Merry Christmas!

My holiday album of 2010...although it actually came out last year.

Musical Musings

As I sat with my roommate's cat Freddie tonight listening to George Frideric Handel, I began to wonder whether Freddie also got anything out of Handel's moving artistic work. Surely, if new parents habitually play classical music to stimulate their infants' minds, the melodic power of this genre, in particular, has something to offer the perceptive non-human as well. If nothing else, the novelty of hearing music - as opposed to nothing - means that ex-stray Freddie probably enjoys it to some degree.

Does he enjoy music as much as or more than me? I can't see that. As a cat, he can never really know what truly goes into making it. Based on Marx's labour theory of value, the value of an object - in this case, a beautiful piece of music - consists of the sheer amount of labour-power that goes into producing it. We all get the use-value (the irresistible journey of emotional states that a powerful piece of music can take you on), but from a Marxist perspective, the value of Handel's music is the amount of work that went into creation.

Apparently crime rates in public places go down when they play classical music on loudspeakers. There must be some significance to that.

A Light in the Dark

Three cheers for Julian Assange and Wikileaks!

To borrow some Lord of the Rings terminology, Wikileaks has become the Phial of Galadriel - bestowed upon Frodo Baggins in the latter chapters of Fellowship of the Ring and referred to in the film adaptation as "the light of Eärendil, our most beloved star. May it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out." Certainly that phrase applies well to our current media environment, saturated as it is by the somber (note: cynical) analysis of "official sources". Whether from the government, military or business, news in our era has been suffocated by the prevalence of trained media spokespersons, and it is their dominion over the airwaves that has rendered official discourse so disgustingly bland, homogenous and friendly to the powerful.

Glenn Greenwald, as you might expect, has already done a stellar job of analyzing the Wikileaks fallout in terms of the media's stunning degeneration into faithful courtiers to the elite. Any notion of the adversarial American press corps exists now only in the minds of those well-compensated pundits that saturate the airwaves. Unbelievably, the same talking heads, notable mainly for their sheer sycophancy, continue to visualize themselves as hard-boiled journalists asking the hard questions. I suppose it's the only way they can live with themselves when they join U.S. political officials in calling for the assassination of that "treasonous" Australian Julian Assange, now officially the new Osama bin Laden.

The fact is that if these media organizations were actually doing their jobs (in the old-fashioned concept of serving the public interest), we wouldn't need Wikileaks. But because of the abdication of responsibility by these traditional news sources in favour of serving as corporate propaganda outlets, the task of informing the public has fallen to this outside organization, now an international pariah. Julian Assange is hated by the political class because he tells the truth, but he is hated by the media because he exposes their power-worshiping nature. As Chris Hedges repeatedly emphasized in Death of the Liberal Class, what the political-media establishment - but especially those pundits who consider themselves "liberal" - fears most is being exposed as the handmaidens to power/corporate whores they have become.

Julian Assange deserves our respect for tossing a wrench into the imperial machinery. It's worth noting Sen. Mitch McConnell's description of Assange as a "high-tech terrorist". If there was ever any doubt, let Miss McConnell declare for the record: a terrorist is indeed defined merely as anyone who opposes U.S. government policy. But hey! Clearly they need these strict measures if we're ever going to spread Freedom and Democracy.

UPDATE: On a related note, another reminder of why I don't watch Jon Stewart anymore.

Rob Ford and the Efficacy of Mass Protest

Toronto's new mayor took the oath of office yesterday. I was originally going to attend some inaugural anti-Ford protests, but in the end decided not to. The main reason was likely going to bed too late the night before and opting to sleep in. But the deeper reason was that my reading of Death of the Liberal Class had left me feeling momentarily skeptical about the effectiveness of mass protest as a means of fighting bourgeois policies.

40-50 years ago, the protest as a form of mass resistance was still able to send a chill down the spine of the elite. They remembered the agitation of workers in the 1930s and feared the power of a mobilized working class. We saw the effect of mass protest in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the eventual American withdrawal from Vietnam. But the elites learned from their experience during the counterculture, and in the decades that followed, as media ownership was concentrated more and more in the hands of a few vast conglomerates, the corporate interests that owned the press learned that it was relatively easy to ignore or ridicule popular movements if they interfered with elite goals. The worldwide 2002 protests against the impending invasion of Iraq were the largest organized protest in human history, yet failed to prevent the Bush administration's rush to war. The election of Barack Obama largely neutralized the American anti-war movement, although as casualties continue to mount in Afghanistan a more concerted push from below may take shape again.

Chris Hedges' pessimistic take on protest should not be mistaken for a disinclination to use it. Rather, his glass half-empty view is predicated on a sober, honest assessment of working class strength today and is part of a larger argument advocating resistance for its own sake. Nevertheless, it was the more superficial version of this lesson that I used to justify my decision to sleep through Rob Ford's inauguration.

Ultimately, this protest in particular was a great example of protest for its own sake, because there was literally no chance it was going to affect anything on this day - other than, of course, further raising public awareness of Ford's reactionary nature. But it was never as if the new mayor was going to see people protesting what for him was the high point of his career and immediately decide to renounce the new office.

I'm all for new subway lines, and while critics of his idea to literally sweep the homeless off the street in winter have some merit in describing the tactic as "fascistic", preventing Toronto's homeless from freezing to death on sewer grates does have its merits, no? But in my view, the main danger from Ford has always been severe cuts to social services under the guise of Stopping The Gravy Train - that, and the assumption that as a right-wing faux-populist he would more ruthlessly execute the agenda of Big Business than any of his competitors. Right now Ford is still a lively, bubbling novelty, a living caricature as good for entertainment value as anything. Time will tell exactly how concerned we should be, but regardless of who holds the mayor's seat, our immediate task and central focus is organizing the workers, the poor and unemployed of Toronto to fight for their own interests.

Book Review: "Death of the Liberal Class"

You must read this book. Chris Hedges is one of my favourite writers and he's in top form here - which is to say, absolutely devastating. He tears apart the liberal class for its failure to halt the expansion and consolidation of the corporate state. At this dire historical moment, when the rapacious forces of totalitarian capitalism have destroyed the global economy and are pushing the human race to unprecedented catastrophe through wanton ecological destruction, the liberal class is marked most obviously by its impotence, its utter betrayal of the values it claims to stand for, and its continuing obsequience to power which guaranteed its own demise as a relevant political force. All the traditional institutions of the liberal class - the media, universities, church, trade unions, the arts, etc. - were long ago bought off by corporate interests. Through this act they sold their souls.

Hedges traces the beginning of this long historical process to the First World War, when the dawn of mass commercial culture combined with virulent nationalism and militarism to demonize any opposition to the war as treasonous. The liberal class wholeheartedly joined in this effort, and they later attempted to remain in the elite's good graces by embracing anticommunism. By assisting in the blacklisting and eradication of the American Left during the McCarthy era, the liberal class removed the one force that kept it honest...but also one that supplied it with political cover. With the elimination of radical socialist and communist movements, liberals could no longer claim to be on the centre-left of the U.S. political spectrum, but effectively became the "far left". Today, in the epoch of the violent decay of global capitalism, without the language of class struggle to make sense of developments, the American liberal class has nothing left to offer - and into that ideological vacuum has stepped a plethora of right-wing demagogues eager to commandeer the populist mantle in the face of a confused and angry public.

I appreciated the gusto with which Hedges attacks traditional bastions of the liberal establishment. Universities, for example, have contributed to their own intellectual decay by cordoning off professors into super-specialized fields and frightening away the masses with laboured academic jargon that can appear meaningless (I too blame the French post-structuralists). Art, too, became the domain of the elite as it embraced the abstract and failed to connect with the average viewer. In the same way as the internet divided people into politically homogenous enclaves through the process of "cyberbalkanization" (which Hedges examines near the end), so the art and academic worlds separated themselves from the broader population by speaking only to each other in specialized language.

If Hedges' writing is characteristically excellent, his final chapter reminded me of our differences in political opinion. I cannot say I disagree with his advocacy of rebellion for its own sake, as a quality that helps us retain our humanity. But by explicitly distancing himself from the notion of "revolution", which aims to create a new social order, Hedges distances himself from the solution and reveals his spiritual side. The spiritual is all well and good for uplifting the "soul", but in terms of real political struggle, rebellion for its own sake is not enough. We need a real revolution to determine where to go and how to fight the corporate state. For that, I turn to Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, with a side dose of Saul Alinsky.