Understanding Brecht - Walter Benjamin

Brecht, Brecht, Brecht. The name appears everywhere, in my reading, in my life, in day-to-day thumbing through periodicals. People refer to him with brevity and sadness and seriousness. He plays a role which is beyond my understanding in European culture and somehow his presence is still felt across European literary circles today, even though he passed around 50 years ago. This book provides something of an insight into where Brecht came from but through the eyes of another wonderful writer, taken early by the menace of Fascism, Benjamin grapples with the meaning and thought of Brecht, the power of what he was trying to do in early theater and the world he was seeking to change. I think this, more than anything else, influences my thinking here. Brecht was writing poetry and plays, alongside staging them himself, but the purpose was greater than the simple act. This was not about money or fame, it was about changing the world. Catching the last great rush of socialist belief before it was crushed by Stalin and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Looking into writing from Jewish authors of the 1930s, it breaks, it breaks the feelings which these worlds, crashing in on themselves as the world closed in around them, must have experienced and how Brecht, in his vantage point, was able to navigate better than Benjamin who was not. This is a book of literarcy criticism but set against the backdrop of a collapsing world. The world falling in on itself as it hurtled towards what seemed certain fascist takeover and unending misery, which was then replaced with a war which destroyed most of Europe and left a split between two worldviews which divided the continent and the implications of which still echo through our collective minds.

Book Review - I am Dynamite - A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche - Sue Prideaux

Thus Spake Zarathustra, an impenetrable work which I started on too young and which left me with a feeling of confusion. What was this that I had read? What did it mean? Why did it feel like I had watched a film starting half-way through, where everyone else knew who the characters were except me? Thus I was introduced to the genius of Nietzsche as a young man, selecting the book on the basis of its weird cover, a 1970s penguin classic, well thumbed by my parents or taken from a second hand bookstore. I knew that the theories in the book delighted me, but I could not fully understand nor grasp the enormity of what was contained therein. This spaking Zarathustra looked somewhat like my father! What fun, but then what eye opening wonder once I started to read. With the backdrop of not fully understanding his work, this book acts as a wonderful foil, explaining the man, his life, his family. You follow his journey through a difficult world and his arrival at a place which brought the most wonderful illumination but at the same time, sent him to a place from which he could not recover. The journey is the story in this book and the author, Sue Prideaux, does a wonderful job of taking you through Nietzsche's life with the right amount of historical digging. While retaining a Mantell like narrative with a familiarity and tone which brings the character of Nietzsche to life through the page. This somehow humanizes the otherworldly figure of Nietzsche, who roams through the pages as in his life. The narrator moves from place to place, bringing down the records where they exist such as through the diaries of Cosima Wagner, but filling in the blanks where they do not. I found this approach wonderfully effective in maintaining the record. Nietzsche is not a polarising character, because there is not much to polarise around. He is neither a figure of the right nor the left, much to his hideous sisters chagrin. His thought is so profound but, as Prideaux quite wonderfully surmises at the end of the book, there is no final guiding thought within it. He simply sets out how the ship can now sail, but does not tell us where.

Book Review - Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers - John Nichols

 I like a good polemic, especially when it talks to my side of the fence, you can warm your hands, metaphorically at least on the roasting of people who all to often escape opprobrium through their deployment of the defence of decency or through the deflection of debate to another venue or topic; the Rude Pundit remains my first and best example of this.  

The bastards that warrant John Nichols ire are those same people who took us through the first year of the pandemic so incompetently.  I almost forgot myself, and thus it was wonderful to read this nicely crafted and narrated book to remind myself of just how much these people took from us and how badly they treated their own people in pursuit of their own political interests or in their belief in the malign politics which had served them so well.  

The book is a nice take down of a number of parties, primarily right lurching wing-nuts of the Rand Paul assortment, in a fairly scientific and robust manner, pointing towards their multiple failings, rejection of science based evidence and appeal to the baser elements of their collective dementia.  The challenge I had was that I did not see within the book, and particularly within the rambling 30 plus page conclusion where it lost its way a bit, a true ideological take down of just what the defining features of these failures were.  Given the stake of what was lost, the millions who died and the lives ruined, it just does not go far enough in determining what the ideology was which brought us to this point.

In a book which from a polemical perspective does not hold back, Nichols does slather blame on the miscreants and does so with erudite aplomb, I found this final step somewhat unsatisfying. Maybe it was the writing of the book so early in the pandemic (as it turned out) in 2021, when we still had around a year to go, which made it more difficult to draw these conclusions or maybe it was the fact that the Biden - Trump circus was distracting everyone still, whatever the circumstances, this is not the definitive history of COVID and it does not begin to really draw the conclusions we need.

Speaking on the first day of 2025, as the forces of reaction and stupidity have gained strength partly through the dislocations created by the pandemic, I can see that there is much history to be written on the COVD crisis topic.  As Trump hurtles forward into whatever onanistic chaos he is going to create in his second term, I can feel we have forgotten so much of what happened in 2020 and we have unlearned so many of the lessons we learned back then.  We are careering towards a combination of economic crisis, environmental crisis, social crisis and a tail spin into ever more hideous conflicts lead by a political class so weak and craven or stupid that no one is actually in charge any more. 

We gave it all up to the market, but as GFC 2.0 approaches, what are we going to do when the market fucks it all up again?

 

The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi

I first read Primo Levi for a school project when I was 16, his words, "If This is a Man" and "The Truce" touched me very deeply. He is an exceptional writer, his prose is clear, lucid and devastating and the topics he covers are of such a hideous nature, the crimes so fundamentally awful, that it requires an author of such qualities to convey these images and messages.

"The Drowned and the Saved" is a different book but one no less powerful and impactful than his earlier works. He speaks with the benefit of 40 years further time to consider the implications of what happened during the Third Reich and he is no less clear in articulating the reasons behind what happened, the lessons he learned from his experiences about the nature of human beings and most interestingly towards the end, how his literature has been received by those persons (the German people) who bear the responsibility for the crimes committed by the Third Reich.

This book should be read by everyone involved in politics today. It is a warning call from a voice lost too early in tragic circumstances but who can speak with authority and clarity about things which we may believe are impossible in our current time but which many of those same Germans who bear responsibility would have had the world believe they were not aware either.

"For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult. We see it as a duty, and at the same time as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to. We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experiences, we have collectively been the witnesses of a fundamental, unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It took place in the teeth of all forecasts; it happened in Europe. Incredibly, it happened that an entire civilized people, just issued from the fervid cultural flowering of Weimar, followed a buffoon whose figure today inspires laughter, and yet Adolf Hitler was obeyed and his praises were sung right up to the catastrophe. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say." 

 "Neither Nietzsche not Hitler nor Rosenberg were mad when they intoxicated themselves and their followers by preaching the myth of the superman, to whom everything is permitted in recognition of his dogmatic and congenital superiority; but worthy of meditation is the fact that all of them, teacher and pupils, became progressively removed from reality as little by little their morality came unglued from the morality common to all times and all civilisations, which is a common part of our human heritage and which in the end must be acknowledged."

Cory Doctrow - The Internet Con - How to Seize the Means of Computation

I really enjoy the way Cory Doctrow writes and puts forth his ideas. Many of them are quite complex and technical in their aims and design but I found this book to be an excellent introduction into both the solution and the problem caused by our modern big technology infrastructure. He's also no dogmatist and although we're on the same page politically, I can see how he would still be accessible to someone further to the right.

Erudite and clear. Sorry I'm writing the review on Amazon and Google, but as he points out in the book, the challenge of Big Tech is it forces you to use it if you want to be online.

https://craphound.com/category/internetcon/

Daniel Cohen · To Monopolise Our Ears: What Spotify Wants · LRB 4 May 2023

The inevitable fate of Spotify, as it careers towards revenue free bankruptcy is an interesting case in point about who is actually making money from the way in which our economy and society is established and evolves.

Spotify seemed to have been destroying the music establishment by subverting the process by which people obtained music, but instead if one analyses the real direction of travel, it appears much more to be the outrider of the very forces who had been impacted far more by the first forces of the internet, the record labels.

Really it was they who were hammered by file sharing rather than anyone else (including musicians themselves) and it is they who coopted the streaming services to effectively become extensions of the record labels and the music industry.  

Now Spotify , despite it's success, has realized the Faustian pact it made and as it desperately tries to extract something for itself from the shitty deal it entered into, it has realized all to late that if you are the company that fronts a service but someone else makes all the money, then it is not in your company where the value lies and where the real control lies. Control is power and it has been a long time since Spotify has been in control of its own destiny.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n09/daniel-cohen/to-monopolise-our-ears 

Adam Tooze - Chartbook #185 Inflation and distributional conflict - in 2023 not 1973! Also a response to the debate around that Blanchard thread.

Just got the latest Chartbook entry from Adam Tooze who is fast becoming my favourite economic commentator of all time. You can find him on substack here. Watching the whole debate in the finance world about what the path of interest rates will be or discussing whether inflation targets should be 2 or 4 percent strike me as akin to people shifting deck chairs on the deck of a sinking ship. None of these things ever did really make a difference. The "market crash" we witnessed last year was simply the removal of some of the froth through zero interest rates being unwound. There has been literally zero transmission between those changes and the real economy thus far.  We are just at the beginning of a tightening cycle in terms of it's real implications for the real economy. The whole thing is a sham. The real problem we have is that much of the worlds productive capacity is being driven by a system which focuses productive capacity on ridiculous things which are not doing anything to address any of the worlds challenges (weaponry, financialized investment services, technological developments to sell and market products, rockets to take us to Mars, murderous self driving cars). Fortunately large parts of the world have realized this and moved away from it. However this does not include the Anglo-speaking world who also love building weapons. So that will end well.