Jack Graham

About Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

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September 14, 2018

Summing Up, Part 2

Jack Graham america, austrians, capitalism, libertarianism, marx, ron paul, socialism 3

In an article entitled ‘Democracy Isn’t Freedom’, Ron Paul wrote:

Americans have been conditioned to accept the word “democracy” as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good.

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, “There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word “democracy” is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

Now, an important thing to note here is that Paul is absolutely right. Most of the Founding Fathers did not envisage their new republic as a democracy. Indeed, Madison (as Chomsky is fond of reminding us) explicitly saw the task of designing the new government as one of designing a system which would protect “the minority of the opulent against the majority”. Chomsky also likes to quote John Jay as saying “The people who own the country ought to govern it”. As he writes in The Common Good,

Madison feared that a growing part of the population, suffering from the serious inequities of the society, would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of [life’s] blessings.” If they had democratic power, there’d be a danger they’d do something more than sigh. He discussed this quite explicitly at the Constitutional Convention, expressing his concern that the poor majority would use its power to bring about what we would now call land reform.

So he designed a system that made sure democracy couldn’t function. He placed power in the hands of the “more capable set of men,” those who hold “the wealth of the nation.” Other citizens were to be marginalized and factionalized in various ways, which have taken a variety of forms over the years: fractured political constituencies, barriers against unified working-class action and cooperation, exploitation of ethnic and racial conflicts, etc.

This is nothing surprising. We can go back to the dawn of bourgeois democracy in England, the Putney Debates, and see the bafflement which enveloped Ireton and the other Parliament Men when Rainsborough and the Levellers demanded that every man should have a say in the government that ruled over him, even if he lacked a “permanent interest” (i.e. property). Ireton and his fellow propertied gentlemen not only didn’t agree with such a concept – they couldn’t even comprehend it. It was utterly alien to them. The very radical ideas thrown up by the revolution they had led were now confronting them, shouted from the mouths of the common men they’d relied on as their muscle, and they might as well have been speaking a foreign language.…

September 7, 2018

Fragile Talons, Part 2: Colonies in Space

Jack Graham colonialism, Doctor Who, imperialism, race, racism 27

“There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. Not even Doctor Who.”

– Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (quoted from memory)

Where was I?

Oh yeah, it’s unfair to pick on ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’ for being racist because all Doctor Who is racist.

So what do I mean by that?

Well, I don’t just mean that there are lots of stories in Doctor Who that contain implicit or explicit racist ideas, representations, or implications … though it does, and it might be worth going through some of them.

There’s ‘An Unearthly Child’, for instance, which associates ‘tribal’ life with brutishness and savagery, and suggests that tribal people need to be taught concepts like friendship and cooperation by enlightened Western liberals from technologically advanced societies… as if, historically, enlightened Western liberals from technologically advanced societies haven’t been the ones slaughtering tribal peoples. Native peoples, by the way, know what friendship and cooperation are. Sometimes better than us. And we are talking about native peoples in ‘Unearthly’. Because of Europeans’ historic encounters with native peoples as European imperialism and colonialism spread across the globe, we’ve come to associate the notion of tribal people – if we accept that word and what it connotes – with people of colour. And such people, after initial encounters (often amiable), became conveniently reconstructed in the ideological thoughtworld of European imperialism and colonialism as, to borrow Kipling’s phrase, “half devil and half child”. This couplet neatly describes the Tribe of Gum, and shows them to be imagined out of the imperialist ideological tradition. Even if, in an alternative reading, they are the descendants of the people of the 1960s after a nuclear holocaust, they are still a picture of humanity in a savage ‘state of nature’, itself part of the same ideological tradition.

This is a very early indication of the complexity of the issue. Without any overt racial statement or coding, the very first story is found to be an ideological product of a racist tradition arising from imperialism and colonialism.

Then there’s ‘The Daleks’, an almost immediate engagement on the part of the show with something that will continue to be one of its running fixations: the metaphorical representation of Nazism. This story introduces the show’s ubermensch uber-villains, well understood to be metaphorical Nazis, with their creed of racial supremacy and their cries of “Exterminate!” (though they don’t actually do that in their debut), and takes a more or less explicit anti-racist line on its surface. It goes beyond a conventional post-war British triumphalism and explicitly associates Nazism with racism… or at least with its own understanding of racism as a form of parochialism, which chimes with a certain way of interpreting post-Windrush tension in the UK. The irony is that, almost behind its own back, this is a story in which “perfect”, virtuous, blonde, volkisch, Aryan, supermen-farmers are forced to fight a race of evil, mechanically-ingenious, wealth-hoarding, subterranean dwarves who threaten their culture.…

August 31, 2018

Fragile Talons, Part 1: Of Its Time

Jack Graham Doctor Who, race, racism, talons of weng chiang 31

Thanks to the various people who looked over this and made suggestions, especially Holly. The mistakes are, of course, mine alone.

This post was originally going to have the alternative title ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to Doctor Who Fans About Race’ but Andrew Rilstone got there before me, damn his eyes. Seriously, go read Andrew’s post because it’s excellent. Amongst other things, he looks directly at the arguments put forward in Marcus Hearn’s Doctor Who Magazine editorial. Which is, of course, what started this.

We live in a strange world. I’m being told, on the one hand, that Jeremy Corbyn, the most consistently and committedly anti-racist MP in the Commons, is an antisemite, and, on the other, that ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’, a story in which a Fu Manchu style villain – played by a white actor in rubber ‘yellowface’ – abducts white women with the help of a Tong of “opium sodden” Chinese cultists working out of Limehouse, isn’t racist. You just know, don’t you, that some professional Doctor Who hacks are convinced that Corbyn, if elected, would institute Britain’s very own reenactment of the Final Solution, but will also quibble with you over whether or not Julius Silverstein, the rich, greedy, grasping, paranoid collector in ‘The Web of Fear’ is problematic or not.

Gee, it’s almost like there is something profoundly, foundationally wrong with our discourse on the subject of race and racism. The problems in Doctor Who fandom are a tiny – if microcosmic – part of this wider problem. But Doctor Who fandom is one of the places I come from. And they picked on my friend. So here we are.

I won’t say much about the specifics of the kerfuffle which led me to write this. Apart from anything else, it’s just another irruption of the same running argument that Doctor Who fans have been having about ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’ for quite some time. El and I, both veterans of Gallifrey Base, were together involved in at least one previous such irruption a few years ago, during which some forum posters – and I shit you not – actually stated that they felt John Bennett’s make-up was realistic. As I noted at the time, being bothered by the rat but not by the yellowface is one thing, but

it’s yet another quantum leap to the point where you find the rat unconvincing but not the yellowface. And you’re prepared to say so in public. This reveals a shameless thoughtlessness, a terrifying absence of self-examination, an arrogance born of privilege. And it also seems to reveal a willingness not simply to be unconcerned by the monstering of a whole race of people, not simply to delude yourself that its not happening in the text (because you’ve never bothered to avail yourself of the myriad opportunities now freely available to anyone with internet access to educate yourself about how representations of people work in the texts you consume) but to actually think that the representations (of, say, Chinese people as expressionless, rubberfaced bogeymen) are accurate and true to life.

…

August 17, 2018

Fatherlands

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The Nazis won the war. They invaded and colonised the Western consciousness. They marched into, occupied, and restructured our heads. They redrew the maps in our minds. They razed and rebuilt our perceptions. They re-engineered our entire civilisation. They purged the libraries of our brains of the books they didn’t like, and convinced many of us to burn those books, happily, with smiles on our faces, certain that in so doing we were fighting intolerance and tyranny. They wrote new books, and we filled the shelves with them. They rewrote our entire story, and we still live in their unfolding plot.

The counterfactual genre tends to imagine that, in a victorious Nazi state, the Holocaust would be a dark secret.

In reality, if Germany had won, today the Holocaust would be known about in Germany.

It would be part of public consciousness – a small part. It would even be studied, talked about, theorised – by a few.

The twenty-first century Nazi state would be perfunctorily apologetic, and claim moral superiority anyway. Indeed, the ‘mistakes’ of the past would be one way in which that state, that society, comprehended and oriented its sense of its own moral superiority.

There would be sad films and TV dramas. There would be sumptuous and melancholy documentaries. They might begin with declarations that the war began with good intentions, started by men of good faith. They might tell of how Rommel was a decent man.

There would be an industry devoted to it.

Students in school might learn of it as a tragedy of the past. Their teachers would stress the way it self-assembled, almost by accident. They would stress the deadly Soviet threat. They would stress Stalin’s gulags. They would stress the exigencies of war. They would stress that the leaders of Germany then were men ‘of their time’.

And dissidents would use it to challenge their culture. And centrists and conservatives within the Nazi state would charge that ‘the left’ talked about it too much. They would prefer to efface it, and focus on the crimes of official enemies, always situating Germany as morally superior by default. Those accused of talking about it ‘too much’ would be the “blame Germany first crowd”. The German public would learn, via a million conservative pundits and talking heads, the mantra that “the Jews killed their own people too”, and imagine that this meant something.

There would be many ordinary Germans who would find the “constant” talk about it infuriating. They would wave the banners of the SS as their “heritage” and denounce the “politically correct thought police” who wanted to “rewrite history”.

There might have been civil rights struggles in the Nazi state as it negotiated the late twentieth century, or early twenty-first, and eased itself out of outright totalitarianism, as a victorious state which didn’t need to stay on a permanent total war footing would probably have done.

Such struggles would have caused waves of statues to be erected. There might even, by now, be controversy about those statues.…

August 10, 2018

The Gateway Drug

Jack Graham alt-right, austrian school, austrians, fascism, libertarianism, paleolibertarianism, rothbard, tendentious theorising 2

Paleolibertarianism was a consciously devised mutation of Austrian-influenced libertarianism, concocted by the late-20th century’s most prominent devotee of Austrian dogma, Murray Rothbard (and his fawning cohorts).

Libertarianism today draws on several sources. Ayn Rand is the best known, but the more influential is arguably Murray Rothbard. (Rothbard’s attitude to Rand fluctuated.) Rand is more influential for her ‘ideas’. Rand is more accessible, despite putting up a superficial show of intellectualism. Rothbard is harder to get a handle on. Unlike Rand, he is a genuine intellectual – which is often a question of how one couches ideas rather than the ideas themselves. And he develops. And he writes long, involved, serious articles (though they get less serious-minded as he gets older). I would argue that his influence is less in actual ideas and more in the surrounding spheres of aesthetics/style and tactics/strategy. After all, in fusing libertarianism with conservatism to create paleolibertarianism, the libertarians consciously submerged certain libertarian ideas. What succeeded – from the libertarian point of view – was arguably less the fusion than the style: the strategic attempt to use populist reactionary politics to further the ends of liberal economics.

Paleolibertarianism aimed to promote the relatively unpopular extreme free-market dogmas of libertarianism by joining them tactically to America’s powerful trends of post-60s reaction. It succeeded to a great extent. It pandered to, and (as far as possible) absorbed, extreme American cultural conservatism, racism, sexism, etc. It took a powerful place in the ecology of American reaction. It fed on the discontents of neoliberalism, and US imperialism, to achieve a quasi-rebellious presence in the mainstream of US politics, most of all in the person of Ron Paul.

We’ve talked about Ron Paul in previous instalments, and mentioned the publication under his name, or at least his ‘brand’, of infamous racist newsletters. People familiar with the content of those newsletters will have been unsurprised by Paul’s recent slip up on Twitter, when he explained the troubles of modern America with a cartoon which featured racist caricatures of various ethnicities (Jew, African American, etc) uniting to punch Uncle Sam with one massive fist made of ‘Cultural Marxism’.

Some libertarians have defended Paul over the years, but others have denounced him, asserting that the contents of the newsletters is paleoconservative rather than libertarian, and that it has no connection to the great pantheon of libertarian thinkers. There is certainly some truth to this. Our own Daniel Harper has suggested to me, in discussion, that Paul is actually not a libertarian but rather a paleoconservative (if, I’d say, an eccentric one) with an opposition to federal regulation rather than regulation per se. So, he’s maybe ideologically inclined towards a ‘states’ rights’ perspective which paleolibertarianism has, in my view, tended to flirt with opportunistically. Paul, of course, formally rejects the contents of his own newsletters and new tweets. But then a great many racists these days formally claim to not be racists. (I often wonder if the people citing that fake Churchill quote about “the fascists of the future… call[ing] themselves anti-fascists” have ever listened to the leading lights of today’s fascist movement steadfastly and indignantly deny that they are fascists.) …

August 3, 2018

Summing Up, Part 1

Jack Graham austrian school, austrians, economics, ideology, marxism, neoliberalism, tendentious theorising 2

As we know, the Austrian School is – but is not limited to – a heterodox branch of bourgeois economics. It is, however, founded upon a more-or-less explicitly political project. And this project continues to animate its zombie, and its zombified victims, infected by its bite. But then the Austrians’ iteration of the new (in the 1870s) bourgeois economic doctrine of marginalism was always a political project, even in its dry theoretical basis.

Marginalism itself arose as a way to escape the increasing obviousness of the fact that capital exploits labour. This was a necessary project as capital spread across the globe. It took the conscious form of an attempt to address genuine weaknesses in the classical labour theory of value. These weaknesses were interpreted as evidence that the theory needed to be discarded precisely because the class position/alignment of the theoreticians addressing the issue pushed them towards a view of value which did not derive from labour. It became an even more necessary project after the Paris Commune scared the shit out of the bourgeoisie.

The Austrian School, in the person of Menger, helped create marginalism. But it continued to exist as a distinct trend within marginalism because of the nature of Menger’s iteration of marginalist ideas – namely his rejection of mathematics; vociferous and foundational opposition to what was called the ‘Historical School’, basing himself on “general laws” and “typical phenomena” rather than historical specifics – which he passed down to a succession of thinkers which formed the Austrian tradition. For contingent historical reasons (the intellectual climate of fin de siècle Austria, the existence of Austro-Marxism, etc), the Austrian marginalists were the ones who concerned themselves most especially with attacks on Marx in particular and socialism in general. They made the political (i.e. class) aspects of marginalism relatively explicit, at least in terms of what they attacked. The Austrian trend within marginalism was the most consciously ideological. This approach is inherently ideological. Bohm-Bawerk develops Menger in direct response to Marx, and this as a result of combat with Austro-Marxism. But the emphasis on the subjective and the general is political in itself. It is based on a class position, and on interests.

I think there is a question as to what extent the Austrian School actually exists in any coherent form rather than as a broad tendency or aesthetic, with its opposition to Marx and socialism as its most important markers. There are delineable basic intellectual principles, but even they tend to be quite flexible. Thinkers within the Austrian tradition will disagree about many things, some of them quite fundamental. This is worth mentioning because it can cause trouble as one generalises – which one needs to do unless one is engaged in a detailed account. What is true of one ‘Austrian’ is not true of another. The Austrian School has a built-in defence mechanism which makes it hard to take aim at: it doesn’t really exist. That’s a somewhat cheeky and overstated way of saying that its members believe all sorts of things, many of which are contradictory, some at a fundamental level.…

July 22, 2018

Literally a Communist

Jack Graham communism, politics 7

“I’m a communist you idiot!” declared Ash Sarkar on Good Morning Britain, in response to the heckling and strawmanning of Piers Morgan. (Video here.) She’s subsequently been all over the media. Morgan has accidentally made this into her ‘moment’. As she herself humourously overstates, he’s even accidentally rehabilitated communism. Turns out, if it’s communism or Piers Morgan, the British people seem more likely to give communism a try.

Sarkar, senior editor at Novara Media, was being interviewed as a representative of the anti-Trump protestors descending on London (despite Trump’s well-advised absence from that city). As it happens, I suspect very few of the 100,000-250,000 who assembled were communists – despite the Daily Mail‘s characterisation of the protest as consisting of what they rather confusingly called a “rent-a-leftie mob”.

(I’m wondering if there’s any money in lefty-rental. Can I hire myself out? And who does the renting? George Soros? The Mail seems to imply it’s Corbyn… but isn’t he one himself? Shouldn’t he be on the books rather than keeping them? Could I start my own franchise? “Ah, so you’re a socialist but you make money from lefty-rental? Hmm… interesting.”)

Morgan is one of those puzzling people who continue to enjoy a high profile in Britain despite the fact that almost everyone in Britain hates their guts. Alongside other such specimens – Tony Blair, for instance – Morgan is one most disliked people in Britain, capable of provoking scorn from even his ideological kindred. He’s a nasty lout who – as Editor of the Daily Mirror – apparently presided over endemic illegal telephone hacking. (The subsequent Leveson inquiry found his denials “unpersuasive”.) He’s so repellent, so self-evidently cynical and foolish, that not even his posh(ish) British accent was able to make anyone in America take him seriously. He doesn’t come off looking significantly preferable to his interview subjects even when they’re Alex Jones (he did at least manage to be broadly on the right side of that ‘debate’) or Donald Trump himself. (To give you some idea of Morgan’s technique: in one interview he asked Trump if he was a feminist.) Sat opposite Ash Sarkar – whom he talked-over, patronised, misrepresented, and unrelentingly attempted to shout-down – he looked possibly more asinine than ever before in his misbegotten life, which is quite an achievement when one contemplates the sheer levels of misbegottonness involved in that life. It was like watching a petulant toddler throwing a tantrum because his increasingly exasperated babysitter wouldn’t let him have a fifth funsize Mars bar. It was only appropriate that he should try to strawman her. What else has a man of straw got?

Morgan has seemed, in recent months, to be trying to make a new career out of Trump-sycophancy. He has recently been castigating London mayor Sadiq Khan (a favorite target of Trump’s, and of Trump’s online constituency, for depressingly non-mysterious reasons) for permitting the infamous Trump-baby balloon. We won’t get into that, except to note that Morgan (whining on Twitter) genuinely didn’t seem to understand that there was a particular reason for portraying Trump as a baby, namely Trump’s characteristic infantilism. …

July 13, 2018

Wrong With Authority, Episode 9 – ‘Anonymous’

Jack Graham anonymous, anti-stratfordianism, podcast, shakespeare, wrong with authority 5

This time, Jack indulges his unhealthy obsession with Anti-Stratfordianism, and forces James, Kit, and Daniel to watch Roland Emmerich’s 2011 self-funded passion-project Anonymous.

Anonymous; 2011; d. Roland Emmerich; w. John Orloff; starring Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, David Thewlis, Rafe Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower, Mark Rylance, and Derek Jacobi; distributed by Columbia Pictures.

It lost about 15 million dollars.

Based on the wackiest version of the longstanding conspiracy theory that the plays of Shakespeare were secretly written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Anonymous is both less entertaining and less plausible than the rest of Emmerich’s films, including the ones about aliens and giant lizards.

It was ‘controversial’ at the time, in the sense that everyone who knew anything about Shakespeare both ridiculed and denounced it, especially its attempts to market itself via ‘information packs’ provided to schools.

In the process of telling his dreary, plotless, and confusing shaggy dog story, Emmerich encourages some of the finest Shakespearean actors of our time to make utter fools of themselves. Not that some of them need all that much encouragement. The whole thing manages to be simultaneously totally insane, quasi-fascistic, and profoundly dull… which is quite a feat, in its way.

None of us were terribly impressed, it’s fair to say. But, in between Jack galloping off on his hobby horse for uncomfortably long stretches of time, we also delve into some of the interesting history and politics concerning Shakespeare, Anti-Statfordianism, and conspiracy theories generally.

Downloadeth here.

LINKS:

Jack has written a lot about Shakespeare in general here.

Here are some books which are either about, or touch on, this issue:

The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate. Has an entire fascinating chapter on the ‘Authorship Controversy’. The rest of the book is periodically excellent too.

Contested Will by James Shapiro. Brilliantly discusses the ‘Authorship Question’, not so much in terms of its actual claims (though Shapiro does address them) but rather as a phenomenon in itself, populated by fascinating people and deserving of study in its own right. Shapiro develops many insights about scholarship, history, literature, and politics.

Shakespeare, In Fact by Irvin Leigh Matus. A legendary work of factual analysis. Forensic, witty, and merciless.

Here’s the Bill Bryson book James refers too. Boasts an amusingly irritated final chapter on the ‘Authorship Question’.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, Eds. Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson. A compendium of essays commissioned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust as part of their assertive response to Anonymous. Scholar after scholar examines every aspect of the issue. The definitive single-volume demolition.

The SBT also created this bite-size pamphlet – Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anymous – summarizing the main issues at stake. Free to download here.

Speaking of online resources, here’s the Shakespeare Authorship Page. Lots of links to lots of articles and essays.

The lecture excerpted in the podcast is part of a series by eloquent Shakespeare scholar and former actor Peter Saccio. …

June 8, 2018

Considering the Reagan – Special German Edition

Jack Graham consider the reagan, podcast 1

Sorry about the dearth of content from me lately. I’ve been unwell. Capable of very little serious effort. I am very grateful for your patience, and especially the apparently inexhaustible patience of my dear friend Elizabeth.

Here are two recent episodes of Consider the Reagan, a strand of the Wrong With Authority podcast in which I and my friends James, Kit, and Daniel, comment on the 80s films – made during the Reagan years – which loomed large in our lives.

More of this sort of thing soon… because watching TV and being a smartass about it is about as much as I can manage right now.

Die Hard

Raiders of the Lost Ark

…

May 11, 2018