Reading, Watching, Listening / 01.05.2024

Here are some things...

Last month, I established an (at least) monthly new feature at Baklava Bolshevik: a short list of the best things I have been reading, watching and listening to recently. I wanted a way to share exciting things with you when I don’t otherwise have spare time to devote to writing full-length pieces. 

I hope to engage with you around the experiences that make life more transparent and tolerable—enjoyable, even. I detect that we all need this at present. I would be delighted to discuss anything mentioned in these letters with you, so please do reach out. Don’t be a stranger.

Without further ado, here is the second edition of Reading, Watching, Listening.

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Reading: ‘Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution’, Maurizio Lazzarato

On March 2nd, I had a few moments to browse the philosophy section in Readings, Lygon Street, before attending an 8:30 p.m. Dune: Part Two screening at Cinema Nova. I had no particular aim: there wasn’t a single title or author I was looking for. But I was intent on openness, browsing rigorously and fairly across the shelves—looking for something unexpected to take home. This, it turns out, can be tremendously rewarding.

I found a curious little reader with a pleasantly supple paperback feel—a svelte five inches in width and seven in height. The cover artwork initially drew my eye, with its murky, submerged black and green tones, resembling the structure of bacteria under a microscope. I was unfamiliar with the author, Maurizio Lazzarato, but the book’s charged title, Capital Hates Everyone, resonated.

Initially, I was non-committal—even taking a photo of the cover in case somebody else snagged the final copy before I decided. Finally, on my way back through the shelves, I was so taken by the blurb that I purchased it on the spot and headed to the cinema. I reproduce the blurb here for you now so that you may get a sense of why it was irresistible:

We are living in apocalyptic times. In Capital Hates Everyone, famed sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato points to a stark choice emerging from the magma of today's world events: fascism or revolution. Fascism now drives the course of democracies as they grow less and less liberal and increasingly subject to the law of capital. Since the 1970s, Lazzarato writes, capital has entered a logic of war. It has become, by the power conferred on it by financialisation, a political force intent on destruction. Lazzarato urges us to reject the illusory consolations of a technology-abetted “new” kind of capitalism and choose revolution over fascism.

This offensive was made possible by the cycle of revolutions coming to an end. But while it was unfolding, critical thinking announced the suppression of social relations and the advent of a new capitalism, a milder one, more attentive to the comfort of workers. Today, the prophets of technology even boast of a solution to the climate crisis or an exit from capitalism by the very means of capital. In the face of these illusory consolations and the growing threat of fascism, Lazzarato argues it is urgent that we rediscover the meaning of strategic confrontations and the means of rebuilding a revolutionary war machine. Since capital hates everyone, everyone must hate capital.

The book itself is a revelation. Lazzarato, born in Italy, was an Autonomia Operaia activist during the broader ‘autonomist’ Italian workers’ movement of the 1970s. In short, this was a radical workerist political tendency shaped by the failure of far-left mass movements over the previous decade and influenced by a range of Marxian, “post-Marxist”, and anarchist thought. 

This background ensures that Lazzarato has a firm grasp on many concordant and discordant strands of radical politics and demonstrates tremendous intellectual agility in weaving them together. The result is an intricate philosophical argument about the nature of the present historical juncture, aiming principally at neoliberalism but with a good deal of acerbic critique reserved for prevailing analyses thereof on the radical left.

Lazzarato’s book, split into four essay chapters, is incisive in this vein. He asserts forcefully that scholars and theorists on the left—from Foucault and Deleuze to more orthodox Marxists—have consistently failed to recognise neoliberalism for what it is: a global civil war on populations waged by capital. 

The book’s first half robustly establishes that capital hates everyone, and in the final analysis, this means capital necessarily relies on enormous objective violence. We are seeing this expressed in the starkest possible terms in Gaza today, where the world’s imperial powers collude to enforce unfathomable exterminatory hatred against Palestinians. This makes Lazzarato’s argument evermore critical and salient.

The book’s second half involves a lucid analysis of the nature of technical machines (artificial intelligence, the internet, robotics and other automative machinery). Here, Lazzarato emphatically asserts the capacity of human labour to shape and reshape technical machines, citing Fanon’s observations around the reconfigurement of colonial radio into a weapon of the Algerian national liberation movement. This is a welcome intervention, as too often the debate around technology devolves into capitalist ideology—barely concealed as “techno-optimist” babble—or intellectually lazy and frankly pathetic doomerism among liberals.

Reading activist-intellectual writing of the utmost urgency is a treasurable joy. Lazzarato delivers an apodictic and piercing political polemic that upsets countless stale shibboleths. As the subtitle suggests, this is not mere vanity—Lazzarato writes in service of reorienting us toward constructing a “revolutionary war machine” capable of challenging the capitalist war machine, lest we cede further ground to rising neofascisms. 

There are times when Lazzarato’s eagerness to penetrate long-standing assumptions on the radical left misses the mark, exposing instead his shallow understanding of certain Marxist notions, such as those of “living” and “dead” labour. But the overwhelming effect of his book is to challenge and enliven keen political minds. Of course, Lazzarato is wielding heavy theoretics, but if you’re familiar with philosophy or simply willing to learn new concepts, Capital Hates Everyone is never byzantine. You will emerge from it intellectually invigorated.

Watching: ‘Tokyo Sonata’ (2008), dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa 

At the beginning of April, I watched Tokyo Sonata, on the surface, a kitchen-table family drama by Japanese film director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The 2008 film was my first foray into Kurosawa’s work, but I was aware that his 1997 film Cure was highly regarded by many. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine a better introduction than Tokyo Sonata. 

The narrative revolves around the Sasaki family, who struggle with authentic communication and personal fulfilment during the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis. When patriarch Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) is laid off from his corporate job and plunged into a prolonged period of unemployment, his decision to keep this secret triggers a series of events that upend the fragile family unit.

From here, each Sasaki—wife and mother Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) and two sons, Takashi (Yū Koyanagi) and Kenji (Kai Inowaki)—must struggle with their own identity about the family and society more broadly. I dare not spoil what this entails explicitly, but I will reproduce parts of my Letterboxd review to whet your appetite:

I'm not sure I've seen another film with such an effect, effortlessly balancing ironic mesto with earnest whimsy. Kurosawa sets this affectation in motion to draw out the absurdity of quiet tragedies without stripping them of their full dramatic and human consequence.

[...]

Visually, Tokyo Sonata sees Kurosawa expertly manipulating framing and blocking to convey the characters' inner turmoil and the external forces that shape their lives. Whether set within the obscured confines of a domestic space or the vast tapestry of Tokyo's bustling streets, every scene is meticulously staged to evoke an emotionally grounded place and purpose.

Thematically, the film delves into myriad dichotomies—ego and money, shame and violence, America and Japan, property and dispossession, hierarchy and freedom—inviting viewers to ponder the systemic interconnectedness of seemingly disparate elements. Most interestingly, Kurosawa introduces the notion of performativity as central to modern existence, which is depicted as replete with poisonous and harmless deceptions. Performance is considered universally human, with equal potential to be tragic or emancipatory.

If you have Mubi, you can stream Tokyo Sonata now. And if you don’t, get Mubi and stream Tokyo Sonata and a host of other great cinema. Please do it now!

Watching: ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ (2023), dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

I will cheat and include a second film recommendation in this letter (this will be a regular occurrence). I do so because Evil Does Not Exist—the latest film by another Japanese director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi—is contemporary cinema nonpareil. You may know of Hamaguchi through Drive My Car, which won the Best International Feature Film Oscar in 2022. 

The ABC ran a spoiler-free review that captures the unique feelings that Hamaguchi’s film conjures, seemingly without effort. Suffice it to say, it is the only recent film that could be called Aesopian in its mythic tenor and mysterious morality. Yet, despite this near-mystical essence, Hamaguchi can keep the film firmly affixed to reality, readily recognisable to all.

Evil Does Not Exist features a bewitching original score by Japanese composer Eiko Ishibashi, which is equally crucial to the film’s imagery for building the thematic, emotional, and narrative experience. You must go to your local Arthouse cinema and watch this film while it plays. There is nothing like it. The sheer force of its brilliance drove me to write a short essay on the film, which you should read as soon as you’ve seen it. Run, don’t walk.

Listening: ‘Where does culture come from?’, Terry Eagleton

I’ve been on a bit of a Lil Wayne wave this past month, music-wise. I can’t count how many times I’ve recently played 2005’s magnificent Tha Carter II or Weezy’s landmark 2009 mixtape, No Ceilings. If you are not already aware, Lil Wayne is one of the most talented rappers in hip-hop history. 

This prompted me to recall that the dominant 2010s culture made Wayne into a figure of racist ridicule—he was seen as talentless and stupid in a far more racially aggressive manner than “mumble rappers” today. It was a popular meme to be racist about Lil Wayne. But I digress; his raps rule, and you should listen to them.

Yet I thought to feature a lecture by Terry Eagleton—adapted from an essay you can read in the London Review of Books—as listening this month. For those unfamiliar with Eagleton, he is an English literary theorist, critic and prolific writer of wide renown. You’ve probably seen his books, such as Why Marx Was Right or The Idea of Culture, on your favourite good bookshop shelves over the years. 

In the lecture, Eagleton provides an amply entertaining and educative abridged history of human culture as we know it today and analyses the nature of its various forms and their constitution. This is the description from the London Review of Books:

The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this approach to a concept with a much more capacious history is too narrow. In the closing LRB Winter Lecture for 2024, Terry Eagleton examines various aspects of that history—culture and power, culture and ethics, culture and critique, culture and ideology—to broaden the argument and understand where we are now.

Despite his old age and poor health, Eagleton is committed to engaging with the cultural and political questions of the time, retaining his adorable sense of humour and casual intellect. It is well worth an hour to listen to his lecture—Eagleton, like all of us, will not be around forever.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on these recommendations. I hope you enjoy it. Until next time!