The pandemic you were waiting for is on its way. Swine-flu began at a pork-processing plant in Mexico and has spread around the world. It's now a Level 4 threat: not yet a pandemic, but the World Health Organization says "there is now sustained transmission of the infection from human to human. It is two phases short of a pandemic... to raise the threat level further would require evidence that the virus was strong enough to infect whole communities across the globe."


And if not, why not? - Newswipe

I've written how our culture is suffused with catastrophe. People are faced with multiplying economic, social and ecological crises. They're unable to understand them as different facets of one larger crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Swine flu fills an existential void: we know it's a few minutes to midnight, and here's proof. Never mind that good old regular influenza kills a million people a year, and there are dozens of infectious diseases ravaging poor countries at any one moment. Swine flu is affecting us in the wealthy countries, so we have to care.



I'm waiting for the racist backlash to begin, when Mexicans start getting blamed for this crisis. In fact the pork-processing plant is owned by an American multinational with a shoddy environmental record:

Smithfield, which is led by pork baron Joseph W Luter III, has previously been fined for environmental damage in the US. In October 2000 the supreme court upheld a $12.6m (£8.6m) fine levied by the US environmental protection agency which found that the company had violated its pollution permits in the Pagan River in Virginia which runs towards Chesapeake Bay. The company faced accusations that faecal and other bodily waste from slaughtered pigs had been dumped directly into the river since the 1970s.

Survivors. I started watching the 1970s version of this and am now glad I stopped.

$12.6 million in exchange for decades of pollution - what's that, Smithfield's breakfast conference budget for a few fiscal quarters? The industrial meat industry is notorious for overcrowding, effluent run-off and overuse of antibiotics. Mike Davis brilliantly dissects their logic:

Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

The problem is not farm size per se: it's that economies of scale are only economical when environmental costs aren't considered. NAFTA devastated Mexico's rural economy, so it makes sense Mexicans would be happy to welcome an American agribusiness and not look too closely at what, after all, are industry-wide standards. Davis goes on to show this outbreak has been predicted for some time:

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly.

A lot of things are - Japan: a story of love & hate

But investment wasn't made in public healthcare or preventative medicine - which might affect the business practices of the agribusinesses so precious to the economy. Nor were rich countries willing to aid poorer nations' healthcare systems, particularly not after spending the last 30 years privatizing them. The villagers at the epicentre of the swine-flu outbreak knew something was wrong a month ago, but no one listened to them:

Residents of the town of Perote said at the time that they had a new, aggressive bug — even taking to the streets to demonstrate against the pig farm they blamed for their illness — but were told they were suffering from a typical flu. It was only after U.S. labs confirmed a swine flu outbreak that Mexican officials sent the boy's sample in for swine flu testing.

We face a patchwork of regulations and vaccine availability, based on the ability and willingness of governments to pay. And how much is a government going to spend to prevent something that might not happen?

This may not be 'the big one', but one thing's for sure: it's not a natural epidemic. It's another capitalist crisis, to be lined up alongside global warming and foreclosures. I don't mean there are men in tophats in a back room, rubbing their hands and plotting the downfall of the world's poor. I mean that capitalism, as a system, is completely unable to take account of long-term consequences. A pandemic would shut borders and further cut trade, deepening the recession, making things worse for everyone. But the rule for all capitalists is profit or die, which means agribusiness cuts corners, governments cut costs and Big Pharma funds medicine, not prevention. Crisis is inevitable and people - particularly poor people - die.


Mmm, that's a tasty metaphor for capitalist greed! - Soviet Toys

Finally, even a pandemic has its plusses and minuses. Minus: I'm smack in the middle of the swine flu's target age range:

The new strain seems to be more lethal to those in the 25 to 45 age range - an ominous sign, as this was a hallmark of the Spanish 1918 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions worldwide. Younger people were probably hit harder by the 1918 flu virus because their immune systems over-reacted.

Here I thought I was making myself healthy: all that exercise, all that fruit and Vitamin D pills, and I was just toughening up my immune system so it'd overreact and kill me when the swine-flu hit. But that's the plus as well: if a healthy immune system is a danger, then I should be drinking, smoking and taking as many drugs as I can. That way the swine-flu will course through my body like a nasty hangover. I'm off down the pub to get immuno-compromised: who's with me?


"Are we safe yet?"
"Dunno, let's have another to be sure." - Looks & Smiles

Labels: agribusiness, catastrophe, pandemic, swine flu

The only link between them is they're all on my mind this afternoon.

1) Ian Tomlinson

On April 1, protestors gathered in London to demonstrate against the G20 leadership of the capitalist world. The police responded by 'kettling' them into tight spaces and not letting them leave, much like corralling cattle. Those who got in the way were beaten, like Ian Tomlinson, a 47 year old newsvendor who was on his way home. He collapsed and later died.


Ian Tomlinson on his last walk.

At first the police claimed they helped Tomlinson when he collapsed, but protestors threw bottles at them. The right-wing net trolls leapt all over this, calling the demonstrators monstrous and subhuman. The cops investigated themselves and found nothing wrong; a coroner called the cause of death 'heart attack'. But flaws soon emerged in the story, chiefly because someone filmed Tomlinson being struck by the police. Soon things began to unravel. An independent investigation was launched; the officers involved were suspended; a new autopsy was conducted, finding the cause of death to be abdominal hemmorhage - internal bleeding. At this point, we may be looking at the first time (to my knowledge) a police officer could be charged with manslaughter.

Anyone who's ever gone to a global justice demonstration knows the police don't hold back from beating and bloodying those who get in their way. But this appears to be the tipping point where suddenly the demonstrators' stories start being believed. The head of the independent commission is reminding police they're the servants, not the masters of the people, and he credits videos by protestors' mobile phones with the evidence needed to prosecute.


Just some bad apples.

It's sweet to see naive liberals up in arms about heavy-handed policing - it means they thought everything was working fine before. But more significant is that the words of hundreds of protestors over the years mean nothing. Even the police murders at Genoa only led to assault convictions. However, video evidence is enough to start heads rolling. All those new surveillance technologies interfere with the state's ability to suppress dissent. And as a society, we fetishize technology to the extent that it supplants the evidence of real people who, being 'biased', can't be believed.

2) Susan Boyle

She's the 47 year old Scottish spinster with a learning disability who spent her life looking after her mother and has never been kissed. Then, on Britain's Got Talent, she bucked expectations and proved she could sing.



I know it's corny. The whole thing looks staged: for one thing, why do the audience leap to their feet as soon as she starts singing? And Tanya Gold makes the excellent point that the drama of redemption wouldn't work unless we judged her for being hideous - and therefore a talentless hag - in the first place. Moreover, her story lends itself to the worst sort of merit-based triumphalism: the narrative that 'the little person can succeed against all odds' is very handy to capitalist ideology in a recession, when little people are getting stomped on. But that said, I found her performance touching. And maybe the 30 million youtube hits show people are willing to identify with the underdog, not the glamorous and powerful.

3) Kari Ferrell


Keri Ferrell. Pic used without permission, but that's kind of the point.

Kari Ferrell is the 'hipster grifter', a 22 year old Korean-American wanted for defrauding hipsters of $60,000. Coming out of the Salt Lake City punk scene, she used her sexuality to gain friends and borrow money from gob-smacked young scene boys (and some women.) Then she moved to Brooklyn, talked her way into a job at Vice Magazine, and went through a series of boyfriends, borrowing money from them and repaying them with cheques from a closed account. She's now on the run again.

I find Ferrell fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, she cultivated the hipster aesthetic: she even has a tattoo on her back that reads "I love beards." Secondly, she sounds less like a calculating fraud artist, and more like someone with borderline personality disorder: she told numerous friends she was dying of cancer, to the point of showing them bloodied kleenexes which she'd apparently coughed up blood into. She sounds like someone who desperately needs drama and the attention that flows from it. Thirdly, despite my ongoing dislike for hipsters, I don't think that having skinny jeans and plastic-slat sunglasses means you deserve to be ripped off. (Except if you work at the evil, reactionary Vice Magazine - in which case you deserve everything you get.) But she was smart enough to speak the hipster code, and inveigled herself into the scene by looking and speaking the right way.


Asian, therefore cute, therefore harmless? - Cibo Matto

Finally, she's a young Asian woman who doesn't fit the proper image of aggressive huckster. The stereotypes of race and gender she falls under are 'cute, exotic and harmless'. Cibo Matto, the 1990s alt-rock fronted by two Japanese women, struggled with the trope, which dictated that no matter how much funk & hip-hop they incorporated into their act, they were seen as 'quirky' first and musicians second. Ferrell made the best of what she was given. That doesn't make her a folk-hero, but if a desperate, needy woman found herself in a world that trusted cute, Asian women, I don't think it's her fault if she used that to her advantage.

Edit: a friend of mine forwarded this to me - frickin hilarious:

Labels: hipsters, police, protestors, Susan Boyle

Most people know Shaft through his epynonymous first movie, in which Richard Roundtree plays John Shaft, hard-boiled private dick who'd risk his neck for a brother man. Shaft and its sequel, Shaft's Big Score, followed a predictable course in which Shaft fights both gangsters and police suspicions to right wrongs, save his life and get the girl.



Shaft in Africa takes the franchise in a completely different direction. An international gang of people smugglers replace the small-time hoods. Shaft is whisked from Harlem to Africa to pose as an immigrant labourer, and track down the traffickers exploiting young Africans. After many adventures he makes it to Europe, where he lives in an overcrowded tenement in Paris with other illegal workers. He must battle the smugglers to free the migrants - but not before their tenement is set on fire.



You read correctly: Shaft in Africa is a drama about the plight of illegal migrants sold into slavery in Europe. It could have been made yesterday; tenement fires in Paris are common, where undocumented workers are warehoused in sub-standard conditions to this day. To my knowledge, Hollywood has yet to touch the issue; the British film Dirty Pretty Things broached the topic of illegal workers in 2005, but the politics were a pale pink next to Shaft. In the former, Chiwetel Ejiofor sums up the immigrant experience with, "we are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. And suck your cocks." Which is true, but doesn't say why it's happening.



Compare this to Shaft, who encounters a smuggler overcharging him and the Africans for an overcrowded room in a tenement:

"Fellows, I take care of everything. Now, this room cost you each 100 francs a month.

We only earn 200 francs a month. For this room, we pay half.

No space in Paris. Very costly. No room, you in street. In street, police come. Ask questions, send you home. But how you go home? No money! So: go to prison. Lock up. 100 francs a month, everybody stay happy."

That's a good summary of the undocumented worker's condition: as long as you're illegal, the threat of deportation keeps you silent. At one point the smuggler shows his evil capitalist colours and rants, "I've given thousands of jobs to Africans and they don't complain. But because of that black bastard and that troublemaker Shaft I've had to leave this country!" Later, a French police sergeant tries to mollify Shaft after a fire in the tenement fire kills some of the Africans:

"The law will punish him, monsieur."

"Fuck the law. What is the law doing about the shitheads who charge 100 Francs a month to stay in a craphouse like this? Why don't you really clamp down on the slave trade? I'll tell you why. Because the black ghettos of Paris is as far away from the Champs Elysee as 125th Street is from Park Avenue. You need a bunch of poor bastards to work on your roads and your goddamn kitchens. So don't lay any of that 'law will punish you' shit on me!"

Shaft connects exploitation, racism and ghettos to the profit motive. No One Is Illegal couldn't say it better. And this wasn't some earnest documentary, it was an action film: though it lost money, the movies were popular enough that CBS tried to leverage Shaft into a TV series. We know illegal immigrants are the first to be targeted during a recession - imagine the impact of mainstream audiences encountering Shaft's sympathetic portrayal today. For that alone, Shaft in Africa is worth watching.



There's another reason to see the film. It's obvious you don't watch a movie named after a euphemism for a penis for progressive gender politics. His character is defined by his sexual prowess - though I suspect that, like a lot of blaxploitation films and hip hop afterwards, much of that is braggadocio, not meant to be taken seriously. Which is what makes Shaft in Africa so fascinating: it elevates Shaft (pun intended) to the status of a sex god. And not because he's good in bed, but because his penis is so large. It's like Shaft as told by Rainer Wolfcastle; there's absolutely no subtlety.



Shaft meets the girlfriend of the head smuggler, and she tries to seduce him:

"How long is your phallus, Mr. Shaft?"

"My what?"

"Your cock."

"Baby by now it shrunk down to 20 inches..."

"You can usually tell by the size of a man's nose. Or the length and thickness of his thumbs. I always look for a man with a prominent nose. And long thick thumbs."

"Baby you're not turning me on. I got too many things on my mind."

Of course he relents, telling her "Baby my nose may not be too prominent, but I got two of the longest, thickest thumbs..."

And it gets better. Shaft meets an African princess, whose culture dictates she has her clitoris amputated on reaching 'womanhood'. She soon learns the ways of Shaft:

"Were you disappointed I wasn't a virgin? Hmm?"

"Hell no baby, you had some good teacher."

"John, this is hardly the time to talk about it, but I've made an important decision. Because of you."

"Well, my daddy told me, he said John, the one time you should never ever make an important decision is right after you've made love."

"It's about my clitorectomy."

"That's an important decision all right."

"February comes, I'm not going to let them do it."

He didn't even have to send her to Clitoraid. Shaft's penis is so great, he can overturn entrenched cultural traditions with it. Yes, Shaft features a black man being objectified for his animal sexuality; yes, it reduces women to slavish conquests. But at this point my analytical ability breaks down and I'm simply dumbfounded that something like this could get written and filmed. Shaft is not a lover, he's a force of nature with transformative sexual powers... who's a friend of exploited migrant labour. Watch it and deconstruct it if you can.

Labels: blaxploitation, movie review, Shaft in Africa

Days of Hope tells the story of a panoply of revolutionaries as they struggle against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The book spans the events of 1936: Franco's initial uprising against the Republicans, and the repeated military engagements leading to Franco's unsuccessful attempt to take Madrid.



This is a military history of the Spanish Civil War, which is the book's strength and weakness. Malraux is an incredibly gifted writer. He takes us through breathtaking vistas of Spanish countryside, and the bombing of civilian Madrid, with a confident pen that contrasts the stark horrors of war with the small details of everyday life. The narrative weaves like a camera between dozens of different players:

"All the morning," Moreno said, "I've felt as if an earthquake were taking place." He meant that it was not so much fear of the fascists that gripped the crowd as the sort of terror a cataclysm inspires; the idea of 'giving in' never entered their heads - one doesn't talk of giving in to an earthquake.

To a jangle of bells an ambulance sped past.

A black crash and the glasses on the tables sprang up like toy rabbits into the air and landed tinkling back amongst saucers, spilt liquor and V-shaped splinters from the windows. The panes had caved in like drum-heads as the bomb exploded on the boulevard outside. A waiter's tray toppled over, bounded on the floor with a thin clash of cymbals, muted by the silence.(314)

It's impossible not to be drawn in by the chaos. I haven't felt so gripped by a war narrative since playing Call of Duty 2.



This isn't solely due to Malraux's descriptive skill. Characters take long pages to explain their motivations. The Negus, a bearded anarchist, rails against all authority; Manuel, a young Communist officer, grows to accept his responsibilities as a leader; Slade, an American journalist, tries to stay aloof from the barbarity around him. Dozens more share their thoughts - and these are not normal thoughts. Well-crafted statements on politics, morality and philosophy emerge fully-formed in casual conversation. It took me months to read Days of Hope, because I kept getting lost trying to follow the complex threads of discussion. Malraux can be justly accused of making his characters mouthpieces for his own views. But to his credit, the ideas he's promulgating are bold.

This is the biggest strength of Days of Hope. In these post-ideological times, it's hard to remember that millions of people flocked to different revolutionary banners. Malraux's characters talk about the relation between Party and state, what makes someone pick up a gun to fight for socialism, the role of revolution in history. These are all conversations I've had with individuals: Malraux puts them on an epic scale, where they belong. If anything, the current capitalist crisis may provoke others to return to these questions:

"For a thinker, the revolution's a tragedy. But for such a man, life, too, is tragic. And if he is counting on the revolution to abolish his private tragedy, he's making a mistake - that's all... There aren't umpteen ways to fight, there's only one and that's to fight to win. One doesn't engage in a war or revolution just to please oneself." (339)

It would be easy to leave the story there, as a tale of intelligent bravado, content in misty nostalgia for the days when the Left pulled its weight in the world. But it's precisely this focus on war and heroism that mark Days of Hope as flawed.

First of all, there are no major women characters. Women are spoken of fondly by the soldiers, and here and there they appear as themselves - mainly elderly peasants fleeing the bombardment. I'm against including characters for what they represent, but it's an historical fact that women fought in the front lines in Spain. Their absence makes Malraux's work less the manly treatise on brotherly sacrifice he wants it to be, and more an attempt to deny women's place in history altogether.



Secondly, the focus on war shrouds a bigger point. Of course it was a war - but what marked Spain was that it was also a revolution, against the bourgeoisie, landed property and the church. The tragedy of Spain is that the Communist Party, under directions from Stalin, turned the revolution into a regular war between armies. Arrayed against the combined forces of Franco, Italy and Spain, it was a war they were bound to lose. Land and Freedom makes this point well, as does Homage to Catalonia.

However, Malraux is telling the story of the war and the Communists and anarchists who fought it. The revolution, when it does get mentioned, is the domain of starry-eyed idealists who are long on enthusiasm and short on discipline. Here's an exchange between two officers, Garcia, a leftist, and Hernandez, a Catholic officer in the Republican army. Garcia tells him

"Because you have to live politically, you have to act in terms of politics; and your duties as an officer bring you every moment into touch with politics. Whereas the cause you have in mind is not political. It is based on the contrast between the world in which you live and the world of your dreams. But action can only be envisaged in terms of action. The business of a political thinker is to compare one set of hard facts with another... our side or Franco's; one system or another system. He is not fighting against a dream, a theory, or another Apocalyptic visiion."

"It is only for a dream's sake that men die."

"Hernandez, the habit of thinking about what ought to be instead of what can actually be done is a mental poison... Moral 'uplift' and magnanimity are matters for the individual, with which the revolution has no direct concern; far from it. I am very much afraid the only link between them, as far as you're concerned, is the prospect you may lay down your life in the cause of both." (183)

In revolutionary Spain, comparing "one set of hard facts with another" led to the Communists disbanding revolutionary brigades, and unleashing secret police terror on anarchists and non-Communists alike. It led to a ban on factory and land take-overs by workers, and returning property to the hated clerical aristocracy - all in the name of discipline.



Malraux was not an arm-chair intellectual. He organized shipments of planes and crews from France to fight for Spain, and toured America to raise money for the Republican cause. However, he famously ended up a Gaullist, and in Days of Hope one can see the roots of opportunism, 'the end justifies the means' which changes the ends altogether, from liberation to dictatorship. That does not detract from the novel's power or beauty, but it is an object lesson in the dangers of losing sight of one's goal.

In the single passage Malraux names women revolutionaries, the journalist Slade is caught in the bombardment of Madrid by fascists. He hears a "rhythmically uttered phrase":

At last Slade guessed what it was, though he could not catch the words. He had heard the same rhythmic chant a month previously. In response to words he could not hear, that human gong was beating out: "No pasaran." Slade had seen La Passionaria, dark, austere, widow of all the slain Asturians, had seen her leading a fierce and solemn procession marching beneath red banners inscribed with her famous phrase, Better be a hero's widow than a coward's wife, had heard twenty thousand women chanting, in answer to another long, incomprehensible phrase, this same refrain: "No pasaran." He had been less moved by them than by this smaller, but unseen, crowd, whose desperate courage rose towards him through the smoke-clouds of the burning city. (331)

This is the strength of Malraux's work: whatever his trajectory, he understood not only the battle for human freedom, but how it's a battle for ordinary people to fight and win.

Labels: Communism, Days of Hope, fascism, Malraux, Spanish Civil War