Books Which Wound and Stab

Promised Reviews:

A book that recently wounded me but for all the wrong reasons and in very sore places was Gary P. Steenson’s labour of love, Karl Kautsky, 1854–1938: Marxism in the Classical Years. Labour of love, I reckon, only because I have no other plausible explanation for his choice of subject. By Steenson’s own account, and his narration is by no means inept, Kautsky as a person possesses no redeeming features—actually, that’s not fair, since it isn’t as if he was a mass murderer or a serial killer. Rather, Kautsky’s crime is that he possesses no features whatsoever. Chapter after chapter detailing the minutiae of political manouevring within the SPD at the turn of the century fails to bring Kautsky to life, and yet you feel that this is not a failing of the author but of Kautsky himself, a nitpicking theoretician, an unimaginative, dreary functionary. And Steenson somehow manages to perfectly encapsulate his subject’s magnificent dullness not just in terms of content but also in the tone of his text.

I recall, vaguely, while reading this book that I enjoyed a brief surge of excitement as I began the penultimate chapter, with its promising title, “Two Revolutions, One War,” but that excitment soon dissipated when I read the opening lines (paraphrasing here): “By 1914 Kautsky’s star was on the wane and he was no longer of any relevance.” Gary P. Steenson, master of anticlimax.

Much of the final chapter is spent trying to convince us of Kautsky’s continued significance without having demonstrated that he was ever of any major importance in his own lifetime. I know many will disagree with that judgement, including Steenson, but who cares? The book left me only with a sense of melancholy and a nonspecific sadness at my own indifference to Kautsky’s travails.

A book that recently punctured the zeitgeist received a review from me here, but I’ve since encountered a number of reviews of it and interviews with the author, Emmanuel Todd, one in the Dominion Paper of Canada, one on the Marxist Web site Political Affairs, and another at Yes Magazine. None of them greatly expands on Todd’s theory, and only one mentions his bizarre attitude toward American women, but he remains of interest because 1: he predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union using his peculiar heuristic and 2: traditional accounts of the development and direction of capitalism/imperialism lack, if not the multidimensionality of his approach, at least the predictive power (if one success is enough to go on!) Todd acknowledges earlier political and economic theories of imperialism but without prioritizing either factors as the ultimate determinants of imperial behaviour; what’s more, he stresses ideological and demographic factors as, perhaps, equally significant. Whether or not his theories will stand the test of time is, of course, another thing altogether. His argument that U.S. indebtedness will play a major role in the American empire’s decline is something that, if the columnists of Business Week are to be believed, is no longer of any importance because the level of foreign investment in the U.S. economy is such that, should it collapse, it will take every other economy with it. From which it follows that the true consequence of globalism is that its interdependence requires of the rest of the world that we write off the U.S. debt(!)

Leon Hunt’s Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to “Crouching Tiger” intimidated me initially because of the Film Studies jargon in the introduction, but I persevered with it and ultimately came through the other side pleasantly surprised and, to some extent, I’d like to think, enlightened. I suspect that the subject matter will only appeal to a specific cohort of back-end boomers and early Gen X-ers, and male at that (although Hunt makes a decent fist of exploring the place of female martial artists in the genre); but for anyone on the verge of investigating the kung fu movie world, this will provide a great introduction. The first kung fu films that filmgoers in Europe encountered, such as those of Bruce Lee, Wang Yu, and, later, Jackie Chan, are put into their wider context, thereby revealing their indebtedness to their forerunners and explaining the distinctive interpretations of the films when viewed here, in Hong Kong, and in the rest of China. The anti-Japanese and anti-gwailo sentiments underlying Bruce Lee’s movies, for instance, were often lost on those of us who watched as enthralled teenagers back in the 1970s, and it didn’t matter to us that there was a rabid Chinese nationalism underpinning the tradition to which his films belonged. It was the novelty value that appealed to us.

Hunt recognizes the ironies and contradictions in the various perspectives and opens them out, but in a way that novices will find non-threatening. In the process, readers will learn why Northern styles of kung fu used sweeping kicks and arcs while Southern styles were compact and linear; discover the differences between crane, monkey, and drunken styles; and find out why swordfights feature so heavily in mainland Chinese films but not in Hong Kong movies. In addition, you’ll find out which films to begin your collection with, and how to prioritize between Drunken Master, Fists of Legend, and Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.

Ah yes, Grasshopper. Fear not the book which stabs with a retractable blade.