Biden as LBJ, China's R&D surge, BP's Sun King, Ninja Turtles & sex under capitalism.
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Ella Walker, Untitled, flying angel and red curtain.
Walker was born in 1993, she lives and works in east London and has established a striking style of historical and aesthetic play as a kind of twenty-first century twist on the neo-Gothic. As her alma mater puts it:
Ella’s repertoire of works are contemporary concepts that explore medieval narrative and costume. Her compositions are tightly framed, shallow spaces that suggest constant interplay between the realms of drawing, painting and design.
Walker explains in an interview:
I am drawn to literature and imagery from the Middle Ages as a period of decline from the high culture and civilisation of the Classical world. The Middle Ages is viewed as a time of ignorance and superstition. I think there are interesting parallels between this period in history and our lived experience in the present day.
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Downhill to liberalism
The struggle against fascism in Europe was, of course, an armed struggle of various types under banners of human freedom. In the Nation, Jeet Heer reflects on a troubling ambiguity that produced. In Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency and beyond, American militarism and mainsteam liberalism could draw on the call to arms in anti-fascist politics to support quite different ends, while speaking ignorantly or disingenuously in the same noble name. Today, the practice continues:
One crucial mistake that LBJ made was conflating Roosevelt’s Popular Front coalition against fascism with Cold War liberalism. The center of gravity of FDR’s synthesis of social security and national security was well to the left of Cold War liberalism. Leftists were an integral part of the Popular Front, and the extreme right was marginalized. Cold War liberalism, by contrast, marginalized the left and empowered the extreme right: Joseph McCarthy thrived thanks to the hysteria fomented by Truman’s loyalty oaths and J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance state.
Roosevelt’s policies also developed sequentially over the course of more than three presidential terms, with the stimulus of both the New Deal and military spending needed to juice up an economy that had been laid flat by the Great Depression. Johnson, on the other hand, governed a much richer America already near full employment, which meant that the double dose of welfare state and warfare state would lead to inflation and deficit spending.
Believing he could have both guns and butter was a delusion, but an attractive one for Johnson, allowing him to unify a political party that included Southern conservatives (who were adamant anti-communists) and Northern liberals (who wanted a larger welfare state). As the historian Irving Bernstein noted in his 1996 study Guns or Butter, Johnson’s desire to have both sabotaged his domestic agenda. Under the threat of inflation, a Congress dominated by Southern Democrats and their Republican allies forced him to underfund the Great Society, setting the stage for the austerity politics of the coming decades.
Joe Biden hasn’t gotten America into a land war in Asia yet, but in every other way he is repeating LBJ’s mistake of thinking guns and butter go together. Through his infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden has admirably returned big-ticket social spending to the White House agenda. But he has been equally concerned to reassert American hegemony, financing the war in Ukraine, promising more money to Israel as it carries out its bombing of Gaza, and pivoting toward a great-power competition with China that could easily become a new cold war.
Like the Cold War liberals, Biden has embraced a military Keynesianism that sees guns and butter as mutually self-supporting. In late October, Politico reported, “The White House has been quietly urging lawmakers in both parties to sell the war efforts abroad as a potential economic boom at home. Aides have been distributing talking points to Democrats and Republicans who have been supportive of continued efforts to fund Ukraine’s resistance to make the case that doing so is good for American jobs.”
But, like LBJ before him, Biden will find that a guns-and-butter consensus is brittle and satisfies no one. By trying to hammer out a guns-and-butter consensus that very few outside the elite support, Biden is tearing apart both his own coalition and American society.
China’s cutting edge
In ten years of growth, Chinese scholars overtook both their US and EU counterparts in scientific publications:
China is also the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels, accounting for 80% of photovoltaic (PV) panel production, the exports of which make up almost 7% of China’s total trade surplus:
Source: Institut Delors
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Ella Walker Untitled, Small figures hunched with flames
The authoritarian firm
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Sex and capitalism
When Christopher Chitty died tragically in his early thirties, back in 2015, he left a reputation among friends as a brilliantly thoughtful intellectual mixer, capable of fusing Marx and Foucault in illuminating ways. The promise was a theory able to explain both underlying social structures (and geopolitical ones: drawn from Giovanni Arrighi’s heterodox Marxism) and our experience of power and desire in our everyday lives. Chitty was an organiser, a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz committed to making universities into spaces of free and collaborative inquiry rather than production lines for competing nodes of human capital — and so it is fitting that his PhD project was finished, as the co-authors explain in this Jacobin interview, not by one individual but by comrades who believed in it. Have a look at the table of contents:
Ella Walker, Love on the Stage.