Monthly Archives: February 2016

My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (2015) by Doug Henwood

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Anti-Fascism, Anti-Imperialism, Anti-War, Democracy Deferred, Democratic Party (USA), Presidential Election 2016

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

hillary_cover-731x1024LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Previously, at Lumpenproletariat, we had intended to follow Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president and keep readers posted on the pros and cons of voting for Hillary.  Given the ethical and logical bankruptcy of politically supporting anyone in the reactionary Republican Party, the real question for progressives becomes whether or not to support Hillary Clinton for the Democrat Party presidential nomination or venture further left.  Yet, progressives seem to know Hillary’s clearly the establishment choice for the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination and, thus, the less progressive choice.

Nevertheless, Hillary is currently outpacing Sanders in terms of winning over Democrat Party delegates.  Whilst Bernie Sanders may seem more progressive to many progressives, and attractive because he’s not the establishment choice, the general public seems unconvinced of Sanders’ electability. [1]  Hillary Clinton is banking on such a perception becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Hillary is also banking on hoping that her supporters will accept her rhetoric and political promises without interrogating her political history, without the historical memory to appreciate her political flip-flopping and opportunism.

This is where economic journalist Doug Henwood‘s new book comes in, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (2015), which chronicles over four decades of Hillary’s political life.  Those of us who have followed the Clintons’ dynastic career and watched Hillary and her political party, the Democrat Party, fail working class people time and again won’t be surprised by the information chronicled in Doug Henwood’s new book. [2]  But for those who haven’t followed Hillary very closely, or find themselves enamoured of her candidacy for president, this book will go a long way in disabusing any self-respecting progressives, or people of conscience, from supporting Hillary Clinton for any political office, let alone that of president.  Doug Henwood spoke with free speech radio today to discuss My Turn.  Listen (or download) here. [3]

Messina

***

[Transcription by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and UpFront.]

UPFRONT—[29 FEB 2016]  “Good morning, it’s February 29, 2016.  This is UpFront.  I’m Brian Edwards-Tiekert.  On Today’s show:

HILLARY CLINTON:  “They are often the kinds of kids, that are called super-predators—no conscience, no empathy—we can talk about why they ended up that way.  But, first, we have to bring them to heel.”

DOUG HENWOOD:  “She was very enthusiastic about three strikes legislation. She would complain about how long it was taking Congress to pass her husband’s crime bill.  So, well, a lot of Hillary’s apologists will say that you can’t blame her for having supported that because it was her husband’s doing.  And, in fact, she is actually speaking publicly and very aggressively in favour of it.”

BRIAN EDWARDS-TIEKERT:  “Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is running on her experience.  So, what is her record?  Doug Henwood has just released a new book chronicling more than four decades of her life in politics.  And we will discuss it next, after the news.  (c. 1:04)

[News Headlines omitted by scribe] 

BRIAN EDWARDS-TIEKERT:   “It is 7:08 in the morning.  You’re listening to UpFront on KPFA.  My name is Brian Edwards-Tiekert.  And we’re starting with election news this morning.  Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina Primary by a staggering margin of more than 47 percentage points.  That put her solidly back in the front-runner position, going into tomorrow’s Super Tuesday contests and puts the spotlight back on her.

“We thought this would be a good time to go deep on Hillary Clinton’s record.  She has a longer record than pretty much anyone in the race.  To do that, we invited on Doug Henwood.  He’s editor of the Left Business Observer.  Many of you know him as the host of Behind the News, a programme, that KPFA airs on Thursdays at noon.  He’s also author of a new book about Hillary Clinton called My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency.  We spoke shortly before the primary took place.  Here’s the interview:  (c. 9:01)  Doug Henwood, welcome.”

DOUG HENWOOD:  “Good to be here.”

BRIAN EDWARDS-TIEKERT:   “I wanna start with the overall thesis of the book, which I think is pretty important framing.  You say:  Hillary Clinton is not the problem.  She is exemplary of the problem.  What is the problem in your mind?”

DOUG HENWOOD:  “Well, the problem is, you know, as Bernie’s been railing against for months now, the Establishment, with a capital ‘E’.  She comes out of, and represents, almost perfectly, a system of money and power, that have systematically limited people’s expectations for what government can do, have reduced what the scope of politics down to very minimal reforms, and amplified by a little highafalutin rhetoric.  But people have just come to expect, and accept, stagnant or declining incomes and increasing instability of their economic lives, and just larger problems like ecological crisis, climate change, resignation of that.  She just represents business as usual, very effectively.  She’s a very intelligent, sophisticated representative of business as usual.  But that is what she is.”

BRIAN EDWARDS-TIEKERT:   “But she is proposing some progressive reforms, as part of her campaign platform now, introducing a public option for health care on a state by state basis, a $350 billion dollar overhaul of public college financing, that would make it much more affordable for a large swath of the population to attend colleges and universities.  Do you doubt her sincerity on those issues?”  (c. 10:31)

DOUG HENWOOD:  “Yeah.  As I wrote in the book, I studiously avoided looking at any of her proposals when I was writing the book, of which there weren’t as many of them as there are now, because I just don’t trust a word she says.  She has a long history of saying whatever’s convenient at the moment and not really following through.  I prefer to look at her some-40-year history in politics and try to figure out where her instincts lie and what her principles are.  And I don’t think that’s a very pretty picture.  And just to react to the two things you mentioned, the public option is a little weird.  I just was reading that proposal yesterday and it’s kind of half-baked to start with.  And, then, she ladles a bunch of qualifications on top of it in cooperation with the states—maybe this, maybe that.  So, even in its official form, it’s kind of hard to figure just how serious she is with that.

“But the other thing you also mentioned, also the college tuition, I was just reading that, like, less than an hour ago.  And I couldn’t really understand precisely what she was talking about.  It’s all very high-sounding and vague.  It sounds, in part, like more work-study and more online learning.  But it’s not the kind of thing, that can stir the heart or really transform the way we live.  As I said on Twitter last night, if you compare the [Bernie] Sanders proposal to hers, it’s like free tuition versus something like the i-Tunes User Licence Agreement.  You know?  It’s like pages and pages of incomprehensible prose.  And, despite all that, I still don’t trust what she says.”  (c. 12:07)

BRIAN EDWARDS-TIEKERT:   “But, I suppose her argument for that is her proposals are what’s achievable.  For instance, the public option in health care is something they’re claiming to be able to do within the existing statute, within the Affordable Care Act.”

DOUG HENWOOD:  “That’s a very strange conception of politics, as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t think you succeed in politics by making minimal demands and then pre-accepting further compromises.  I think you succeed in politics by demanding a lot and, then, maybe, making some compromises along the way.

“So, I think that that whole conception of politics, which she and all her apologists and her intellectual supporters, like Paul Krugman’s embrace of the possible, has a deep resignation and pessimism underlying it, that just depresses me to think about.  It is as if expectations have been beaten down now for 30 or 35 years.  But they need to be beaten down further.

“There’s a sense among elite liberals or centrists or Democrats—whatever label we wanna apply to them—that the right is so much in command of the institutions and ideology today that we cannot afford to make anything but minimal demands and wage defensive warfare against their onslaught.  I don’t think that’s the way you win in politics.  You have to come back with strong proposals and fight for them.  That’s something, that Sanders is doing.  That’s something that the right has been doing for 30 or 40 years in American politics.  And they’ve been very successful at it.  I don’t see this strategy of preemptive compromise, which is something that Obama embraced from the very first moment he took office, as being a very fruitful way of trying to improve things.”  (c. 13:41)

BRIAN EDWARDS-TIEKERT:   “Well, let’s talk about her political formation.  By college, she’s off to a promising start.  She writes her undergraduate thesis about the legendary community organiser Saul Alinsky.  She interns under a couple of communists in Oakland, while she’s in law school.  One of them was on Pacifica‘s board at the time.  She worked for Marion Wright Edelman after law school.  When does she start to part ways with the left?”

DOUG HENWOOD:  “Well, even in her younger days, in her more radical days, she was never on the extremes.  She was always one for working within the system.  She thought Alinsky was too much of a radical, that the best way to change things was from the inside, not from the outside. [4]  When she decided to go to law school and told Alinsky that, he was very disappointed in her because he didn’t like the insider approach.

“So, we can see where she was going, even in those heady days of the late ’60s/early ’70s, when she was young and still wearing her striped tiffy pants. But she really started changing in the late ’70s in Arkansas when she became a lawyer at the Rose Law Firm, which represented a lot of elite Arkansas interests, such as Walmart and Tyson Foods.  She served at the Walmart board at that point.  And she was also advising and working with her husband, while he was governor.  (c. 15:05)

[SNIP]  (c. 59:51)

Learn more at UPFRONT.

[This transcript will be expanded as time constraints, or demand and productive forces, allow.  Contact us to find out how you can help expand and contribute to Lumpenproletariat.org]

***

[1]  Unfortunately, our news media lack the imagination to question why we must have a single-choice vote, which prevents people from voting their conscience for fear of ‘throwing away their vote’.  As anyone willing to think beyond our current constraints will find, simply moving to ranked-choice voting would mean that all of those interested in voting for Sanders could do so and still pick, say, Hillary Clinton as their second choice (and perhaps another candidate for a third choice as well).  That way, if one’s first choice loses, one’s vote is simply transferred to one’s second choice, and so on.  Imagine that.

Now, you know that more people would vote their conscience if they weren’t forced to choose a single candidate.  With ranked-choice voting, it can be easy to see how Sanders would likely defeat Hillary in such a democratic election.  Unfortunately, the Democratic Party isn’t that democratic in its nomination process.  Perpetuating the electoral status quo has as much to do with shutting out alternative political parties from the cartelised electoral system controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties, as it has to do with ensuring the nomination of an establishment candidate within each corporate political party.

Our current single-choice voting system forces people to choose for the least worst of those choices perceived as having the likeliest chance of winning.  Denying voters ranked-choice voting essentially blocks alternative political parties from gaining political traction because voters are pressured toward the established corporate political parties, such that Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, cannot run for office within an actual socialist party, such as the Peace and Freedom Party.  Anti-democratic barriers to ballot access and Top-Two Primary legislation aside, we can also question the pros and cons of Bernie Sanders’ decision to not publicly question our two-party dictatorship.  Some will argue it is political pragmatism, whilst others will argue it is part and parcel of the problematic nature of aiding and abetting the cartelisation of the electoral process.

[2]  We still haven’t read the book at Lumpenproletariat.org.  But getting a sense of it from listening to Doug Henwood discuss his book on free speech radio KPFA, the Clinton history is consistent with our historical memory over the years.  But we look forward to reading it and updating this article with some relevant notes.  Please leave us your thoughts below if you have read My Turn.

[3]  Terrestrial radio broadcast (with online simulcast and digital archiving), UpFront (94.1 FM, KPFA, Berkeley, CA) for Monday, 29 FEB 2016, 07:00 PDT, during KPFA’s 2016 Winter Fund Drive.  Host Brian Edwards-Tiekert discusses My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the White House with the book’s author, economic journalist Doug Henwood.

[4]  Notable, this is, essentially, the ideology, as far as I can tell, to which UpFront radio host Brian Edwards-Tiekert and his political allies at KPFA subscribe.  Only Doug Henwoods’ and Brian Edwards-Tiekerts historical amnesia or sheer mendacity preclude them from acknowledging this fact during this conversation.  Edwards-Tiekert’s political faction within KPFA has long been aligned with the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club, which seeks to transform the Democratic Party from within, in direct contradiction to the majority of activists in and around KPFA, who oppose both corporate political parties, by and large.  This is a strange strategy, if it is to be taken seriously, because even if it were sincere and such activists managed to capture the Democratic Party from within, it would do nothing to change the cartelised nature of a two-party dictatorship, which lacks an open and diverse political system.

This ideological division within KPFA has led to much internecine strife and discord within KPFA and the Pacifica Radio Network.  I’ve been listening to KPFA since before high school in the 1990s, and Brian Edwards-Tiekert and his KPFA faction SaveKPFA, et al., have shown great zeal and enthusiasm in their support for the Democrat Party, including giddy support for Obama’s presidential campaigns.  This interview with Doug Henwood, made inevitable by Bernie Sanders’ race for the Democratic presidential nomination marks a dramatic shift away from shameless apologia for the Democrat Party.

***

[1 MAR 2016  01:21 PDT]

[Last modified 10:43 PDT  2 MAR 2016]

Advertisements

Debunking Neoclassical Economics: The Myth of the Barter Economy

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by in Anti-Capitalism, History of Hip Hop, Marxian Theory (Marxism), Music, Political Economy

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

619px-Barter-Chickens_for_SubscriptionLUMPENPROLETARIAT—Cash rules everything around me/C.R.E.A.M. get the money/dolla, dolla bill ya’ll, was the popular refrain from the Wu-Tang Clan, as many others before and since.  Such an observation conveys a sentiment borne from an awareness that there’s a certain cutthroat reality about how money permeates contemporary human existence.  As long as one has money, however it may have been obtained, one can take comfort in life’s comforts and pleasures.  Without money, regardless of the lack of jobs or opportunities, one very quickly becomes persona non grata.

“C.R.E.A.M.” by Wu-Tang Clan

Money is a peculiar convention, which conceals complex social relations imbedded within our money-based society.  Looking at the nature and origins of money from an academic perspective, we’ve likely been taught that money developed as an alternative to the inconvenience of barter, which, we are told by uncritical economics textbooks and uncritical educators, preceded the use of money for people to exchange the daily necessaries of life.  But, as anthropologists, such as David Graeber, point out, this narrative of barter preceding money is proving to be a myth.  And it seems to be more than an innocent mistake of a crude pedagogical device or tautological simplification, as David Graeber argues in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, because this myth “makes it possible to imagine a world that is nothing more than a series of cold-blooded calculations.”

In a new article for The Atlantic, which explores actual anthropological evidence of various indigenous societies toward sussing out pre-money social formations [1], Ilana E. Strauss writes [2]:

“But the harm may go deeper than a mistaken view of human psychology.  According to Graeber, once one assigns specific values to objects, as one does in a money-based economy, it becomes all too easy to assign value to people, perhaps not creating but at least enabling institutions such as slavery (in which people can be bought) and imperialism (which is made possible by a system that can feed and pay soldiers fighting far from their homes).”

Messina

***

THE ATLANTIC—[26 FEB 2016]  The Myth of the Barter Economy

Adam Smith said that quid-pro-quo exchange systems preceded economies based on currency, but there’s no evidence that he was right.

Imagine life before money. Say, you made bread but you needed meat.

But what if the town butcher didn’t want your bread? You’d have to find someone who did, trading until you eventually got some meat.

You can see how this gets incredibly complicated and inefficient, which is why humans invented money: to make it easier to exchange goods. Right?

This historical world of barter sounds quite inconvenient. It also may be completely made up.

The man who arguably founded modern economic theory, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, popularized the idea that barter was a precursor to money. In The Wealth of Nations, he describes an imaginary scenario in which a baker living before the invention of money wanted a butcher’s meat but had nothing the butcher wanted.“No exchange can, in this case, be made between them,” Smith wrote.

This sort of scenario was so undesirable that societies must have created money to facilitate trade, argues Smith. Aristotle had similar ideas, and they’re by now a fixture in just about every introductory economics textbook. “In simple, early economies, people engaged in barter,” reads one. (“The American Indian with a pony to dispose of had to wait until he met another Indian who wanted a pony and at the same time was able and willing to give for it a blanket or other commodity that he himself desired,” read an earlier one.)

But various anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe. “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

Humphrey isn’t alone. Other academics, including the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, and the Cambridge political economist Geoffrey Ingham have long espoused similar arguments.

When barter has appeared, it wasn’t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn’t emerge from it—rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to. “In most of the cases we know about, [barter] takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money, but for one reason or another, don’t have a lot of it around,” explains David Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics.

So if barter never existed, what did? Anthropologists describe a wide variety of methods of exchange—none of which are of the “two-cows-for-10-bushels-of-wheat” variety.

Communities of Iroquois Native Americans, for instance, stockpiled their goods in longhouses. Female councils then allocated the goods, explains Graeber. Other indigenous communities relied on “gift economies,” which went something like this: If you were a baker who needed meat, you didn’t offer your bagels for the butcher’s steaks. Instead, you got your wife to hint to the butcher’s wife that you two were low on iron, and she’d say something like “Oh really? Have a hamburger, we’ve got plenty!” Down the line, the butcher might want a birthday cake, or help moving to a new apartment, and you’d help him out.

Learn more at THE ATLANTIC.

***

[1]  For a useful article on the Marxian concept of social formation, see:

ENCYCLOPEDIA—Social formation is a Marxist concept referring to the concrete, historical articulation between the capitalist mode of production, persisting precapitalist modes of production, and the institutional context of the economy. The theory of the capitalist mode of production—its elements, functioning at the enterprise level and the level of market relations among enterprises (e.g., processes of competition, concentration, and centralization), and its contradictions, tendencies, and laws of motion—can be found in

Karl Marx’s Capital ([1867] 1967) The capitalist mode of production as such is an abstraction, accessible to research only through social formations; that is, through its concrete, historically specific manifestations in nation states, regions within nations (e.g., the South), or regions encompassing nations (e.g., the European Union). Though Marx (1818–1883) did not define this concept, its meaning and significance can be inferred from his work, particularly from this statement:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled … and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire foundation of the economic community which grows out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship between the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers.… which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and … the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis—the same from the standpoint of its main conditions—due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances. (Marx [1867] 1967, vol. 3, pp. 791–792)

Marx postulates here a necessary, dialectical interrelation between relations of exploitation and political relations, between economic and social systems, a point previously made as follows: “The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (Marx [1859] 1970, p. 20). The historical specificity of the relations of production is crucial for understanding the social formation in its universality (i.e., as a capitalist social formation) and in its particularity because, empirically, “the same economic basis” (i.e., the capitalist mode of production) will show “infinite variations” due to a social formation’s unique characteristics among which, the presence and persistence of precapitalist modes of production are of key importance. This is why the study of social formations entails the investigation of the articulation of modes of production; that is, the specific ways in which the capitalist mode of production affects precapitalist modes of production, altering them, modifying them, and even destroying them (Wolpe 1980, p. 2).

RECENT INTERPRETATIONS

The relationship between the capitalist mode of production, social formations, and social change has been interpreted in determinist and dialectical ways. Literal, atheoretical readings of the work of Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) reduce their views to technological and economic determinism, a result produced also by sophisticated but undialectical readings (e.g., Cohen 1978) that ignore the dialectical nature of Marx’s thought. Marxist concepts are essentially material and social; for example, a machine, in itself, is a physical object that becomes a means of production or a productive force when it enters the production process in the context of historically specific relations of production. Changes in the forces of production occur, it follows, always in the context of political struggles. Cohen, on the other hand, attributes to the productive forces a primary, determinant role in historical change, and he radically divides the social (e.g., relations of production) from the material or extrasocial (i.e., nature, humans, forces of production). Cohen’s undialectical materialism and determinism has to rely, unavoidably, upon transhistorical sources of change: a universal tendency of the productive forces to develop and a “somewhat rational” human nature capable of coping with scarcity (Cohen 1978, pp. 132–160). From this standpoint, then, historical changes are the effect of changes in the forces of production, undialectically understood as mere technological change. Class struggles play no role in historical change for political actors are reduced to rationally adapting to the effects of changing circumstances.

A determinist understanding of Marx would lead social scientists to expect that the penetration of the capitalist mode of production in social formations where precapitalist modes of production are widespread would soon produce qualitative changes in their economic system (e.g., modification or destruction of the precapitalist modes of production) and their superstructure (e.g., culture, legal, and political institutions). Determinist perspectives, however, underestimate the resilience of the noneconomic characteristics of social formations and the extent to which production is a thoroughly social activity that requires social and cultural conditions of possibility that cannot be instituted by decree. Despite appearances, for example, the drastic economic changes introduced in Russia after 1917 and in Eastern Europe after World War II (1939–1945) were, to some extent, superficial, for those countries quickly reverted to capitalism. There are many complex economic and political reasons why revolutionary change did not produce deep and qualitative superstructural changes, but reliance on the determinant and automatic effects of changing the mode of production must have contributed in important ways.

The literature on social formations subject to the penetration of the capitalist mode of production through gradual, nonrevolutionary processes indicates that forms of articulation between the capitalist mode of production and precapitalist modes of production cannot be logically deduced from Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production. The notion of articulation refers to “the relationship between the reproduction of the capitalist economy on the one hand and the reproduction of productive units organized according to pre-capitalist relations and forces of production on the other” (Wolpe 1980, p. 41). How these processes actually interact varies a great deal from one social formation to another, thus leading to the construction of conflicting perspectives about the nature of social formations: (1) Social formations lack a necessary structure; one mode of production may dominate or several modes of production may be articulated with or without one dominant mode; (2) A social formation’s necessary structure may be formed by a dominant mode of production and its conditions of existence, which might include elements of precapitalist modes of production, or it may simply be the effect of the articulation of any number of modes and their respective conditions of existence; (3) Given a dominant mode (e.g., the capitalist mode of production) in any social formation, all other modes will be subordinate to its structures and processes so that they are reduced to mere “forms of existence” of the dominant mode (Wolpe 1980, p. 34).

These and other perspectives entail different implications depending on whether the mode of production is defined in a restricted sense, as a combination of relations and forces of production, or in an extended sense, encompassing linkages among enterprises as well as other economic and political/cultural elements constitutive of the mode of production and conducive to its reproduction over time (e.g., distribution, circulation, exchange, the state) (Wolpe 1980, p. 40; Marx [1859] 1970, pp. 188–199). Because modes of articulation are unique to specific social formations (e.g., in South Africa, racial ideology reproduced and sustained capitalist relations of production [Wolpe 1980, p. 317]; in Peru, agrarian reform contributed to the proletarianization of Indian communities [Bradby 1980, p. 120]), it could be erroneously concluded that social formation and articulation are useless concepts, for their use in research is unlikely to yield testable empirical generalizations.

These concepts are exceedingly important, for they contribute to the adjudication of an important issue in Marxist theory: the extent to which Marx is or is not an economic determinist. The historical and empirical variability in the conditions of reproduction of the capitalist mode of production that is documented through research in social formations and modes of articulation demonstrates the nondeterminist nature of Marx’s theories.

While the structure, processes, contradictions, and tendencies of the capitalist mode of production remain the same, thus constituting the “innermost secret” of the economic and political structures in social formations where the capitalist mode of production is dominant, the historical conditions for the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production vary historically and cross-culturally in the terrain of social formations, where political struggles carried under a variety of banners (class, race, religion, and nationalism) shape the different and spacialized outcomes of capitalism’s never-ending expansionary tendencies.

Dialectically considered, social formations are the unity between the universal (the capitalist mode of production) and the particular, the concrete conditions within which the capitalist mode of production operates. The concept of social formation, unlike the abstract non-Marxist concept of “society,” opens up the possibility of a realistic and historical understanding of social reality, based not on inferences from transhistorical tendencies, functional prerequisites, or concepts of human nature, but upon the historical specificity of the social formations within which capitalism operates.

“Formation, Social.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 2008. Retrieved March 03, 2016 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3045300847.html

Learn more at ENCYCLOPEDIA.

[2] “The Myth of the Barter Economy” by Ilana E. Strauss, The Atlantic, 26 FEB 2016:  http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/

Published (online) by The Atlantic

***

[3 MAR 2016]

[Last modified 3 MAR 2016  14:45 PDT]

[Thanks to Dr. John Henry for running Dr. Lee’s UMKC-LEE ECONGRAD Announcement List.]

Post Pop Depression (2016) by Iggy Pop

27 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in History of Rock and Roll, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Post_Pop_Depression_(Front_Cover)LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Iggy Pop is currently preparing to release his seventeenth album entitled Post Pop Depression on 18 MAR 2016.  The man is a living rock and roll legend and a musical genius.  Just consider the songwriting prowess Iggy Pop imbued into composing what would go on to become one of David Bowie’s most recognisable hits “China Girl“, which, by the way, is not about miscegenation.

On this project, Iggy Pop joins forces with Josh Homme (Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal, Them Crooked Vultures, et al.), American rock multi-instrumentalist Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age, The Dead Weather), and drummer Matt Helders (Arctic Monkeys).  Check it out.

Messina

“Gardenia” by Iggy Pop

“Break Into Your Heart” by Iggy Pop

***

INDIE LANDSCAPES—[27 FEB 2016] [Listen here.]

This segment features music by Iggy Pop, who in collaboration w/ Josh Homme, Dean Fertita & Matt Helders prepare to release their debut album on Loma Vista Recordings (March 18, 2016).

Amsterdam trio Bombay who return with their sophomore full-length Show Your Teeth out now on independent Dutch label V2 Records.

Pacific Northwest 3-piece Night Beats from Seattle with a track off their album Who Sold My Generation out now on Heavenly Recordings.

Four-piece Plates Of Cake from Brooklyn featuring a track off their 3rd LP titled Becoming Double released on Bandcamp.

Musical project of Jett Pace titled Old Man Canyon dropping his debut LP Delirium released independently.

Montreal, Quebec’s fourtet Suuns featuring a cut off their forthcoming album Hold/Still due for release April 15, 2016 via Secretly Canadian.

Birmingham, Alabama’s 3-piece Wray returning with their album Hypatia, out now via Communicating Vessels.

Concluding the show with a London four-piece named Telegram releasing their debut album Operator out on Republic Of Music.

Learn more at INDIE LANDSCAPES.

***

THE NEW YORK TIMES—[21 JAN 2016]  LOS ANGELES — “Now that you’re all greased up, how about ‘Lust for Life’?” Iggy Pop said in a voice that was part Midwestern twang, part grizzled prospector to his new band as they rehearsed at a North Hollywood studio. Although it was Mr. Pop’s first time singing with the group, which had been preparing on its own, the mood shifted quickly from tension to elation. After each song, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, who assembled the musicians, asked Mr. Pop if he wanted to wrap up, but Mr. Pop kept calling for more: first new songs and then oldies from “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life,” his two late-1970s collaborations with David Bowie. Mr. Pop, 68, wore a dark, patterned shirt, baggy black pants and sandals. He had started the rehearsal seated, conserving his energy, but by the end he was strutting.

“We’re hanging on by the skin of our teeth, but we’re making it through,” Mr. Homme recalled of the group’s initial practice with its singer a few days later. “And by the time we get to ‘Lust for Life,’ we’re all sweating and dancing around with this moronic look on our faces. Iggy looked over at me and …” Mr. Homme mimed a wink and a half-concealed thumbs up. “With Iggy, compliments are not forthcoming. It was a real moment.”

The new songs are from “Post Pop Depression” (Loma Vista), an album Mr. Pop and Mr. Homme wrote and recorded together with utmost secrecy and full independence, which is scheduled to be released in March. Its music shows both songwriters’ clear fingerprints: the pithy, hard-nosed clarity of Mr. Pop’s lyrics and the unflinching tone of his voice; and the crispness, angularity and deft convolutions of Mr. Homme’s chords and melodies. (The group will be making its debut on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” Thursday night.)

In some ways, “Post Pop Depression” also picks up where “Lust for Life” left off. “Where those records pointed, it stopped,” Mr. Homme said. “But without copying it,” he continued, “that direction actually goes for miles. And when you keep going for miles you can’t see these two records any more.”

The lyrics reflect on memories, hint at characters and offer advice and confessions; they can be hard-nosed, remorseful, flippant, combative or philosophical. The album’s theme, Mr. Pop said, is: “What happens after your years of service? And where is the honor?”

Offstage, Mr. Pop is slighter and calmer than the hyperactive rocker he becomes in concert. His face is lined, his long hair unfussy; he has a professorial pair of eyeglasses. He answers questions thoughtfully, with a clear gaze, an occasional self-deprecating laugh and a vocabulary far more elaborate than the monosyllables that nail down his songs; he quoted de Tocqueville and the French author Michel Houellebecq.

Learn more at THE NEW YORK TIMES.

***

[3 MAR 2016]