes an experience-based pedagogy based on the civil rights movement model of Freedom Schools, put into practice in the form of Detroit Summer, which holds workshops and other participatory educational programs.

Traditional social movement theorists, not to mention cynics, may view all of this as marginal at best. And yet what Boggs is talking about is essentially a new form of post-party politics. Given the current state of the union, it’s an idea well worth considering.

 

Grace Lee Boggs and Immanuel Wallerstein in conversation - 2010 from Moving Images on Vimeo.

Monday, May 16, 2022

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

Photograph of evening in a valley settlement. The skyline in the hills beyond is lit up red from the fires.

The Orroral Valley Fire, Australia, January 2020 (Photo: Nick D, CC BY-SA 4.0)
 
I was asked by the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America to review this book on climate change by Syracuse University geographer and Jacobin contributor Matt Huber for their publication Detroit Socialist where it first appeared. Below is a edited version of my review, which appeared in the New School journal Public Seminar. (Click here for the Detroit Socialist version and here for the one on Public Seminar.)
 
* * *
 
A recent survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shows that 72 percent of Americans, believe that climate change is real with an almost equal number concerned that it will harm future generations. While the climate movement finally appears to be winning the war of ideas, it is still losing the battle for securing the planet. After a brief pause due to the global COVID-19 lockdown, carbon emissions are again on the rise, having reached record levels in 2021 according to the International Energy Agency.
 
Syracuse University geographer Matthew Huber traces the origins of the climate crisis and proposes a plan of action in his new book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022). Huber, a frequent contributor to Jacobin and other journals, argues that climate change is first and foremost a class issue that pits the interests of capitalists over everyone and everything else, sacrificing the planetary future in the process. He proposes to mobilize the working class not just in resistance but as the most viable agent of change.

Huber offers a class-based analysis of the ecology, and the ownership of the material means of production, from resource extraction to the centrality of carbon-based fuels in the global industrial complex whose productivity has been progressively leveraged over the past 150 years by electrification. He criticizes what he sees as the underlying assumptions of current environmentalism to set up an agenda for a broadly based working-class approach to meet the challenges of a warming planet.

That capitalism is the primary driver of climate change has been largely acknowledged in recent times among academics and policymakers, as well as some elements of the popular media. Understanding the relationship between capitalism and the climate is thus the first step toward constructing what Huber terms a “proletarian ecology.”

Climate change, or more accurately planetary warming, is inextricably tied to the development of modern capitalism, which has consumed more and more energy to expand its industrial base and pursue greater profit. This is particularly true since the mid-twentieth century in what is termed “The Great Acceleration,” whereby the deleterious effects of capitalist-based growth have become increasingly evident across the planetary environment. The increased emissions from industrial production are at the root of emissions in all other sectors of the capitalist economy—transportation, construction, commercial, residential, etc.—as they depend on industrial products for their capacity to function. Electricity is the primary power source for industrial production, and the US Energy Information Administration estimates that some 60 percent of all electricity is generated from fossil fuels, primarily natural gas and coal.

Control of this production system is in very few private hands, which Huber, following London School of Economics sociologist Leslie Sklair, identifies as “the transnational capitalist class.” Huber devotes Part I of Climate Change as Class War to several of these bad actors and the ways in which the material conditions of the climate are all too often obscured. It is well researched and provides concrete detail to what ecosocialists such as John Bellamy Foster, Ian Angus, and McKenzie Wark, following Karl Marx in volumes I and III of Capital, term the “metabolic rift,” the disconnect between the environment and human, and in particular more radically capitalist, interventions that have interrupted its natural cycles.

Recognizing that the climate crisis has its material foundations in the capitalist system of production, Huber asserts that tackling the problem requires changing how production is organized. That necessitates a struggle for power against the transnational capitalist class who are reaping the rewards of environmental degradation at collective expense. So far, efforts toward that end have met with limited success.

A major impediment, in Huber’s estimation, is the terrain upon which the struggle is being contested. The climate dispute is currently the purview of a professional class of intellectuals, technocrats, and other knowledge workers—the credentialed beneficiaries of postwar meritocracy—who rely on scientific knowledge, technological intervention, and “smart” policy recommendations to carry the day. Among this class, in Huber’s reading, there is the assumption that things will necessarily change for the better if only the “objective, scientific facts” could be properly communicated and accepted and remediating tactics put into place.

The pitfall of that strategy was succinctly summed up by Upton Sinclair more than 100 years ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Even more so, when the ability to accumulate immense wealth and power depends on blatantly ignoring facts and getting others to do the same. Communicating climate statistics or attempting to address so-called market failures through mechanisms such as carbon taxes will have only modest, and many would argue insufficient, effects so long as there are substantial financial gains to be made.

Another obstacle is what Huber terms the “carbon guilt” also associated with the professional class. On the one hand, there is the “anxiety of affluence,” the deeply rooted Puritanical reproach of consumer excess in American culture, and on the other the virtue-signaling of what is termed “the ecology of austerity,” the imperative to subsist on less, as summed up in the phrase: “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” This latter directive is particularly insidious in the way its emphasis on individual responsibility and restraint dovetails with neoliberalism, which emerged as part of the capitalist attack on workers and the welfare state coming out of the 1960s and into the present.

Furthermore, austerity ecology has little resonance among much of the working class, which during the past half-century has seen their share of the wealth from increased productivity stagnate and even erode while the social safety net has simultaneously been pulled out from under them. From that perspective, it can be argued that it is unreasonable to expect those who are living paycheck to paycheck, many of whom are only one major medical expense or household repair bill away from financial crisis, to voluntarily live lower on the food chain if that is even possible.

The remedy Huber prescribes is to mobilize workers with an appeal to material interests that expands upon the purely economic to embrace a broader ecological framework. This stems from Huber’s conception of the working class as those who are alienated not just from the means of industrial production but from the very natural conditions of life itself. This comes straight out of Marx’s notion of estranged labor as articulated in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: “The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.” (Emphasis original.) Nature is what capitalism, at its most fundamental level, alienates the worker from and the foundation of Huber’s conception of the proletarian ecology, which includes anyone and everyone who derives their means of survival from their dependence on market forces.

As part of moving forward, it is important not to cast workers as the victims of some zero-sum game, as much of the climate debate, especially from the right, has heretofore done in the false dichotomy of jobs vs. the environment. In this regard, Huber holds up the Green New Deal as a model of how to address the twin objectives of inequality and climate action. He notes that the Green New Deal rejects austerity as a condition of repairing the environment, but instead sets out an agenda for a just transition to a sustainable future through a combination of economic, technological, and social initiatives that would ultimately benefit workers of all stripes.

In setting out his action plan, Huber takes a cue from longtime labor writer Kim Moody, who in On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket, 2017) identifies the supply chain as a potential chokepoint where workers may organize to disrupt the flow of goods, and thereby profits, as part of a rank-and-file tactic to win their demands and foster solidarity. Huber’s scheme is to move the disruption upstream to where the capacity to produce originates: the electricity grid.

In addition to being the source of much of capitalism’s ability to produce, the electric power industry is fairly well unionized when compared to other sectors of the economy, including renewable energy. It is also already subject in many parts of the country to public oversight when not publicly owned outright. It can thus serve as the cornerstone of a longer-term strategy to socialize and decarbonize the rest of the economy. If a move toward socialization can be achieved in this crucial sector, Huber surmises the potential for working-class power to expand as victories accrue and spread to other sectors.

Huber’s analysis of the links between capitalism and the climate crisis is compelling; he also offers an incisive argument as to the conundrums of current climate politics. However, there are questions that can be raised as to the efficacy of his proposed solution. First is the prospect of mobilizing electric power industry workers against their own union leadership, which like others in the age of diminished union power have sought to maintain relationships with owners in what some would say is a misguided attempt to forestall givebacks and other concessions. Then there is the single-sector strategy, which is liable to be nipped in the bud under what will no doubt be intense opposition from owners, investors, the government, and other powers of the transnational capitalist class. One may also question the prospects of expanding solidarity into the broader working population, which has largely rejected unionization over the past 50 years. (Though there are rumblings of that possibly changing, especially among younger workers, with the recent upsurge in organizing in the “meds and eds,” retail service, and supply chain sectors.)

Beyond what appear to be the unlikely prospects of it ever coming to fruition, one may also look askance with respect to the Green New Deal, as currently conceived, as a model for moving toward a truly just and sustainable future. Most obviously, the Green New Deal is aspirational, setting out a laundry list of desired outcomes without much in the way of concrete details as to how they might be achieved. It is also a capitalist solution to the climate crisis, essentially a neo-Keynesian program that proposes to muster government-led investment in green technologies and social-welfare programs to carry out its agenda within the confines of the market system. Its gesture toward the original New Deal of the 1930s might also be seen as flawed as there is much to suggest that it was the ramping up of production (and the attendant waste) in conducting the Second World War that ultimately “saved” capitalism not New Deal economics, which stumbled in 1937-38.

Climate Change as Class War does offer fuel for thought if only to clarify the irreconcilable conflict between our collective future and capitalism’s scorched-earth drive. Huber is essentially correct that the climate crisis is for all intents and purposes a class war, that of the transnational national capitalist class against the rest of us. There is no doubt that little will change without radical action. And the stakes are high: There is more than a world to win; there is a planet to lose.

Monday, November 8, 2021

Yaris Varoufakis's Novel "Another Now" Presages and Contests Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse

This review of Yaris Varoufakis's speculative novel Another Now was published by PopMatters on November 8, 2021.

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Almost immediately upon Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on October 28 that his company was adopting the new identity Meta, Greek economist and political activist Yaris Varoufakis fired off a tweet, saying: “Hands off our mέta, our Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation https://metacpc.org/en/, Mr Zuckerberg. You, and your minions wouldn't recognise civilisation even if it hit you with a bargepole.” In Another Now (Melville House, 2021), a work of speculative fiction that is his first novel, Varoufakis offers an alternative vision to what he brands Zuckerberg’s “Technofeudalist” nightmare.

Varoufakis is the author of the best-selling economic analyses Talking to my Daughter About the Economy: or How Capitalism Works -- and How It Fails (Bodley Head, 2017), a history of capitalism, and The Global Minotaur: America, Europe, and the Future of the Global Economy (Zed, 2011), an analysis of the economic system from the 1970s to 2008 crash within which the US occupies a central role, He is also author of Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment (Random House, 2017), a memoir of his six-month crash-and-burn tenure as Greece’s Minister of Finance, attempting to resist the draconian terms being forced upon the country by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (collectively known as “The Troika”) in 2015 to resolve its public-debt crisis.

In addition to serving on mέta’s Advisory Board, Varoufakis is currently a member of the Hellenic Parliament representing greater Athens. He is also co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), a pan-European progressive political movement, and Progressive International, an organization dedicated to uniting and mobilizing progressive activists and organizations around the world.

Another Now is a thought experiment disguised as a sci-fi narrative that ponders what a society might look like that balanced freedom and equality.

The narrator of the tale, Yango Varo, relates events that took place primarily from 2025-2035 as recorded in the diary of a woman who had recently succumbed to cancer. It concerns three friends, the diary’s author Iris, a radical contrarian living off a bequest from a hereditary peer; Eva, a former Lehman Brothers investment banker turned academic; and Costa, a computer engineer who made one fortune shorting high-tech stocks ahead of the dotcom bust in 2001 and another, even bigger fortune shorting financial services in the run-up to the mortgage-backed derivatives crash of 2008.

At his job, Costa's technological innovations were constantly being shelved by his employers in the interest of extending the life cycle—and revenue streams—of existing, less-effective technologies. Disaffected by this experience and enjoying the autonomy granted to him by his wealth, Costa sets out on a secret project to create a kind of Freedom Machine that would offer users the ability to experience an infinite horizon of pleasure, freedom not only from want but from every boundary one could imagine. The catch: the price of entering the blissful world of the Freedom Machine being that one could never leave it, a price he believed no one would be willing to pay. This refusal, Costa thinks, would be based on a recognition of the ultimate emptiness and futility of unending desire under capitalism.

To protect his project from being stolen by corporate hackers, henceforth known by its technical acronym HALPEVAM (Heuristic ALgorithmic Pleasure and Experiential VAlue Maximizer), Costa creates a security device that inadvertently opens a wormhole into an alternative reality, the “Other Now” of the book’s title. He begins communicating via batch-file messaging technology with someone in Other Now, who is in fact his Other Self, identified as Kosti. The messaging back and forth between Costa and Kosti, which soon brings in Iris and her Other Self Siris, and Eva and her Other Self Eve, provides an opportunity for Varoufakis to lay out how things might work in a world without capitalism, ideas he has put forth elsewhere outside the realm of fiction.

These include direct democracy applied to corporate governance in which each employee receives a single share of an organization’s stock and an equal vote in all decisions. Everyone also has a Personal Capital account from a central bank that has three buckets: an Accumulation fund based on their work income, a Legacy trust fund given by society to all at birth intended for retirement or extreme emergency, and a monthly Dividend from the state derived from a 5 percent tax levied on all gross corporate revenues. These policies emerged from the wreckage of the great disruptions set off by cadres of various techno-rebels in Other Now, which brought an end to capitalism in the wake of the 2008 crash and the point at which it diverged from the Our Now inhabited by Costa, Iris, and Eva, along with the rest of humanity.

The balance of the plot deals with the interactions between Costa, Iris, Eva, and their Others as they confront their existence—their aspirations and their discontents—in their divergent Nows. Other Now is not an unmitigated utopia, it turns out: corporations may have been democratized, capital markets and investment bankers may no longer exist, but patriarchy continues to hold sway. The shared prosperity of Other Now brings with it a renewed social conservatism. Shady characters continue to find ways to game the financial system even if their machinations are quickly uncovered and swiftly dealt with.

In the book’s final pages, the wormhole begins to deteriorate as corporate hackers are getting close to breaching HALPEVAM’s security device. Big Tech’s takeover of HALPEVAM would, of course, result in its total monetization, offering only short-term pleasures in pay-per-view until its customers are completely enmeshed in its experience, the very specter of the Technofeudalist nightmare Varoufakis abhors in Zuckerberg’s notion of the “metaverse.” What’s more, the ability of Our Now users to communicate with their counterparts (it goes without saying for a fee) would likely devastate Other Now, as well.

How the various characters respond to the impending doom is the denouement of Varoufakis’s narrative. In offering a glimpse of how things might be different, Another Now invites us to contemplate possibilities that are not without their challenges, but worth entertaining nonetheless.