The Mafia as the Capitalist Avant Garde: On Scorsese and The Irishman

The Figure of the Mafia

In his essay on The Wire, Fredric Jameson makes the point that while the show is essentially a representation of capitalist social relations as a whole, capitalism itself is functionally invisible. Of course we see corrupt politicians and cops, real estate con artists and even Stringer Bell attending business courses. But power, the power that allowed for, and in turn requires, the set of social-spatial relations of David Simon’s Baltimore, is only visible refracted by the figure of the Greek, the invisible mystery man, the denizen of the wilderness of mirrors who supplies the heroin and, it is implied, he is someone quite “high up”. The Greek is a signifier, essentially, only functional to the plot insofar as he exists. This is to say, capitalism as such can only be represented by way of a form of mediation. Like Marx’s vampire, or Boots Riley’s Equisapiens – or the Greek, that is to say, through the figure of the Mafia. Our image of the Mafia as omnipresent power, both romantic and fearsome, is largely as provided to us by Martin Scorsese.

There is a telling moment in what is widely taken to be Scorsese’s mob masterpiece, Goodfellas. Arrested after a “job”, that is to say, not a murder, but a robbery, a crew of gangsters are arrested and hauled off. One of them jests to the cops, “why don’t you go to Wall Street and arrest some real criminals”. Some may take this to suggest that the implication of such a moment is to glorify these elements that essentially skim the fat off the milk of capital, as compared to those who structurally drive the train itself. Yet in the context of Scorsese’s body of work, like that of the best of his contemporaries (Schrader, DePalma, Coppola), Organized crime, broadly conceived, and Wall Street are co-constitutive, indeed, are structurally inseparable. This is how it really works.

Scorsese’s work, and the mob-film genre at its best, engages in the historiography of the last one hundred years, give or take, through the story of the ubiquity of criminality.  Criminality, in what we can call Coppola-Scorsesean films, is a dual power, to a certain extent, or rather, it is its own sovereignty, with its own internal relations, sets of rites and rules. And by virtue of following – this – code, they provide a structural role as part of an apparatus at the service of capital, by which they attain varying degrees of sovereignty, taking on a multiplicity of forms.

This not at all unrealistic, indeed it nearly perfectly captures a time in which there is a geopolitical battle playing out, to varying degrees, between various factions of global organized crime with tentacles within various states and private entities. “Private Military Contractors” are today’s mercenaries, a role played proudly and in a romanticized way by the Mafia for US Empire from World War 2, all the way through the Cold War. Their power depended upon their willingness to play the long game – as Joe Pesci’s Russell Buffalino says to Robert DeNiro’s Frank Sheeran in The Irishman, they needed to accept the attorney general Robert Kennedy’s crackdown on the Teamsters and mob as Kennedy’s brother John was making sure the Mafia could gain back what was theirs but taken by Castro in Cuba.

We are now living at a time in which the window dressing is no longer drawn. The figure of the gangster is insantiated in the president, and his colorful henchmen.  Indeed, in the public mind, not just the president, but the entire political class is seen as – obviously – connected to organized crime as organized crime is obviously connected to politics. Witness the ubiquity of the “Jeffrey Epstein Did Not Kill Himself” memes. It is taken for granted all over the world that the ruling classes and organized crime, sex trafficking rings, drug dealers and the like, are inseparable. How then, does one represent the specificity of the Mafia? What is it that makes it unique, worthy of inquiry, dramatic, literary and cinematic adaptation? To what degree is there still a possibility of gangster-as-antihero, in the Dillinger vein? It is to Scorsese’s credit that this potential critique is taken on in The Irishman.

Business unionists watch the Kennedy assassination in real time.

From Gotti to Trump

The Irishman is Scorsese’s most sophisticated, if esoteric mob film. Indeed, it could be the most bleak, sad crime film ever made, tragic in a Hegelian sense. At its heart is the overlapping but distinct codes of business unionism and organized crime, the former with a displaced loyalty to a corporatized and clientelist but nevertheless abstractly pro-worker values, the latter by doing right by one’s family and one’s family alone. There was a confluence of interest between these layers, going back to when they worked together, with the early CIA, in Europe, to disrupt the communist-led unions. Frank “Irishman” Sheeran, played by Robert DeNiro is a man who attempts to live by both codes, and has warm, even loving relationships with powerful men in both realms. Yet his mentor is not his beloved Jimmy Hoffa, played brilliantly by Al Pacino in a sort of Tony Montana-as-Labour-Bureaucrat high camp schtick, it is the soft-spoken and cool-headed Buffalino. But at the same time, he is a proud Teamster to his dying days.

It is remarkable and telling, in terms of what Scorsese is doing in this film by casting Pesci, who has signified the hot-headed out of control gangsters in his previous films, as the rational, long game type. As this film acts as not so much a corrective but an inversion of the role of the Mafia in this film and his previous collaborations with Pesci and DeNiro, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino. He is not the guy who you think may shoot you when he doesn’t take a joke, he is the one trying to de-escalate things. He is by all appearances and within his own logic, a very kind human being.  In the earlier films, the Mafia are just “tough guys”. Certainly they kill, indeed viciously so, but that is not their purpose for the audience.

In Goodfellas, they are a way to escape being what Henry Hill ends up memorably calling a “shnook”, eating spaghetti with ketchup. They provide a romantic way into a realm that retains a connection to the working class street while living the high life. They are not romanticized so much as portrayed as an inevitable feature of Italian-American working class life at a given stage of postwar American capitalism. Like David Chase’s Sopranos, they – really – want to be regular bourgeois people with bourgeois habits like cocaine. The audience has no choice but to identify with them, to cheer them on but also do feel melancholy about it, but to somewhat enjoy that melancholy. After all, it is clear that they are but structural players in the grand scheme of things, and the real criminals were on Wall Street.

Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta in Goodfellas

Yet Goodfellas, like all mob films, from The Godfather to Scarface, does lend itself to a romanticization of the mob as there was something “cool” about them. Yet what seems “cool” about the mob seems nothing short of sad and pathetic in the Irishman, yet its pathos is what makes for “cool” viewing, as in the audience is reminded of these previous signifiers but sees them in new ways as befits our current set of circumstances. One enjoys seeing the old gang back together, not to mention a number of excellent small performances, notably from The Sopranos’ “Charmaine Bucco”, Kathryn Narducci, and its heart is with DeNiro’s daughter, played by Anna Pacquin. Yet one is not seeing them for the same purpose and the same feelings are not evoked. One doesn’t come out of the theatre (where it should be seen, if possible) awe-struck, but rather ponderous. As to Scorsese’s influences, is more Bergman (especially Wild Strawberries) and Fassbinder (especially the BRD trilogy) than Rosselini and Leone. If Goodfellas was the mob film for the era of the fashionable John Gotti, The Irishman is the mob film for the era of Trump, not to mention Netanyahu, Erdogan, Bolsonaro and the many other “world leaders” with unhidden connections to the criminal (not so) underworld.

Of course, most of all, it is influenced, structurally, by what amounts to almost a cover version of Godard’s Breathless. The film, told in a circuitous order until the final act, surrounds a Breathless-derived road trip and the great open highway, with mundane and sometimes hilarious hijinx, between Buffalino, Sheeran and their wives. They stop for smokes and food, they make calls. The episodes, largely improvised, are exquisite. Scorsese never had such tenderness and such spite for his characters as he does here. There are also plays on many of his own films, notably Taxi Driver and Raging Bull more than the mob epics, save for one sequence that exemplifies the differences with the Pesci/Buffalino character, indeed the dark, sad and pathetic heart of the film.

There is no antihero here. This is not to simplify to make the point that the primary characters are all pure archetypal villain. Rather there is that same degree of mediation used with the mirror in Taxi Driver yet the mirror is only towards Sheeran’s daughter. It is through her gaze that we see his life. We see her as a young girl repelled by the seemingly tender – but in fact quite creepy “Uncle Russell”. Yet Jimmy Hoffa evokes the opposite response, a genuine warmth. This is an implicit suggestion that in spite of his flaws, Hoffa was not an evil man, or perhaps, more likely, he was an evil man on the right side of the class struggle. Or a class traitor who genuinely believed he was engaged in class struggle gangster-unionism. And later, given her father’s choice of loyalty, she never speaks to him again for the rest of his life. Like Buffalino, he dies alone, with no family but the church. Yet the somewhat less repellant Hoffa has his blood paint the wall of a house. The bad guys live a long and lonely life, while the somewhat less bad guys die relatively young. Nothing romantic here at all. And no antihero, not even Hoffa.

The previous films were about the Mafia supplying a need to American society and were critiques that addressed the audience of the eighties and nineties, one still presupposing a formal separation between organized crime and the ruling class as a whole. They had their antiheroes, their Ray Liotta or DeNiro himself. These antiheroes, like Donnie Brasco, Tony Soprano or Stringer Bell made choices predicated upon the parametric determinants of the Mafia, but rose above or sank below this status in a way not unidentifiable to the late eighties/early nineties American. Thus, these previous films, while they were partially didactic in a classic sense, more than a few spoons of sugar went down with the medicine. With their culture-defining moments, this added sugar was top shelf, not high fructose corn syrup. They were entertaining but intelligent parables about a structure as exemplified by a specific figure or cluster of figures, decontextualized, history bathed in parody. This being said, the very revelation of the “secret history” of Las Vegas in Casino (as well as Warren Beatty’s Bugsy) served a purpose of demystifying this great American anomaly, as it came to a new era – as DeNiro’s Ace Rothstein says, the corporations took it from the mob. Yet in order to develop Las Vegas in the first place, the mob was dependent, like Donald Trump, on unorthodox means of funding, like the Teamsters pension fund. It is to this far more tragic story that is partially told in The Irishman.

He Has Big Ears

In one beautifully tragicomic scene in The Irishman, Sheeran participates in a weird operation supplying weapons to Cuban exiles, training with special ops and the CIA ahead of the Bay of Pigs invasion. He is told by Buffalino that his contact person would be a guy named Hunt, and he had big ears. This, of course is E. Howard Hunt, famed CIA operative and spy novelist, often said to have been one of the “hoboes” arrested in Dallas on the day of the Kennedy assassination. Yet the humor here is not about it being Hunt, except that being an extra signifier. The role of Hunt in this moment is a McGuffin. It is the ears that matter. Hunt, both the man and the character did not sport ears that were that big in a memorable sense. Yet after a comically awkward silence, Hunt says to Sheeran, “Are you looking at my ears?”, and repeats himself, somewhat like Travis Bickle in the mirror in Taxi Driver. Yet there is absolutely nothing to indicate that Sheeran is looking at the man’s ears. More than a decade later, watching the Watergate hearings on TV he sees Hunt, who had been one of Nixon’s top mystery men, testifying. “Oh I know him, it’s the guy with the ears”.

This scene and its aftermath do nothing to with driving the plot forward per se except insofar as it introduces by signifier the Mafia’s organic link to the American intelligence services in space and time. There are a great number of episodes told in no coherent order, all seemingly meant to drive home the structural role of the Sheeran, Hoffa and Buffalino within an unvarnished if stylized context of the fifties and sixties and Hoffa’s eventual imprisonment and release. This alongside tales of legendary mob figures and their demises like “Crazy” Joey Gallo, romanticized in a Bob Dylan song. We also learn partially how Hoffa rose up in the Teamsters through a willingness to engage in militant and combative rank and file unionism, striking back hard against raiders in the CIO, and treating scabs the way scabs should be treated. Though it is not mentioned in the film, it is worth noting that Hoffa learned about tactics and strategy from the great Minneapolis Trotskyist Teamster Farrel Dobbs, including a powerful, if vulgar, Marxist analysis of class struggle, boiled down to “between two rights, force prevails”, that is to say, power comes from below. Hoffa was one of the great (if megalomaniacal and sectarian) labour organizers of his time as he worked his way up, and were it not for his turn to gangsterism by way of the American state, he may be seen in a different light.

Jimmy Hoffa’s mentor chatting with Leon Trotsky

Yet like many a militant unionist before him, Hoffa was not so much tamed as co-opted into the power structure in the post-war years on his own terms, and in reality, he was the power brokering nexus with whom the CIA was able to make contact with the Mafia. The same skills with which he fought scabs and raiders were used to train those who were set against CP dominated trade unions, particularly in Italy. Yet by all accounts he was a true believer, and was able to, for a time, bring workers good deal after good deal. Indeed he was a thorn in the side of capital, and his connection to the mob (which had its point of origin in many unions in the thirties, seeing the bosses hire goons, recruit goons of their own, or adapt some goon-like tactics, fighting the proverbial gun thugs with their own gun thugs) was used as a cassus belli to particularly go after him. The Teamsters were exiled from the CIO and retained their power only by their numbers, their treasure chest and their connections to the emerging American nomenklatura and the Mafia simultaneously. Thus the collaboration with Hunt and his colleagues on arming Cuban exiles is treated in the same way as the frustration of a fellow “connected” Teamster showing up late for a meeting and wearing shorts. They are but a series of tableaux broken up by returns to that long road trip to what Sheeran pronounced “Dee-troit”. What happens in the outskirts of the motor city can be surmised, but are best not “spoiled”.

Wearing shorts to a meeting was a violation of a code, but even more disturbing to Hoffa, as well as his mob colleagues, was the actions of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a rich kid going after the mob and Teamsters in spite of the fact that the mob, at least in this narrative, were instrumental in getting his brother into the White House. The hegemonic thought of the sober wise men of the mob was to play the long game, as they’d get back their voluminous properties that had been expropriated in Castro’s Cuba. The aftermath of the Cuban revolution looms large on the Mob, but not in a melodramatic Godfather II sort of historical glory, but in terms of the concrete material losses. But after the Bay of Pigs, it is implied that perhaps the mob was involved in the Kennedy assassination but this is an afterthought. The point of the inclusion is again counter-intuitive. Buffalino and Sheeran, mob middle management and soldier alike are mournful in spite of themselves, but Hoffa, if anything is happy. He refuses to fly the flags at Teamster headquarters at half mast.

Some critics have complained that many of these episodic ventures in mob/union social history amount to a sort of “Mafia greatest hits”. But it is how they are adorned that is the point here, insofar as they are inseparable with the real human practice under a given set of parameters. There is a Brechtian quality to the three primary characters, like Travis Bickle and Harvey Keitel’s Sport in Taxi Driver. And the point is that in reality, this social type, if successful, does not die in a hail of bullets, nor do they end up in a witness protection program. They end up dying in jail or ending up convalescing in a Nursing Home, alone and out of touch with their family. They inevitably turn to the church, the last refuge of the scoundrel. In reality, as we see them through the eyes of their daughters, we know they are irredeemable.

The Irishman falls in the tradition of late style in its classical sense, as in Adorno or Edward Said. Rather than being more comfortable in the world around him, Scorsese, and frankly, the actors who make this film what it is, display, if anything a greater alienation, a greater sense of loss, of homelessness, than in their earlier work. Pesci in the most vivid way, but more subtle with Pacino. Pacino uses the over-acting style that, when used best – in Dog Day Afternoon or Scarface – is glorious, but when used in much of his work, becomes nothing more than a schtick. Business unionism gives Hoffa a mixed consciousness of aligning with the most reactionary and criminal forces while retaining righteous hatred of “big business and the government” and enunciating the word “sol-i-dar-i-ty” repeatedly. De Niro evokes his entire career as he goes through Lucasfilm’s somewhat disturbing, yet not offputting de-aging process. He even takes on a “Fockers” vibe in his later life.  All of the performances, even the small but memorable ones from the likes of Keitel, are a reflection on being increasingly out of place, like the shorts on the gangster. There is something exceptionally old fashioned about this film.

The Irishman is the end of the mob film as statement, the end of the figure of the Mafia. This signifier no longer has the power it once had, as it fades into the ruling class itself. Fading away is what these figures do. The classical tragedy is not how it ends, but its inscription of tragedy rightfully onto this tragic history of gangster involvement in the labor movement, forcing Sheeran to think he can play both sides. For a time both sides really are inseparable. He was after all first approached by a mobster with a sign of solidarity, helping with a problem with his truck. And he couldn’t help but feel that sense of solidarity, even as he violated it. Of course he outlives everyone else and wears his Teamster hat to the end. It is here, not with Hoffa, that one sees the victory of business unionism, as conjured up by Scorsese.

Jordy Cummings, once called the “Tinpot Beria of the Counterculture” is an editor at Red Wedge.

Theses on Nagle, or I See a Red Door and I Want to Paint it Brown

1)      On Monday evening, the self proclaimed socialist Angela Nagle went on the white supremacist Tucker Carlson’s television show and made fun of the DSA. Just so folks in the back can hear clearly, someone who is identified as being on the Left and indeed has her defenders, went on the television show of someone extreme even in a Fox News context. Carlson is an endorser of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, and come to think of it, Angela Nagle’s reprehensible immigration stance isn’t that far off from Carlson, or for that matter the El Paso shooter. And this was on the Monday after two mass shootings that both, to varying degrees, were influenced by a new fusionist “red/brown” common sense. One almost imagines the two opportunistic slimeballs joking as to which shooter was more influenced by which talking head. But it was all DSA sliming, one almost thought Carlson would pull out Grayzone. Nagle and her new pal laughed mean-spiritedly about accommodations that are actually not uncommon in the labour movement – keeping clapping and noise to a minimum and using gender-neutral pronouns, avoiding heavy scents. Of course this was a laugh riot to Nagle, who as we may recall, spent a good four pages of her Dirtbag Turner Diaries book making fun of non-binary folks and “spoons theory”. Of course, this is red meat for Tucker Carlson. Not unlike Nagle’s “left case against open borders”, Carlson loves having on guests that help forward the “great replacement theory” or “white genocide”. It helps to see that Nagle in all likelihood shares this point of view.

2)      Of course this was all on Fox News. This summer, the cable network Showtime has an uneven if informative series on the disgusting figure of Roger Ailes, The Loudest Voice, with great performances from Russell Crowe and Naomi Watts as Ailes and Gretchen Carlson respectively. Ailes, a serial sexual predator of the type the Dayton shooter imagined himself, and right-wing family man was a true believer. He is cadrified at a young age to be of service to the powers that be precisely because he is not only such a true believer in reactionary ideology, but his knowledge that this true belief would be lucrative to him. Being a true believer can be good for the pocket book indeed. So upon being forced out of CNBC for sexual harassment, he starts Fox News on the successful wager that he’d be filling a lucrative market that doesn’t want CNN or MSNBC or the “liberal coastal elite media”. Pitching it to Rupert Murdoch, he compared the formation of Fox News to “turning out the base”. And yes, he’d pander to their racism, implicitly and explicitly so. He is shown nixing any anchors of colour during the founding year of the network. It would be churlish to draw a straight line from Ailes and his Murdoch money, his Nixon, Reagan and “IC” connections right through to the shootings of this past weekend, or would it?  It was Ailes that pushed Trump on the birther stuff and perhaps nudged him towards running for president. It is Trump that took the Ailes model and ramped it up to a fever pitch from the beginning, as approved by Ailes, who loved his “Mexicans are rapists” line at the campaign launch that he helped conceive, along with Roger Stone.

3)      The night after hosting Nagle, Tucker Carlson smiled at the cameras the same big smile he gave as he vented about how Stalin and Trotsky would be disgusted by anti-clapping strictures at meetings. He smiled and declared that white supremacy was a hoax, even while giving up the game by making the claim that one could fit all the white supremacists in the United States in a football stadium. Football stadiums can fit sometimes almost 100,000 people. That’s a shitload more than a hoax, young Tucker. Ink does not need to be spilled to prove that Carlson at the very least instrumentalizes white supremacy for ratings, thus he is effectively a white supremacist himself. The scion of a liberal beltway journalism family, perhaps preppy Tuck has taken his Alex P. Keaton rebellion into an adulthood of real-deal racism. To wit, it is not going on Fox News or even Carlson that is a problem as such though – but it was to go and join him in slandering the organized Left, not unlike when she joined him for her Left-Lou-Dobbs schtick a while back. After all, the point is, to Carlson, to Ailes, and indeed to Angela Nagle, to gaslight viewers and readers. Who are they gonna believe? The fair and balanced Fox News and/or the “socialist” Nagle, not to mention her cothinkers like the has-been Adolph Reed and the opportunistic Adam Proctor?  Or logic, eyewitness accounts, statistics and the like.

One of them is a dangerous demagogue with far too much clout and feared by those who should know better, the other is Tucker Carlson.

 4)      And this was precisely the point, indeed, of Nagle and Carlson poking nasty fun at the DSA convention’s commitment to equity, in particular, the strictures against clapping and the use of gendered language. By most accounts of participants from a variety of tendencies and caucuses, there was a lot more to say about the convention than a triviality about clapping and gendered language. Yet suddenly, everyone is talking about clapping. Mean spirited jokes are bandied about. And to their credit, a good number of those who once could be counted as defenders of the Nagleans made it a point to defend the DSA convention rules around accessability. That It was much ado about nothing was rightly proclaimed by a wide variety of prominent DSA figures – but it was out there anyway. In point of fact, given Nagle being such a polarizing figure, the point of her going on Fox News was precisely to participate in this muddying of waters, no different from Ailes feeding the Obama/birther nonsense to Donald Trump himself. It is the classic Cambridge Analytica/Russian bot/whatever you want to call it “Fake News”. It is putting something out there to repeat, repeat, repeat. Usually that something may be a half truth, sometimes a lie, but always decontextualized. Whether Maddowian conspiracy theory about “Russiagate” or talk of “death panels” or for that matter, “they want to take away your insurance”, the point is to get people talking about it, complaining, arguing. Distracted.

5)      So then this begs the question – and indeed has begged the question – why give someone who is effectively RCP/Living Marxism/Spiked cadre who wrote a mean spirited book a few years back more attention. Why even talk about Nagle? Why “fall into the trap”, so to speak, of precisely what I am pointing out here? But the trap is not talking about Nagle, it’s talking about jazz hands in place of clapping, something increasingly common in the labour movement. But Leftists have traditionally taken genuinely dangerous renegade more seriously than just “ignoring them and they will go away”.  For fuck’s sake, Nagle went on a goddamned white supremacist TV show the day after a weekend of mass shootings and the DSA convention, and she went and called the great efforts of the DSA as a whole to create an equitable atmosphere as “bourgeois narcissism”. She shit-talked an organization in the most unprincipled of possible fashion, from enemy territory. Is there a distinction between what she actually said and did on Carlson and her past misdeeds, from her encouraging of chauvinist anti-migrant social democracy to her rendering transgender folks and the disabled an object of humour? No. What she did by going on Carlson was relatively mundane. The point is that she did it in the context of a fascist assault on the population as a whole, and with the Left being a particular target.  Indeed, Mike Pence was in Atlanta on Sunday inveighing against socialism. It’s hard not to speculate that the Vice President was in Georgia to incite protests, if not outright violence against the DSA convention.

“The moment America becomes a socialist country is the moment America ceases to be America.” says Pence.

6)      And here we come back to Roger Ailes and from Ailes to Carlson to Nagle, and from Nagle to the mass shootings this past weekend. This stochastic terrorism, this nihilistic murderousness is indeed qualitatively different from the more organized party-like Klan or Neo-Nazi movement of the past. Yet this fascism-from-below is merely an appearance, it is being manipulated in time-honored decentralized fashion, through information warfare. And that information warfare is not some Russian plot to destabilize America, though it may well have some connections to the emerging right wing international that certainly has Russian as well as Beltway ties. That information warfare, rather, is against not so much the Left as such but any and all left and even liberal reform, to strip rights that have been won and to repress the population, to defend and continue the programs of international apartheid and concentration camps from Texas to Xinjiang. An intrinsic part of this new model is violence from below precipitated by incitement from above - take what has already happened in Brazil and Honduras, for example.  So while  it is indeed important for us to understand the changing face of fascist violence, we also need to understand that it is happening for a reason. That old magick, that old hauntin’ spectre.

True believers like Ailes or for that matter Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson may be cynical and fundamentally financially motivated yet they are a foundational part of an emerging right wing international, an emergent fusionist common sense, “beyond left and right” as the saying goes but in truth brutally anti-socialist and anti-communist. Thus the ongoing attacks on socialism, AOC, the “squad’ and so on. And part of the emergent fusionist common sense is precisely the type of terrorism witnessed in El Paso, Dayton and Galway. There are those that point out that the Dayton shooter seemed to be a Democrat, a Warren supporter, even someone who posted left-wing material on his Twitter account. Yet the particular bar he attacked was known to be multi-racial and queer-accepting, perhaps even a gay bar. The presence of queerphobia on the Left is not news, but what it accompanies is instructive. As well, with the continued popularity of the wretched Ben Norton/Max Blumenthal analysis of international affairs (admired by Nagle), a lot of what passes for left “analysis” is pretty damned reactionary – and also essentially indistinguishable from the narratives coming from the likes of Tucker Carlson. The long and short of it is that while detached from the overall pattern of manifesto writing 8Chan and 4Chan posting lul-seekers, the Dayton shooter must be counted as part of this pattern. Indeed a paradigmatic case for an understanding of what is of particular concern to the organized (and disorganized) left.

7)      And so with Fox News or with Nagle, or with Nagle on Fox News, I hate the band but the fans are worse. For real, though. As shown in Loudest Voice, Fox News are just a bunch of DC hacks, and there are some incredibly sad stories of idealistic young conservative women destroyed by the rapists Ailes and O’Reilly. But Fox News set in motion an atmosphere, during the first few years of the Bush administration that was as authoritarian and pro-police state as anything ever seen on American media. Successive attempts to dial it down by the sober Rupert Murdoch never succeeded, and later it pioneered vicious and racist attacks on Barack Obama. Make no mistake, Obama is not our friend. But the campaign to delegitimize him as a socialist Muslim who was not really American and was friends with terrorists like Bill Ayers may not have denied him the election, but that was not the point. The point, to Ailes, and his passing the birther information to Trump was to awaken the slumbering beast of American racism and anti-socialist, anti-left thought from below. Top reactionaries genuinely believed their own bullshit about Obama. And it worked, witness the wave of terrorist murder of African Americans by police unanswerable to the federal government increasing exponentially during Obama’s presidency. Witness the terrorist pigs with their “I Can Breathe” T-Shirts. Pig racism is nothing new, but they were empowered by the emergent reaction. As social rights were hard won or gained back during the relative social thaw of Obama, so increased animosity pumped out against people of colour in general and African Americans in particular, Muslims, LGBTQI folks. Anti-Semitism even crept back into the mainstream.. And meanwhile, the apparently “socialist” Obama was not doing a goddamned thing to ameliorate these human catastrophes that got worse under his presidency. To wit, as the “deporter in chief”, he laid Trump’s groundwork at the southern border.

 8)      Obama, like Bernie Sanders and even some Leftists, not just Nagle, but some sincere (and misguided) Leftists, was for “comprehensive immigration reform” and against open borders.  This is not the place or time to rehearse what should not be a debate, especially among socialists. But here is where we find the common ground between Trump, Obama, Carlson and Nagle, and why Nagle’s fans, those denizens of StupidPol on Reddit, given their existence as a coherent stratum of the Left, are the danger that we need to address. Nuance is important when parsing out differences between why person A, person B and person C all have the same political line when abstracting out particularities, yet seem different when those particularities are in place. Engaging all of this within the context of a philosophy of internal relations, or dialectical reason allows us to connect the dots not in a positivist sense but in a sense of affinity and memesis. Of course, a contrarian gadfly, a bowtied preppy fascist and a wonkish Neibuhr fan are different. We can’t go conflating widely divergent political positions as “red/brown” or “social fascist” lightly and we should absolutely avoid the latter term. Obama was not a fascist, obviously, nor were the social democrats of Weimar, who made plenty of errors that led to the rise of fascism but did not deserve that Third Period epithet. But we  - do – need to examine the very real emergent fusionist common sense has for years been making overtures to the Left. Recall that Steve Bannon cultivated a relationship with left figures and gave an interview to the Social Democratic American Prospect. And left figures, in particular, “tankies” often appear in right wing media. But this is not about tracing out institutional ties and “fascist creep” as it is about an emergent common sense and how that common sense is being weaponized in the multi-faceted present fascist offensive.

Key Nagle backer Adam Proctor, an absolute reactionary who somehow still is given the time of day by people who should know better..

9)  When I first reviewed Angela Nagle’s book, comrades and I would speculate if she really was red/brown. I think it is safe to say continued ties to Spiked and the “Dirtbag Left” qualify someone who – at the very least agrees with Tucker Carlson’s hot take on white supremacy being a hoax or blown out of proportion. I am saying here quite clearly that the telos of this position is indistinguishable from that of the fascist right. This is elementary history now, we talk about hose who were not Nazis but turned a blind eye and bought into its presumptions, even if opposed to its methods. From the very beginning of the Trump years, and on a deeper level, for a long long time - perhaps since World War 1, elements of the left, particularly among the nationalist wing of social democracy, have downplayed the threat of the far right. And not surprisingly this same milieu, with its links inside the labor bureaucracy, often develop the same essentially Say’s Law oriented vulgar economistic position on migrants. And when Trump won office they downplayed a lot of the organizing around the women’s strike and the Muslim Ban, even Black Lives Matter as “neoliberal identity politics”. It wasn’t appealing “to the working class”, showing that they have the same vulgar and ossified and outdated view of what constitutes the working class as does Carlson. In turn, and in fairness, many younger denizens of this emerging fusionist commonsense – the left side of it, the stupidpol and Cumtown and Chapo side of it, having developed their politics within the realm of a genuinely toxic social media culture. So called “cancelation” culture and the circular firing squad it entails is a real thing – but that is not to leap from a critique of its abuse to the critique of the very act of veritable “cancelation”. Lyn Marcus, AKA Lyndon LaRouche was canceled by most of the American Left for a reason and Nagle, Norton, Blumenthal and others are participating in what is essentially a new version of “Operation Mop Up”. That people don’t see the threat of a presence of stochastic manipulability on the part of this wing of the so-called Left is indicative of a dangerous blind spot indeed.

10)   But yet Angela Nagle, who I now have very little doubt is not only a reactionary in effect, but also in intent, as why would even the most sincere but misguided Leftist go on a white supremacist TV show to bash the Left, has her defenders yet still. This ranges from the obvious, the denizens of StupidPol, a subreddit dedicated to a “critique of essentialism” but is essentially an effectively alt-right conveyor belt, championing Nagle, Adolph Reed, Aimee Terese and the like, while like early 4Chan ostentatiously using offensive, homophobic, racist and remarkably ableist language. Chatter indicates that the clapping segment was fed to Nagle and Carlson by way of StupidPol, itself started by a former member of Solidarity. I will pause and mention that when Nagle attacked my review of her book, she caught onto my line of her fetishizing the working class as able-bodied. With one sentence from my review, Nagle sent out a dog whistle that her critics shouldn’t be taken seriously and she and Amber Frost called me nasty names on a series of podcats.

Disability is a real theme for Nagle, as it is for StupdPol, as it was to the Nazis. The disabled are trash, they can’t be workers, they have nothing to offer either the socialist project or the national socialist project, this is the underlying message. But when people point out the affinity of her message with the shooters, when people call her out for going onto enemy territory, they are denounced. There is a lot of “she has a point” or “Even if she shouldn’t be going on Fox News, that stuff about clapping is weird” and it goes on and on. The presence of this mindset, when all of the connections are so obvious speaks to an obliviousness of the parts of the “online” left that are not at the DSA conferences or even meetings, but are like all too many people, alienated and isolated on the internet that are being hegemonized by this fusionist common sense. In turn, since Pence was not able to stir up violence against the DSA conference, instead, an information op was undertaken, targeting this segment, which is aflutter with denunciations and retweets. And everybody is talking about clapping and jazz hands, not about processing the conference and what looks from the great white north to have been a long and harrowing but successful weekend. Everybody is staking out a position instead of processing and coming to continued terms with the fascist threat, both retail and wholesale to use Noam Chomsky’s terms.

Once more for good measure. Teen Vogue has better politics than Angela Nagle.

 11)   This isn’t about Nagle. Nagle is a rapscallion shit disturber, a Marlo Stanfield type figure delighting in an act of wrecking. But it is about the fact that the English-speaking Left needs to really take seriously the emerging fusionist common sense. This fusionist common sense is often anti-corporate or even, as in the case of the Dayton shooter, self-proclaimed anti-capitalist. It is also highly misogynist and queerphobic and racist, as in the case of the Dayton shooter and his targeting a queer and multiracial establishment. Make no mistake this Dayton shooter was not someone involved in the “IRL” left. He was not known to anyone in Dayton, I’m told by veteran Ohio based socialists. His worldview was not nearly as well formed as the El Paso shooter, yet even if he was at a different stage of cadrification, he was fascist cadre. His actions, the El Paso and Gilroy shooters actions, Mike Pence’s presence in Atlanta, Angela Nagle’s presence on Tucker Carlson are all indeed part of this emergent fusionist common sense. Just as much as are the likes of Blumenthal and Norton with their stanning of Putin and Assad and slander of the DSA, their ‘anti-imperialism’ is explicitly, as has been documented, in line with Dugin and Eurasianism. So when they say “Of course Assad is a dictator”, it is like when respected socialists say with regards to Nagle “Of course I wouldn’t go on Fox News”, they aren’t to be taken seriously. But in point of fact, it is easy to recognize that their politics and methods and slander are poison to the Left and actually an attack on the Left. As are the actions of Nagle. Prominent left wing figures who have said privately and sometimes publicly they strongly disagree with Angela Nagle should not be implicitly or explicitly defending her in public. Is her audience that important? Do people at long last have no shame?

Comrades, this is not happening in a bubble and it is not bound by the American or any other state. An emergent right wing international is on the war path. We must broke them no quarter and what’s more we must see our own role in either encouraging or stopping the spread of their common sense in our own movements. Left thought isn’t a consumer item to tail the base. It’s to move the base to our politics. And if our politics can have affinity with Carlson and worse, we need to think through these politics, eh?

It cannot be emphasized enough that Mike Pence was in Atlanta on the Sunday of the DSA conference. It cannot be emphasized enough that progressive women of color, socialist or not, are being targeted by their own party and by the President, implicitly and explicitly respectively encouraging violence. Pelosi collapses into Trump as Nagle collapses into Carlson. Trump and Pence and beyond want violence, and they want violence against the Left. The American state in turn, the “deep state” and perhaps the Democratic Party establishment is targeting the Left on all fronts. Take it seriously. Teen Vogue does.

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Jordy Cummings is an editor at Red Wedge

Reverence to Irreverence/Irreverence to Reverence: An Anti-Obituary of Paul Krassner

Paul Krassner Is dead. Of course I’m no believer in any after-life, except I like that theory that what we see as “the afterlife” as reported in near-death encounters is our final dream as a proverbial loop, that second between body and brain death. In that case, one imagines Krassner in the midst of wild group sex, smoking the best weed and drinking the best wine, while the best music in the world plays in the background. At 87, he lived an exemplary and humane life, an oddball among oddballs, a mensch and a yenta, a merry prankster with an AK47.

Krassner was in that small cohort of people who constituted the very threadbare, and perhaps never truly consummated encounter between the sixties-and-beyond counterculture and the radical and revolutionary Left. He travelled in every circle, a founding Yippie who never made an ass of himself with the kind of self righteousness of Abbie Hoffman or the zig-zagging yippie-to-yuppie trajectory of Jerry Rubin. It was Krassner’s real-deal hippy wisdom that encouraged some of the Left to nominate a pig for president in 1968. Get it? As Krassner recounts,

Folk singer Phil Ochs observed, “A demonstration should turn you on, not turn you off.” It was the credo of the Yippies. We were in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, where a certain competitiveness developed between Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

Abbie bought a pig as a presidential candidate, but Jerry thought Abbie’s pig wasn’t big enough, mean enough, or ugly enough, so Jerry went out and bought a bigger, meaner, uglier pig, which was released outside City Hall. In the elevator inside, a few cops were chanting, “Oink. Oink.”



Presidential Candidate Pigasus, a decent pig, among some monstrous pigs.

The obituaries that have already been written on comrade Krassner (he’d probably make fun of me for saying that!) have done a good job in filling in the facts of his life – starting out at Mad Magazine, doing stand-up along with his mentor Lenny Bruce, all the while running an underground abortion referral service. Founded the satirical magazine the Realist published on and off until quite recently, all of its archives are online and accessible. Indeed I would venture to say that there are almost as many words written by Krassner in that voluminous archive than by Karl Marx on the Marxist Internet Archive. So the focus I’d like to take here is more to understand Krassner in his context and how while neither reducible to nor deducible from his context, he acted as a determining figure. His aesthetic, for better more than worse, permeates the best in North American humour and North American radical politics, not to mention our relationships with sexuality, weed and psychedelics.

Without Krassner and Lenny Bruce and their ilk, steeped in the legendary milieu of Mad Magazine, you wouldn’t have Carlin, Pryor and so on.  Yet Krassner was, as the obits all note, an activist above all else, the closest modern analogue would perhaps be Boots Riley. He was there fror the folks who needed abortions that he gladly helped with, he was there for queer liberation. He was there for the antiwar movement and the labour movement. He was there for the sex workers he championed – as  workers, not objects – in his seventies writing on porn, he was here for the satirists and writers and cartoonists he championed and cultivated. He was the rare sixties male figure to by all accounts have genuinely decent gender politics. While ambiguous about it, it is not unreasonable to assume that he was bisexual especially if one reads his writing on sexuality as such. Yet he was not a “theorist’, he was a jokerman, his art was his profanity.

Krassner with the inimitable Harry Shearer (later of the Simpsons, Spinal Tap and so forth), and Peter Bergman of the classic Left/hippy comedy troupe, the Firesign Theatre.

So you’ve already been told by all the obits that he was a foundational yippie (he coined the term!) and lifelong peace activist who, as the AP notes, never burnt out and never faded away. In a sense Krassner was one of those Jewish guys who was born old, and just grew into his age, the rabbinical wisdom as cultural memory even if like me, he was Deutscherite to the bone. Yet he was someone who, in satire and in political activity, he groped for – meaning. Not God, not New Age woo woo, but meaning, cultivation of sensibilities, Bildung. Nothing under the sun was alien to him. And he found it and helped create it in the abode of the production and consumption of sex, drugs and rock & roll.

Indeed, Krassner was the first person I ever interviewed and wrote about as a 19 year old student journalist. Having recently been on the Prankster bus in a group with Ken Kesey when they showed up at a Phish concert in Buffalo, and even meeting Mountain Girl on the west coast, meeting Krassner was heady stuff for a young guy. I thought it was such a big deal that he was speaking in Montreal that it seemed almost awkward how nearly empty the space was in which he was doing his schtick, along with the inimitable Wavy Gravy. It occurred to me then that I was onto something that was like a forgotten history, and my writing and theoretical work has largely concerned this forgotten history – the politics of counterculture, what I call the missed encounter.

In the standard narrative of the sixties, the truism, if with some complications, that the hippie milieu was intrinsically connected to Left politics, or moreso that both were a manifestation of the spirit of the age has been somewhat eclipsed, even by some on the Left by a narrative that situates them as discrete and often at loggerheads. While there is much to say (I wrote a dissertation on the matter) on the obscurantism of some hippies and the tailism and/or moralism from some of the Left, this friction occurred within a shared common sense and a shared social experience and there is much more than obscurantism and moralism to engage – as seen in the revival of “Acid Communism”. The narrative, as told from some of the more socially conservative segments of the Left, and even some who should know better, is that counterculture militates against radical politics, that it is inherently a statement of life in capitalist society.  Yet, as I wrote a few years back in a critique of A. Nagle, “Counterculture and the avant-garde, to be clear, are products of how everyday life is produced and reproduced within class societies in general, and capitalism in particular. This process echoes the system’s combined and uneven development, its constant search for novelty, the constant destruction and creation of capital, and the near universality of uneven and mixed consciousness. To outright deny any political meaning in counterculture or marginal or antinomian types is profoundly un-materialist”.

There certainly was meaning to Krassner’s satire. Whether it was to mock Spiro Agnew’s comments that opponents of the Vietnam war were women, he joked that “Spiro Agnew” could be scrambled to “grow a penis”. When that reactionary Walter Disney died, Krassner, publisher of the legendary radical satire magazine the Realist, conceived and commissioned from his former Mad Magazine colleague Wally Wood what was called the Disneyland Memorial Orgy. Upon first glance it is just a funny scene of a vast meadow of all the Disney icons in a wild orgiastic state. Some just watch, like the the lost Boys, Peter Pan and the enigmatic Stromboli masturbating to the site of Tinkerbell about to do some type of performance alongside none other than Jiminy Cricket. Indeed Pinnochio is watching and his nose grows and grows. And over there, the three little pigs are in a row, joyously fucking each other to the delight of the Big Bad Wolf.  Over the brook, the Seven Dwarves dote on the dominant Snow White – at least five of them that is. Doc and Dopey have their own thing going on. Yet Mickey Mouse himself is oblivious, while Pluto gives a great big golden shower to an iconic Mickey portrait. Of course Minnie Mouse is in bed with Goofy, with an audience of Morty and Ferdie. 

Likewise Huey, Dewey and Louis are on their own, masturbating to the sight of the dwarf scene while Donald Duck shakes his fist and angrily screams at the sky. This is to say that Disney’s iconic male characters are squares, oblivious fools who can’t even tell where they are. They may be angry at the death of the man who gave them voice, their own Gepetto, but they don’t look mournful.  In the distance the Disneyland castle stands, gleaming with beams of dollar bills. Krassner’s spirit had brought the world not merely a pornographic profanation of the bastard Disney, but a dialectical critique. It engaged the telos of the charm of Disney characters by portraying them at the height of glorious fun, celebrating the feudal lord’s boss. The castle over the meadow was empty. What would happen in Disneyland with the death of the Lion King Walter? Mickey and Donald, those petit-bourgeois fucks care, but no one else gives a shit. This was class struggle profanation of the highest degree. And that – class struggle profanation – is the height of Krassner’s warm satire.

The Great Disney Memorial orgy. Dopey’s face is everything.

Krasner’s Groucho-Marxist revolutionary politics were fundamentally rooted in the profundity of satire, in itself a form of immanent critique, as he pointed out, “Satire has a truth embedded in the laughter and it can serve to wake people up from their cultural brainwashing.” Sometimes a truth had to be wrapped up in a joke, but his jokes were not only understandable by way of decoding, like that of Slavoj Zizek in his more tolerable guises, or the high-level wryness of McSweeny’s. And sometimes reality itself is satire, but then satire moves one step ahead. Krassner’s veneration of satire brings to mind the power of a figure like Chaplin breaking the fourth wall in Great Dictator. He saw a real wisdom in figures like Chaplin, and his close friend Groucho Marx, who he famously introduced to LSD. LSD, mushrooms and pot, the whole old fashioned hippy psychedelic ethos was a very large part of Krassner’s life and output, though that “stoner” cliché is part of how the history of his era is misunderstood by both prevailing narratives of the era.

Cinema often gets it right. In the Coen Brothers’ Big Lebowski, the perpetually stoned Dude was once one of the authors of the Port Huron document (the original one!), there was a politics to Krassner’s beliefs around drugs, not dissimilar to the lumpen-proletarian Lebowski gleefully lighting a J in the Big Lebowski’s office. It was a fuck you, I’m not like Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. It was akin to what Abbie Hoffman, in one of his wiser moments pointed out when he that a lot of the generational difference of the sixties was the eclipsing of “alcoholic culture” by “grass culture”. Krassner seemed to imply that cannabis and psychedelics could bring about an epistemological shift not merely on an individual scale. Yet he was never a huckster or a mystic. The late socialist critic Andrew Kopkind writes of asking a comrade if the revolution would be “like acid”. The comrade replied that the revolution is acid. This is not to say that acid itself was the revolution, rather that the psychedelic experience provided tools with which to see the world in its contradictions and fluidity. Consciousness, the theory went, had to be expanded somewhere, and LSD and a few puffs of grass could help with that. “Feed your head”, as Grace Slick says.

Jeff Bridges as "the Dude” in The Big Lebowski. The dude was one of the authors of the “original” Port Huron statement. Still bitter at the Harringtonites for insisting on anti-communist language. But the Dude abides.

Yet LSD was nothing next to the power of satire, that is to say, in a sense, the power of critique. Krassner could be called the Walter Benjamin of the American counterculture, the lost and rediscovered figure, except there is very little that is tragic about Krassner. Yet there is much to be rediscovered, and with the Realist magazine entirely online, this is a project well worth undertaking. Yet I can almost imagine Paul Krassner saying oy gevalt, you want to get all theoretical here, you’re telling people to read my work by telling them to engage with them. And I’d be a proverbial straight man and say back that this is how I talk, you got a problem with that? What are you doing when you discover someone’s writing, are you not engaging with them? No, he’d say, I’m reading them. Don’t forget to pass by that piece of writing that convinced a nation that Lyndon Johnson fucked JFK’s skull on the plane ride back from Dallas.  And of course, don’t forget his assistance on Lenny Bruce’s memoir or his later collaborations with Kesey, Ginsberg, Dick Gregory, Terry Southern, and the whole old weird American counterculture.

Read Paul Krassner. Once in a while you get the shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right. It’s fun stuff. He and his generation remind us of the necessity to keep socialism weird.

Here is a GoFundMe for Krassner’s widow and family. Please help if you can.

Jordy Cummings is an editor at Red Wedge. This is the inaugural entry in Jordy’s blog at the Red Wedge website, Tinpot Beria. Jordy would like to thank the rapscallion hack James Heartfield for the name.