Adolph Reed on ‘working class’ vs ‘black’

Adolph referred to Preston H. Smith’s book:

Cal wrote:

I like what Reed said just before the video started. I thought this was an interesting comment.

This [the most recent shift in the protests] is the bread and circus stuff that appeals to the other side and you can feel the long hand of the Ford Foundation and leadership development corporations shaping the institutional structure of a political economy of race relations administration in a certain direction so that it moves in a slightly different direction, farther away from anything that smells anything like class re-distribution.

Interesting stuff–I looked up the Ford Foundation and was intrigued to see BLM protest photos on the website of a multi-billion non-profit that has been operating since the 60’s.

Off topic–If you still need info WV about sharpening a (Japanese) knife a friend of mine sent me an insightful email as I need to put a sharper blade on my knife.

=================

Yeah, we used to talk about a Thomas Frank collection of essays back in the 90s, called ‘Commodify Your Dissent.’ Its kindof about that whole subject of the system taking authentic-dissent and turning it into something tame so it doesnt actually threaten capitalism. Think of CHE earrings and such.

This ‘process’ of domesticating and shaping dissent-movements
would not work if the citizens actually had higher political-IQs. But they’ve been dummed-down so far, that its not that hard for the system to nudge them, shape them, bewilder them, tame them, divert them…

Ah well.

I dont wanna sound too dark though. 🙂 This latest uprising did indeed lead to some nice reforms in some places. Colorado.

w
v
—-
link:https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler/dp/0393316734
Amazon.com Review
In this thought-provoking collection of essays, editor Thomas Frank and other contributors to the contrarian journal the Baffler examine the unprecedented ascendancy of business as the dominating force in American life. If the closest historical parallel is with the Gilded Age and its all-powerful robber barons, Frank and his ilk clearly see themselves as the muckrakers out to expose the absurdities and abuses of big business. Today, however, advertising has come to permeate every aspect of our society, and corporations are in the business of manufacturing culture–what Frank calls the “Culture Trust.” These essays analyze the ways in which this Culture Trust has co-opted the power of dissent by appropriating the language and symbolism of nonconformist youth culture, from hippie slang to grunge fashion; in other words, when the media markets rebellion, it becomes just another consumer choice. As evidence, the essayists explore the image of consumer as rebel pioneered by publications such as Details and Wired, as well as the preeminence of “revolutionary” business gurus such as Tom Peters. The result is a highly original book, a satirical and savage indictment of ’90s consumerist culture.
Review
You’d have to look back at the fights between New York intellectuals in the fifties to find the sort of verbal firepower unleashed here. — Nation

[Frank is] … perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment, and certainly the most malcontent… Although he has been to graduate school … both his thinking and his prose hark back to a time when the radical left was something more in America than conferences and seminars attended by Foucault-steeped professors. Frank has thrown off the mandarin jargon; for him it’s about wealth and power, haves and have-nots, loud and simple–it’s as if he were channeling Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills and Thorstein Veblen through a boom box. — The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Marzorati
From the Back Cover
The 1980s and 1990s have seen an enormous increase in the power of business over the American mind. Not since the Gilded Age have the robber barons of business accumulated more wealth or won more popular attention. But where the tycoons of yore built railroads or banks, today culture stands at the heart of American enterprise and mass entertainment has become its economic dynamo. For a decade The Baffler magazine has been an invigorating voice of dissent against these developments, in the tradition of the muckrakers and H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury. Commodity Your Dissent gathers together the best of its excoriating criticism of the new American cultural order, exploring such peculiar developments as the birth of the rebel consumer as hero in the pages of Wired and Details; the dramatic rise of “alternative” culture in the post-Nirvana era; the appearance of new business gurus like Tom Peters and corporate fads like “reengineering”; the ever-accelerating race to market youth culture; and the encroachment of advertising and commercial enterprise into every last nook and cranny of American life.
About the Author
Thomas Frank is the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool.