Monthly Archives: August 2018

Puerto Rico Imaginary (455)

C.R.E.A.M (310/415/485)

The CREAM thesis is essentially what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”– i.e., the belief “that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2).

Here’s the song Wu-Tang sampled.

HUM415 First Assignment

Print, read, and bring this pdf:

Lester K. Spence, Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (pp. xv-26): Knocking

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Socialists

Aug. 24, 2018

By Corey Robin

…. Since the 1970s, American liberals have taken a right turn on the economy. They used to champion workers and unions, high taxes, redistribution, regulation and public services. Now they lionize billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, deregulate wherever possible, steer clear of unions except at election time and at least until recently, fight over how much to cut most people’s taxes.

…. Under capitalism, we’re forced to enter the market just to live. The libertarian sees the market as synonymous with freedom. But socialists hear “the market” and think of the anxious parent, desperate not to offend the insurance representative on the phone, lest he decree that the policy she paid for doesn’t cover her child’s appendectomy. Under capitalism, we’re forced to submit to the boss. Terrified of getting on his bad side, we bow and scrape, flatter and flirt, or worse — just to get that raise or make sure we don’t get fired.

The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/sunday/what-socialism-looks-like-in-2018.html

Supine Sam (310/485)

Prone, actually, but it’s alliterative.

The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are, that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South – When “the bottom rail was on top” all over the Southern states, and to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States – Praise God.
I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.

Source: Julian S. Carr, “Unveiling of Confederate Monument at University. June 2, 1913” in the Julian Shakespeare Carr Papers #141, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Note the year. The monumentalization of the Confederacy and its transmutation into the fable of the Lost Cause was integral to the rise of Jim Crow as a legal and cultural formation.

from http://hgreen.people.ua.edu/transcription-carr-speech.html