timespace coodinates: late 19th century Italy / New York City
Cabrini is a 2024 American biographical drama film directed by Alejandro Gómez Monteverde. The film depicts the life of Catholic missionary Francesca Cabrini, portrayed by Cristiana Dell’Anna, as she encounters resistance to her charity and business efforts in New York City. Cabrini explores the sexism and anti-Italian bigotry faced by Cabrini and others in New York City in the late 19th century. (wiki)
“An impoverished preacher who brings hope to the Miami projects is offered cash to save his family from eviction. He has no idea his sponsor works for the FBI who plan to turn him into a criminal by fueling his madcap revolutionary dreams.”(IMDB)
Altough it may appear completely preposterous this shows another facet of the FBI. Conspirative thought is the bread and butter of the Alphabet agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA to just name the most famous). Obsessing over anarchist conspiracy or internationalist anti-colonial revolutionary networks characterized the work of the British or French secret service very early on. Digital theoretician Alexander Galloway classified “conspiracy is a kind of network thinking, appropriate for a networked world.” – in this sense, the FBI is either a purveyor of conspiracies or – if need be a fabricator. We should also not consider the agencies as all-powerful, the bigger they are the bigger their footprint (not only carbon) the larger their propensity to fail miserably. One of the effects of the War on Terror has meant that a lot of vulnerable and poor racially discriminated communities practically got entrapped into playing the role of the terrorist and the baddie – and this movie pokes fun at this situation. The demography of the US is changing in universities (as the current protests demonstrated) and this is one of the lynchpins of the right manifested as ‘replacement’ bogus fears. What is being replaced is their sense of entitlement and laissez-faire that made sure inequality followed racial and heteronormative lines. In a sense, it speaks both of the ways these agencies work against the very citizens they aim to protect and of the way capitalism always finds a fall guy in those who are already in a sense marginal and powerless while protecting the brazen and unaccountable.
In the case of the Liberty City Seven – seven black construction workers and members of a small Miami, Florida-based religious group who called themselves the Universal Divine Saviors got baited by the FBI. I guess here is the agency of the almost all-powerful hegemonic US – representing the NSS as something more akin to a horrible farce (on those who had to pay with their lives or with prison). Russiagate, Epstein, Pizzagate, now TikTok CEO hearings or the president signing a bill that could ban Tiktok, seems to be all about the Paranoid Style in American Politics, an essay penned by US historian Hofstadter but also about the shadow of McCarthyism coming to haunt today’s geopolitical strains.
As Jameson put it in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, quoted by Galloway, the conspiracy means “a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility.” The cabal must be massive and interconnected, yet despite everything the plots remain somehow veiled, just beyond one’s grasp.” In the end, this movie is about systemic racism and economic relations in today’s world and the richest and most powerful nation on earth, and how easy it is to fabricate subversive groups while the biggest subversion (the subversion of Democracy with the help of techno-capitalism) remains in plain sight for all to see. The TW below has everything wrong in the title (Balaji never mentioned that he wanted to ethnically cleanse SF – but the more important takeaway is the way techno-libertarians right wants to appear endangered and under threat by ‘woke’ assimilation).
🧵To understand what's happening in San Francisco today, you must examine the extremist politics of the "Network State" cult. For the @NewRepublic, I wrote about Balaji Srinivasan, an influential tech baron seeking to “ethnically cleanse” SF. Read➡️ https://t.co/SMTd4Mo441 ⬅️ pic.twitter.com/1uoZOjjcO3
Capital B – Who Owns Berlin is probably the best documentary about a city any city out there, in a league all of its own with Los Angeles Plays Itself.
What happened to one of the biggest cities in continental Europe? A city that had incredible opportunities, cheap basically free spaces for grabs, and immense swaths that were opened up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin was probably the biggest story in subcultural history. This documentary by Arte Channel in 5 parts explains it all step by step. Yet saying this we cannot forget that after the Wall, there were winners and losers of the reunification, and sadly the losers (in economic terms, in job and academic positions, and cultural management positions) – were the people of former East Germany or DDR who today are being swiped off their feet by populist rhetoric and vote for the extreme right-wing AfD demagogues (altough there have been huge protests against AfD recently against right-wing extremism and for democracy).
Important to mention here that the institution (Treuhand), the pop-up trust company seated in Berlin that regulated and controlled the restructuring from a planned to a market economy did this almost overnight, without much accountability or democratic supervision. Its task was certainly immense to privatize 8,000 formerly nationally-owned enterprises. Modernizing thousands of enterprises and closing down thousands of others, from gigantic combines comprising a staff of umpteen thousand up to small family enterprises – and it ended with complete humiliation for East Germans, even if some say there were some benefits.
I think the story in Berlin is even starker, for most Berliners, and for most that have been living to see the explosion in subcultural spaces, clubs, and underground venues – it all came with a huge cost, they all were just acting like a magnet for the real estate mafia. Real estate – and space (to use Jameson’s suggestive quote from below) one might say is at the center of today’s capitalism. It was involved in the sub-prime crisis in the US that spread throughout the whole world, and certainly in land grabs around the world as well as ‘zoning’ of special economic zones, duty-free areas, and offshore tax-free heavens.
To narrow it down to a city – Berlin, the German capital allows us to see this process of capital accumulation, rent extraction, and speculative markets. It is a very sad documentary, particularly harrowing for all those who went through 30 years of gentrification and speculative luxury housing investments. Sadly the 5 part documentary is only available in French and German, there are no English subs, but I sincerely think someone who cares about the history of this city should do it, especially considering how many EN-speaking inhabitants live in this city.
There is interviews with key figures of the underground but also mayors, investors, politicians etc. The documentary offers a unique range of voices and key figures who were deeply and personally involved in shaping this city and transforming it into what it has become today. This is also the story of techno music and its entry into German electronic music. It is about the translation of a metronomic abstract heavy beat arriving in Berlin from Detroit Motor City via the UK and Belgium and one of the first musical styles to unite both East and West. Techno pioneers from East and West Berlin started setting the night on fire. It is really important to see how the members of the initially small rave culture tribe started scouting for a location, and how they ended up finding TRESOR by chance, that incredible space initially situated on Leipziger Straße and cleaning it and there is incredible VHS footage of that moment in 1991. Subculture had its summer of anarchy, an incredible mix of utopia and frenetic living, but the power elites of the city started asserting their pressure – and it all ended with fierce police raids, street battles, and forced evacuations.
The Fall
One should understand that this is a battle to the teeth, in the middle of the 1990s the West Berlin old-money elites got their interests served by mayor Eberhard Diepge – and started exercising their stranglehold over the city. Klaus-Rüdiger Landowsky one of the most powerful figures in Germany and together with Diepge want to transform Berlin from an industrial hub into a financial capital of the world on par with London and Frankfurt. It all ends with the biggest banking scandal in Germany and the arrival of a new younger mayor ready to use the power vacuum: Klaus Wowereit. Districts such as Kreuzberg and Wedding with a big migrant population are being transformed into virtual ghetto’s without opportunities, high unemployment rates and lack of funding. Savas Yurderi aka Kool Sava becames one of the most well-known rappers in Germany and he’s speaking with the voice of that place.
Poor but Sexy (was the mayor Klaus Wowereit motto for the city)
The City as Prey
This is the final decade where clubs get closed, everyone is kicked out and most of the underground places get shut down. It is the march of uberization, digitial nomadism and finacial speculation.
We have covered here the Sino-Soviet Split, Soviet Science Fiction, Tetris, 1990s shock therapy that led to Putin’s Russia (Lenin is according to Putin latest speech the complete anti-hero), and Big Computer Socialism. Now it is time to watch a social realist movie from the early Soviet period about a young teacher Yelena Kuz’mina who is sent to Siberia, or more exactly the Altai mountains to introduce socialism and to alphabetize the local population (which is evidently non-Russian speaking, altough they all seem to speak the same language). Empowerment of women, alphabetization, and education were key elements of the young Soviet state. The movie also depicts three ‘hot’ political topics at the time (or even today?!): education, technology, and the elimination of the kulaks.
Why watch this movie?
I take my cues mainly for watching this movie from the analysis of Bogdan Popa’s De-centering queer studies: Communist Sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War (Manchester University Press 2021). It is important to watch these movies that are freely available online, of course, playing them from YT still offers the platform ways to monetize, and streaming still contributes to the climate crisis we are currently in, but considering that Alone is such a low-definition, non-HD movie, I would still follow Bogdan Popa here basically echoing Boris Groys – perhaps the greatest contemporary theoretician of Soviet and post-Soviet art and theory: “Currently, socialist realism and its objects function as an aesthetic avant-garde because they are outside a circuit of cultural incorporation, or so Groys argues”. The ‘sexomarist’ detournement of Stalinist era Alone – is one of my favorite pieces from the book (before I had never seen this movie).
(The most common example of price scissors is from the Soviet Union: agricultural prices continued to fall while industrial goods prices rose)
To me, Alone is also a movie that reflects the whole dialectic and division between the countryside and the city, or of how the growth of industry and new productive forces were paid for by the peasants (in a classic Price scissors case), something that will early be a point of contention between the Soviets and their Chinese counterparts, even if initially the Chinese followed the Soviet example.
I would also recommend watching this movie in today’s context of current degrowth eco-socialism and solarpunk aesthetics that should openly embrace a communist and anti-capitalist outlook. While there is an inner debate between the eco-modernists (roughly those who still embrace the amenities of modernity for all, but are still tributary to a sort of limitless cornucopian idea of growth) and degrowth socialists (those who roughly question how Global North lifestyles are easily translatable to the Global South and also ask for a climate justice and climate reparations) this movie gives scope to what it means to actually confront the material realities and political contour to the experience of leaving the city and moving to the countryside. Many sent-down youths in China already did this, and some willingly, some forced, but in total this experience left a long impression and brought together people from different milieus, and made them face and address China’s problems, poverty and country/city divisions and make the first steps towards economic reform.
The movie critiques the residues of the market economy (NEP – New Economic Policy) in the Soviet Union that were part of the Leninist rebuild of the economy during the early days of the young Soviet state. We meet Kuz’mina, the young teacher in Moscow in an ideological setting that the socialists denounced: living alone in a single in Moscow, sleeping in a laced nightgown, easily enchanted by the symbols of comfort, window shopping or eyeing the glittering commodities. The kitchenware shop (think IKEA) is the place where one is seduced by the materiality of consumer objects. Luxury items are part of the exchange economy. >>”Like her the viewer is placed in a position of “refusing the sensory pleasure of a haptic encounter with the material” because they are encouraged to live in a different economy of [socialist] affects.>>
In Altai, Kuz’mina enters another world because she becomes a producer of things and just a consumer. In the Soviet imaginary, the local Shamanist indigenous people are shown to be “close to the labor production and the material world of objects. This tactile sensuous materiality -this involvement with actually existing communism, its programmatic productivism in terms of bodies or experiences is being bypassed in a lot of recent radical thought (see Frederic Lordon’s communism realism).
“The book [Figures] can also be cursory verging on the cavalier in its stated decision to do without any but the most oblique discussion of ‘actually-existing communism’ – which, whether we’re thinking of workers’ councils, Cuban experiments with medicine, socialist planning, or what have you, certainly harbours pertinent lessons and materials for present debate.” (Alberto Toscano’s review of Lordon’s books)
That is why it is intersting to see how in Aline the Easterners (while being fully aware of what the East holds for both Imperial and Revolutionary historiography) “grasp, cut and rub wool, and live in a world where they are part of the natural life”. Emma Widdis (from the volume below) “argues that Kuz’mina develops a different sensory relationship to objects when she moves to Altai, which is the springboard for her becoming a communist.” In a sense, Kuz’mina gets educated first, in a more fundamental way leaving back her bourgeois, individualist self, before educating the children of the region.
It is even hard – even in my family, coming from an east-bloc intelligentsia background (father sculptor, mother soprano), the word “gypsy” had its usual racist connotations, but it was used more in the sense of ‘underdeveloped’ or rather a slightly colonialist ‘uncivilized’ which of course completely ignored the ways Romani were supposed to be still nomads that need to become sedentary. But the pressure to ‘urbanize’, to build and produce socialism was particularly harsh on women and minorities. In my family the phrase “You were born on the ‘French Street'” (Te-ai născut pe Franceza) was a euphemism for the Romani street in the village of my mother’s side grandpa (a worker welder). They were constantly joking and accusing each other of being born there which was supposedly a way to put you down the social ladder. The interesting thing is the way the French were supposedly synonymous with ‘high culture’ in Romania (in the Interwar period as well as during Communism). So calling the Romani village street ‘French’ was supposed to be an outrage, was meant to be initially off-putting, but also, underneath, to admit that mixed couples were happening and that everyone could have Romani ancestors. A was an admission that a clear dividing line did not exist, and also a play or satire on high/low culture ideals (or this is how I understand it).
They were slaves in Romania for hundreds of years, longer than slaves existed in the US. In Bulgaria, the situation was somewhat similar from what I understand and Romani escaped to the Ottoman Empire before where they could be free.
Keep thinking of this document, where 27 Roma families, that is 117 human beings in total, adults and children, were sold between two wealthy individuals in mid-19th century Moldavia, for the price of about a head of cattle each.
Here is a very important documentary that I truly recommend and that has been long unavailable or only reluctantly so it seems (in Germany). It is not only a movie about the plight of the Romani victims of the Holocaust (together with Jewish, queer/lesbian, as well as Communists and Anarchists), but also an indictment of the autonomy of the arts and the doctrine that artists are ‘Gods’, existing above politics, above accountability, above historical events, basically outside of history. This pernicious view is popular in Germany and elsewhere, while things changed, it is still part of an official cult of artistic ‘geniuses’ and cultural elites that tries to keep “Kultur” untarnished by its miserable associations, and one that continues to whitewash and justify many abuses. There’s a direct line that leads from the authenticity and separation of fhe artist from everything else and fascism. While artists have been hunger artists, or even thrown out of the polis (Plato), or declared degenerated and pathologized (Max Nordau), there’s something very wrong with upholding the unicity of the artist – that in the end acts like mercenary at the disposal of different regimes and powerful protectors.
It is the story of the Romani survivors of concentration camps in Nazi Germany and how Tante “Leni” Riefenstahl, well known Nazi propagandist filmmaker director, producer, screenwriter, editor, and photographer used them as extras in one of her wartime movies (Tiefland) before they were sent to the extermination camps. Don’t mean to be disprespectful to the survivors, but I could not help myself thinking ‘Tante’ Leni making Dune instead of Villeneuve, and using Romani extras as Fremen (maybe this does not forbode well for the next Dune installment).
timespace coordinates: Germany just after the 1989 reunification, in the transition years that have marked not just ex-Eastern Germany but the whole of Eastern Europe with a similar set of problems including deindustrialization, structural adjustment, shock therapy, mass layoffs, rising neo-nazi anti-immigrant sentiment, overnight privatizations, and defunding of the public sector (education, health, social welfare) and mass migration
Staggering yet not surprising if one recalls the post 1990 shock therapies inflicted on most, leaving 'cheap labour migrating' growth models in their wake https://t.co/gABSY2xUNo
There are not many movies that can transmit the feeling of rage and disenchantment that followed right after what Boris Buden termed “the honeymoon years” when literally Western fashion magazines with photo shoots of East Berliners marrying West Berliners next to the former Berlin wall.
Usually, we are familiar with the US hardboiled noir detective – of the 40s and 50s who is usually a sarcastic middle-aged male, a former or present alcoholic, a private detective ‘gumshoe’ brutally confronting and confronted by a corrupted and corrupting system. In film noirs, characters are lost and found or completely abandoned by law or justice according to merciless logic. They are delivered to their ineluctable dark fate and fall for the femme fatale as they always, bloodily and viscerally try to escape the pull of money, seduction, or a decent living. The main characters seem to be attracted to the darkest corners and they always seem to be followed by their past, falling deeper and deeper into a Kafkian maze that is masterfully lit and whose stark shadows evolved out of the German Expressionist movies.
In Paths in the Night – we have something else, a former employer, maybe even a high-ranking party member or ex-bureaucrat of the DDR who is somehow completely unadapted and unadaptable to the new society, where the only jobs available are night watchmen, bodyguards, or becoming an entrepreneur (like his former, more lucky or more adaptable colleagues). He is also a collateral victim of what has been termed the feminization of the workplace in the 1990s- or simply because in the new economy service jobs and care jobs are more available than factory jobs. East Germany and the former East bloc went from full employment to joblessness overnight almost. Not only jobs were lost but also careers, departments, and aims. History had an aim and its aim was the abolition of capitalism, when this did not happen the world turned upside down.
In a way, he is already a dead man, a ghost haunting the places that were familiar and close to him, the empty ruined factories and shutdown plants that were abandoned, destroyed, or sold out (in the movie someone asks him if the acquisition by a Japanese company was successful). In an extraordinary exchange with his wife who has a good job in a cafeteria or restaurant, he takes her to the ruined factory and she becomes more and more frightened somehow realizing that they are visiting some netherworld – the ruined factory is some sort of realm of the dead.
There is no explanation in the movie for a lot of actions, but they are all quite clear. He starts having a double life – which his wife is completely ignorant of, even if she suspects something. He starts joining a vigilante group that tries to bring justice in the subway – by way of suborning and beating up hoodlums and neo-nazis. This is done in the most brutal almost ecstatic way – and in fact, there is a sense that in the new capitalist society, where protection of any sort is lacking one is pushed to becoming a vigilante – a sort of ex-socialist Batman in a consumer society. He wants goods for his wife that he cannot afford so he turns to petty crime. It is not clear but he could even be an ex-Stasi, although meeting some of his former colleagues does not align him with the born-again ex-Stasi entrepreneurial state. He carries a gun and feels somehow important but at the same time, he cannot even find peace in his Schrebergarten garden.
But while Batman is a rich kid who goes psychotic after he witnesses his parents getting killed, this ex-East German somehow witnesses something else, not only just on the personal level but also the unmaking of this whole world. That does not mean he is more justified to do what he does, it just makes him less of an advanced, highly-trained superhero and more of a shipwrecked character, who has seen his ideals and progressive visions being trampled on. I would even say he is a figure of socialist realism – and also one that still gathers press clippings with the wars and even has an Internationalist memory left. What happens when the future is forfeited?
He seeks to be this model and still dreams perhaps of embodying this image of the model citizen of a better (German) state from the two, but ends up destroying or even endangering those who care for him or look up to him. It is also one of those movies that shows the dark side of transition – and not just this nostalgic (Ostalgie) tragicomic idea of communism and post-socialist pop like in Good Bye, Lenin!
It is definitely a highly interesting and dark movie, and I do not aim to discuss all its aspects here, just give you a taste of it- so just watch it and draw your own conclusions!
“This week we are joined by Prof Sergey Radchenko to discuss the of tumultuous relationship between the two major superpowers of the communist world during the Cold War. The People’s Republic of China and the USSR.
Sergey Radchenko is the Director of Research and Professor of International Relations at the University of Cardiff. He is an expert on Sino-Soviet Relations, atomic diplomacy, and has written books on Mongolian and North Korean History. He has previously served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre (in Washington D.C.), and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai)”
I think today, during what looks like the early start of the Cold War 0.2 we tend either to exaggerate Russian-Chinese relations or collusion around the fact that after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been integrated more and more with the Chinese economy. The increasing dependency of Russia on China, after the SWIFT ban on Russian banks, has also been exaggerated. In the words of Arnaud Dubien, in spite of what governments believe it appears that “Russia Won’t be China’s vassal” (a very good article).
I think that we have to go back to the Cold War relations of the two motors of world communism: the Bolshevik Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Relations have been always changing and evolving over time – and altough friendship was always more important than enmity, one should say that from the very beginning (not covered in this podcast) there was room for a lot of misunderstandings, low points, high expectations, and a slow syncing (compounded by the all-out attack of Japan and Western imperial powers that had every interest in subverting and blocking communications and avoiding a united anti-Imperial front).
Even if letters and Telegraphs were under surveillance by the Japanese, British, Dutch, and French secret services, the two revolutionary powers of Sun Yat-sen’s Republican China and Lenin’s Soviet Union reached out to try and find a common ground in common anti-imperialist and later on anti-capitalist struggle. Some of the conflicts also arose around wordings and perceived counter-revolutionary actions (such as the invasion of Prague by Warsaw pact troops or Budapest 1956 by Soviet troops). Other arose of older wordings and perceived arrogance – such as using terms such as “infantile” or “backward” that seemed to pop up rather indiscriminately at the most inopportune moments (and that seemed to be lifted out of an imperialist and racialist vocabulary).
Advocating for a united front with the Nationalist Kuomintang (that turned out to be a major mistake), was also encouraged by the Soviets. If you want to find out more about documents that traced the evolution of the Comintern and what was to become the Third World (or the Global South today) you have to look beyond this podcast. The invasion of Prague by the Warsaw Pact country was another blow to the Sino-Soviet relations and also the way the Soviet Union seemed to retreat from the world revolutionary stage, while China seemed to ascend to that position. Also, there was a war Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969 that tends to be forgotten nowadays.
Very early on the young Soviet power started taking the colonial question seriously (but only as a secondary priority in the fight against the Western industrial imperialist powers) – V I Lenin’s Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions (written in 1920 on the Second Congress of the Communist International) is an important document in that sense.
TimeSpace Warps 