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The Rise Of Skywalker is Film Garbage. Time for Disney's Expropriation.

  • Alexander Riccio

Capitalist culture is a battleground of signification.* Considering such, what can be revealed by reckoning with the fact that the latest installment of Star Wars, The Rise of Skywalker, was utter film garbage?


In our episode with guest AK Thompson he discussed how capitalism, in order to maintain itself, requires increased rates of consumption to continue cycles of capturing profit. "But," he says, "in order to maintain ever increasing consumption you need to be perpetually stimulating desire." For capitalism to live it must persuade the masses that desire is satisfied through consumption. A key component of capitalist political economy, then, is the cyclical movement of cultural production and consumption.


At times capitalist culture can be quite subversive against the prevailing logics needed to maintain the very system upon which it relies. I do not want to overstate the significance of this, however, because it is more often the case that capitalism's need to implant itself as ultimate desire results in cultural products where a capitalist imaginary is presented as a default or the only possible world- not even the best world just the only one available. Even among the majority of mainstream fantasy, children's, and sci-fi films the political imagination is constrained to a matter of right-wing villains and doggedly centrist protagonists seeking to maintain the prevailing social order. I mean, what is Batman other than just an uber-wealthy cop? The left is hardly ever represented.


The late Mark Fisher described the above as "capitalist realism," writing that "capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population [and it] is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment." Quite bleak, and while I might protest the extent to which Fisher posits an all-consuming totality his point is well-taken.


In the uncommon instances where capitalist culture does produce something subversive, or even pays a bit of lip service to themes of social justice and representation, the consequent backlash is extraordinary. Ghostbusters with an all-female leading cast gets panned on film aggregate reviews before it's released; a scene in Avengers: Endgame featuring a panel (probably 10 seconds long) of all women characters is derided as "SJW propaganda,"** and, bringing it back to my original intention, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which barely registers as "liberal" in my view, creates mass outrage.***


Consistent reprisals such as these suggest to me that the right-wing is fully aware of the need to narrow political horizons within capitalist culture. In her book, This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein exposed how climate denialism is motivated by a reactionary allegiance to maintaining capitalism, and I think we should understand that the right-wing views the implications of the so-called "culture wars" in a similar way. As noted earlier, capitalist political economy requires the ongoing stimulation of desire to complete its cycle, and this reveals why it is so important for the right-wing to delimit desire.


So we get as a follow-up for The Last Jedi an offering of non-offensive, and painfully mediocre, Rise of Skywalker. As my comrade, Andrea Haverkamp, pointed out to me the film begins with a retcon to appease right-wing detractors of The Last Jedi. Didn't like that Rey was just an ordinary person from a working-class background and still capable of heroism? Okay, how about we just bring the Emperor back from the fucking dead to make you happy? Rose being an Asian-American woman bothered you? We'll just give her two sentences of dialogue and claim it was the deceased Carrie Fisher's fault! Fans want Poe and Finn to act on the amorous undertones of their relationship? Here's a scene with two women characters you've never seen before sharing a celebratory kiss after zombie-Palpatine is defeated (for the second time).


In their pure profit-driven motivation to generate content that is inoffensive to any, Disney has managed to serve up the movie equivalent of a banal Lean Cuisine dinner. As I wrote earlier, capitalist culture is a battleground of signification. When the right-wing is so prepared to narrow the already constricted parameters of capitalist culture it is so much more crucial that we on the left make every possible effort to actually conceive of alternative political imaginaries and construct these images in our critiques of mainstream film and media. Otherwise, as I've argued elsewhere, we will continue to be defeated by the colonized imaginaries of an oppressive social system.


Framed in this way my annoyingly long-winded critique of The Rise of Skywalker is obligated to end with possibilities over fatalism. Rather than just offer script tweaks and adjustments, I'll take a step back and state the obvious: we would have been guaranteed a better film offering if the Star Wars universe belonged to us all instead of the mega-corporate octopus of Disney. The franchise of Stars Wars has been in the public lore for more than forty years, how dare any corporate entity claim ownership over it! Moreover, Disney should have all its cultural materials expropriated, and allow fan-fiction and creative projects to fill the gap in its wake. Damn, just imagine what grand visions of cultural creativity would be accomplished when all the materials for life are shared and exchanged in reciprocal ecosystems? In that world, at the very least, I couldn't imagine the types of concessions made to a toxic minority where corporate overlords decide to conjure up a dead Emperor that no one asked for or wanted to see. Making this statement is, of course, easy while bringing it into the material realities we live in is a much more difficult task. But I've become increasingly dissatisfied amid the saturation of reviews and critiques that rarely mention the possibility of another world, and concede too readily to remaining colonized even in our dreaming lives.


*I imagine myself in the spirit of Cornelius Castoriadis as I write this sentence.

**After drafting this I rewatched the scene and clocked it at a total of 50 seconds- not the single frame where it's only women in the scene, the entire scene where the women come together and launch a collective attack against the army of villains. That whole scene takes 50 seconds from a 2 and a half-hour movie before the woman formation is broken.

***I think there's a particularly acute level of misogyny happening in these examples, and the cultural industry surrounding sci-fi and fantasy, along with video games and comic books, is rife with toxic reactionary men aggressively policing the boundaries of what they perceive to be "their" niche. This article from Polygon provides an excellent aggregate of interviews discussing this in more depth: Gaming's toxic men, explained.



Pleasures of 2019

  • Alexander Riccio

Seeing as I get so much pleasure out of all the year-end "best of" lists, and one of my greatest joys this year has been reading the work of adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism (hence the choice in post title) I wanted to share with folks some of my favorites in books, articles, and podcast episodes as we move beyond 2019 and into the next decade--hopefully one future generations will call "the decade of revolution!"


Books!!!

I couldn't possibly keep up with all the amazing books published in 2019, but of the ones I did steal time to read I've most thoroughly enjoyed:


Published by AK Press.

Thus far every time I've spoken about this book with a fellow comrade who has not had the chance to read it I've had to make clear that this is not a book claiming that the shallow pleasure we derive from eating pizza and taking bubble baths is liberatory. Quite the opposite! No one explains it better than the author herself, "Pleasure activism is not about generating or indulging in excess...Pleasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough." If you need an entry-point into the book before reading, we were fortunate enough to be able to produce this episode of Laborwave with adrienne maree brown speaking on Pleasure Activism.


Published by Verso Books.

You'll notice that Nick Estes makes an appearance in my favorite podcasts of the year as well. How could it be otherwise? Take, for instance, this empowering quote from a recent interview he did highlighting the type of historical perspective you'll gain from reading this excellent book, "Would you rather fight this system as an individual? Or with a thousand ancestors at your back and in front of you? We [Indigenous people] have a solid foundation that even mass genocide couldn’t destroy, so let’s use it." quoted from an interview done with Commune Magazine at https://communemag.com/with-a-thousand-ancestors-front-and-back/


Published by AK Press.

Building upon her essay, The Opposite of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture, this is a fantastic book full of essays and dialogues on gendered and racialized violence, and prospects for healing through nurturance amidst it all. One of the key insights that I continue to come back to offered right away in the book is that "violence is nurturance turned backwards." Get deep and personal with the book as soon as you can, and also check out the interview I was lucky enough to have with Nora Samaran earlier this year!


Published by AK Press.

Maybe you've noticed that AK Press reappears on this list often already- well they'll be on here one more time before I finish. They've been crushing it this year! Here's another excellent title they published in 2019, invoking the legacy and spirit of Walter Benjamin these essays by AK Thompson touch on topics of mental health, decolonization, political strategy, and winning the battle over Necropolis- the concretized dead labor that has brought this world into being. Particular favorites of mine in this collection include Avatar and The Thing In Itself and The Battle for Necroplis. We had the happy opportunity to chat with AK Thompson at length on his book earlier this year, check it out!


Published by Verso Books.

A concise summary of the work these three thinkers have been doing over subjects such as social reproduction, I think this is an excellent book for the person new to Marxist Feminist thought, and also those who have accepted "feminism" as necessarily its problematic "lean-in" or liberal variants. No way, feminism is contested terrain and this book offers a pathway beyond narrowed feminist frameworks that are open to capitalism and inattentive to struggles against racism and class oppression. This little book is not without its faults, however, and our guest Marianne Garneau I think does an excellent job in highlighting its limitations concerning political strategy. Doesn't, to me at least, mean the book gets tossed aside but instead issues a challenge for the left to think more seriously about how to wage a strike against reproductive labor. Let's take it up in 2020!


Published by AK Press.

Another title from AK Press, and the one I have found the most deeply painful and cathartic all year. I think the title says it all, and I caution anyone prior to reading this book to emotionally prepare yourself-- especially if you have trauma histories surrounding sexual abuse.


Podcasts!!!

Likely not a surprise, but I listen to podcasts non-stop (while cooking, cleaning, or just lounging on the couch half-awake). There are just a ton of amazing podcasts online, and I'm always looking for podcast recommendations. Here's just a sampling of podcast episodes this year I've enjoyed:


Always excellent reporting on labor news, this particular episode really delivers on providing not just a summary of what the CTU won, but how they did it and what lessons other labor unions should take from CTU's methods. Possibly my favorite conversation of the whole year.


As promised, Nick Estes shows up again in favorite podcasts from this year. I believe this conversation clocks in at two hours of deeply insightful historical (and future) analysis, and is a great primer before reading the book as well as a nice addition to the book's contents.


Doug Henwood interviews Jessie Sage on the prevailing myths surrounding sex work, wrapped up in highly moralistic claims which distort much of the empirical experiences of sex workers and the industry, and follows this with an interview on the new book Birth Strike by Jenny Brown where the author argues that many are waging an unstated strike against giving birth due to lack of access to childcare, paternity leave, and healthcare.


Hosted by Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown (showing up everywhere this year for me) this is an often really fun podcast getting to explore themes like "raising superheroes," future-making, and preparing for climate apocalypse. This particular episode should not be entered into lightly, it's a raw and deeply emotional episode on processing the pain and implications of learning how influential people in our lives can be capable of both beautiful and monstrous acts.


Get up close and spooky personal with Maximillian Alvarez, host of the excellent podcast Working People, on this fun show that devotes time to exploring "Gothic Marxism," the political ideas behind horror films like Scanners, and episodes likes this one where we gain insights into the personal stories of people who have devoted their energies to changing the world.


This podcast always feels like being invited to a party where it just so happens that everyone is a socialist and wants to talk and joke about politics all night. Fun! And, just to add icing to the cake, you get to learn about a lot of things you likely didn't know in the process. Take this episode, for example, exploring the highly influential role women have played in the labor movement despite often being written out of the "official" record as reported by labor historians and the AFL-CIO.


One of my early introductions into the world of leftist podcasts, This Is Hell has a close place in my heart and is a show I regularly return to as they feature so many awesome guests and take their time discussing the news of the day- unlike the frenetic sound-bite style pablum of news networks like CNN and MSNBC (and of course Fox, but obviously). Here's another episode from the year that gets real and personal, and I'd also caution folks prior to listening to prepare themselves emotionally. What I appreciate about this discussion is how it pulls off the layers of taboo surrounding discussions of suicide and highlights how common, and therefore human, suicidal thoughts are for many people. Getting past these stigmas helps get to a point where honest conversation and reflections can begin on this subject.


Another early introduction to leftist podcasts, Against the Grain has multiple weekly episodes where they go deep into particular subjects (history, politics, current news, etc) that always leaves the listener more informed and feeling more engaged by the end. This is an interview with Dina Gilio-Whitaker, co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of the excellent book All The Real Indians Are Dead And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, that discusses the problematic legacy of mainstream environmentalism practiced in the United States and the uneasy alliances that are cautiously attempted by Indigenous people with the environmental movement.


Remember Maximillian Alvarez from that episode of Horror Vanguard? Well you'd do yourself well to check out his podcast too, Working People, and especially this episode with a staff worker from Portland State University in the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies department discussing the almost strike staged by SEIU 503 due to typical management conduct such as attempts to cut healthcare, increase costs for shift meals, and all that bullshit Laborwave listeners are likely all too familiar with.


I love Rev Left Radio becaues the host, Brett O-Shea, is so consistently willing to engage with guests who have different political views than himself (well, not outside of the broad left spectrum, he's not fucking interviewing fascists thank god) which makes for occasions like this refreshing debate between the anarchist-identified hosts of Srsly Wrong (another stellar podcast) and Brett and Alyson Escalante who endorse the concepts of Scientific Socialism. Personally I lean more anarchist but have a lot of love for the writings of Marx (not as much for many of his self-proclaimed "followers" but that's a different story), so this debate was enjoyable and helped me clarify my own thoughts on the whole idea of whether Marxism can truly be considered a "science." Rare to hear debates that actually engage in constructive critique and attempt to take people's arguments at their strongest rather than playing "gotcha" games where the smallest line of disagreement is treated as some major moral failing and an irredeemable point of difference.


Articles!!!

I'll editorialize less in this list because I can better communicate what these articles have to offer by just copy and pasting some key passage. Yay, less work for me and thanks for the writers for all their labor going into producing these articles!


Eleanor Finley: The Stories We need: Pan-African Social Ecology a review on the book by Modibo Kadalie at Roar Magazine

"Political life lends itself to narrative representation as well as to literary elements like protagonists, imagery and pacing, yet stories remain devalued as a serious way to convey political knowledge. Sadly, this is only to the detriment of social movements. How can a popular, broadly democratic ecology movement possibly form when the vast majority of people can neither understand nor enjoy the obtuse way that we talk about politics?"


“Largely because of the challenge posed by the alternative political vision that Sanders advanced and the subsequent struggle over how to interpret the meanings of Trump’s victory, the 2016 election and its aftermath have thrown into relief the extent to which antiracism, and other formulations of politics based on ascriptive identities, are not simply alternatives to a (working) class politics, as Clinton’s cheesy put-down during the campaign implied. What is typically called identity politics reflects the perspective of a different class, the professional and managerial strata who are relatively insulated from the negative impacts of the four decades long regime of regressive redistribution and better positioned to take advantage of the opportunity structures it opens. That perspective suggests a reason many high-profile antiracists have become so vehement in their opposition to a politics centered on downward economic redistribution.”


"In its time, federal fair housing, which entailed the right to be free of racial discrimination in the housing market, was hailed as the crowning achievement of the “rights revolution” of the 1960s. But the effects of “fair housing” have been imperceptible in large swaths of the country, where poor and working-class African Americans live in racially segregated enclaves. The reluctant celebrations of the Fair Housing Act’s milestone anniversary this past year were rooted in the basic fact that racism continues to pervade the American housing market."


Jarrod Shanahan: Noel Ignatiev, 1940-2019 at Commune Mag

"Pointing to the structural white supremacy baked into the workplace by hundreds of years of US history, Noel and Allen argued that any struggle that did not address white supremacy head-on, lining up behind the demands of the workers on the lowest racialized tier, was bound to reinforce the racial division of labor, to the ruin of any strategic program for actual unity. Drawing from W.E.B. DuBois’s classic Black Reconstruction in America— a book Noel told me “every American radical ought to have their face rubbed in”—the duo formulated the concept of “white-skin privilege” to indicate the perks offered to white workers by the US ruling class, in exchange for which the former foreswear all meaningful solidarity with their non-white coworkers, and bind themselves instead in a self-defeating alliance with the white ruling class. The task of the revolutionary, they argued, is to break this alliance."


Sady Doyle: How Capitalism Turned Women Into Witches a review on Silvia Federici's newest book at In These Times

"Sexuality—once demonized 'to protect the cohesiveness of the Church as a patriarchal, masculine clan'—became subjugated within capitalism: 'Once exorcised, denied its subversive potential through the witch hunt, female sexuality could be recuperated in a matrimonial context and for procreative ends. …In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.'"


"A boss is a boss is a boss. Managers want to control wages and workflow, and any pushback against that will unleash a power struggle. But it’s worth digging into the particular form this takes at nonprofits: why workers at these ostensibly progressive institutions feel the need to organize, and why they face so much resistance.


This isn’t just about calling out the hypocrisy of so-called progressives. It’s about preparing nonprofit sector workers, who are often young and idealistic and inexperienced at asserting their rights, for what they might face from these employers, and inoculating them against the bosses’ attempts to convince them they don’t need or deserve a union.


Workers go to work for these organizations thinking they can do good, and assuming they will be treated well by employers committed to social justice. But it turns out that good treatment for workers is not a matter of philosophical commitment to progressive political values, but a matter of how power is distributed in the workplace."


"Leftist abolitionisms have always been both destructive—dismantling racial capitalism—and constructive, building alternatives, from the “abolition democracy” of Reconstruction to today’s projects seeking to divert people’s attachments to prisons and police into alternative practices of community accountability, safety, and transformative justice. Our left abolitionist approach to universities also negotiates these two paths at once: reckoning with universities’ complicity with a carceral, racial-capitalist society while creating an alternative, abolition university. We ask, Are prisons and universities two sides of the same coin? When we raise this question, does it make you anxious? We feel this anxiety, too, and we want to sit with it, to grapple with the impasse such questions open up."


I had the pleasure of interviewing Eli Meyerhoff and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein on this subject earlier in the year, check it out here!


The Red Nation: Four Principles of the Red Deal an Indigenous expansion on The Green New Deal at TheRedNation.org

The principles listed out: 1) What Creates Crisis Cannot Solve It; 2) Change From Below And to The Left; 3) Politicians Can’t Do What Only Mass Movements Do; 4) From Theory to Action

"We will make policy recommendations that can be used at any level of government, from the grassroots to the tribal council to the state. We cannot turn away from the state because the state has its sights set on us at all times. Indigenous people know that every moment of our existence is mediated by the state: it is illegal to give birth in our traditional homes without state permits and we aren’t even allowed to visit our sacred sites that lie within federal lands without proof of identity. The state harasses us wherever we go because we are not supposed to exist; we are supposed to be gone, erased off the lands the US so desperately wants to exploit for profit. Wherever the state and forces of capital set their sights—urban Indigenous youth, women, migrants, Black people, LGBTQAI2+, our sacred mountains and waters–we must agitate and organize. We cannot simply build isolated utopias while the rest of the world burns, nor can we wait for the slow process of reformist reform to kick in. We cannot simply heal our individual trauma, nor can we consume better to save the environment. We cannot vote harder and place all our hope in a few individuals in Congress. Climate change will kill us before any of these strategies liberate the planet from capitalism."









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