Years of Poems and Spirits

A really wonderful book. As enlightening as E.P. Thompson’s classic.

I remember Kent G asked us during class – what is “class consciousness”? It was then I suddenly realized, oh, it is not something that is always there!

Perry’s book really helped me to complete the intellectual journey started with this question. In my mind at least, there is no longer such a structural being called “class consciousness”. It is more organic, something grows out of a complex makeup of social soil.

Note, this is a second try. It failed last time when I tried to write a comprehensive review. It just didn’t work out. This book took me several month to finish on the 3rd try (ever since recommended by DS a year ago), it is not like while I was in school when I had to finish a couple of books a week. The memory faded by the time I started writing review but thoughts and inductions abound. It is really hard to write something concise that way.

I also thought about book reviews like those in the New Yorker. But they are more like literature reviews, each comes with broad references and, more importantly, a clear narrative of how a certain subject evolved. I am nowhere near being able to discuss Labor Study (or even Labor History in China) in that way. So I gave up writing last time.

I am grateful for this book because it helped me to recalibrate my view on Marxism. Its Historical Materialism still wield a heavy influence on my world view but at the same time I know it is just another theory among many. The difficulty is to escape my own myopia and put what brought me here in a proper lineup. I have been trying to do so for years. Finally, with help from this book, I found some kind of closure.

In the book, Perry developed two themes: First, different workers protest differently. Second, they become different as a result of their social relationship with each other. In general, Perry argues, the more skilled workers are more likely to engage in class struggle. The less skilled are more likely to be thugs (aka Lumpenproletariat in Marxist lexicon). In Shanghai’s example, it is the printing press mechanics, the managers in Postal service and so on, are the CCP-affiliated activists. The tobacco rollers and textile workers, on the other hand, are easy recruits of the GMD-controlled Green Gang members.

However, her second point is more subtle. Paraphrasing Charles Tilly’s words, “A worker’s skill is a type of social relationship”, Perry used the first half of the book to develop a narrative on how a worker’s native place can determine his political awareness. It makes total sense in the Chinese context where I grew up – people from Jiangnan are generally considered smarter, are quicker learners. They tend to get better jobs, which heightened their self-consciousness and political demand. All of this development was further nurtured by a strong native-place bondage, apprenticeship training and the existence of Habermas-ian public space.

There it is: class consciousness is not a uniformed, structural being. It is not the same in every culture, at different times, or even within the same “working class”. It is very much a product of socio-cultural environment–as much as that of the material-production relationship that Karl Marx thought was the defining character. In other words, class consciousness, like religion, it is not something everyone is born with, but rather a gift one may or may not receive somewhere in one’s life. No wonder Perry uses terms like “rise above” to describe the formation of class-consciousness. Here you go, Migdal, this is you exegesis.

Finally watched Avatar–so many people told me so much about it, I figured that if I didn’t watch it now, I’d probably lose interest soon. It was good. I have to say the visual effect is less than what I expected but the story is more weighty. Overall, it is great. ZR and I had this discussion afterward. She thought the references in the movie about War on Terror (”we have to fight terror against terror”, etc.) was a little overbearing and unnecessary. I thought that was the part I liked it.

Not that the reference is any more clever or persuasive than the prosaic news columns we all have read. But I can tell Cameron is inspired by the absurdity sensible Liberals like him have to live through in the name of Democracy. Like other artists who created their masterpiece after years of mental agony, Cameron’s work is not a show for show’s sake. It is trying to say something. In that way, it is not unlike some of the great movies made after the Vietnam War, except the means through which Cameron & Co delivered the message is incredibly imaginary and beautiful. Still, at the end of the day, Avatar is a allegory, not just a fantasy.

I don’t know how many people truly get the message though. It was said that when the Pope first saw Michelangelo’s painting in Sistine Chapel, he immediately knelt and asked for forgiveness. I don’t see any tourists doing that nowadays. They just hold up their camera phones and say, “Wow, how beautiful!”

I can’t help but to sing praise to the movie District 9. Upon knowing how old the director (Neill Blomkamp) is, I was very impressed. The kid certainly has wisdom beyond his 30 years. Of course, he is from South Africa. Still, being able to distill an almost biblical human sin into a short movie, he’s got talent.

The reason it moved me so much is that it says so much about we Socio-sapiens. There is an exclusive impulse that is innate to us, not unlike the territorial instincts in beasts from who we evolved. But now that we did evolve and call ourselves creature-of-sapience, we therefore have to invent so many words and so much pretense to cover up our beastly inner-self, in order to carry on whatever brutality without a guilty conscience.

In fact, we don’t need a whole lot words in order to achieve that. One is enough, and that is the word ”alien”. Besides direct citations such as ”illegal alien”, there are other synonyms such as “terrorists”, “rogue nation”, and in an earlier ear, “the Communists”.

Once a collection of people is attached with the “alien” (or alien-alike) label, the cruelty, the violence, and the suppression of humanity directed toward them is henceforce justified. Such a pattern permeates time and space, so much so that I can pick out stories like this easier than picking the blackberries in my backyard in late August.

I grew up in Shanghai where people from Subei (and their descendants) were considered second class. If something goes wrong involving a native and a Subei-ren, it is without question the fault of the latter. On a more grand scale, the Old Testament is an epic tale of God-Man collaboration of alienizing “the other”. A more secular story, from a different angle, tells a similar belief. My father told me that when Deng Xiaoping visited the U.S. in the late 1970s, he hugged and kissed the girls greeting him at the tarmac. This simple gesture apparently left a deep impression with Jesse Helms who said something like: a Commie can do that?

Having observed endless stories like such, I found District 9 a very powerful rendition of who we are. In this case, Blomkamp stripped all the pretense and left the story to a bare-bone scenario—what if we are to live with aliens? Not the illegal immigrants, not people who speak different languages or practice different customs, or of different skin color or sexual preference. But real aliens.

More to the point: what if the reality–however it was lead to or sustained–offers us plenty of excuses to despise them. And we have the power to dispense them too. What do we do? The main character, Wikus van de Merwe, however cheerful, is a bureaucrat-henchman: he has no strong sense of right-or-wrong. If he had problem with soldiers carrying too much ammo it is because making-a-scene would hurt his career growth. Once at work, he is courageous, effective and even creative (as he improvised ways to get around the problem of the Prawns don’t know how to sign their names). So he is the perfect executioner of our collective judgment. The fact that the aliens have feelings like us–the desire to procreate, caring for their young and grieving for their dead–does not bother him at all. In a way, Blomkamp portrays John Yoo better than Yoo himself would recognize.

The movie didn’t try to come up with an answer. That is another reason I like it. It is hard to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. Sometimes I wish I could lose a few pounds or to grow more muscles. But in the end, I have to live with the image in the mirror. To give the movie a wishy-washy ending would have ruined it altogether.