China's housing blues, the new S in ESG, humanity's history and Mao in the Middle East
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Merton Simpson, Confrontation (#1A). Source: the Johnson Collection. Simpson was an Abstract Expressionist painter, jazz musician and African art dealer from Charleston, part of the extraordinary Spiral Group. This is from Artsy:
The Spiral Group was a New York–based African American artists’ collective active from 1963 to 1965. It was founded by Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff to explore the relationship of art and activism, particularly how black artists should relate to American society in a time of segregation. The group also included artists Emma Amos, Calvin Douglass, Perry Ferguson, Reginald Gammon, Felrath Hines, Alvin Hollingsworth, William Majors, Richard Mayhew, Earl Miller, Merton D. Simpson, and James Yeargans. While it espoused no common style, the group is characterized by its experimental and eclectic approaches, including forms of modernist abstraction that were neither common nor expected among African American artists at the time. A major point of contention among the group was whether artists should illustrate the black experience in figurative terms, or if black abstraction itself was a politically radical form of artistic practice. While short-lived, the Spiral Group ignited important debates about philosophy, creative integrity, and artistic freedoms among black artists—and for the cultural community’s role in social change more broadly—during a time when few art critics were asking the same questions.
The new S in ESG
What can we expect of capital in the twenty-first century? Many of the answers are depressing, but tend to focus on the “economic” — prognoses of widening inequality between asset owners and the rest in Piketty, for example. And yet we also know that our mounting crises, above all climate change, bring with them threats of massive population flows handled by anxious Western opinion as security threats. Gustavo Petro, the Colombian President, made perhaps the most interesting diplomatic declaration of solidarity with Palestinians when on October 15 he warned that climate change and anti-migrant policies together entailed the West treating lives in the Global South as “disposable”, with Gaza as an exemplar of the future to come. Capitalists considering circumstances beyond their immediate bottom line, then, might come to mean not just the nice stuff, but the nastier necessary conditions for the reproduction of their social order in tumultuous times:
Monetary policy — not like that!
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Trouble in China
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Romare Bearden, Strange Land, 1959
History in us
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Faith in color
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A truly world war
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Calm before the storm
Walid Khalidi’s Before their Diaspora does its historical and political work through photography — documenting Palestinian life thriving on the eve of the Nakba of 1948, inviting haunting questions about what happened. Here is an earlier serenity, from what is now Tel Aviv, courtesy of Wikimedia commons. JAFFA FROM THE SEA, HOLY LAND, CA. 1895:
Marxism and history
One concern of Marxists reading Louis Althusser in the 1960s-70s was to dethrone an image of history as a practice equipped with its own adequate theoretical apparatus, insisting instead on the need for a theory of the social totality that explained continuity and change in ways more sophisticated than the historian’s easy emphasis on events and trends:
It is very important to welcome work of this provocative power and
subtlety, and the welcome it deserves is a critique which tries to take the argument
forward, rather than throwing it back. Anything less would be a disservice to
Poulantzas's project — a political project which Marxists cannot ignore or brush
aside. Not to take Poulantzas's history seriously would also merely confirm the
bankruptcy of self-confessed historians, trained generally to a level of
sophistication little more demanding than that represented by the supposed
distinction between facts and ideas. If we must learn to elaborate a problematic
which will not turn history into a prolonged tautology, we must also realise that
history conceived unproblematically is reduced to the category of the factitious.
Though the latter fate is often unthinkingly embraced by historians, no Marxist
should be satisfied to be numbered in their company.
Source: Jane Caplan, “Theories of Fascism: Nicos Poulantzas as Historian”, History Workshop Journal, 1977, pp. 83-100.
World Revolution
The People’s Republic of China was the first non-Arab country to establish relations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). In 1965, Mao said to the PLO: “Imperialism is afraid of China and of the Arabs. Israel and Formosa [Taiwan] are bases of imperialism in Asia. You are the front gate of the great continent, and we are the rear.” PLO leaders went to study in China, and Haaretz notes that “by 1967, the Palestinians were seemingly fighting almost exclusively with Chinese-made weaponry.” In this photo from 1970, Palestinian guerrillas from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO are pictured reading copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung or 'Little Red Book' in Jordan. (Photo by Rolls Press/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images).
Romare Bearden, Pittsburgh Memory, 1964