RAINBOW PIE

[Panaconda]

Book review of ‘Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir’ by Joe Bageant

‘Cotton never saw much cash, and never got rich by any means. Not on the ten-cent and fifteen-cent purchases that farmers made there for over one hundred years. Yet he could pay Jackson Luttrell for the tomato hauling—in credit at the store. That enabled Jackson to buy seed, feed, hardware, fertiliser, tools, and gasoline, and farm until harvest time with very little cash, leaving him with enough to invest in a truck. Unger could run his tomato cannery and transform local produce into cash, because he could barter credit for farm products and services. This was a community economic ecology that blended labour, money, and goods to sustain a modest but satisfactory life for all. — Rainbow Pie

I don’t know where to start with Rainbow Pie, it’s a book of two sides, two faces even. On the one hand there’s Joe’s evocative, heartfelt nostalgia for a life destroyed by corporate capital and on the other, his anger and frustrations, rants on occasion, as if analyzing sets off an uncontrollable chain reaction to how capitalism destroys human beings and all in the name of free choice! It’s a frustration many of us lefties feel, a sense of powerlessness made all the worse by the knowing.

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What Joe calls the white underclass, some forty-plus million Americans, who struggle to survive out of sight and out of mind of the urban middle class who not only manage capitalism but who also shape the kind of self-image people end up having of themselves. They are Marx’ surplus labour writ big, real big. They are the (former) heartland of the American Dream turned nightmare. A class turned in on itself and entirely ignored by mainstream everything.

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I don’t know if Joe has read any William Morris such as ‘News from Nowhere’ but I get the same sense of loss, a grievous loss of Joe’s cultural, let alone economic, inheritance just as Morris lamented the loss of rural life and all its many skills and traditions, wiped out by his hated Victorian capitalism. Yet over the past two hundred-plus years of capitalism rampant, Joe’s experience is the third such auto-destruction to take place in the so-called developed world, where entire cultures and communities have been erased from the face of the earth. All in the name of ‘progress’ of course as capital yet again must revolutionize the means of production or die.

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http://williambowles.info/2010/09/08/book-review-of-rainbow-pie-a-redneck-memoir-so-different-yet-so-familiar-by-william-bowles/