Resistance Through Knitting

Numenius drew my attention this morning to a thread on Blue Sky about the Melt the Ice Hat, a knitting pattern released a few days ago to emulate a hat worn (and subsequently banned) in Norway to protest the Nazi occupation. The pattern notes contain this narrative:

In the 1940’s, Norwegians made and wore red pointed hats with a tassel as a form of visual protest against Nazi occupation of their country. Within two years, the Nazis made these protest hats illegal and punishable by law to wear, make, or distribute. As purveyors of traditional craft, we felt it appropriate to revisit this design.

Norwegians are ingenious people and this story gives an account of how the resistance moved to creating Christmas cards that echoed the sentiment as a way of getting around the ban.

I have no red yarn in my stash, at least yarn that isn’t particularly scratchy, so I ordered some online today. I already have requests for four hats, and I’m going to knit them two at a time — not like the double-knit socks in War and Peace, which is really a party trick, but using the magic loop method.

The outrages of ICE in Minneapolis are being well documented. We have GOT to stand up to this thuggery.

Memorial In Central Park

We went to the memorial held in the afternoon in Central Park here in Davis for Renee Good who was murdered earlier this week by ICE in Minneapolis. There was a good turnout of several hundred people, some of them wandering over from the tail end of the Farmers Market, and the memorial was marred only by a disruption by our town’s Moms for Liberty loon (Lady, I’d like to hear what the pastor is saying, thank you, I thought).

On YouTube later I watched a bit of a conversation between historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman about this moment. A fragment from this:

(HCR) “And you know, I quite frankly never wanted to live through historic times. I just got to lay that out there.” (JF) “And I wanted to sit in archives and read dead people’s mail. Like that was our job.”

A Neo-Royalist Future?

As we struggle to make sense of Trump’s maneuvers in Venezuela and elsewhere, a couple of international relations scholars have a new term to describe this possible shift in the world system order. This term is “neo-royalism”, and is described in a paper written by Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman which was published a couple months ago in the journal International Organization. This paper has seen a lot of interest in the past several days including many mentions on Bluesky and a MetaFilter post about it.

International relations scholars view the liberal international order as a system that is in decline, but they have tended to think that this shift may be a fallback to what preceded it, that is the Westphalian great power system, where systems of global governance are weak and states are sovereign and acting to pursue their own best interests. What Goddard and Newman are suggesting is that we might be have to look back before the Westphalian system for an analogue (the Treaty of Westphalia was 1648). As they put it:

A plausible emerging order, which we label neo-royalism, would be a major break from both [the liberal international order and the Westphalian system]. It centers on ruling cliques, networks of political, capital, and military elites devoted to individual sovereigns, seeking to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes.

They give as examples of royalist cliques the Khanate “great houses”, monarchical families such as the Tudors or Hapsburgs, or conglomerations such as the Medicis in Florence. Today’s analogues would be Trump and his circle of course but also Putin, Modi, Orbán, Modi, bin Salman, and others.

They see neo-royalists maintaining their power through rent-seeking rather than a rules-based order. As they say:

The goal of rent extraction is not simply self-enrichment; it amasses wealth from both the domestic and international peripheries so as to perpetuate and extend clique political dominance.

Or as Newman just expressed it on Bluesky: “Why target Venezuela/Greenland? Because they offer rents that can be extracted and distributed to the insider clique. The broligarchs have a long term interest in these places.”

I’m afraid to say it but I think Goddard and Newman are onto something here. This has a lot of parallels to discussions around neofeudalism but perhaps neo-royalism as a concept has more descriptive power. Maybe it’s time for medieval and early modern political historians to educate us all about the world before states.

The Work

Sleepless Planet

I had the first of my four Comix Activism classes on Saturday. This class is being taught by Maureen Burdock, author of Sleepless Planet (and Queen of Snails) and this first session was on Health Justice and Graphic Medicine, a topic I’m particularly interested in since it intersects with my work on End-of-Life Issues.

Comics work well for activism: they are democratic, inexpensive, widely accessible, and can operate happily outside capitalist consumer culture. Maureen called the “portable empathy machines.”

I particularly like her take on insomnia since she’s suffered from it since she was a child and has tried just about everything to address it — and there’s no one quick fix, bur rather, it must be approached holistically. (It’s also very common for post-menopausal women to suffer from it, which has certainly been my experience.)

The comic at right was drawn during our initial warm-up exercise, whose prompt was “draw your day” — Maureen is in Europe so her day was coming to a close, but mine had just started!

White Rose

I was curious to read about the white rose as a symbol of Russian feminist resistance this morning on the profile of a man in Germany to whom I was about to mail a postcard. Not knowing its history, I assumed it was a new Russian symbol. (I knew it as a symbol of Yorkshire vs. the red rose of Lancashire, from the Wars of the Roses, and of course as a symbol of the need for beauty in the lives of working people in the anthem Bread and Roses.) Imagine my surprise, though, at hearing the white rose mentioned again in my German class later on today by a Russian who now lives in Austria, talking about the resistance movement in Germany during World War II. One group of five dissidents in Munich called itself Weiße Rose and was captured in 1942 by the Gestapo, imprisoned, and executed. The anthem “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” was written a century earlier and was required to be invoked over the decades as repression and authoritarianism took their successive places in German history.

I am about to embark on a course tomorrow, Comix Activism, taught by an artist who was born to German parents and who has now moved back to Europe. The United States is no longer a safe place for her. It’s time to wield symbols and pens to resist oppression…

ETA Saturday morning: I forgot. I also caught a reference to the White Rose on Feli from Germany’s YouTube video from several years ago. Google is watching me… White roses to you, Google.

Patterns of Liberation

About four years I was doing some literature research on information and communications technology for sustainable development and came across the writings of Douglas Schuler, a computer scientist now retired from Evergreen State College in Washington, who works on democratic technology. He is most noted for the 2008 book Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution, published by MIT Press. I revisited this book today and it seems a good work to share in our present moment. As the title suggests, it is inspired by the highly influential 1977 book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by architect Christopher Alexander. Liberating Voices takes a similar approach to the latter book and provides a catalogs of patterns helpful for positive social change.

The physical book for Liberating Voices seems hard to find but much of the content is replicated in the website the Public Sphere Project. In particular, there is a section specifically on the Liberating Voices pattern language. Several examples of these patterns include Linguistic Diversity, Participatory Design, Intermediate Technology, and Voices of the Unheard. There are 136 patterns listed in the original Liberating Voices publication and these are summarized in a set of cards here. Patterns which others have submitted are also listed here.

It looks like the Public Sphere Project has gone dormant for now but many of the patterns described there for social change are timeless, and it is well worth reviewing the set for ideas on how to act.

Elections With Cuban White Beans

I am quite heartened by the results of yesterday’s elections — the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the mayoral election in New York City stands out but Democratic candidates did spectacularly across the board. It was sad to see the high level of racism and Islamophobia in the mayoral race from sectors I’m supposedly in alignment with, but the voters of New York City as a collective got past that.

I first heard about Zohran Mamdani last spring leading up to the June primary, and soon discovered a fact about him that made me like him a lot. Six or so years ago as an aspiring rapper he made a rap video with the actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey that was a tribute to grandmothers. Madhur Jaffrey is in high esteem in our household and every week we cook between one and three recipes from her cookbooks. This week’s recipes are the following:

• Aromatic Cuban White Beans and Pumpkin Stew (Tuesday’s soup)
• Green Beans with Mushrooms (tomorrow’s dish)
• Bean Curd with Fresh Coriander (our standard Friday night fare — we simply call it tofu-cilantro).

I wish that the Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa had managed to push past Andrew Cuomo and come in second, but it was not to be. Sliwa is a cat person and currently has six kitties: at the height of the pandemic he was rescuing abandoned cats and one point had 17 living in his apartment. Trump disparaged him for his plans if elected to turn the mayoral mansion into a cat rescue site.

Three months ago independent journalist Marisa Kabas summed up the race this way:

why is this mayoral election different than all other mayoral elections?

in all other mayoral elections, we get to see andrew cuomo lose but once. but in this mayoral elections, we get to see him lose twice.

Mamdani will have many powerful people against him trying to thwart his agenda, but he has already done something quite significant. Today he named Lina Khan to be the co-chair of his transition committee. Khan is a brilliant young legal scholar who was the chair of the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden administration and was one of Biden’s most leftwing appointees. As an antitrust regulator, she was the terror of many of the large tech firms including Amazon and Meta. Naming her is a great choice by Mamdani.

Stammtisch

Last night I rewatched Downfall (Der Untergang in German), which chronicles Hitler’s final few days in his Berlin bunker. A tour de force by actor Bruno Ganz, the film draws heavily on material from survivors, especially Traudl Junge, who was one of Hitler’s secretaries. The spectacle of not just Hitler’s, but of many minds unravelling as the Soviet army advanced on the German capital, is something I find particularly interesting in light of where we are in the world.

The term “malignant narcissism” was coined by social psychologist (and Holocaust survivor) Erich Fromm to describe the type of grandiose sadistic paranoid pathology displayed by Hitler. It is a term that has also been leveled at various dictators or would-be dictators such as Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Kim Jong Un, and Trump, and whether or not the armchair diagnosis is an actual pathological condition, there are certainly traits in common to all of them. “Becoming unhinged” is a fate most of them will face.

I have been very remiss in my German study since before Mum died but wanted to do some preparation for today’s Stammtisch, a monthly gathering for my German conversation group where we get together and speak German for an hour or two. Given that we often end up talking about politics, this seemed a good entry point. I am not sure about the usefulness of the “No Kings” rallying cry since most kings nowadays have little more than a ceremonial role and exert little to no power, unlike the characters mentioned above, but it does have resonance in the American context and certainly brought people out in their millions last week.

Pondering Neo-feudalism

As I remarked in the notes on my imagined board game, I am drawn to the term “neo-feudalism” to describe the set of transitions that are underway now. This is despite “feudalism” not being a term very much in vogue among medievalists these days. (David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele discuss this here, referring to a classic article from 1974 by Elizabeth AR Brown that reviews how the concept of “feudalism” has never been very well defined and does not account for the great variety of medieval social systems across time and space.)

I think my use of the term “neo-feudalism” refers more to economics rather than a social system. It’s not the relationship of mutual obligations between lords, nobles, and vassals that is being replicated now. Rather it is much more akin to land ownership by nobles who capture the wealth of serfs..

In short, I believe that capitalism as an economic system is coming to an end now or has already ended. (When people write about “late capitalism” they don’t seem to mean this, rather their usage is more like “the system in its current incarnation”) One writer who believes this is the economist Yanis Varoufakis, who has come up with the concept of technofeudalism. In his view, tech companies function like modern feudal lords. They make their money via rents rather than producing goods. For instance, Apple makes 30% profit (or something like that) from producers and consumers just for the monopoly privilege of selling apps on their app store.

A second argument is not one that Varoufakis makes, but seems clear to an environmental scientist. One of the oldest sayings in environmental science is that “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet”. The upcoming decades will be the ones where we hit profound limits to growth. Tom Murphy discusses the physical limits in a 2022 paper in Nature Physics. For instance, our energy use has been increasing at a tenfold rate over the past century, and this rate simply cannot continue (in four hundred years we’d be boiling due to waste heat). There is also a limit to which economic activity can be decoupled from physical activity.

But a capitalist economic system is primarily about one thing: return on investment. If growth is no longer to be had, the financial system will necessarily start to break down. To be replaced by some other economic system that no longer is demanding returns of 3, 4, 5, 8 percent and so on. I don’t know what this new system will look like, but it seems it will be a lot more static than what we have now. An economic system based on capturing rents rather than producing goods. “Neo-feudalism” seems evocative, if nothing else.