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Tag Archives: The Atlantic

Birth of a Nation (2016) directed by Nate Parker

15 Sat Oct 2016

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Fascism, History, Police State, Political Economy, Political Science, Racism (phenotype), Sociology

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Birth of a Nation (1915), Birth of a Nation (2016), Nate Parker (b. 1979), Professor Griff, The Atlantic, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton Virginia (1831), Time

the_birth_of_a_nation_2016_filmLUMPENPROLETARIAT—It seemed strange to see this title as an option this evening at the movies.  Of course, the original, racist, Ku Klux Klan propaganda film comes to mind when one sees this title come up in this new 2016 film.  But this film is no nostalgic updating of D.W. Griffith‘s 1915 silent epic drama film, The Birth of a Nation (originally called The Clansman).

Birth of a Nation (2016), a powerful reclaiming of history and a courageous confrontation with historical truth, gives American families and friends and neighbors an opportunity for truth and reconciliation around some of the horrors of our collective past.  Rather than proselytise white supremacy, as in the 1915 iteration, this film makes a remarkable argument for emancipatory violence in a climate of institutionalised violence.  This film raises many provocative questions and challenges the humanity in all of us.  And it is a fine work of cinema, with superb acting, cinematography, and direction.  This is a must-see film.  Take a friend or a loved one; and, then, most importantly, talk about it honestly.  Birth of a Nation (2016) is in theatres now. [1]

Messina

Birth of a Nation (2016) trailer

***

Of course, there will be diverse responses to Nate Parker’s final cut of Birth of a Nation (2016).  It’s good to get different perspectives.

***

THE ATLANTIC—[20 OCT 2016]

The Historical Fiction of The Birth of a Nation

Nate Parker’s film uses cinematic tropes that may obscure the true complexity of Nat Turner’s legend.

04:45 EDT

Vann R. Newkirk II

Why is Nat Turner’s story necessary?

It’s a question that’s often subtly animated an ongoing debate about Nate Parker’s film The Birth of a Nation, which tells a version of Turner’s infamous 1831 slave revolt in Virginia.  While it shouldn’t enter conversations about Parker’s acquittal of sexual assault charges and his subsequent comments about the case, the question of Turner’s importance has lingered after The Birth of a Nation’s struggles at the box office.  Some of the film’s most ardent advocates have charged that its problems result from plots among black feminists to harpoon the work of a duly acquitted man.  More reasonably, some reviewers and supporters have called the film necessary viewing in spite of its creator.  But those who defend The Birth of a Nation share a common concern: Does the movie’s underperformance somehow damage the underlying story of Turner and his rebellion?

Most of the movie’s defenders believe that Turner’s story carries a unique, overriding weight in black culture, whether for its historical significance or as a sort of animating founding legend of black resistance, and that Parker’s film does a prima facie service in telling such a vital account.  Whether The Birth of a Nation actually carries that burden, and whether it can be appreciated in spite of the besmirchment of its creator, depends on understanding the phenomenon of Nat Turner himself and what he has come to symbolize.  The main problem with figuring out that phenomenon is that so much of the Turner we know is historical fiction, an impenetrable legendarium of many things that cannot be verified.

Even before Turner was hanged, the story of his rebellion had spread far and wide as propaganda, both among slavers and the enslaved.  For some, Turner and a roving band of rapist ruffians attacked white women in the most bestial of ways.  For others, General Nat led a glorious armed revolution that still maintained hidden legions in the Virginia woods years after his capture.  These disparate visions were aided by the fact that as an enslaved person, Turner saw his history, visage, and biographical details intentionally erased, even as they were formed.

Much of modern knowledge about Turner descends from these legends and a few shaky sources.  The primary source with the most information about Turner himself is a firsthand account from the lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray, called The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia.  The problem with that document, which was based on purported conversations between Turner and Gray, is that those conversations may or may not have actually happened and are not mentioned in the court of record, despite Gray’s claims.

The novel based on that document, William Styron’s 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner, is completely a work of historical fiction.  Taking its skeleton from an already questionable source with limited scope, Styron wove a fascinating, impossibly omniscient yarn about Turner’s life and inner motivations that was promptly criticized by many black writers and intellectuals for missing too many historical marks and reinforcing negative stereotypes.  Nevertheless, that novel and its source material probably form the bulk of modern popular knowledge about Nat Turner and his 1831 revolt in Virginia.

There’s nothing wrong or uncommon about the transformation of historical tidbits into legend; the legend of America’s birth is what tills fertile ground for works of art like Hamilton.  But historical fictions often carry political messages beyond the basic facts of the historical record.  The legend of Turner’s rebellion in many black households carries an inspirational message of agency, expressed through violence, and genius that belies the popular slavery myths of dumb, contented enslaved people who were brought civilization by white people.

[snip]

Learn more at THE ATLANTIC.

***

Underground Radio hosted Professor Griff for a film review of Birth of a Nation (2016) directed by Nate Parker. (Interview published 13 OCT 2016.)

***

THE ATLANTIC—[7 OCT 2016]

How ‘Important’ Is The Birth of a Nation Really?

It’s the latest slavery narrative to receive critical and popular attention, but Nate Parker’s film isn’t the original powerhouse many hoped it would be.

7 OCT 2016

Gillian B. White

One of the words most commonly used to describe Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation is “important.”  The word seemed less fraught when the movie, which tells the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, debuted to notable acclaim at Sundance early this year.  But it took on a different feel when college rape allegations against Parker and his co-writer for the film emerged during promotion for the movie. And then again when news broke that the alleged victim killed herself in 2012. “Important,” now, is being deployed to help sway those who remain critical of or conflicted about Parker, The Birth of a Nation’s writer, director, and star.

Amid the strong criticism of Parker that’s ensued, there have been many calls to prioritize the significance of the movie over any personal feelings about the filmmaker. Again and again, cast members, critics, and supporters have suggested both explicitly and implicitly that The Birth of a Nation should be seen because it’s an “important” work.  But what exactly makes a film required viewing despite personal ambivalence or objection?  What does “important” mean?

The Birth of a Nation is important insofar as any narrative about slavery, race, or other parts of America’s dark past is.  Films in this tradition are valuable because they demand a continued reckoning with a history that’s too easy to forget or gloss over, and they also explore how the impact of that past continues into the present.  But the fact that The Birth of a Nation is representatively important as a movie doesn’t mean that it’s good cinema, or even a necessary addition to the genre of stories about slavery.

One oft-cited meaningful feature of the film is its historical grounding in one of the bloodiest slave rebellions on record: Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia, which resulted in the deaths of over 50 white people and the subsequent killing of hundreds of blacks as retribution.  The Birth of a Nation doesn’t spare its audience the powerful and disturbing images of beatings, force feedings, and a litany of other atrocities that supposedly motivated Turner’s rebellion.  Nor should it.  But aside from its status as one of the deadliest, there’s not a widespread consensus among historians that Turner’s uprising had critical, long-lasting consequences for the institution of slavery or the people who benefited from it.

Further, little is actually known about Turner himself aside from a few sparse historical accounts and the confessional he wrote prior to his execution—a document that deserves scrutiny since it was produced by a white attorney during Turner’s confinement and published after Turner’s death.  This knowledge vacuum would make it difficult for a filmmaker (or anyone) to fill in the blanks about Turner’s life and motivations without significant editorializing.  And Parker does editorialize, choosing to include scenes and tropes that viewers may bristle at: at least two instances of the brutalization and rape of black women and the portrayal of Turner as the constant, morally unambiguous hero.

[snip]

Learn more at THE ATLANTIC.

***

THE ATLANTIC—[6 OCT 2016]

Grappling With The Birth of a Nation

Tipped as an early Oscar frontrunner, the film has been clouded with controversy in recent months.

6 OCT 2016

Christopher Orr

Rarely have a film’s apparent fortunes fallen so far so quickly.  At Sundance this year, The Birth of a Nation, a film documenting the 1831 slave uprising led by Nat Turner, won both the grand jury and audience awards, earned its writer-director-star Nate Parker a standing ovation before the movie even screened, and sold for a festival record of $17.5 million.  Since then, however, the film’s critical and commercial prospects have taken a decisive hit, from presumed Oscar frontrunner to borderline cinematic pariah.

Over the summer, the news broke widely that Parker had been charged with rape while he was a student at Penn State in 1999.  Although he was acquitted at trial in 2001, his co-defendant, Jean Celestin (who is also the co-writer of The Birth of a Nation), was convicted in a ruling that was later overturned.  Not long after, it emerged that the alleged victim had committed suicide in 2012.  Many have found Parker’s subsequent responses to questioning on the subject inadequate.

To what degree should we judge a film by its author?  How is it that the backlash against Parker, a black filmmaker, has been so much swifter than those against—to cite two obvious examples—Woody Allen and Roman Polanski?  These are thorny questions, and I can only recommend that potential viewers grapple with them as best they can.

[snip]

Learn more at THE ATLANTIC.

***

TIME—[12 SEP 2016]

Why You Should See The Birth of a Nation, No Matter How You Feel About Nate Parker

Punishment by refusal can’t rewrite the past

12 SEP 2016

Stephanie Zacharek

Movies, and sometimes the people who make them, work on us at strange, subterranean levels we can’t even begin to comprehend.  That’s why, even though relatively few people have seen it, few know quite how to feel about Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation, which premiered here at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday to a rousing response from the audience, some seven months after its sensational Sundance unveiling.  Parker’s debut picture—about Nat Turner, the enslaved African American who led a violent revolt against slave owners in 1831—is distinctive for one notable reason: Movies about the history of blacks in this country are rarely made, and if you rule out the usual suspects like Spike Lee and Lee Daniels—and count back to the days before 12 Years a Slave and Selma—they have rarely been made by people of color.  But months ahead of its release in the United States, in October, The Birth of a Nation has also become infamous for a thornier reason:  In 1999, while they were students at Penn State University, Parker and his roommate and wrestling teammate Jean Celestin—cowriter of The Birth of a Nation—were accused of raping a fellow student.  Parker was acquitted.  Celestin was found guilty, though the verdict was overturned.  Their accuser committed suicide in 2012.  In the context of this terrible blot, should Parker be lauded as a filmmaker?  Should people show tacit support of him and his actions by seeing the film?  Is his work, or his view on anything, in any way trustworthy?

Anyone who believes he or she will find true gratification in refusing to buy a ticket to The Birth of a Nation should probably stay away.  But this sort of punishment by refusal can’t rewrite the past, and it suggests that closing ourselves off from a movie is a bold way to engage with the world, when in fact, it’s the opposite.  The Birth of a Nation isn’t a great movie—it’s hardly even a good one.  But it’s bluntly effective, less a monumental piece of filmmaking than an open door.  Parker stars as Nat Turner, and his performance is grounded and thoughtful—he may be a better actor than he is as a director.  The Birth of a Nation works best when its story is told most simply, without too many strained poetic images—at one point, after a devastating event, Parker’s camera closes in on an ear of corn that begins seeping blood, an unnecessary blast of symbolism that tells us nothing, other than that a beginning filmmaker is being a showoff.

But there are discrete moments in The Birth of a Nation that speak to all sorts of things we “know” as Americans, but in an elemental way that makes us see them anew.  We watch a group of well wishers surround bride and groom Hark and Esther (Colman Domingo and Gabrielle Union), their overwhelming warmth the essence of community.  Later, Esther will be dragged away to provide a night’s entertainment for a white man—though for us, as viewers, the real horror is the aftermath, when she emerges from the plantation house in her nightgown, her face showing an inability to process the horror of what she’s just experienced, as her husband opens his arms to her.

[snip]

Learn more at TIME.

***

THE ATLANTIC—[21 AUG 2016]

Why the Debate Over Nate Parker Is So Complex

The discussion over how to parse the filmmaker in light of a sexual-assault trial 17 years ago is particularly difficult for black women.

21 AUG 2016

Morgan Jerkins

At first, it seemed as though Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation couldn’t have come at a better time.  In the wake of #OscarsSoWhite activism and the rapid expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement, a film about Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion that examined the history and power of black liberation seemed to be just the story America needed to see.  When Fox Searchlight purchased the global rights to the movie at the Sundance Film Festival for $17.5 million—a new record for the event—Parker’s ascendancy seemed unstoppable.  Excitement rose among black filmgoers for the film’s October release, while Parker seemed like a significant new presence in both the film and activism worlds.  Unfortunately, the promise of both him and his movie appears now to be too good to be true.

Over the past few weeks, debate has swirled around the fact that Parker was accused of raping a female student in 1999 along with his writing partner on The Birth of a Nation, Jean Celestin, while all three were enrolled at Penn State.  The victim also stated that both Parker and Celestin continually harassed her after she reported the crime.  In 2001, Parker was acquitted on the grounds that he and the woman had had sexual relations before the alleged rape.  Celestin was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to six months in prison, but he appealed, and the case was dismissed in 2005.  This week, Variety reported that the woman involved killed herself in 2012, at the age of 30.

Within the black community, these revelations have provoked sharp debate and sour feelings.  Parker’s movie concerns itself with black liberation, but the question of who gets to be the herald of this mobilization has long been a contested issue.  In this sense, Parker’s personal life is inextricable from the message of The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner is a symbol of liberation through rebellion and Nate Parker has chosen himself to be the vessel through which to tell this story.  But the revelations around his personal history illuminate the extent to which this liberation isn’t and hasn’t been equal for black men and women.  Parker’s history of Nat Turner revolves around a particularly powerful presentation of black masculinity—one that reflects how the subject of liberation so often puts black women in a difficult bind.

[snip]

Learn more at THE ATLANTIC.

***

[1]  GONZO:  My family and I decided to get out to the movies this evening, on an easy Saturday.  And of the available choices, we decided on Birth of a Nation.  My 11-year-old son wanted me to see The Magnificent Seven because he really enjoyed it and was certain that I would enjoy it as well.  I had voted for Birth of a Nation.  And, out of a series of twists and turns of fate, we ended up watching Birth of a Nation.

But I wanted my son to watch this because it looked like it might be a somewhat honest historical portrait of slavery in the United States, such that he could have an opportunity to appreciate our American heritage for all of its good and bad.  I’m not sure our kids are getting the same level of sociopolitical consciousness in class, as us older generations got back in the 1980s and ’90s, when the nation’s educators, particularly in the SF Bay Area, were still significantly influenced by the idealism of 1960s.

Even today, a movie, such as this one, which should be a clear wake-up call against the white supremacy upon, which this nation has been built, and upon which presidential platforms are still being built, is still controversial.  That’s all the more reason to see this film, mindfully, and engage with it.

Admittedly, going into this film, I only had a vague recollection of seeing a film trailer about slavery, which promised to provide a sincere, contemporary depiction of the realities of slavery, brought to life on the big screen.  Even as the film started, I had no clue that the The Birth of a Nation was going to be a telling of the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt against slavery.  Later to learn that the film was, indeed, directed by the lead actor in the film, Nate Parker, is even more impressive, as it is a rare case of a black man in Hollywood telling a story about black people.  Given that fact, as well as the competent production of the film with superb acting, it’s not surprising that many critics have allowed themselves to be caught up in the sexual assault charges, for which the film director was acquitted back in 1999.  It seems moralistic fingerpointing, or injecting confounding gender politics, functions to detract from the gravity of the importance of the historical Nat Turner revolt, which defies white supremacist narratives about backwards, docile, or complacent slaves, who didn’t mind their enslavement all that much.  In our critical analysis of a work of art, whether musical, visual, or otherwise, one must separate the art from the artist, as Professor Gustavson used to say in the conservatory.

***

[Image of Birth of a Nation film poster by source, used via fair use.]

[15 OCT 2016]

[Last modified  19:40 PDT  20 OCT 2016]

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The Atlantic: Should Students Learn About Black Lives Matter In School?

23 Sat Jul 2016

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Fascism, Critical Pedagogy, Education, Philosophy of Education, Police State, Racism (phenotype)

≈ Leave a comment

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Alia Wong, FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Hayley Glatter, New School for Social Research, Project Censored, Radical Pedagogy, The Atlantic, University of Missouri-Kansas City

the_atlantic_magazine_coverLUMPENPROLETARIAT—If we consider the press critically, of course, we find for-profit broadcast media to be compromised in its journalistic integrity and riddled with censorship and/or underreporting and obfuscation of important news stories. [1]  But, even non-profit, audience-sponsored, broadcast media often suffers from self-censorship of varying degrees. [2]

Similarly, as free speech radio is, first and foremost, an educational institution, our public school classrooms suffer from censorship and self-censorship, which stifles critical thinking.  School textbooks may discuss Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the American War), as issues of the past, as if the same struggles for civil and human rights and opposition to wars of capitalist imperialism are no longer happening.  Dr. James Loewen, as well as Dr. bell hooks and others engaged with critical pedagogy, have also drawn attention to the distortions and misrepresentations of history, and even outright lies found in most American history textbooks.  This uncritical acceptance of substandard textbooks and uncritical pedagogy, of course, does not only affect history and social studies, which usually glosses over the American government’s repression, enslavement, and genocide of ethnic minorities and also fails to address current events of great import and historical significance, such as Black Lives Matter and extrajudicial or illegal killings of unarmed children and adults by police, death in custody cases, police brutality, and disparities in the criminal justice system.

Similar problems are found in the discipline of economics, which is divided between a heterodox approach and a neoclassical approach to economics.  A neoclassical approach is predicated upon unrealistic assumptions about human nature and society, assumptions which are overly mathematised and completely delinked from any meaningful historical context.  Heterodox economics offers more pluralistic and, thus, more coherent analyses.  But this approach is confined to only a minority of heterodox economics departments, such as that of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the New School for Social Research in New York City. [3]

Our education system continues to be adversely impacted by the historical legacies of American racism, white supremacy, nationalism, and anti-communist, anti-socialist, pro-capitalist ideologies, which stifle truly critical analyses in American schools.

As educator Dr. Henry Giroux argues, we are rendering our students diminished in their capacities for critical thinking because we restrict the critical thinking, which we allow our students to engage in, to only involve prescribed content from textbooks, which usually avoid controversy, contemporary issues, and subtly stay within a particular establishment ideology of uncritical acceptance of capitalist modes of production, free market fundamentalism, American exceptionalism, and suppression of the American government’s enslavement, oppression, genocide, and dispossession of ethnic minorities.

Students, and educators, are not fully liberated to explore and critically engage with the world around them.  Consequently, most educators and the teaching programmes from which they hail, are largely uncritical conveyor belts of the status quo, enabling the persistence of historical social ills and pathologies.  But, some courageous educators are challenging pedagogies of repression and engaging in critical pedagogy.  And, in so doing, they are resisting the deprofessionalisation of educators.

A recent article in the The Atlantic asked the question:  Should students learn about Black Lives Matter in school?

It’s a good question.  The answer should be obvious.  But for some, probably, Orwellian reason, it is not.  And that should give us great concern for its implications for a democratic society, when successive generations of students are kept in the dark about the problems of society and effectively inoculated against any concept of civic engagement.

Messina

***

THE ATLANTIC—[21 JUL 2016]  Should Students Learn About Black Lives Matter In School?  The lengthy timelines of publishing new history textbooks—and the problematic narratives those books often present—push primary resources to the forefront of current-events education.

Hayley Glatter

If the Chicago social-studies teacher Gregory Michie waits for a textbook to teach his students about the Black Lives Matter movement, the first seventh-graders to hear the lesson won’t be born for another seven years.

Despite the historical implications of that movement, bureaucratic timelines all but quash any possibility that students might learn about today’s events from an actual history textbook in the near future.  According to Anthony Pellegrino, an assistant professor of education at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, many school districts receive new books on a seven-year cycle. However, in some states, schools don’t receive new books for 10 to 12 years, and the most current material in those books could be a few years old.  Certainly digital textbooks shorten this timeframe, but physical copies lag far behind: In some districts like Michie’s, students are reading textbooks that don’t even contain the name Barack Obama.

On top of that, the chapters on America’s most recent history often fall short.  Because content on, say, the American Revolution, has been read and edited over the course of multiple book editions, more recent chapters often “feel like just add-ons.” Pellegrino said.  “They’re so afraid to tackle anything current because we don’t have the perspective of history to be able to inform us more.  As such, the sentences, the words, the paragraphs, are just really vapid.”

But Michie, who teaches seventh- and eighth-graders at The Windy City’s William H. Seward Communication Arts Academy, doesn’t let outdated textbooks deter him from addressing timely, sensitive topics in the classroom.  Michie said the social-studies textbooks at Seward are around 20 years old, but even if they were contemporary, he wouldn’t rely on them. The history books “are just horrible,” he said.  “They dodge controversy.  Textbooks are commercials for the countries they’re made in.”  Instead, Michie’s conversations with students are rooted in sources ranging from images to political cartoons as he moves social-justice issues to the forefront with lessons that draw on modern cases like those of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown.

The use of primary-source documents has become a popular tool for teachers seeking to bring current events into the classroom, particularly as schools have adopted the Common Core standards, which encourage students to engage with such resources.  But the immediacy and timeliness of police brutality, activism, and institutionalized racism have led educators to consider the ramifications of sharing these issues with students.  Michie said talking about newsworthy events is critical, but his teaching of sensitive contemporary issues has drawn criticism—someone on Twitter called the lessons indoctrination.  However, he thinks the world outside the classroom is too relevant to ignore inside school walls.  Not discussing current events and issues of race, Michie said, sends a stark message to kids because “our silence as teachers speaks very loudly to our students.”

Public-school teachers should stand up against racism, should stand up against homophobia, should stand up against religious intolerance.

In addition to the relevance of topics like Black Lives Matter, Daisy Martin, a senior research associate in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, said weaving current events into lesson plans provides an opportunity for history teachers to re-engage their students.  “One of the most common words that’s used to describe history in K-12 is ‘boring,’ and kids think of it as, ‘It’s all done, and it’s sort of determined,’” Martin said.  By talking about what is going on now and explaining the connections between past and present, teachers can work to remove that stigma.

However, as Michie demonstrated, teachers who choose to bring current events into the classroom face numerous challenges.  And it’s not just claims of imprinting a teacher’s opinions on the class—Martin said some history teachers struggle to discuss sensitive topics because they may feel like they don’t know enough about the topic, have too much to cover already, or lack the school-wide support needed for such conversations.  Michie, though, is adamant about not shying away from sensitive topics: “Public-school teachers should stand up against racism, should stand up against homophobia, should stand up against religious intolerance.  To me, that’s not [taking] a side.  We have to advocate for, and believe in, and have high hopes for all of our students.”

Not everyone agrees with Michie, and textbook publishers are saddled with the task of appealing to a wide audience around the country.  And yet, certainly today’s political, social, and economic climates will be written about in history books. The events of today have been compared to the tumult of 1968, a year frequently cited as one of the most dynamic in American history—that year, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, riots burst out during the Chicago-hosted Democratic National Convention, and the Tet Offensive was launched in Vietnam.

Learn more at THE ATLANTIC.

***

THE ATLANTIC—[21 OCT 2015]  History Class and the Fictions About Race In America  High-school textbooks too often gloss over the American government’s oppression of racial minorities.

Alia Wong

Earlier this month, McGraw Hill found itself at the center of some rather embarrassing press after a photo showing a page from one of its high-school world-geography textbooks was disseminated on social media. The page features a seemingly innocuous polychromatic map of the United States, broken up into thousands of counties, as part of a lesson on the country’s immigration patterns: Different colors correspond with various ancestral groups, and the color assigned to each county indicates its largest ethnic representation. The page is scarce on words aside from an introductory summary and three text bubbles explaining specific trends—for example, that Mexico accounts for the largest share of U.S. immigrants today.

The recent blunder has to do with one bubble in particular. Pointing to a patch of purple grids extending throughout the country’s Southeast corridor, the one-sentence caption reads:

The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.

The photo that spread through social media was taken by a black Texas student named Coby Burren, who subsequently texted it to his mom, Roni-Dean Burren. “Was real hard workers, wasn’t we,” he wrote. Roni-Dean quickly took to Facebook, lambasting the blunder: the reference to the Africans as workers rather than slaves. A video she later posted has been viewed nearly 2 million times, and her indignation has renewed conversations around the Black Lives Matter movement while attracting coverage by almost every major news outlet. “It talked about the U.S.A. being a country of immigration, but mentioning the slave trade in terms of immigration was just off,” she told The New York Times. “It’s that nuance of language. This is what erasure looks like.”

McGraw Hill swiftly did its damage control. It announced that it was changing the caption in both the digital and print versions to characterize the migration accurately as a “forced” diaspora of slaves: “We conducted a close review of the content and agree that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves,” the company said in a statement. “We believe we can do better.” Catherine Mathis, the company’s spokeswoman, also emphasized that the textbook accurately referred to the slave trade and its brutality in more than a dozen other instances. And McGraw Hill has offered to provide various additional resources to any school that requests them, including supplemental materials on cultural competency, replacement textbooks, or stickers with a corrected caption to place over the erroneous one. But Texas school districts were already in possession of more than 100,000 copies of the book, while another 40,000, according to Mathis, are in schools in other states across the country.

If nothing else, the incident may serve as yet another example of why social studies—and history in particular—is such a tricky subject to teach, at least via textbooks and multiple-choice tests. Its topics are inherently subjective, impossible to distill into paragraphs jammed with facts and figures alone. As the historian and sociologist Jim Loewen recently told me, in history class students typically “have to memorize what we might call ‘twigs.’ We’re not teaching the forest—we’re not even teaching the trees,” said Loewen, best known for his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. “We are teaching twig history.”

Learn more at THE ATLANTIC.

***

[1]  For example, see Project Censored, which publishes an annual book of the most censored news stories, as peer-reviewed evidence of persistent media censorship.  Project Censored also broadcasts a weekly radio show out of free speech radio KPFA and across its national Pacifica Radio Network.  And, in 2013, Doug Hecker and Christopher Oscar directed Project Censored: The Movie, Ending the Reign of Junk Food News.

Also see articles featuring Project Censored at Lumpenproletariat.

CounterSpin is another good media analysis production by the media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), which airs on free speech radio stations throughout the nation.

[2]  One valid complaint, which could often be levelled against, for example, free speech radio KPFA is its tendency to shy away from the more controversial topics and issues.  For example, KPFA has been willing to air documentaries about the Black Panther Party history from the 1960s and ’70s, but has deemed it necessary to censor its descendants, which are currently civically engaged, such as J.R. Valrey and his Block Report Radio broadcasts, which used to air during The Morning Mix morning show.  Many people are okay discussing issues of racism, class struggle, and capitalist imperialism, but only if the issues are safely removed decades in the past.  The same goes for the 9/11 Truth Movement, which is not fully supported by all at free speech radio KPFA.  This editorial bifurcation reflects the historic internal struggle of free speech radio KPFA’s competing faction’s ideologies.

The radio programming produced by the less progressive faction at KPFA, which shamelessly calls itself SaveKPFA (appropriating the slogan from 1999 when KPFA listeners and staff successfully resisted attempts to hijack the station), has improved in terms of its willingness to confront police state terrorism, extrajudicial killings by police, death in custody cases, and police brutality and corruption scandals.  But it was not always like this. [2]  The more progressive, or revolutionary, broadcasters, such as JR Valrey with Block Report Radio and Dennis Bernstein‘s Flashpoints, and Davey D‘s Hard Knock Radio, which first featured Block Report Radio, paved the way for radical social justice campaigns, such as Black Lives Matter.

[3]  The history of free speech radio is obscure, but it’s out there.  As a truly concerned listener, among many scores, your author has had many memorable (and insightful) experiences in, and around, KPFA and the Pacifica Radio Network.  Your author’s experience with the behind-the-scenes KPFA dirt began before, and extended after, running for the KPFA Local Station Board (LSB) in 2010, as part of the Voices for Justice LSB slate, including SF Bay Area labour journalist Steve Zeltzer and Kurdish-American Dr. Sureya Sayadi.

One fine afternoon, back when my family and I lived on Liselle Lane in Modesto, California, circa 2012, I had the good fortune of chatting on the phone with Curt Gray, of the original Save KPFA.  He was a kind soul, who empathised with my being mistreated, like others, at KPFA by the elite clique, which had appropriated the Save KPFA name.  (Even SaveKPFA poster-boy Brian Edwards-Tiekert was surprised when I asked him for us to take a picture together during a ballot-count in Berkeley during a 2010 ballot count.  I wanted to believe we were misunderstanding Brian, so I also maintained polite interpersonal relations, although I disagreed with him publicly whilst campaigning for the LSB.)  Curt Gray confirmed my observations, which corroborated his narratives of KPFA/Pacifica history and perceptions about the SaveKPFA faction (formerly known as Concerned Listeners).  Gray described how this faction at KPFA used a system of patronage to bring in lackeys to do their dirty work.

Read Curt Gray’s article, “Stealing Save KPFA“, from 2010:

Stealing Save KPFA, 20 SEP 2010

by Curt Gray in concurrence with Jeffrey Blankfort, Maria Gilardin, Marianne Torres and Sasha Futran

I have learned that a group that had formerly called itself the Concerned Listeners, a faction in the community who are partisan supporters of the status quo controlling clique that runs KPFA and opposes accountability and participation by “outsiders” in the station, is now calling itself Save KPFA. The choice of this name is an ahistoric action that speaks of an arrogant sense of entitlement and a lack of knowledge or interest in how KPFA has developed and changed throughout its history as a ground-breaking community radio station.

The sad irony is that the original Save KPFA advanced ideals and goals that were and are in moral opposition to what this current group seems to be supporting. The original Save KPFA championed democracy, transparency, community participation and accountability for KPFA as a vital and irreplaceable resource of the Northern California progressive community.

The real, original Save KPFA came out of large public meetings held at the Ashkenaz Folk Dance and Music Hall on Berkeley’s San Pablo Avenue. The meetings were called by a group of listeners and unpaid KPFA programmers in response to station management’s unilateral actions to cancel a swath of community volunteer produced programming without notice or discussion. In the winter of early 1993 there were meetings attended by more than 200 people, both listeners and programmers, and all expressed growing concerns about the direction that KPFA was headed and a fear that the community that both supported and depended on KPFA was being pushed aside.

Those early meetings of hundreds of listeners and activists and a scattering of staff led to more than a year of intense organizing and a harsh education on the widening distance between what supporters of KPFA believed Pacifica was and the reality behind the image. It was the first time that many had a chance to tell and share with the larger community their knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes, information that was kept off the air and out of the printed program guide, the Folio. Coming together in these early meetings, gaining knowledge by sharing information, developing a more sophisticated understanding of who and what was shaping changes in the radio station that they had supported and relied on for so long, this was one of the beginnings of a nationwide Free Pacifica movement.

At these town hall style meetings on those rainy winter nights in the darkened nightclub we learned for the first time about Pacifica’s Strategy for National Programming document that over time called for more and more local volunteer produced programming to be replaced by national programming produced by radio professionals. It also called for Pacifica to go after big money grants to fund all this programming, with a stated aim to become “partners and players” with the largest corporate foundations such as the Pew, Ford, Carnegie and Readers Digest Foundations.

There were plans for national morning shows and national overnight call-in talk shows with big name celebrity hosts. We recognized this abandonment of local and volunteer produced programming as a fundamental turning away from what makes community radio what it is supposed to be. We called it what it was, NPR-ization of community radio. These plans were moving forward with little or no knowledge or input from listeners or the average programmer.

For the first time in a long time, a group of listeners were learning how KPFA really worked. We learned that there was a Program Council that consisted of programming department heads that met every week at the station. We learned that there was a local station advisory board that met quietly at the station every month, which should have been a venue for community input, if listeners had been encouraged to attend or even knew it existed.

The local board was self-selected and had the power to seat their members on the Pacifica National Board, the real holder of KPFA’s license, that met only three or four times a year in different parts of the country. Pacifica was and is a network with four other stations that also shares programming with many other affiliate community stations. A lot of the real power to decide the direction of the network seemed to be in the hands of the Pacifica Foundation’s Executive Committee and smaller power cliques within each station. There was no mechanism for any accountability to the people at the grassroots, the volunteer programmers and the subscribers and listeners.

At the core the station supporters in the public meetings at Ashkenaz loved KPFA and were fighting to defend it, especially its most progressive programming. But they started to realize that their interest and concerns were viewed somehow as a threat by an insular insider culture within the station’s management, staff, and local and national boards.

Out of the larger town hall style meetings KPFA’s new listener activists started to coalesce into the form of the organization named Save KPFA with a smaller, dedicated steering committee. Attempts were made to communicate, to share concerns, to work together with the other stakeholder groups – management, paid and unpaid staff, the station and foundation boards – to both protect and improve KPFA.

These attempts were met with a disturbing mix of fear, suspicion, contempt and disdain so frequently that the impression was communicated very clearly that only compliments were allowed and that any mere listener with a critical opinion was viewed as an enemy of the station as a whole. Not for the last time the listener activists had come together to defend programmers’ rights, but programmers did not return that solidarity by supporting the concerns of listeners.

A listener who politely tried to attend a Program Council meeting to suggest ways to use the station’s airwaves to educate listeners about internal station issues, as well as about larger media issues involving the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), and was suggesting that perhaps the Program Council might benefit from having listener representatives attend, observe and contribute to station programming decisions was angrily shouted out of the meeting, because “listeners do not belong at Program Council meetings.”

When members of the new listener group Save KPFA started attending local and national board meetings, the members of these boards seemed disturbed to have actual listeners in the audience at their meetings. Any discussion of the issues raised at the listener meetings was mostly suppressed on station call-in shows and the letter section of the printed program guide, the Folio, making it difficult to include the larger listener community in the discussion.

A listener who politely tried to attend a Program Council meeting was angrily shouted out of the meeting, because “listeners do not belong at Program Council meetings.”

Through 1993 KPFA’s new listener activist movement moved from town hall meetings to taking action. The show of listener concerns at the first noisy public meetings at the Ashkenaz dance club resulted in the threatened programming changes being temporarily withdrawn, and KPFA’s verbally abusive and divisive station manager, Pat Scott, was kicked upstairs within Pacifica. She was replaced by her assistant, and within months the iron-fisted Scott would become Pacifica’s next executive director.

As the group recognized that the powers-that-be within Pacifica were not interested in allowing open discussion or debate of the listening community activists’ issues to reach the larger KPFA audience via any free exchange of views on the air or in the program guide, other ideas for getting the word out were tried.

Some Save KPFA activists tabled at progressive events, creating surveys to try to get feedback from KPFA listeners. Some started to set up pirate stations to create an alternative way to get information out. Listener activists tried to call in on KPFA shows and wrote letters to the local press about the issues within the station. And we started a mailing list to disseminate hidden information to interested listeners through newsletters. We invited representatives of KPFA management and the station board to attend and address our meetings.

There was little interest in the station to acknowledged Save KPFA or the community concerns it represented. In fact, a narrative quickly took hold that alternately trivialized the station’s critics as out of touch ’60s leftovers or demonized them as violent and out of control.

Save KPFA decided that if KPFA would not allow dialog on the air or in the pages of the Folio that the listener activists would buy an ad in the program guide to address the whole KPFA community, inside and outside the station. One of the activists was moved enough to donate the cost of the advertisement from his inheritance from his recently deceased mother. We filed a fictitious name application, opened a bank account and got a P.O. box. The Folio editor assured us that our ad would be accepted.

So Save KPFA met and worked on statements to outline our group’s concerns, positions, proposals. The group collaborated on statements that called for elected station boards and on-air discussion of internal station issues and for the station to depend on its listeners for its funding, not foundations. They were determined to keep KPFA a voice for dissent that was not afraid to be critical of the powerful and to keep the station close to the grassroots community of programmers and listeners who had supported it for decades.

Yet, when we submitted the advertisement and the money, suddenly the station refused the ad without explanation. Immediately Save KPFA created a flier featuring the text of our ad and asking why the station was censoring our Free Speech and distributed it that night at a large public event sponsored by the station. Station management then reversed themselves again, saying that they would not allow us to run the advert as we had designed it, but we could publish it as an “Open Letter” if we modified and edited it to fit into the space they allowed us in the Folio.

In our “Open Letter,” Save KPFA called for local station boards to be elected by subscribers and staff and for a regular, listener-run call-in show dedicated to discussing internal KPFA and Pacifica matters. This pressure from Save KPFA caused station management and the local advisory board to very tentatively allow an election among subscribers for a small minority of seats on the advisory board.

Save KPFA called for local station boards to be elected by subscribers and staff and for a regular, listener-run call-in show dedicated to discussing internal KPFA and Pacifica matters.

Even so, the people controlling KPFA and Pacifica acted out their internalized conflict between the hollow on-air rhetoric promoting democratic empowerment for everyone else in the world and the need to protect their effective total internal dominance of the station. First management announces the election in the program guide but no discussion or candidate forums on the air. Then they announce that the election is canceled for lack of candidates, even after a handful of listeners submit candidate statements.

Then they change their minds, but now the voting period was during the on-air fundraiser, and their policy was to not mention the election while pitching for donations on the air. In the last week to send in the ballots, an unenthusiastic recorded message is aired reminding listeners of the advisory board vote.

On one morning a paid staff member is reported to shout at a volunteer programmer in the control room, “Don’t play that when my audience can hear it. We don’t want any of those idiots elected to the board.”

The seeming attempt to stifle the election goes from bad to worse. The actual ballot is the thin newsprint of the back page of the program guide, which the listeners must cut out with scissors. Then they mark their votes, fold and tape the ballot together and send it through the mail. Many of the returned ballots were destroyed, torn to tatters by the post office sorting machinery, arriving in the station mailbox in little plastic body bags supplied by the Postal Service.

KPFA has so little respect for the election that ballots are collected in an open unsealed mail cubby where they spill out onto the floor like so much trash near the front door. When the time comes to count the votes, ballots are found scattered underfoot down the hall, blown by a draft from the street. None of the candidates or any representatives are allowed to watch the count.

It is announced that not enough votes were cast for the election to be valid. The votes are not counted, and where the ballots wind up is a mystery. Mention is made that some voters had written comments on their ballots, but the ballots disappear without being further examined.

In an announcement in the next Folio, the listeners are told that there were not enough votes but that the advisory board might seat some of the candidates on the board anyway. But that was not a true intention and none of the election candidates were every spoken to about sitting on the advisory board, even though they continued to attend the monthly meetings as members of the audience.

In the same period, the station staff had been demanding elections for the staff’s own representatives to have a couple of seats on the station advisory board. The station staff voted and elected Maria Gilardin, an unpaid staff member who was a leader of Save KPFA and one of the few staff critics of Pacifica’s leadership and policies, to be one of the first station staff representatives on the board. But before Maria could take the seat she had been elected to fill, she was banned from all Pacifica properties without any appeal on trumped up charges of inciting violence at a Pacifica National Board meeting in Los Angeles. The KPFA station staff seemed to meekly accept the effective gutting of their vote by the Pacifica board without protest.

These and other events are the legacy of Save KPFA in the year of 1993 at the beginning of the long struggle to democratically reform Pacifica and try to bring some accountability to KPFA and the network. It is the foundation of what became a movement and where many hard facts about the reality of Pacifica were learned.

SAVE KPFA IS PART OF PACIFICA’S HISTORY, AND THAT HISTORY STILL MATTERS NOW. It is a history that is preserved in Mathew Lasar’s book about the Pacifica struggle, “Uneasy Listening,” and on websites and email lists.

In 1995 Pacifica moved ahead with its plans to transform itself into a professional media organization by purging hundreds of volunteer programmers from the Pacifica stations, some of whom had donated their time and work to build the network for decades before being tossed aside as Pacifica tried to become more respectable. In response to the mass purge of programmers, the leadership of Save KPFA started a new organization, Take Back KPFA! TBK! carried on the struggle to reform Pacifica and KPFA for the next few years as similar organizations sprang into being at the other Pacifica stations and a truly national movement evolved.

Take Back KPFA! has its own history and accomplishments, and the struggle to reform KPFA and Pacifica continued to be difficult. Just as Save KPFA from 1993 led to Take Back KPFA! in 1995, when events started to build in 1999 towards Pacifica’s corporate takeover and the KPFA lock-out, members of Take Back KPFA! helped form a new organization with its goal right in its name, the Coalition for a democratic Pacifica. The CdP was and has been a front line organization in bringing about the elections for the KPFA Local Advisory Board and pushing through the new reform bylaws for Pacifica that gave subscribers and staff members of the Pacifica Foundation the power to elect station boards with oversight powers.

This history is too important to be allowed to be forgotten or erased. It is a story of a long exhausting struggle for needed progressive reform in the face of every kind of underhandedness, mean spiritedness, hypocrisy and deceit. The long fight for elections within Pacifica was finally won, but the same internal struggle for control of the stations and what sort of stations they will be continues.

The difference is that now those conflicts are out in the open light of day, because elections necessarily lead to more openness.

And most unfortunately, there are still those in and around KPFA who hate that openness and want to keep “the audience” at arm’s length.

Clearly, not only is this history at risk of being erased, but the democratic reforms themselves are under attack. The same culture within the station that feared listener activism and opposed any accountability or oversight has continued to try to undermine the new democratic structures. The status quo faction works to protect the station’s patronage culture by using their power within the station to recruit and elect slates of candidates who work to keep the democratic structures from functioning as they were meant to.

For the last few years, the anti-reform slate has called itself the KPFA Concerned Listeners. Now, in order to confuse and to hide from its own record of voting to block accountability, it has taken the name Save KPFA.

We, members of the original Save KPFA’s steering committee, strongly object to the use of our name. We have not endorsed this election slate, nor were we asked. We believe that the use of our name dilutes its historic meaning and is likely to confuse some voters, who may believe this slate stands for the same things we did.

We, members of the original Save KPFA’s steering committee, strongly object to the use of our name by the anti-reform slate that had previously called itself the KPFA Concerned Listeners.

We demand that this election slate stop using our name, or at least take steps to let any voters they have contacted know that it is separate group and not endorsed by us. We ask Pacifica also to take reasonable steps to make clear to subscribers that this election slate is a separate entity and not related to us or our positions and certainly not endorsed by us.

Author and journalist Jeffrey Blankfort – jblankfort@earthlink.net – distributed this story with the following note: “For those of you who have a deep and abiding interest in community, listener-sponsored radio and its inherent problems, I strongly recommend this article/letter, ‘Stealing Save KPFA,’ written by Curt Gray, one of the original members of Save KPFA, who has put together a remarkable history of the struggle that began 17 years ago to preserve the country’s first-listener sponsored station, a struggle that is still ongoing.”

BeyondChron misrepresents ‘Save KPFA’ slate on 2010 ballot with 1999 Save KPFA photo

Letter to the Editor by Sasha Futran

Dear BeyondChron Editors Randy Shaw and Paul Hogarth,

This is the photo initially used by BeyondChron to illustrate their story. It has since been replaced by a photo of the KPFA building entrance.

I’m truly disgusted with both of you, almost beyond words. The visual you chose for your article, “KPFA Election Will Decide Progressive Network’s Future,” published Sept. 13, has no connection to the slate you are endorsing and which is now confusing voters by running under another group’s name. Your use of a 1999 photo of that different group is beyond disingenuous.

Not only was the slate you continue to promote not members of Save KPFA in 1999, they stand for the exact opposite of what we wanted for the station. (I was a member of the steering committee of the original Save KPFA.) A slate’s sudden change to use of another group’s name in the current KPFA board election is misleading to voters. You and they aren’t stupid so I would guess you all know that.

Not only was the photo you chose a misrepresentation, your article was also filled with misinformation.

Several of us currently on the board and still involved with KPFA were organizing activists in 1999 as well and a part of the original group. That includes one of candidates running with the Independents for Community Radio, another slate and one with which I am affiliated.

Tracy Rosenberg kept the tent city that slept outside the station organized in the 1999 era of demonstrations. Those demonstrations led to a democratic change at the station and ended management’s lockout of KPFA’s staff.

Do not state or insinuate that either Ms. Rosenberg or the rest of us are against the paid staff. Do not malign us with your misrepresentations that are beyond all but right-wing media tactics. Do not attempt to further baffle voters.

Let’s look at your first paragraph and description of your favorite slate: “On one side is the Save KPFA slate of candidates, who believe the station should be the voice of the entire progressive community, and must expand listenership to help broaden the progressive base.”

Are you sure they can do that with a slate of primarily white males over the age of 60 on a slate put together by a group of Democratic Party activists? Many of their group – both presently on the board and currently running for the board – are also related or work together. I’d be interested in hearing how you think they are representative of the diverse Bay Area and can speak for people not only of their generation, ethnicity or political affinity, but also not members of their family and office staff as well.

Let’s move on to what you insinuate we, Independents for Community Radio, want to do – without checking with us; another mistake that an honest journalist wouldn’t make – “A victory by the Independents will likely usher in massive downsizing at KPFA, eliminating popular programming and replacing the current paid, unionized on-air staff with all volunteers.”

First, let’s remember that I already pointed out that we were the ones involved with ending the lockout of paid staff in 1999. Now on to the present. The group you are so fond of held the board majority for three of the not quite four years I have been on the board. As such, they passed station budgets that had known spending deficits each year in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They ran through KPFA’s entire cash reserve of a million dollars as a result. They were told by Pacifica to cut spending and instead added paid positions and moved staff around in a way that benefitted people on our board and members of their group or supported them within the station. They ended up with new or better jobs at KPFA. KPFA ended up with more, not fewer, expenditures.

When they were the majority on the board, Concerned Listeners – now calling themselves Save KPFA – ran through KPFA’s entire cash reserve of a million dollars.

Today we are dealing with that legacy. This week the station borrowed money from another Pacifica station to meet the payroll. Will there need to be a different budget or can we continue spending at the same rate? The answer should not be beyond your comprehension. Before I forget, I guess that little detail about borrowing money also does away with your favorite slate’s claim that KPFA is supporting other Pacifica stations.

Will the now unavoidable budget cuts have an effect on paid staff? Of course, since salaries and benefits are the single largest budget item by far. Will that happen if your favorite slate is in the majority? Of course, since salaries and benefits are the single largest budget item by far. Who brought us to this point? Of course, your favorite slate.

We can’t afford this public political board election bickering. Think fox and hen house. We need to move beyond thinking those who have almost killed the station will keep it alive in the future. Every effort will be made to keep as much paid staff as possible by Independents for Community Radio and to remove the foxes.

Your willful disregard for how KPFA got to its present precarious state does not belong in journalism even if it is only on a blog site and pseudo-journalism. It is beyond the pale.

Sasha Futran is a member of the KPFA Local Station Board and Independents for Community Radio. She can be reached at kpfasasha@yahoo.com.

Learn more at SAN FRANCISCO BAY VIEW NATIONAL BLACK NEWSPAPER.

[3]  If memory serves your author, Dr. Frederic S. Lee, a former professor at your author’s alma mater, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, actually coined the term heterodox economics to emphasise the heretical nature of challenging the underlying assumptions of neoclassical economics.

My colleague and personal friend wrote a memorial for our beloved Dr. Fred Lee, In memoriam: Frederic S. Lee (1949-2014), el adiós a un “economista blasfemo”[*].  The title translates from the Spanish to In memoriam: Frederic S. Lee (1949-2014), farewell to a blasphemous economist.  (I’ll have to translate my friend’s poignant and informative memorial for Dr. Lee from the Spanish into the English, for our Spanish language learners.)

***

[Image of The Atlantic magazine cover by Source used via Fair use.]

[12 SEP 2016]

[Last modified  23:18 PDT  14 SEP 2016]

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Debunking Neoclassical Economics: The Myth of the Barter Economy

28 Sun Feb 2016

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adam Smith, anthropology, C.R.E.A.M., Encyclopedia, heterodox economics, Ilana E. Strauss, money, neoclassical economics, social formation, The Atlantic, The Myth of the Barter Economy, The Wealth of Nations, Wu-Tang Clan

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.]

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