From The Shape of Things to Come: Selected Writings & Interviews (Kersplebedeb, 2023).
Monday Nov. 28, 2022
Like most interviews, this discussion was never researched in the first place. It reflected whatever current news and talk was bouncing off my own thoughts and long memories. When i needed a fact or a name spelled out, like everyone else i just quickly went to the internet pantry. Didn't even think of endnotes, since others could just google things like i did. A few times, it became convenient to use an old book or a clipping file from my bookshelves, but that wasn't much and i didn't worry about it.
That was when i hadn't planned on anything past the present Part 1. But after delays going to press during the pandemic, and my trying to answer continued questioning from my editor, Karl K., led to adding an even longer Part 2—and using specific sources on facts more heavily not simply my memory.
(BTW at the same time, discovered that some of the sources of my facts had up and disappeared themselves. Just ran away into the forest of knowing. i couldn't re-find several internet sources i had earlier used.)
Anyway, my editor has always liked source notes whether endnotes or footnotes, arguing that giving people leads where they can read an author's sources more extensively on their own, is a real help to some readers. Finally, he wore me down and i've tried to note sources if only in incomplete ways, particularly in Part 2. Good luck in the hunt.
Mikhail Bakunin was obviously an important revolutionary figure in starting revolutionary anti-capitalism, and although much maligned and dismissed by Marx and Engels in a way that wasn't truthful, he did lead a life much of which sounds like it was from an adventure novel. Wanted to list and comment on where i had found my facts about his life, so i went back to the suburban public library where i had found and read three biographies of the Russian revolutionary—only to find that all were now unavailable. Asking about them, i was told unofficially by one library worker after a computer search that all three were really missing, had probably been stolen. Wasn't that just like something that would happen to the footloose rebel? And, no, i was told, they were not being replaced, because that was futile since some kinds of books were just always being stolen. Hmm, not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is frustrating.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Outlaw Woman. A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975. City Lights Books, 2001. Pages 198–200.
Incidentally, during the anti–Vietnam War struggle days i had met both women involved in that political clash of wills at that GI coffeeshop, and had even worked with one. Both were respected in the movement then, and i recall hearing on the anti-war grapevine about their disagreement at that Army base town—and how the one later came out and crossed over to women's liberation work. So Dunbar-Ortiz wasn't just making up that great story.
Rosa Brooks. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. Simon & Schuster, 2016. Pages 318–320; Alison Bowen. "Easing the Path to Owning A Home." Chicago Tribune November 22, 2020. For poverty problems among young u.s. military families in the time of coronavirus and job losses in off-base civilian communities, see: Jennifer Steinhauer. "For More Military Families, Losing a Job or School Lunch Means a Search for Food Aid." New York Times. December 17, 2020.
Unlike most sources used here, this How Everything Became War book was an international bestseller that made an unlikely state policy star out of a professor of international law. Rosa Brooks was both a former advisor for Human Rights Watch and once the member of a top secret Pentagon committee which gave the final yes or no to individual u.s. assassinations of young Muslim activists. In her latter role Brooks rose to being a senior counselor to the u.s. Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy (she still lectures soldiers as an adjunct at the Army's West Point Modern War Institute). How Everything Became War never does explain its title subject, of course, but the book was so popular in the Establishment and warmly recommended by a number of top u.s. generals because it intellectually massages the growing contradictions in "America's" cancerous military-civilian relationship, from a soothingly white liberal humanitarian but loyally pro-imperialist viewpoint.
"FTA," short for "F—K The Army," was the great all-purpose anti-brass graffiti among u.s. Army troops then in the 1960s–70s, with it inked onto the front of many thousands of helmets in 'Nam (not usually taken up in other u.s. services, especially among Marines, who used their own graffiti phrases incorporating the slang dis "The Green Machine").
H. Bruce Franklin. Crash Course. From the Good War to the Forever War. Rutgers University Press, 2018. Pages 264–267. Franklin was widely followed, envied, admired and resented on the West Coast during the anti-war 1960s. As a controversial Stanford professor, his breakthrough literary criticism which insisted on raising up as important then-banned or marginal genres, such as criminal prison writings and science-fiction, had a wide effect. He was more immediately one of the main radical anti-war activists in the Bay Area. Finally burning out as one purist national leader in the birth of u.s. Maoism, a failed period of his life he later wrote off as a self-delusional fever. He retained his basic anti-capitalist view of u.s. society, though. Much of this memoir of his own capitalist war (he was a frontline air force veteran) and anti-war is shocking material with a positive jolt. Though to be clear, it's not about the u.s. revolutionary left.
Alan Greenspan and Adrian Woolridge. Capitalism in America: A History. Penguin Press, 2018. Page 84. This is a different kind of history of "America." Stripped down and perhaps easier to read, the legendary former longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and his co-author, the political editor of The Economist, explain the u.s.a. primarily in terms of business investments, profits, and developing the capitalist class economy. Minor things like the rise of the Klan and lynchings, as well as changes in presidential politics, receive only brief lines to help frame the passing times as direct capitalist activity holds center stage. In its own way, a very cold-blooded but telling exposition of how "America" was made into a great-but-now-declining economic empire. The blame now, according to the conservative authors, is the "encrusting" suffocation of liberal state benefits like Social Security, which bestow automatic income on the masses without their having to work every day or risk anything. Charming.
Ibid. Pages 88–89.
Gabriel Kolko. Main Currents in Modern American History. Harper & Row, 1976. Pages 26–29.
Daniel Bergner. "Open Minds." The New York Times Magazine. May 22, 2022.
See: statista. "leading construction equipment manufacturers in 2020 based on global market share"; iSeekplant. "TOP TEN HEAVY EQUIPMENT COMPANY MARKET SHARES."
Greenspan & Woolridge. op cit. Page 14.
Shane Goldmacher. "Drop in Small-Dollar Donations Alarms G.O.P." The New York Times. July 27, 2022.
Ilona Andrews. Blood Heir. Nancy Yost Literary Agency, Inc, 2021. Page 77.
David Brooks. "The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse." The New York Times. April 23, 2021.
This quotation is often seen right now, but almost always attributed to the left critic Fredric Jameson. As in it being described as "the famous Jameson quote" on one popular Goodreads page. Not that there's any mystery about H. Bruce Franklin's work, but Jameson is so much more "hip" and "in" right this moment to the shoddy white reformist intellectuals.
Sally Rooney. Beautiful World, Where Are You? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Pages 43–44.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derlugian, Craig Calhoun. Does Capitalism Have a Future? Oxford University Press, 2013. Pages 57, 65. For a good browse, try his paperback selected works, which include not only some highlights from his world-system theory but also short writings on subjects such as race and ethnicity, the bourgeois as concept and reality, and liberalism: The Essential Wallerstein. The New Press, 2000.
Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian, Calhoun. op cit. Page 35.
After the June 2022 slaying of the two Catholic priests, i took out one of my files of press clippings on the Mexican crisis. While these are separate news stories on different events in the crisis, they really are interconnected, and i urge anyone interested in diving deeper into the situation to simply read them all together. It's like an extended magazine article:
Natalie Kittroeff and Oscar Lopez. "Catholic Church Joins Mexico's Critics After Murder of 2 Jesuit Priests." The New York Times. June 25, 2022;
CBS News. July 6, 2022. 10:06 am. "Bishop proposes 'Social Pact' with drug traffickers to tackle violence in Mexico";
Maria Abi-Habib. "In Mexico, Farmers Are Caught in Middle of Drug Cartels Turf War." The New York Times. May 5, 2022;
David Agren. "Witness testifies that El Chapo paid a $100 million bribe to ex-Mexican president Peña Nieto." Washington Post. January 15, 2019 at 7:34 p.m. EST;
Noah Hurowitz. "El Chapo Trial: Witness Alleges Presidential Bribes, Cartel Brutality." Rolling Stone. November 21, 2018. 12:54 PM ET;
Randal C. Archibold. "In Mexico, a Growing Gap Between Political Class and Calls for Change." The New York Times. December 13, 2014;
David Karp. "Is the Lime an Endangered Species?" The New York Times. May 30, 2014;
Jose de Cordoba. "Bloody Struggle Erupts Over Avocado Trade." The Wall Street Journal. February 1–2, 2014;
Santiago and Jose de Cordoba. "Executive Slaying Sparks New Fears." The Wall Street Journal. January 11–12, 2014;
Ginger Thompson, Randal C. Archibold and Eric Schmitt. "Hand of U.S. Is Seen in Halting General's Rise." The New York Times. February 5, 2013;
Mary Anastasia O'Grady. "The Real Victims of Mexico's Drug War." The Wall Street Journal. November 12, 2012;
Jose de Cordoba. "Trial Exposes Odd Ties in Mexico Drug War." The Wall Street Journal. January 7–8, 2012. (contains Mexican Attorney General Office's color map of different drug cartel areas at that time).
SPECIAL NOTE: Look up if you are interested some of the many internet articles on drug cartel officer Jesus Zambada Niebla as well as Bush regime security official Robert Bonner (especially his op ed on Mexico in the New York Times).
Ruchir Sharma. The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World. W.W. Norton & Co. 2016. Pages 141, 193–194.
Julie Turkewitz and Genevieve Glatsky. "Soul-Searching Report From Colombia's Truth Commission." The New York Times. June 29, 2022; Phil Klay. "America's Ongoing Secret Wars." The New York Times. May 29, 2022.
Maria Abi-Habib and Oscar Lopez. "Plight of Mexico's Poor Worsens, Despite President's Promises." The New York Times. July 18, 2022.
Elizabeth Kolbert. "The Catastrophist." The New Yorker. July 27, 2020.
Minqi Li. China and the 21st Century Crisis. Pluto Press, 2016. Pages 33, 95, 137.
Ibid. Page 182.
Lenin never wrote much about his own life, particularly in the chaotic time when the revolution was going on, so this isn't something i read about (my best friend seized my set of the collected works anyway, when we moved into separate places and divvied up the bookcase). This great story of Lenin getting held up by stick-up guys posing as red guards was told to me by an old trotskyist, as part of the mostly unwritten lore of the marxist-leninist movement. i was young and not in his faction of the left, but he tried to wise me up anyway. He said it came from a French socialist who had gone to Russia to work with Lenin and his communist international and was a first-hand witness. Much later, that French comrade published his own memoir, parts of which were translated into English and circulated in the movement here. Was struck by the story so much that i kept asking questions about it, to get that older comrade to repeat the tale so i could remember it best i could. Can't prove the facts, but in some dusty old sectarian journal or zine from the way past i think it was passed on.
Dani Romero. John Schreiber. "LA freight train looting 'out of control' as thieves worsen supply chain bottlenecks." Yahoo/finance Wed, January 19, 2022. 6:47 AM.