Excerpted from Roses for Gramsci
By Andy Merrifield
$24.95 / 978-1-68590-104-2 / 148 pages
THE MAN IN THE WHITE VEST AND I SHAKE HANDS AND bid each other arrivederci. Wandering back to my duties at the cemetery’s Visitor’s Center, leaving him with Gramsci and that red rose, I realized I’d forgotten to ask if it was he who had laid the flower there. I never got the chance to talk with him, either, about the significance of roses for Gramsci and how growing them became almost as much a passion as filling his thirty-three scholastic notebooks.
After Gramsci was transferred in July 1928 to the Turi prison for the infirm and disabled in Bari, Calabria, he began, in a little plot of soil along a sidewall of its courtyard, to grow different plants and flowers. His letters to Tatiana and Giulia thereafter fill up with news of their progress. On April 22, 1929, he wrote Tatiana: “On one fourth of a square meter I want to plant four or five seeds of each kind and see how they turn out.” He asks his sister-in-law if she can get hold of sweet pea, spinach, carrot, chicory, and celery seeds.
Gramsci says he’s become more patient, “but only by virtue of a great effort to control myself.” He seems to take inspiration from his flowers and plants, from their slow and persistent growth, from the rose he’s trying to cultivate, patiently and persistently—against all odds. “The rose has fallen victim of a dreadful sunstroke,” he says, “all the leaves in the more tender parts are burnt and carbonized; it has a desolate, sad aspect, but it is putting out new buds.” Seemingly referring to himself, he adds: “It isn’t dead, at least not yet.” In Gramsci’s letters, the plight of his dear rose strikes as an allegory of his own dear plight…. | more…
In the service of furthering public knowledge of the roots of the current horrors in Gaza and beyond, Monthly Review Press is offering you the full introduction to A Land With A People. Please circulate widely!
ALSO: MRP is offering deeply discounted copies of A Land With A People in an effort to encourage people to form study groups–as just a first step towards action. Reach out! | more…
Richard Clarke recommends a hugely valuable text for those seeking theoretical analysis and practical action to defend public services: ‘Matthews argues that capitalism’s devaluation of the “normative body” and the social exclusion of many disabled individuals “is firmly grounded within capitalism’s rejection of them as a source of economic value”….’ | more…
Marsh draws on the insights of Marx and Veblen, producing literary criticism that blends the economy and ideology. We get a fresh take on a 100-year-old novel that helps to contextualize the current moment of AI and anthropogenic climate chaos. | more…
He writes of the ‘august wilderness’ of the ranch and his growing responsiveness to the landscape that teaches him to carry a ‘grand negation’ in the soul: “a relentless hate, or a fierce contempt, or an awful calm, or a granite resignation”. These are the qualities that shine through his prose and make “Paraguayan sorrow” such a powerful and moving book to read. | more…
Our collective humanity very much depends on the natural world, for joy, for comfort, and for sheer survival. Nature is full of complex and dynamic systems that are constantly interacting with our societies. The natural world is not simply active in some abstract sense; its collective physical interactions guide and forge many fundamental features of human societies and civilizations. Humanity does not exist on a magical pedestal above the rest of reality; we are just one slice in a grand continuum of physical systems that interact, combine, and transform over time. We too belong to the natural world, and we too experience its interactions and conditions, just like everything else. The wonders of the world are waltzing to the rhythm of restless atoms and oscillating fields.
….Energy is embedded in all human actions. But it’s not something that’s just lying around, ready to be used. All conceivable economic transactions, from the exchange of money to the production of commodities, require energetic conversions from various sources. Oil is first extracted from the ground, then converted to gasoline at a refinery, and finally the gasoline is burned by your car’s engine, which converts the chemical energy of the gasoline into the mechanical work of the tires. And while you’re busy browsing the Internet, the solar panels are taking the light energy from the Sun and converting it into electricity, which is then sent to your home so you can stay online. The conversion of energy into different forms is what makes civilization possible. It’s what allows us to do things like drive to the grocery store, surf the web, play video games, watch television shows, and read romance novels at the beach. In this fundamental sense, all economic activities depend on energy flows, and none of those activities can exist separately from the laws of physics. | more…
Excerpted from Chapter 2: Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires
“But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.” —Nick Carraway, on closing his relationship with Jordan Baker
Can a book change a landscape? If ever a book did, it was The Great Gatsby.
The previous chapter explored how clothes in The Great Gatsby followed a Veblen-like logic of conspicuous leisure and, still more so, conspicuous consumption. For Veblen, what unites conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption, beyond their need for visibility, is waste. To conspicuously consume, the wealthy need to advertise that they can waste resources. So they spend thousands of dollars on a watch when a ten-dollar one would do, or, spend grotesque amounts of money on food and alcohol, as Gatsby does for the parties he throws.
But waste informs The Great Gatsby in ways other than conspicuous consumption, nowhere more so than in the valley of ashes that characters pass through on their way to Manhattan and on whose outskirts George and Myrtle Wilson live. In these ashes, we can foresee the culture of waste that has irrevocably harmed our own world and threatens to harm it still more. Although no one is innocent, including us for mimicking them, the wealthy, just as they did in the realm of clothes, bear more responsibility for this culture of waste than do others. The story starts not on Long Island, where The Great Gatsby largely takes place, but in Brooklyn. It ends, like the novel, on Long Island, but it ends with one extraordinarily ambitious reader, the urban planner Robert Moses.
By 1898, when Brooklyn joined the other boroughs to form New York City, it had already run out of room for its garbage and the tons of ashes generated by the coal its residents burned to heat their homes. Until 1906, the Street Cleaning Department had used horse-drawn carts to collect garbage and ash and haul it to dumps, some as far as ten miles away. Or they simply threw it in the ocean. Because of this laborious system, the New York Times reported in 1907, “It was a common thing in any street in the borough to see barrels running over with ash standing for days and sometimes a week in front of houses.”
Enter the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company and its treasurer, the Tammany Hall confrere John “Fishhooks” McCarthy. Accounts vary, but his nickname is thought to refer to how, whenever a bill appeared, his hands, like fishhooks, got caught in his pockets, making it impossible for him to pay…. | more…
….and the “normal” body, if you want to use that term, is the one which can keep up with the productivity of machinery, of factory life. And what Marx argued in fact was that in most cases, the productivity of machinery could outpace that of the ‘normal’ body, if you want to put it that way…” | more…
In Yabebyry, where Barrett has gone from clandestine fugitive to a symbol of pride, hopes are high that his writing can also help lead to a new future. “Rafael Barrett planted a seed here,” said Esquivel Romero. “I’m convinced that through these efforts we’ll see our young people being more prominent, defending themselves, and defending the rights of the community and its people.” | more…
Excerpted from:
CHAPTER 8: Healthcare under Capitalism
Fundamental to the Marxist method is dialectics, with change understood as emerging from the interaction between objects and phenomena. The health status of any individual arises from the dialectical interaction between the materialism of their body and the materialism of the social context within which the body is situated. The body has its own biological structural organization, governed by its own internal biological forces. Without doubt there exists an expected way in which the body functions, reflecting its inherent structural operation, which, when operating in the expected manner, contributes to the existence of good health. Yet, both good and poor health, do not, in many incidences, simply arise from, or can be reduced to, the positive and negative functioning of the body. Instead, as crucial as the biological operation of the body is, the structural organization and operation of society plays a vital role in influencing how someone experiences their health, with differing social environments more or less conducive to good health. | more…
The slight thaw in the US relationship during Obama’s presidency was thrown into deep freeze at the twilight of Trump’s first term when Cuba was reinstated onto the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Biden left it untouched. On 30 October, the UN general assembly once again voted on the resolution, titled ‘Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.’ It passed with 187 votes in favour, two against (Israel and the US)… | more…
“…what makes you shudder is when he declares: ‘Now I’m going to pull up all the trees around the property so that it looks nice.’
Yes, the gleaming, stupid façade must look clean, bare, with its brazen colors that profane the softness of the rural tones. People must say: ‘This is the new house of so-and-so, that man who is now so rich.’ It must be possible to contemplate the monument to so-and-so’s endeavors without obstruction. Trees are surplus to requirement: ‘They block the view.’ And there is not only vanity in this eagerness to strip the ground: there is hatred, hatred of trees.
Is this possible? Hatred of beings that, unmoving, with their noble limbs always open, offer us the caress of their shade without ever tiring; the silent fertility of their fruits; the multifarious, exquisite poetry that they raise up to the sky? They claim that there are harmful plants. Perhaps there are, but that should not be reason to hate them. Our hatred condemns them. Our love would perhaps transform them and redeem them….” | more…
