TaxAct: Skank Capitalism in Action

So, as I was doing my taxes today on TaxAct I learned something that I didn't know: the skanks and slags at TaxAct charge you before a transaction is complete and before one's taxes are submitted to the IRS and New York state. I also learned something I already knew: TaxAct has never, though I tried three years to do this, been able to submit my taxes via efile to the IRS and NYS. Finally, I relearned another lesson that I previously knew: Intuit Turbo Tax was able, with the same information, to submit my taxes to both the IRS and NYS. I will, to say the least, be contacting the NY AG about TaxAct's practise of charging one for a TaxAct job not well done, hell not at all done.

Sarah Palin, Attention Whore

So that narcissistic attention whore Palin thinks she has the right to dine in New York City restaurants despite being unvaccinated putting others at health risk in the process. I am not sure anything better encapsulates right wing me me me America with its delusions and tenuous grasp on reality better than Palin's sense of smug, self righteous, and self centred sense of royal entitlement.

Mike Lindell, Smeghead of the Day...

You gotta love it when a delusional smeghead like Mike Lindell goes on TV, you know the TV millions watch, whinging and whining about cancel culture and not even realising the absurdity of such flim flamming. But then he is a snake oil salesman of the skankiest sort.

Musings on Meat Loaf

Probably my most salient memory of the pop rock musician and actor Meat Loaf (yet another anti-vaxxxer and anti-masker who, according to some reports, succumbed to covid) involves Munice, Indiana. At the time, I was attending Ball State and living in a big multi-story apartment block stretching into the heavens around University and Jackson. One morning at 2 am I was awakened in my ground floor flat by the blaring sounds of "Bat Out of Hell" coming through the paper thin walls of my bedroom and my next door neighbours whatever. It wasn't the best introduction to the Texan but I ended up kind of liking the song.

When Old Joe Went to Sin City: Musings on DixiePublicans Masquerading as Democrats

One never expected much from old Joe Manchin beyond the Corporate Inquisition. One suspects he would sell out his own mother for BigCorporateAmerica. It is sad to see that SinCity is a kind of clone of old Joe, however, a clone with a bit of a difference. While old Joe, no doubt, would have sold out Jewish citizens to German Nazis for BrotherCoal, SinCity sells American citizens out to a utterly moronic idea, the idea that macchiavelian our way or the highway DixiePublicans (definitely tipsy) will "get along" if we simply look the other way while they, who don't trust their own ideas in the marketplace of ideas, manipulate voting and gerrymander their way toward Theocratic America. SinCity, get thee to the increasingly fascist Dixiepublican Party. That is where you truly belong. Bah humbug.

In the Land of Cotton: Musings on Contemporary Dixiecrats...

Now this is priceless. You can't dream this crap up. For someone like Sinema, who refuses to make Congress work again and who supports voting dispossession, to celebrate service on MLK Day is an astounding example of tone deafness. But then Sin is a politician without apparently much of a social ethical consciousness or a sense of history.

Well here is some real authentic history for you. Using the filibuster to block a voting rights bill and undermine, in the process, the civil rights of Americans (something the illegitmate Supreme Court in all their theorcratic and authoritian Christian lackeysism supports), does that sound familiar? Well it should because that is what the Dixiecrats did in the 1960s. That is what they, the Republicans cum Dixiecrats, along with their good old time Dixiecrat felllow travellers (It's the Sin), are doing today. The difference is that in the 1960s there were Republicans who supported the bill and who supported the right of all Americans to vote. Now that the Republicans have been dixiefornicated, theocraticised, and authoritianised, all they care about is power, their power. And, as a result, once again, the Republicans are displaying for those with eyes to really see that which is truly and fully disgusting about human beings, their fake American oligarchic "democracy" (Jolly Joe Manchin is, of course, a running dog lackey for the Big Corporation that really runs the US; I suspect the Sin is too), and their fake Mammon worshipping Dollar Bill and White Race Christianity.

There the Right Wing Blowhole Blows...

The news headline blares: Governor of Virginia bans Critical Race Theory. You can't make this shite up. First off, CRT isn't generally taught in primary and secondary schools in Virginia so there is literally nothing to cancel. But then these right-wing loops love to blow fictional spew through their blow holes for political fun and economic profit. Second, to ban CRT at Virginia Tech or UVA raises free speech issues, you know, the free speech guarenteed in the US Contsitution right wing morons like the governor of Virginia claim to think was handed down by god in white gloves from golden heaven. It also points up the fact that right-wing anti-intellectual nuts who have been bathed in rivers of mythic fiction that they mistake for fact and simply can't handle historical fact or methodological validity. Finally, "brainiacs" like the governor of Virginia claim to hate cancel culture while simultaneously cancelling culture. What more can you say about these  gumby's other than that they are gomerian morons? Uh, that they are slimy, slaggy, and skanky Macchiavelian demagogues with delusions of righteousness and delusions of messiahood who think that their way is the only way. I suppose that one might say that in all this they truly do represent the worst in religion.

By the way, I can't wait for the Abbey Lincoln v. Freddy Douglas debate...

Musings on the Brave New World of Digital Television

 

Jean Baudrillard in his brief and fascinating monograph The Mirror of Production argued that the world has undergone at least three communication revolutions--oral, representational, and postmodern--and that these communication and cultural revolutions, which are tied to economic change, are as important and consequential if not more important and consequential than the economic transformation from traditional (hunter-gatherer, agricultural), to industrial, and to post-industrial. Marx's approach to the transition from the feudal to the capitalist, Baudrillard asserts, for instance, was grounded in a representational cultural and ideological communication formation pointing up just how consequent, important, and central cultural and communication change was and is.

The transition from analogue to digital television in the early twenty-first century has foregrounded for me again just how important cultural and communication changes and the relation between these cultural changes and economics is in human history. In the brave new world of on-air commercial digital TV there are, as far as I can tell, two broad types of digital television networks. There are, to name a few, the Me-TV, Antenna TV, Start TV, Get TV, and Decades TV networks of the brave new digital TV universe. These TV networks operate as TV networks typically have in Australia, the UK, Canada, and the US during my lifetime. They show TV shows complete or slightly edited (commercials have increased over the years) in acts with commercials as part of the televisual flow between the acts. 

Then there are the TV networks which, in my case, can be found on more fly-by-night and less economically sound TV stations such as that of WYBN in New York's Catskills Region. WYBN, a TV station that is more dreadfully incompetent technologically than I have ever seen from a TV station during my 67-year-life. WYBN's Retro TV and Classic Reruns TV, for instance, are the television equivalent of capitalist snake oil salesmen and flim flam men. They buy shows on the cheap, shows that haven't been seen on the airwaves for decades, something that actually makes them of interest for the historian, and may even be in the public domain, and stick them around the commercials that dominate the televisual flow of the networks on the station. For these stations and networks, the commercials that run around and over the TV shows cutting them into fragments rather than acts in the process, are the raison d'etre and at the heart of these TV stations and its several networks. WYBN and these networks appear to care little about the fictional and non-fictional TV shows they broadcast and care all about the monies fragmented TV brings from showing the commercials that are the real stars if probably not the real draws of the networks and station. 

I know endless commercials with fragments of TV shows in between are not of interest to me which is why I avoid WYBN like the covid plague these days. I tried to watch the 1957 film The Pajama Game on Classic Reruns TV and WYBN last week but gave up because of the slicing and dicing and commercial saturated bombing of commercials during the film in the wee hours of the morning to such an extent that it was no longer possible to make sense of the film. I have not watched WYBN since. Others, if Facebook posts are representative, also seem to have a problem with the commercial dominated WYBN as well. WYBN's Facebook page, which once allowed comments, no longer does. It doesn't even allow you to contact or message this king of incompetents anymore though a contact email address does remain on the page. I understand the reason for this; the station got hammered on Facebook for its everyday incompetencies, its commercials running over the beginnings of shows, its commercials running over the ends of shows, its commercials fragmenting shows, and its regularly disappearing networks, particularly Retro TV and the now sadly disappeared France-24. Interestingly, now one can only share the commercials that now dominate the WYBN Facebook page just as they dominate the station in general. All this, of course, tells you everything you need to know about WYBN.

I want to come back to Baudrillard again as I end this post. Baudrillard was categorised by commentators as a postmodernist theorist during his intellectual lifetime. In one understanding of postmodernism, one Baudrillard emphasised, the switch from a representationally dominated cultural formation to a postmodernist cultural formation has brought with it Disneyfication or simulation, the confusion of the simulated "fake" with the representationally "real", and the conflation of the "real" and the "fake". In this scenario the commercials that are the stars of WYBN represent the conquest of simulated magical commercial capitalist "realism". On the other hand, one might argue that the fact that commercials are at the heart of WYBN's Retro TV and Classic Reruns TV simply foregrounds what has always been at the real pecuniary rather than the fake entertainment and, to a much lesser extent, informational heart of American TV, commercials and their magic system. TV has always been and always is all about the profit.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: David Hurwitz and the Church of the Anti-HIP Mind

I grew up listening to and even playing, until an injury, classical music. I have been buying classical albums and CDs since at least the 1970s quite regularly and have accumulated, as I have moved along the life cycle from teenage years to growing old age, a mountain of CDs that are increasingly becoming difficult for increasingly sickly me to deal with. I have also been reading classical record and CD reviews since the 1970s. I was thus quite happy to see that David Hurwitz, currently executive editor of and self-professed spokemodel for Classics Today, with his backdrop of mountains of CDs, had begun producing videos during the pandemic on YouTube with him as the star critic of these self-produced and self-directed, one assumes, mini-"documentaries".

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy, for the most part Hurwitz's reviews of Mahler, Shostakovich, Beethoven, the underrated Nielsen, and Martinu, you name it on YouTube. That said, he is not the only reviewer I read. I tend to be as catholic in the reviewers I read just as I am in the various type of performances I listen to and frankly enjoy. What I have grown increasingly weary of, however, is Hurwitz's seemingly never ending obsession--that is what auteurists would call it--with the presumed evils--historical (the omnipresent mention of vibrato), ethical, moral, aesthetic, etc.--of Historically Informed Performance or HIP, performance practises that began to emerge after the 1970s. Increasingly, in the face of Hurwitz's almost constant jeremiads on the deviltries of HIP, I have come to think of him as the high priest of a cult and his obsessions as at the heart of a cultic religion constructed around the evil of some profane phenomenon, in this case the aforementioned unhip HIP. 

Hurwitz's priestly rants against HIP reached a fever pitch recently with his YouTube video entitled "Music Chat: Period Performance is Killing the Classics". In that talk Hurwitz seemed to assert that one of the reasons if not the major reason for the decline of contemporary classical music is the cookie cutter idiocies of the HIP crowd. Putting aside the issue of whether the classical music industry is in decline or whether the action has shifted from the once Big Boy godfathers of the industry to companies like Naxos, which also distributes a bevy of smaller labels, and BIS, to choose two of many increasingly significant players in the classical music industry, and putting aside the health of digital media like Naxos Radio, I found myself puzzled by what seemed to me Hurwitz's rather reductive argument.

I was taken aback because generally speaking, in my experience and in my research, I learned that one can easily recognise the fact that a variety of factors influence everything and everyone including the classical music industry. There's economics, for instance. With respect to the classical music industry, the music industry, the media, and corporations, all of these have been impacted by, whatever you want to call it--I will call it neo-liberalism or revitalised laissez-faire liberalism with its dogma that the market is rational--an empirically ludicrous notion--and always right--an even more vacuum packed empirically ludicrous notion--and neo-liberal corporate oriented globalisation (a globalisation that allows corporations and monies free movement but not labour). There's politics. Political bureaucracies, dominated as they are by neo-liberal ideologies and economic elites, have allowed the theology of neo-liberalism to become uncritical dogma in their minds and they bow before it and give obeisance to it as if it was a sacred rite and a holy god. There's demographics. With regard to the classical music industry, we might want to ask whether there demographic shifts going on in classical music listening? How have these intersected with important cultural factors such as class? race? gender? status? cultural capital? social capital? the rise of moronic dumbed down populist elitism and give rich people their freedom populist movements? There's geography. Here we might want to think about the issue of whether geographical patterns of classical music listening and practise have shifted. Are there variations in these across space? Then there is the big one, culture. Here we might want to reflect upon whether performance practises have previously changed across space and time before and whether they will they continue to do so in the future given the nature of consumerism, public relations, and advertising propaganda. Is the cult of the fad of the moment built into consumer capitalism? Is the neoliberal media in general dominated by a cookie cutter formulaic approach (see Hollywood paint by the genre numbers "adolescent" blockbusters with their mania for anti-realism and anti-naturalism) for economic reasons and is that what the masses really want (bread and circuses)? If it is, isn't it thus silly to blame HIP, a mirror and reflection (a dependent variable) rather than a cause (independent variable), for the current status of the classical music industry? And what about the socialised eyes of the beholder?

Anyway, all of this is a short way of saying I prefer multifactorial approaches which recognise that economics, politics, culture, demography, and geography all impact human life, including the classical music industry and its bureaucracies and practises, to those that are more reductive and reductionist. I have to admit, however, that I have increasingly grown not to expect little more than Spanish inquisitions from the many cults of the emotionally fevered poison minds out there in the normative determines descriptive, political and ideological correctness determines reality, lalaland. Let me end this post by noting that I didn't expect a kind of Spanish inquisition, one milder in form to be sure, from the clearly intelligent, knowledgeable, learned, and studied David Hurwitz's of the world. But I think that is what I got.

One further note before I go: Hurwitz is yet another one of those blokes who whinges and whines about wokeness and cancel culture while engaging in both regularly. He apparently is on a mission from god to awaken those who use social media about the historical mistakes of historically informed practise (vibrato) and he censors posts on his site that critique or add to his politically and ideologically correct rants, itself a long historically informed practise.

 

 

The Books of My Life: A Christian America

 

When I was an undergraduate student in religious studies one of the deans of American Christian history and more specifically American Protestant history was Robert Handy. Handy, who taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, along with Winthrop Hudson, William Hutchison, William McLoughlin, Edwin Gaustad, and H. Richard Niebuhr, were all scholars of the history of American Christianity and American Protestantism who I learned a great deal from about American Christianity and American Protestantism, who I admired, and who I wanted to emulate in my historical and sociological scholarship on American Protestantism and new religious movements as I progressed through my intellectual and academic career.

One of the most noted and well-known of Handy's books is his A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, revised and enlarged, 1984). Handy's classic history, written in a period of great demographic, cultural, economic, and political change in the United States, explores the impact of constitutional disestablishment, White Christian nationalism, urbanisation, industrialisation, wars, revolutions, economic booms and busts, and the increasing demographic, political, economic, and cultural diversity of the United States had on White evangelicalism from the American Revolution to the Reagan Revolution. Along the way Handy explores how mainstream White Protestantism linked Protestantism (translation White evangelical Protestantism), the Christianisation of America through voluntarism (translation evangelical Protestantisation), global missions (translation the evangelical Protestantisation of the world through voluntarism), and Americanism (Gilded Age and after notions of the economic, political, cultural, and, demographic superiority of the "civilisation" of the US), in both its Gilded Age and post-Gilded Age Victorian or traditionalist individual oriented or pietistic form and its more liberal Progressive or social gospel forms. Taking a dynamic approach Handy also explores how historical economic, political, cultural, and demographic changes in the US impacted these two dominant strains of White Protestantism over time leading eventually to an acceptance of diversity and pluralism, cities, and industrialisation. 

Handy argues that this White Protestant (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist) dominance lasted until what he calls the second disestablishment after WWI. After WWI, Handy argues, thanks to the currents of cultural disillusion and the rise of such secular social theories as Pragmatism, a disestablishment that continued into the 1980s and which led to increasing divisions in a Protestantism that had once been somewhat united around broad conceptions of mission and the superiority of American civilisation, declined. Handy ends his book by noting the increasing importance of right-wing thought, the increasing success of right wingers in American politics, and the increasing prominence and influence of right-wing religion in American life. Handy implies that, thanks to disestablishment and increasing demographic, cultural, political, and cultural diversity, a disestablishment and pluralism that most right wing Christians continue to believe in, the revived White evangelical Americanism of the post-LBJ era was unlikely to turn back the clock to the nineteenth century when White evangelical Protestantism did dominate American economic, political, cultural, and demographic life and did when White evangelicals did believe that America was god's chosen nation and Americans were god's chosen peoples. 

Retrospective history is, of course, always twenty-twenty. From the vantage point of 2021 the history and sociology of White evangelical Protestantism looks somewhat different than it did from 1981. With the revival of evangelical and political theocratism with their our way or the highway mentalities when it comes to politics, economics, and culture, its White supremacism (even when it is denied by its proponents), and its connections to the Cult of Trump, activist evangelical Christianity and its Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, and Judaism right wing allies may be able to at turn the clock back at least to the civil war, a cold and hot civil war that is once again being fought out over who is a "real American", over what a "real American culture, politics, and economics should look like, and what a America should be. Beyond the revival of the theocratic right in its religious and secular forms in late twentieth century and twenty first century America, some might wonder whether Handy's heavy emphasis on elite evangelical theologians and the official records of the mainstream denominations may be problematic in terms of getting at what individual evangelicals thought about the Protestant dominance of the US and its ideologies of Christianisation and Americanism. One also wonders whether there were geographic variations in White evangelical culture given that historical studies of the American (and Canadian) West have shown that that region is more open to White sects and cults than the South, for instance.

Regardless of what one thinks about Handy's interpretation of post-second disestablishment America and its religious culture and his use of sources, A Christian America is an important book that should and must be read by anyone who seeks to understand the role of White Protestant evangelicalism in American economics, politics, and culture. This is a must read for anyone interested in American religious history and a must read for anyone who wants to know how we got to now.

The Dr. Steven Elfant Kiada

Complaint Against:
Dr. Steven Elfant
855 Central Ave, Suite Ll-112
Albany, NY 12206
518.437.1757
NPI: 1710069463
License: X004851-1 (NY)
Taxonomy: 11N00000X

Complainant:
Dr. Ronald Helfrich Jnr

Complaint:
Some essential backstory first: I saw Doctor Steven Elfant of 845 Central Avenue, Suite L112, Albany, NY 12206, for muscle and neck problems after an accident. State Farm (claim number 52-2B97-641), my automobile insurance company at the time, paid for my care with Elfant from 22 January 2013 and for several months afterwards.

Now back to the present: this case was never closed by Elfant. Given that New York State law requires the case to be closed by the attending physician, in this case Elfant, and Elfant did not close the case, the case remains open and it is now affecting my Medicare coverage in a negative way. Because the case was never closed Medicare has the State Farm coverage as my primary and Medicare as my secondary. Since State Farm isn't covering my doctor and medical bills, Medicare won't and can't pay them. Welcome to my bureaucratic nightmare. I was able to get Medicare changed to primary via the phone but this is, until the case is formally and officially closed, only a short-term solution to a long-term problem. I, of course, want a long-term solution so I don't have to call Medicare and to through the whole process again and again.

I contacted Elfant by phone and asked him to send a letter to State Farm closing the case. Elfant did not allow me to explain the issue talking over me whenever I tried to explain and repeatedly claiming that Medicare and State Farm were lying to me. He initially refused point blank to send a letter to State Farm and that the case could not be open because that is not the way insurance works and works in New York State. Assemblyman John McDonald, on the other hand, who I contacted about this issue, notified me that it is the law in NY State that a case like mine remains open in the state until it is closed by the attending physician. Later, Elfant called me back by phone and agreed to sign a letter if I wrote it. 

Needless to say, I find such behaviour unacceptable, problematic, and unprofessional hence my formal complaint herein. By initially refusing to listen to why I needed him to close the case and by dismissing the empirical facts, Elfant negatively impacted my health care, my health, and the doctors Medicare owes monies to that I saw.

In sum, Dr. Elfant violated his obligation to me and to NY State law when he refused to do anything about the open State Farm insurance that is keeping me from getting my Medicare properly and, as a consequence, is keeping Medicare from paying my doctors. He only reluctantly agreed to do this IF AND ONLY IF I wrote the letter for him and I assumed responsibility for everything relating to closing the State Farm insurance. I will be doing this as soon as I get the letter from State Farm. 

In closing, let me point up the arrogance (it is arrogance when you think you are right when you are actually wrong) of Elfant expressed in his rhetoric that he knows NY State law and insurance issues better than any other party including a representative of NY state, State Farm, and Medicare, regardless of any facts to the contrary. Let me also note his total lack of concern about the fact that his failure to close the State Farm case is negatively impacting my Medicare and Medicare's ability to pay my doctors. Finally, let me point out that his behaviour here is a clear violation of every responsibility of his profession, particularly his responsiblity to his patients. I need something to be done about this so I can get on with my life and so Medicare assumes responsibility for my medical care.

Thank you for your prompt attention.

Dr. Ronald Gail Helfrich Jnr.

 

The Books of My Life: Kibbutz

 

When I was young in the 1970s I, if memory serves, I recall that I romanticised the Israeli kibbutz movement, specifically the "secular" Israeli kibbutz movement, and I romanticised "secular" Zionism and, as a logical consequence, the state of Israel. However, experience with the kibbutzim in the 1970s along with rising cynicism related to the anti-Vietnam war movement, governmental responses to the peace movement, government and corporate lying, capitalist flim flammery, the negative as well as positive wages of secular and religious zionism, and a host of other de-romanticising currents in the post-sixties era, cured me once and for all of romanticism, utopianism, saint making, and a missionary zeal to change the world, at least beyond the occasional armchair intellectual varieties of each.

Despite all of this I still have an interest in communal movements like those of the Hutterites, which has been around for hundreds of years, and the kibbutzim, both of which show that there are viable and workable political, economic, and cultural alternatives to dominant and mainstream forms of political, economic, and cultural organisation and action. Given this continued interest in the kibbutzim, moshavim, and workers cooperatives, it should not be surprising that I finally got around to reading one of the classic works of social science on the kibbutz, Melford Spiro's Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, augmented edition, 1970. Kibbutz would turn out to be the first of a three-book trilogy Spiro would write and periodically update between the 1960s and the 2000s. Kibbutz was updated in 1963 and 1970. The second, Children of the Kibbutz, was published in 1958 and updated in 1965 and 1975. The last, Gender and Culture: The Kibbutz Revisited, was published in 1979 and updated in 1996.

All three of Spiro's works on the secular and socialist kibbutz he gave the anonymous name Kiryat Yedidim to, are grounded on Spiro and his wife's almost a year's worth of ethnographic fieldwork in 1951 at Kiryat Yedidim and periodic returns to the kibbutz in the 1960s and 1970s. Spiro's Kibbutz, however, is not simply an ethnography. Spiro not only explores the contemporary economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of Kiryat Yedidim during the year he was there, he also explores the history of Kiryat Yedidim and its relation to broader Israeli societym if too briefly. Spiro provides us with a short prehistory of Kiryat Yedidim. He explores the romantic, romantic socialist, and romantic zionist background of Yedidim's founders who immgrated from Poland to Palestine in the 1920s. He explores the harsh environment of central Palestine that the kibbutz grew up in and the changes it experienced as it grew up. He explores the communal agricultural dominated economic system of the kibbutz. He explores the participatory democratic political organisation of Yedidim with its rotating offices. He explores the migrations or aliyas of later generations to the commune and the cultural tensions this sometimes brought.

Spiro's attention to tensions point up the fact that Spriro's Kibbutz is not grounded in a purely equilibrium, consensus, or static approach to social and cultural formations. While Spiro notes, for instance, that high social status attached to agricultural work in a commune where the founders romanticised and celebrated agricultural work and going back to nature, he also explores the lower status service sector of Yedidim and the need to rotate these jobs because many did not want to do them, and the tensions that seemed to be inherent in this sector of the Yedidim  economy. He explores the somewhat gendered, as we would call it today, nature of the service sector and the tensions this brought. He explores socialisation practises in the kibbutz, particularly as it relates to child rearing and schooling, and the tensions these sometimes brought.

One of the most interesting, at least to me, aspects of Spiro's Kibbutz is his contention, a contention I find compelling, that Kiryat Yedidim and other similar kibbutzim, are akin to religious sects. Religion, after all, at least on one level, is about meaning and "secular" social forms, including social movements like the kibbutz movement, also give meaning to the world around and to their place in the world around them. As Spiro notes, the meaning system, some of the symbol system, and some of the rites of passage associated with the commune, were grounded in a meaning system that was messianic, millennial, millennialist, evangelical and ethnocentric. Yedidim's kibbutzniks believed that were a city on a hill, a light unto the world, an instantiation--Yedidim and other kibbutzim created an institution and organisation grounded in these cultural ideologies--of how the world could potentially be not as it was but as it was realistically imagined and concretely put in place.

Spiro's book is not without its problems. His prophetic abilities, for instance, are sometimes less than perfect as he himself notes in the updates to the book. In the original text of Kibbutz Spiro contends that a transformation in Yedidim's Soviet Union as messianic and missionary ideologies would lead to a transformation of the commune, if not its end, if they declined and vanished proved wrong. He emphasises the tensions female "gossip" brought at Kiryat Yedidim but he does not explore the role male "gossip" might have played in raising tensions in Yedidim. He doesn't square the circle between the respective impacts of nature and nurture, broader economic, political, and cultural factors, on tensions over family, child rearing, service sector work, which was becoming gendered with more women doing service work and less doing agricultural labour, as I noted earlier. He doesn't compare the kibbutz movement with one of its perhaps closest relatives, Hutterite communes and communalism. He doesn't give as full an exploration and explanation of the various kibbutzim federations as I would like to have seen. Still, Spiro's book is a very interesting historical, social and cultural anthropological, and sociological approach to the Israeli commune movement, and I highly recommend it. Essential reading for anyone interested in alternative social systems and communal and cooperative forms of organisation.