“Undisciplined, playful and yet Bhadra”: Old ghosts and their Advocates in an Age of Enlightenment

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book on the Colonial Uncanny.

Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination, a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already suspected—folktales (fiabe) are real.—Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, xviii.

 

The bhoot was a member of the family in rural Bengal…I was young and visiting my grandfather in our village when a neighbor came to see him.  After chatting for a while, the gentleman remarked “a petni is really irritating (tyakto) us”. The method of this irritation was that whenever fish was fried in the kitchen, the petni would appear and in her nasal voice beg for fish. The funny thing was that no one listening was surprised by this neighbor’s story. Everyone assumed it to be very natural: bhuts loved fried fish, so of course they would irritate and demand their share. —Humayun Ahmed, Amar Priyo Bhuter Galpo, Introduction.

An illustration from the classic Bengali folk-lore collection Thakurmar Jhuli (1907) by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder.

In the spring 1857, as Calcutta prepared for the impending threat of a mutiny, the noted intellectual Rajendralal Mitra (1822-1891) published an excellent study of ghosts, titled “Bhoutik Byapar” or “Ghostly Matters”, in his journal, the Bibidartha Ṣangraha.  Rajendralal’s career as a man of letters was stellar even for his times which had produced a multitude of such men.  He had a law degree and was fluent in several languages including, Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu and of course his native, Bengali.  An enthusiastic and well-respected participant in the educational and cultural projects of the times, Rajendralal was also active politically, having served for several years as the President of the British India Association, the precursor to the Indian National Congress.

 

He was, by modern standards, a highly unusual source of intelligence about ghosts and their activities.  And in this regard Rajendralal does not disappoint us.  The short essay is a wonderful tongue-in-cheek comment on ghosts in particular, and belief in the supernatural in general.  It is of interest not only for its dry wit about the so-called irrationalities of life but also for its effective disordering of the usual categories of rationality and faith in political terms.  A colourful “historical” account of ghosts is employed by Rajendralal to make an inimitable argument about nationalism and British colonial rule. 

 

It is perfectly clear, Rajendralal informs us at the outset, as to how ghosts come into being.  Accidental or untimely death gives birth to a ghost, and this rule is valid for all ghosts internationally.  But despite their universalism, ghosts do have certain particularities.  They are, for instance, partial to women and children.  According to Rajendralal, in all nations of the world ghosts are never far from the hearts and minds of this chosen demographic.  He then provides us with a list of activities that we can reasonably expect of ghosts:


They are by nature undisciplined, playful and yet bhadra [polite].  Their activities include throwing a few stones in the dark, making some needless noises, opening closed doors without any apparent purpose, manifesting in horrible forms and sometimes possessing the simpleminded young wife of the family; besides the above they are not known to harm humans in any particular way.  However, they are likely to carry out their own form of justice if they are wronged.

 

Rajendralal’s ghosts are marked by their near-genial relationship to the human world.  Their spectrality is almost mitigated by their traceable predictability: we are made aware of their functions and hence their limitations.  Most importantly, we feel the uncomfortable imminence of their nature to our own, captured intensely in Rajendralal’s deliberate use of the word bhadra

 

The word carries a history of its own, too elaborate to reproduce here.  Suffice to say that it is a very specific designation meant for a distinct social group in colonial Bengal, the bhadralok, whose social identity was to a large extent predicated upon caste, class, English education and concomitant perceptions of Enlightenment rationality, making them close historical relatives of the Victorian gentleman.  The inclusion of ghosts by Rajendralal within the hallowed circle of bhadra-hood explicitly establishes their kinship. Although part of this ironic discourse, the word actually overflows with cultural insinuations about affinity; and rightly so, for the ghosts of nineteenth century, in perception and representation, often unsettlingly dissolved the distinction between the world of the dead and that of the living. 

 

Who were these “traditional” ghosts that Rajendralal was ready to include in the hallowed circle of the bhadra or cultural gentility? Some clues to their distinguishing characteristics are provided for us in his essay.  Let us remind ourselves of what he saw as essential attributes of ghosts: indiscipline and playfulness but with a touch of innate politeness.  Their deeds, we noted, were making disembodied noises, appearing in fearsome forms and possession usually of the young and the female of the human species.  On a more disturbing note, Rajendralal had cautioned us about their predilection for purveying “their own form of justice”.

 

Rajendralal’s description might serve as a basis for exploring the lineage of what I call, the “traditional” or pre-modern ghosts.  His sketch is demonstrably not fabricated by him for the sake of literary effect for there exists a remarkable uniformity in the descriptive pedigree for a pre-colonial ghost.  

 

In 1874, the native Christian missionary and scholar Reverend Lal Behari Day published a detailed ethnographic novel about rural Bengal titled Govinda Samanta or the History of a Bengali Raiyat.  Later in this section we shall have occasion to discuss this unique text in detail.  Here, let me reproduce in its entirety, the exceptional genealogy that Day presented for traditional ghosts:

Of Bengali ghosts, that is the spirits of Bengali men and women, there is a great variety; but there are five classes that generally make their appearance…the first and most honourable class of ghosts are those which pass by the name of Brahmadaitya, or the spirit of departed Brahmans…unlike other ghosts, they do not eat all sorts of food, but only those which are considered religiously clean…They are for the most part inoffensive, never doing harm to benighted travellers.  Another class of ghosts, and they are by far the most numerous class, are simply called Bhutas, that is spirits.  They are the spirits of departed Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Sudras…The Bhutas are all male ghosts.  There are two classes of female ghosts, called Petnis and SankhchunnisPetnis are terribly dirty…they are [also] very lascivious, trying to waylay benighted passengers for the gratification of their lusts…Sankhchunnis, or Sankhachurnis, so called in the opinion of some demonologists, because they put on clothes as white as sankha (conch-shells)…they are not so filthy as Petnis, but equally dangerous.  Another class of ghosts are the Skandhakata, so called from the circumstance that their heads have been cut off from above their shoulders.  These headless ghosts are probably the most terrible of the whole set, as they have never been known to spare any human being…Muhmedan ghosts, usually called Mamdos…are regarded as infinitely more mischievous than Hindu ghosts.

Day here produces for us a testimony of folk belief in which both ghosts and their behavior are carefully mapped to steer clear of them.  It is noteworthy how Rajendralal’s essay and Day’s account both underscore the safeness of these Beings, “inoffensive” and “harmless” are terms that are repeated as descriptions. 

 

If Day provided a format for model behavior for traditional ghosts, during the same period Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay published an entire collection of ghost stories, Bhut Petni, which catalogued the pursuits of such creatures.[1]  This collection of established fables about traditional ghosts proved to be immensely successful.  Originally intended for children, the book was approved by the Director of Public Instructions as a suitable book for school-awards and libraries in 1939 and it earned several “gold and silver medals and First-Class Certificates” from various exhibitions and nationalist enterprises.  It had not lost its popularity even by the 1950s, its impressive twelfth edition being published in 1955.

 

There are nineteen stories in the collection each in its way fulfilling a requirement for what we may regard as being standard behavior for pre-modern ghosts.  Of the nineteen tales only one has a Prince as its protagonist, the rest consistently have as heroes and central characters various members of the lower classes.  The word that describes almost all human characters is garib or poor.  The poor laugh, suffer, love, often cheat and connive to better their lot.  Sometimes they win and do end up marrying the fabled princess, but often they do not.  But even as they lose in life they are never patronized or belittled in the narrative mode, thereby conclusively betraying the social origin of these tales. 

 

From Lal Behari Day’s Folk-Tales of Bengal Illustrator: Warwick Goble ( 1862 – 1943).

Ghosts R Us: “Traditional” Ghosts and their Worldview

The Bengali urban intellectual of the nineteenth century, for a variety of reasons, very literally went into the depths of rural existence in their ethnographic search of ghosts, talking beasts and beautiful princesses.  The moment these unsuspecting creatures were located they were promptly bagged and incorporated into collections, journals, and meticulously researched books.  The ghosts, on their part, were not wholly unfamiliar with this behavior.  The tales in Mukhopadhyay’s collection demonstrate that this tradition of the dead being duped by the living was particularly strong. 

 

Of the recurrent themes, captivity narratives form the most pervasive of these tale-types.  The basic format is as follows: a human encounters a ghost and is initially frightened by them.  Then, by a sleight of hand the human captures the ghost or threatens them into perpetual bondage.  The ghost either ends up being sealed away in a place of confinement or is indentured into servitude to enhance the material prosperity of the mortal.  In the tale “Kalshir Bhut” (“The Ghost in the Urn”), for instance, a poor fisherman (jele) nets a little copper urn.  Thinking it to be full of gold he unscrews the lid only to reveal a terrifying ghost that emerges out of the urn and threatens to kill the poor jele.  The jele quickly thinks on his feet and asks the ghost how he managed to fit his enormous body into such a tiny vessel.  The unsuspecting ghost boasts of his demonic powers to shrink himself at will- and as the jele insists on a demonstration - puts himself back into the urn.  The jele of course tightens the lid back on and throws the whole thing back into the sea.  Similarly, in “Bhuter Bichar” (The Judgment of the Ghost), the ghost ends up in a little tube and is confined there forever.

 

The more common form of captivity is, however, where the ghost is enslaved to serve the needs of the mortal.  In “Bhutmedh Yajna” (The Ghost Sacrifice) for instance, an indigent barber or napit encounters a fearsome ghost in a forest.  The ghost, delighted to have found dinner at last, starts to dance.  The shrewd napit, not to be outdone, also begins dancing and tells the ghost that it he who was delighted to have found the ghost.  The king of the realm, the napit continues, was about to perform the bhutmedh yajna which required a hundred ghosts to be sacrificed.  The napit had already captured ninety-nine of them and this ghost would complete his collection.  Upon being asked to furnish proof of his captives, the napit brandishes his mirror.  The ghost takes his own image to be evidence of other ghosts being held prisoner in this object.  He begs the napit not to capture him and ends up as the napit’s slave for the rest of his life keeping the napit and his family in luxury by supplying them with riches.  

 

 

Let us review in this light the frequent descriptions about the ghosts being harmless or inoffensive.  When the dead come across the living in these tales, the modern reader is thus more alarmed for the fate of the former than the latter given the nature of outcomes of such encounters. 

 

What is the lesson here that these tales embody? For ghosts: clearly, that they should stay well away from humans.  For historians however what emerges distinctly out of these stories is the close resemblance the world of the ghosts bore to that of the rural poor.  Coerced, unpaid labor, begar or beth-begar, existed in many forms throughout the Bengal presidency, its effects especially pernicious on lower castes and indigenous peoples.  Similarly, extraction of “gifts” and taxes from the peasant as nazranas (gift), abwabs (extra tax), and other forms of arbitrarily imposed dues by the rural elites was a common occurrence. While brutalized by these violent relations of land and labor in the real world, in the tales, the poor reverse roles and exact their vengeance on ghosts.  Or perhaps the ghosts mirror their own condition and enrich the bonds of kinship and solidarity between the worlds. Storytelling, Walter Benjamin has pointed out, is intimately connected to labor. Boredom, that envelops the worker during the labor process, was for Benjamin the “dream bird” that hatched stories.  As weavers and spinners worked their looms, the peasant worked the field, as the “rhythm of work” “seized” the worker, s/he listened “to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them…[came to them] all by itself. This… is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.”

 

These relations of extended kinship between ghosts and humans, “cradled” in work rhythms and life, were part of the warp and weft of precolonial storytelling and stories.

 

From Thakurdadar Jhuli. Reproduced in Kathakali Mukherjee’s blog.

As far back as in the sixteenth-century we have an excellent description of a “unique bazaar for ghosts” (“aparup preter bajar”) in the lyric ballad, Chandimangal .  In the ballad, after a particularly bloody battle between the king of Ceylone and an army led by the goddess Chandi, the humans lose the war and the battlefield is strewn with mortal corpses.  The ghosts and demons then descend upon the scene and start up a market to deal in the dead bodies:

 

A unique market for ghosts

Some dice and some slice                               some weigh and some dispense

                                    Some just deal and trade in meat
The flesh is sold raw and cooking                  some even buy it by hocking

                                    Human heads, like so many coconuts

 

Besides being adroit businesspeople, pre-modern ghosts also had other social skills which mirrored the world of the living.  They married other ghosts- as evidenced in the case of the petni and her episode with the alta-and even gave birth to baby ghosts, defying any brahmanical notions of their genesis.  For instance, a commonly told tale in the nineteenth century was of the two sister petnis, Kuni and Buni.  The former lived in houses while the latter lived in the wild.  One day a poor Brahmin on his way home through a forest encounters the towering Buni.  But instead of the usual threats of dinner and neck snapping, Buni asks him, rather shyly, to carry a message for her sister, Kuni, that she had just given birth to a beautiful baby boy.  The Brahmin, not overtly pleased to have met Buni in the dark runs home as fast as he could.  Once home he recounts this odd experience to his wife, and as he was narrating the alarming tale, a similarly huge and terrifying creature, Kuni, rushes out of the interior of the Brahmin’s home and asks him delightedly about news of her new nephew.

 

A distinct pattern then emerges about this spectral world of the “traditional” ghosts: it is very much like our own.  The claims of kinship that we sensed from Rajendralal Mitra’s account now rings ominously true.  They demonstrably suffered from hunger, physical pain, and social vanities as much as the next living person.

 

The hallmark of a modern ghost story is that we start off with an elaboration of the death that will become central to the rest of the narrative; it will “explain” the presence of the ghost, overlay even the preliminary proceedings (i.e. before the appearance of the ghost) with an sense of intense unease and usually as the deaths are frequently accidental or untimely, hauntingly bring home for us the needlessness of the end of life.  Simply put, they are about death and the terrorizing concept of life ending. 

 

This modern mode of narrativizing the dead is markedly different from that of our traditional ghosts.  The most remarkable feature of these beings, also their chief difference with their modern counterparts, is that we are narrative participants in their lives, not their deaths.  The older ghosts, as we saw, lead regular “lives” and were collective social beings.  Their deaths were incidental to the plot, most often unreferenced.  It is their lives that we hear about, their social norms are described, their trials and tribulations documented.  The stories were embedded in and arose from a society where such Beings were inextricably woven into ritual life of the subaltern.  The immensely popular festival of charak, so abhorred by British to merit its outlawing, for instance, consisted of the important ritual of dāno bārāno, or resuscitation of the dead. The chief devotee propitiated the village ghosts by taking food “to a tree standing in some lonely meadow, and the food [was] poured on a plantain leaf and left for the ghosts to devour”, while others impersonated the ghosts themselves, donning masks, and reciting verses, “My name is Ram Sol, I shall be burnt and resuscitated again.”

 

These Beings were autochthonous citizens of a familiar landscape, equal to humans in all their formal activities; and to paraphrase a classical mode of understanding the “other”, when you tickled the “traditional” ghost s/he too laughed, if you poisoned him, he too died and if you wronged her, she too sought revenge.


From “Ghosts of Bengal” by Debojyoti Das

[1] Sukumar Sen speculates that it was first published in 1895, See Sen, Galper Bhut (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1982), 67.













"Riddles of the Sphinx": What Social Reproduction Theory Says and Does not Say

There has been some comradely, and semi-comradely, discussion on social media of the book on Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) I recently edited from Pluto Press.

SRT Pluto Press.jpeg



My fellow contributors and I are greatly looking forward to responses to the volume, for we think this discussion is an important one.

For those who may, perfectly understandably, not have the time (or inclination) to read such long journal-y responses, I want to flag a few things the book is claiming to do and not to do:

Charge 1: "Marx said it all before, why are you saying this is new?"

The contributors to the volume have never claimed that the way we conceive of SRT is a brand new innovation/invention in Marxist theory.  Quite the opposite.  SRT, in our version, repeatedly declares its commitment to the prefix "re" when it comes to Marxism—to recover, revive, rejuvenate, critical aspects of the Marxist tradition.

It is not a project to "add" things to Marxism (Marxism, fortunately, is not a cauldron to which we can add new things) but an effort to theorize and explore the silences in Marx, and Capital.

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One central Marxist idea the volume seeks to probe is how labor power is reproduced under capitalism and what the relationship is between the social processes/relations that reproduce labour power and those that produce commodities.

It is clear that one could not write a Harry Braverman-esque account of the processes of "reproduction of labour power" the way Braverman or Michael Burawoy have done about the workplace, i.e. the production of commodities. The regimes of discipline are very different. It is hard to submit the many aspects of reproduction (of labour power) to a manager's ticking clock.  So what does that mean? It certainly does not mean that capital relinquishes all control over the processes of reproduction of labour power. But what does that control look like? how does it shape society and those who produce wealth for capital in society?

These are the questions we grapple with in the volume.

Charge 2: "SRT claims that domestic labour creates value"

We don't.  And the feminists and activists we work with in this volume do not either. 

There has been a certain confusion about Lise Vogel's interpretation of the Marxist concept of necessary labour.  In the 1983 edition of her book, Vogel, wrongly, includes domestic labour as a component of necessary labour.  

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Susan Ferguson and David McNally's (who are both contributors to the volume I edited) excellent introduction to Vogel's book , reprinted in 2014 by Haymarket Press, draws attention to this and clarifies the error.  The Haymarket edition also helpfully includes a supplemental essay by Vogel herself where she amends the mistake.

I believe that this is allowed, in fact more acknowledgements of mistakes made would probably enrich the revolutionary tradition as a whole!

Charge 3: "Lise Vogel derides Engels"

I have an short piece coming soon in which I discuss both Vogel's political and intellectual development as well as her alleged dismissal of Engels. Here is what I say in the piece:

The passage that Vogel took most exception to was one wherein Engels wrote of human life necessarily assuming a “twofold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.” Further on this dual process, Engels elaborated that the social organization of a particular era or stage of human history was “determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other
She is not disputing the twofold character of human life that Engels outlines in Origin, or Marx and Engels gestures towards in the German Ideology previously.  What she is objecting to is that in Origin Engels fails to clarify the relationship between social production and “the production of human beings”. In the absence of a discussion as to how the two processes relate, the relative weight of each, or the possibility of determining effects of one on the other, it appears as though, writes Vogel, “the production of human beings constitutes a process that has not only an autonomous character, but a theoretical weight equal to that of the production of the means of existence” [emphasis mine] (Vogel 2013, 33).  If both processes are equally weighted, as a reading of Engels might suggest, this opens the door, Vogel correctly warns, to the “dual system” theories that have plagued the socialist feminist movement for decades. (Bhattacharya, forthcoming).
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In most of her work Vogel emphasizes the overall soundness of Engels's "Origin" but says that if certain things were formulated better Engels would have been better fortified against later misappropriations of his theory. 

Charge 4: "SRT is undialectical"

This is a major criticism of our theoretical approach and must be taken seriously.  But a short blog post is not a place where I can fruitfully engage with this charge.
So you will have to decide for yourself! And I hope you will be fully armed with your Marx and your Bertell Ollman when you judge us.  

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Charge 5: "It is a bunch of tenured women with feminist husbands who share the housework, wtf are they complaining about"

In other words we are not industrial or service 'workers' toiling under capitalism (in the way Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and other Marxist theorists were) and so we lack the authenticity to talk about capitalism or of anticapitalist futures.

We plead guilty to this charge.  Even though several of our contributors, far from being "tenured women" with that lovely accessory called a "husband", are openly-Marxist graduate students looking for jobs in a Trumpian world.  Perhaps not the most enviable of enterprises, especially if you consider their race, gender and student loan amounts.

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A final word about the book

If the "lesson" of the book could be summed up it would perhaps be how the richness of Marxism as a living theory continues to help us make sense of our neoliberal world and thereby helps us think of ways to change it.

We came together to do this book because we have worked with each other not in seminars alone, but on the streets.  We came together to do this book because all of us, despite how the world looks right now, share a fierce hope about its future.   

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So we want you to use the book and its ideas not just in the classroom, but most importantly, in the streets.

In solidarity,
Tithi Bhattacharya

 

Vienna: With Myself and Some Others

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Louis Corinth, "Still life with Chrysanthemum" (1922)
“I have found a new way: true art is to practice unreality"

Watch how in this painting the wind from nowhere blows through the flowers.  Vienna was a bit like that.

Vienna, Day 2, March 10, 2016.

Beautiful, sparkling sky, blue without any mist. 

Took the S-Bahn to the Belvedere Palace.  The train had two floors, very fancy and very clean.  It was a relief of the familiar to find a Viennese man give me wrong directions to the train and a small, immigrant woman correct him and direct me to the right train. 

The Belvedere Palace is a massive Baroque palace that has been turned into a museum.  It is set amidst beautiful gardens and faces a shimmering pool.  It is fitting that it should house the translucent, golden-magical works of Gustav Klimt. 

Belvedere Palace

Belvedere Palace

 But more than Klimt, I fell in love today with Egon Schiele, one whom I knew little about. 

Apparently Schiele led a dissolute life, married a woman he was not particularly close to and then at twenty-eight died of Spanish influenza along with his wife who was then pregnant with their first child. 

There is a vivid and spectral painting by Schiele at the Belvedere—“Mother with two children III” (1915-1917).  A grey, grey, gaunt mother is holding two colordrenched children.  The eyes of the mother are cast downwards while the children look wide eyed upon you.  The mother’s head lies at her shoulders, laden with layers of exhaustion, and her body is draped in a half inclined position between the two children.  She can barely sit up.  Her body is invisible except for her skeletal face and her shroudlike long dress that melds into her face, blurring all distinction between flesh and flesh-cover, both being of the same texture.

“Mother with two children III” (1915-1917)

“Mother with two children III” (1915-1917)

The children wear vividly colored, patterned clothes.  They are based on Bohemian peasant clothes, a region of Austria where Schiele’s own mother was from.  The bright yellows, oranges and reds of the jackets almost hurt my eyes.  Did they drain the colors from their mama? Did they eat her life?

The Mother Again

The second in my Mother series of the day is Giovanni Segantini’s (1858-99) Evil Mothers (1899).   The painting apparently was inspired by a poem by a twelfth century monk, Luigi Illica.  Some sources say Illica was inspired by an Indian epic poem, Pangiavahli.  But I have found nothing on this so called Indian poem, so I am both curious as well as skeptical about this ‘Indian’ connection. 

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Giovanni Segantini’s (1858-99) Evil Mothers (1899)

Who is an Evil Mother?

One who did not fulfill her true biological destiny but aborted/destroyed her children.  The painting has in its foreground a woman wrapped in a diaphanous material attached to a tree.  A baby is at her exposed full breast.  But she herself along with the baby seems to be being birthed.  The web like mesh around her holding her in its womb.  Her hair is caught in the branches of the tree, but gives the impression of waving in water.  Again, is she in this dry barren landscape, or is she being born in painful waters?

The woman in the foreground is one of the redeemed.  She is birthing her child and hence can be born herself, anew, as a pure soul once more.  Thronging her in the distant desert background are her evil sisters.  The unredeemed.  They writhe in strange bramble woven cocoons, denied a rebirth into purity.  These are the women who have committed the terrible crime of making decisions about their own bodies and their own lives. 

We are the children of these women that they refused to foreground. 

Vienna, Day 3, March 11, 2016.

I am closing my eyes at the Café Central, trying to see Trotsky walking through the doors.  

Cafe Central, Herrengasse 14.&nbsp;

Cafe Central, Herrengasse 14. 

Is he ordering a drink or a coffee or both? 

Something is wrong with the way the servers are moving around me as I try to think of 1915-17.  I realize that I expect them to move slower in the past, sort of glide around me, rather than keep to this hectic, neoliberal, ready-for-the-tourist pace.  Imperial culture is all about gliding, only when you expose the actual culture of work and labor do you see the rush.  When you make work invisible, everyone glides.  

Dear Leon...

Dear Leon...

Anyway, here comes Trotsky.  Am going to ask him about poetry and sex.  Got to go.  

Vienna, Day 4, March 12, 2016.

Just ordered a “Large Viennese Breakfast” at the charming Café at the Leopold Museum.  Behind me as I sip tea is the Museum Quartier.  A vast expanse with several museums lined with trees.  I can imagine what this place looks like during the warm months when the trees are in full bloom.  There is a children’s museum here in the quad, I hope I get to bring Lulu here one day.  

Leopold Museum, Museum Quartier

Leopold Museum, Museum Quartier

I love the ceiling lights in the café, old 1950s style lamps and there is a bar lining the back of the room.  I just saw a father raise his three year old on to the bar stool and order food and drinks for themselves.  The little boy’s head is framed by a line of Sherries and Cointreaus.  So beautiful this nonsegregated childhood between children and adults.  

 

Next to me, on my left, a deeply slivered and lined couple just ordered two little cappuccinos and two huge Sacher tortes.  

This is a good place, Vienna.  

Vienna, Day 5, March 13, 2016.

I came out of the underground metro and right there in front of me, a full kilometer long, is Karl Marx Hof.  A full kilometer of 1300 apartments, play area, libraries.  

Karl Marx Hof was built between 1927 and 1930 by Karl Ehn, a student of Otto Wagner, during the Red Vienna years, when Social Democrats controlled the City Council without interruption between 1919 and 1934.

It is an astonishing structure, like a little city.  The outer perimeter wall has large vaults, arches and heavy, grilled gates which look like medieval castle entrances.  Beyond those there are beautiful, wide open, green spaces where the clustering buildings breathe.  Looking around it is astonishing to me how utterly modern the early socialist imaginaire was.  No sentimental or sly nods to ‘tradition’ or the past here, it is all suffused with a relentless now and new.  

Inside the Museum of Red Vienna

Museum is a rather grandiose term for two rooms, in Washhouse 2.  I loved the fact that this archive and memory of working class history was in a laundry building, and a still working one.  

The social democrats won their first municipal election on May 4, 1919 winning 100 out of the 165 seats, making Vienna the world’s first city of over a million people with a social democratic administration.  These were some of the architects of those insurgent times:

Ferdinand Hamisch introduced the 8 hour work day and 48 hour week, social security, unemployment insurance and capping of weekly working hours for women and children.

Julius Tandler, scientist and city councilor said: "What we spend for youth homes we will save on prisons. What we spend for the care of pregnant women and babies we will save in hospitals for mental illnesses."  All parents got a "clothes package" for each baby so that "no child in Vienna has to be wrapped in a newspaper."

Money to pay for all these programs came from a socially graduated taxation system instituted by Hugo Breitner.  Between 1923-34 over 380 council blocks were constructed with more than 64,000 new homes.

Election Poster for Breitner

Election Poster for Breitner

The interwar period saw the consolidation not just of the Left, but also of the Right.  Paramilitary groups of the Right called "Heimwehren" or Home Guards, began to form all over Austria to fight the organized Left.  In response, workers formed their own militia, the Republikanischer Schutzbund. 

The first objects you see when you walk into the museum are a military uniform, rifle, flag and pennant of the Republikanischer Schutzbund.  Why start with defense rather than celebratory achievements?

Perhaps because the memory of 1934 is still encoded in the architecture of Karl Marx Hof.

On February 12, 1934 the Heimwehren raided the Social democratic Party offices in Linz.  Within hours fighting broke out between the Right and the Left all over the country.  Particularly brutal centers of the fighting were working class areas and neighborhoods such as Karl Marx Hof.  In a civil war like situation that lasted for days more than 1000 people were killed and members of the Schutzbund arrested and executed.  On May 1, 1934, the Austro-fascist state was established along with the banning of all organizations of the Social Democrats.  Gentle reforms were not enough against the might of Capital, armed to the teeth. 

At the end of the exhibition there is a slightly unreal installation, a modern flat screen television pops out slightly from the wall.  It plays old black and white film reels of Social Democratic Party propaganda.  Right atop the television screen is a melancholy head of Victor Adler.  

Here he is, the television blares, the old 1920s posters crowd the room.  

Dear Victor, how shall I remember you? For the social housing? For your support for the war in 1914? For your derision of Socialism from below and your utter, unfailing dedication to Socialism from above? In the age of Jeremy, Bernie and Tsipras, your head looks like it’s made from papier maché.   

 

 

Keeping “Safe” in Mexico City

You know you are in the global south when -- the old homeless man on the street wears a T-shirt proclaiming “Extreme Skater” with the image of a skateboard.  He does not know what a skate-board is, or what Extreme Sport is.  He does not speak English.  He picked up the shirt from the rubbish or bought it cheap at some point at the many second hand clothing heaps that exist on the roadside selling this stuff for very little, funneling yet more first world rejects into his city.

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The Children of Gaza Have Names.

I wake up in the middle of the night to go check on my child.  She breathes, she makes little sleep-noises.  I leave the room.  Again, half-an hour later I go back to check if she is alright.  If she still breathes.  I go back again and again through the night because instead of sleeping I have been watching the news coming in from Gaza. This is the seventh day of bombing in Gaza, ten children are dead and 140 wounded.

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Why We Should Take Our Children to Demonstrations

The Chicago Teachers Union went on strike on Monday, September 10, 2012 to defend public education.  That sentence alone should be cause for celebration, since according to most reports strikes have been decreasing steadily for the last 30 years. But wait, the CTU won! And they won against the most powerful and toxic brew of political forces.

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“For the Kids”: Rahm Emanuel’s Grim Fairy Tale

This is a blog about children and how we as parents, caregivers and general putter-uppers relate to them.  This is why we have to talk about the Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, for Rahm is all about the kids. Rahm has uttered the words “It’s for the kids” almost as many times as he has slashed budgets for social programs; and if you know Rahm that will be many times.

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Who Cares About Caregivers?

My three year old came home from preschool yesterday and said “Mama, Miss Tara twisted my arm today at naptime and it hurt me”.  These are words that scaffold every parent’s nightmares.  My failure to have protected my child from pain/harm does battle with my immediate blinding rage.  What is the due process in this case: should I dialogue with the school or should I ask for a public square and some rocks? What could possibly make the 45-year-old Ms. Tara hurt my child? As my sleepless night abdicates for a resigned morning there is another drama unfolding across my small town.  43-year-old Bethany Warner is fired from her job as a school bus driver by the local school board.  She fell asleep at the wheel while driving the children back from school.  Eight students were sent to the hospital with minor injuries.

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The Difference Between Night and Day (Care)

When I first moved to this country in 2002 what shocked me more than the violent primate in the White House were shops that were open round the clock.  Pharmacies—maybe understandable--but supermarkets? Did Americans wake up routinely at 2:00 am and say, “I’ll just pop over to my nearest florescent-heavy supermarket and get myself some Grout Aide Markers?” (Don’t ask me what they are.  They are advertised, so they exist). It turns out supermarkets and other shops are open for 24 hours because we have a “flexible” work force.  People do not buy Grout Aide Markers, but milk, vegetables and diapers at 2:00 am, because they might be coming back home from work at that time.

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Eat more Cookies: with Pride

If you haven’t already broken your New Year’s resolution: time to do it by buying box loads of Girl Scout cookies. A group calling itself HonestGirlScouts.com is calling for a boycott of Girl Scout cookies because the Colorado chapter of the scouts has admitted a transgender child as a scout.  The age of this terrible degenerate child out to destroy the purity of the girl scouts? Seven.

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A Head Start on New Year’s Resolutions

I am going to take a stand this New Year and say that I don’t like bullies.  I don’t mean the 7-8 year old-kind who thinks that pulling your kindergartener’s hair is like playing Voodoo Child.  I mean the kind that lives in the White House, attacks preschoolers and among other things, bombs other people’s children. Two months ago in November 2011, Obama declared that the federally funded pre-school program, Head Start, was not efficient enough and ought to be revamped.  Ordinary people like you and I might think that when a program (or a person) does not do well, it means that they need more help.

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Raising Cain: Parenting for the 99%

I have exactly one cat, one partner and one child.  The first two numbers are subject to change, the last—no way.  On a Monday morning, as the work week begins, if you asked me about having more kids, I would probably say: “no f***ing way”. Raising a child is relentless.  The particularly difficult age, I think, is between 0-18 years.  After that it tapers off into sleepless nights, general mind-numbing worry and screaming at them over a long distance line, while they say they have a bad connection and need to hang up.

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