A Vital Comparison

 Will the U.S. Follow Hungary Into Autocracy?

As has been evident for a while, the Republican Party’s ideologues have adopted the methods of Orban’s Fidesz Party in Hungary in their bid to turn the U.S. into an autocratic, capitalist ‘illiberal democracy.’  Orban has become a European leader in the EU for other far-right movements like Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally, the Netherland’s Party for Freedom, Austria’s Freedom Party, the Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law & Justice.  The Israeli Likud has just joined.  Putin’s United Russia and Argentina’s Milei are also parts of this reactionary political front, but not yet formal members.

Orban has gained a main lock on the media; the universities and schools; the judicial system; the Parliament; the arts complex, grants from the EU; the banking and financial system and more. This was done slowly over 15 years, breaking laws and expectations, with the EU allowing some of it.  The EU has yet to hold up some grants for instance. 

Fidesz revised the Constitution 12 times.  They instituted gerrymandering, packing opponents into larger districts.  They got rid of run-offs in elections.  They blocked joint electoral lists.  They removed many judges as ‘too old’ and appointed new ones of their own.  They increased the size of the Constitutional Court.  That Court was outlawed from reviewing budget-related laws, so the Parliament retained that power. The Curia, Hungary’s top court, was put in the hands of a Fidesz loyalist.  They extended the terms of these judges, then created a new court system for administrative issues, all controlled by Fidesz. 

They fired many civil servants and hired their own loyalists.  They took over TV and radio media by having wealthy supporters buy outlets, or putting them under a ‘Media Council’ for TV and radio as government media or as paid outlets thru Fidesz advertising. The Council enables censorship.  In 2022 the opposition candidate got 5 minutes on one station once. All that the opposition had was on-line. 

They use business patronage to deny funds to any opposition, as businesses were afraid to anger Fidesz.  They outlawed sending political materials through the mails.  They allow some people living outside Hungary as ‘honorary citizens’ (Transylvania) to vote by mail while making it almost impossible for actual Hungarians living abroad to vote.  They have blocked foreign NGOs.  They closed certain universities, while putting a government body in control of the rest.  They dominate the arts institutions through financial grants.  They are starving Budapest of funds for hospitals and more, a pattern that Trump is trying to use.

They stole far-right anti-immigrant and anti-Roma ideology from Jobbik, the fascistic far-right party - and built ‘a wall,’ supplementing that with culture war rhetoric from the U.S. about gays, identity and birth rates.  Orban has just banned Pride celebrations in Budapest.

Hungary & the U.S.

What are the differences and similarities between Hungary and the U.S.? 

The Republicans have pushed white Christian nationalism and their targets are immigrants, Latinos and African-Americans primarily.  The difference is that there are already millions of actual immigrants in the U.S, so the rhetoric might be the same in Hungary but the situation on the ground is completely different.  African Americans, Arabs, Africans, Asians and Latinos make up a huge percentage of the U.S. population, unlike the Roma and tiny groups of 'foreigners' in Hungary.

Hungary changed their Constitution, yet changing the Constitution in the U.S. is almost impossible.  ‘Interpretations’ can change, as the Supreme Court is now in ‘originalist’ hands, but that is not the same thing.  Orban practices obvious gerrymandering, as is done in the U.S., always securing a majority in the Parliament.  The Republicans haven’t achieved a permanent majority yet.  The small Hungarian judicial system was overhauled by Orban, replacing many judges.  The Republicans would have to somehow institute a nationwide purge of judges in a far larger system.

So the MAGA strategy is to ignore rulings – to ‘move fast and break things’ while hoping the Supreme Court will back them up.  The ability to ‘enforce’ a judicial decision on Trump is almost impossible, as any decision against him has to be enforced by someone.  He will not be impeached, as he controls the Congress right now. They do not care about legality as they know the courts are too slow, too obtuse or too cowed.  Orban has used a ‘state of emergency’ 3 times already, and Hungary is still under one due to the Ukraine war, as part of a ‘unitary executive’ outlook.  If Trump declares some sort of invasion or Insurrection ‘emergency’ it will be harder to justify and might provoke military refusal or acts of armed resistance.

Hungary has around 9.6 million people, while the U.S. has 340.1 million.  Note, a smaller population is easier to dominate.  Hungary has a very small bourgeoisie, including many cronies of Orban’s who he has enriched.  Farmers and petit-bourgeois small businessmen support Fidesz outside of Budapest, as would be predicted.  The Hungarian bourgeoisie itself has a narrow, national profile and interest.  The U.S. on the other hand has a very large and powerful bourgeoisie, which is not of one mind, but is split between two main factions, with some sectors switching sides, as the tech sector has just done, crossing to Trump.  A large sector of the U.S. bourgeoisie does business across the world, including the Trumpist oil sector, so they are not purely nationalist, as their relation to the world is transactional. The petit-bourgeoisie in the U.S. is split between the professional strata and the businessmen/farmer strata, but the latter - Trump’s voting base - is nationally oriented. Hence class structures are different in both size and complexity in each country.  What the nationally-oriented capitalists and small capitalists forget is that we are in a world economy.  Tariffs will make that quite clear, which is what large capitalists are especially worrying about.

The working-class in Hungary is the majority, but still small, with only one big city in the country.  There are more small farmers and fewer rural workers.  The class structure of the U.S. is complex and huge.  The city of 1.6 million, Budapest, provides the biggest obstacle to Orban.  The next biggest city in Hungary has 115k citizens, Debrecen.  The U.S. has 9 cities over a million and 27 cities with populations from under 1 million to a half million, so there are many more sites of opposition.  If you look at metro areas, there are 54 metros over a million in the U.S.  Hungary is dominated by rural areas and smaller cities and towns.  The U.S. is not, except in its undemocratic Constitution which gives power to small states and rural areas through the Senate, the Electoral College, the Constitution and now the Supreme Court. The U.S. military is far vaster than Hungary’s and its role could become key, especially if all its soldiers are not on board with abrupt changes.

The press in the U.S. is variegated and multiple, though 6 large corporations control nearly all content.  If those 6 could be intimidated into conforming then that would be a victory for Orbanism.  That is happening right now in small ways. U.S. oppositional journalism is migrating to the internet, as in Hungary.

The opposition to Orban and Fidesz is scattered, temporary and weak.  There is an LMP (Green Party), a center-left Democratic Coalition, a neo-liberal Socialist Party, a center-right Tisza grouping, a fascistic Jobbik Party and others, but they get a minority of votes due to the system.  The opposition coalition in 2022 included some of these smaller parties and lost the election.  The opposition has no guiding idea of the future except getting rid of Orban, using anti-corruption as the main political angle. 

In the U.S. the Democratic Party is far larger and more powerful, yet comes off as weak, moralistic and yearning for ‘bipartisanship.’ Democratic Congress people actually voted for Trump cabinet and Supreme Court nominees, for instance.  It has no guiding idea of the future except getting rid of Trump.  So both opposition parties, while of varying sizes, have no future outlook and come off as parties of a dead ‘establishment.’  Neither is oriented towards the material needs of the working class or the future as they see it.  As some labor leaders and Marxists have noted, it is clueless ‘opposition’ parties that enable authoritarians and fascists.  Tony Mazzocchi of OCAW said about the founding of the Labor Party in the U.S., that if we don’t win workers they will move towards a far-right populist movement.  A plurality of the U.S. population doesn’t even vote any more.

Classes

Socialist transitional strategies are taboo in both countries, as Parties red-bait regularly.  So the only opposition  to Orban/Trump comes from liberal or neo-liberal ideology, both ideas of high-capitalism.  Yet capital is passing into another phase, that of late autocratic capitalism, using Libertarianism. The oppositions are living in the past as a result, as a stressed capital does not really need even bourgeois ‘democracy.’ 

Orban himself came out of the anti-Communist student movement in the late 1980s and many of his closest allies are friends from that time.  I.E. his government is personalist, much like the Trump loyalists, chosen for their fealty and personal ties, not for competence or knowledge. Orban is smarter than Trump, though Trump is surrounded by think-tankers and Project 2025.  Both represent an abandonment of internationalism of a neo-liberal sort in favor of bully nationalism, a perspective impossible in a world economy in the long run. It is a prelude to barbarism.

Historically Hungary was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1919: a short period in 1919 of a Red council republic; a long period up to 1944 of Horthyite autocracy and collaboration with Germany; 1 year of Arrow Cross fascism and round-ups of Jews; a deformed workers’ state period until 1989 and then the re-institution of capitalism and the first institution of bourgeois democracy.  Orban and Fidesz have now been in power for 15 years of that period as an ‘illiberal democracy.’  So the history of the 2 countries is very different, with Hungary having various forms of top-down rule for much longer.

In Hungary govt. money is doled out to capitalist cronies, families that have many Hungarian children and the comfortable middle-class.  The EU gives more to Hungary than they contribute to the EU, and then EU money is stolen.  It is somewhat like Southern states in the U.S. who feed at the federal government tax trough and northern productivity.  There are unions for teachers, bus drivers and so on in Hungary but blue-collar workers as a whole are not targets of largesse.  Small villages and towns do not have much support either – doctors and teachers don’t want to work there, much like the U.S.  Because of emigration, possible political enemies, a brain drain, labor and youth leave for other EU countries.  This is not the same as in the U.S.  There are far more guns in the U.S., while only a few Hungarian hunters have arms.  This could prove to be a key issue at some point.  Catholicism is stronger in Hungary than the U.S.  In the U.S. 30% of the population is atheist, agnostic or ‘unchurched.’  Orban heavily relies on religion instead, creating a virtual Catholic theocracy even though many Hungarians are not actually observant.

Conclusion

Orbanism is unlike classical fascism and should be understood that way.  Trump has a fascist fringe on the streets in the shape of the 3%ers, Oath Keepers, Patriot Front and Proud Boys, along with mercenaries like Eric Prince’s outfits. They are backup thugs to be used at certain times.  But using complete state and street terror and murder against the working class is not yet in their Libertarian wheel-house.  They are going to try what I call the Anaconda – to strangle democratic rights, public services and labor unions in an attempt to privatize everything for profit, putting capital completely in charge without as much bloodshed. This is how capital learns from its prior fascist mistakes.  Looting the public sector is actually a sign of capitalist weakness due to falling profit rates, which is why they are desperate to privatize public sources of wealth or destroy parts of the government that impede their profitability.  

The upshot is that Orbanism, from these facts, probably cannot be fully implemented in the U.S. as it was in Hungary due to differences in culture, national size, class structure, legal institutions, ethnicity and economic power. Democratic Party panic over Orban is designed to demobilize and depress opposition.  “Move fast and break things” will come back to haunt Trump and his cronies, as is happening now.  Orban took years, while Trump is trying to do it immediately.  The key thing, of course, is the resistance of, not the Congress or even the legal system but the general population, and especially the working class.  Class struggle will have to go beyond legalism and result in new forms of transitional collectivity, like workplace and community committees, united fronts, anti-fascist fronts and new electoral labor parties.  If the population rolls over on the other hand, then authoritarianism will be instituted, even in the U.S.  If Orbanism fails, the Right may choose a more direct method... fascism.  

Prior blogspot reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Hungary,” “Orban,” “libertarian.”

Kultur Kommissar / March 2, 2025

The 1990s Labor Party

 Panel on the Labor Party

Attended by over 1,000 people on-line, this 2/20/25 seminar by four former leaders of the Labor Party (LP) and Labor Party Advocates reflected back on what happened, and perhaps what could happen in the future. The LP was an attempt to build a labor-based Left electoral party in the 1990s.  The warning by one of the founders of the LP, Tony Mazzocchi of OCAW, was repeated several times by the speakers.  Mazzocchi said that if the LP didn’t succeed, workers would be drawn to right-wing populism.  That has come true with the second Trump victory and the 2024 electoral collapse of the centrist Democratic Party.  It reflects a well-known historical point that liberal or liberal-left weakness and ignoring the working-class encourages fascism and the Right. 

The event was hosted by DSA’s National Labor Commission, the UE, UAW Region 9a, Socialist Register and Project Rank & File.  The LP at one time encompassed about 1/3^rd of the U.S. union movement, along with community groups and local community chapters.  The 1996 LP was formed in Cleveland partly in reaction to Clinton’s NAFTA deal.  It is not to be confused with the 1973 “U.S. Labor Party” – a group of rightwing brown-shirt LaRouchites who still haunt the Left. 

The host for the panel was Stephen Maher, an editor for Socialist Register.  Presentations were made by Mark Dudzic, a former national organizer of the LP and member of OCAW, now leader of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare.  He described the history of neo-liberalism, starting under Carter in the late 1970s, up to the present day.  SUNY economist and former vice-chair of the NY LP Howard Botwinick discussed the successful writing of the pro-labor, social democratic program of the LP as a member of the program committee. Jenny Brown, an activist on abortion and workfare and former chair of the Alachua LP, who now seems to be in DSA, talked about how to work with differences in united fronts.  This centered around having ‘the right to abortion’ in the LP program, though without mentioning the term ‘abortion’ as a concession to Catholics in the Farm Labor Organizing Committee.  Carl Rosen, president of UE, quite rightly reflected on the mistakes of the LP and a possible way forward for labor.

My takeaway from the experience, as I was part of a Twin Cities LPA/ LP chapter, was that the LP failed to run candidates.  Our group of many unionists, ex-unionists, retired unionists, leftists and supporters were instead directed to door knock for single-payer.  This was a useless project which petered out like a dying swan.  Rosen in his analysis made the same point about the LP’s failure to run candidates. Carefully choosing a weak point in the electoral system, perhaps an urban area that had a strong labor union base, and represented by a right-wing or weak Democrat or weak Republican, could have led to a breakthrough. Instead the LP put up too many barriers to running.  Rosen thought that independent labor candidacies were still possible, citing a recent near-successful run by a pro-labor independent.    Everyone called doing this by the wonky term ‘proof of concept’ – i.e. proving in the real world that an idea has legs.

Others on the panel, like Dudzic, said perhaps the LP was ‘premature.’  Botwinick thought perhaps things should have ‘moved slower.’  Rosen disagreed, especially now as things have gone past the point of Mazzocchi’s prediction coming true.  He said we needed to “move faster,” in effect challenging the glacial, bureaucratic pace of the union movement and its addiction to Democrats. Some union leaders on the other hand, like the head of the Teamsters, have chosen to tail Trump’s anti-labor intentions and the flawed nomination of Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Labor Secretary, who has already back-peddled on the PRO Act.  

The first working-class target:  Federal workers and their unions.  The second target:  OSHA, NLRB, DOL and other labor agencies. The third target:  Immigrant labor in the millions.  The fourth:  Private and local public sector unions and the whole U.S. working class.  So… Occupy the Public Service parts of the Government!

A link to the 1.5+ hour podcast was given to attendees.  Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSpoJrmjp4Y

A link to an LP Reader .pdf is here:  Labor Party Reader.  National unions on board were:  Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, United Mine Workers, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, American Federation of Government Employees, Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, California Nurses Association, Farm Labor Organizing Committee.  

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Labor Party.”

Red Frog / February 27, 2025

"The horror! The horror!"

 “Cobalt Red – How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives” by Siddharth Kara, 2023

This is the true and grim story of the Congo (DRC), a rich land and people still being exploited for, among other commodities, cobalt. Cobalt is a necessary ingredient in the rechargeable batteries used by every large tech, manufacturing and car company in the world.  That includes Apple, Tesla, Samsung, Glencore, Daimler, along with the Chinese BYD, CATL and Huawei.  This book focuses on cobalt and the labor conditions of the ‘artisanal’ miners who do this work by hand, not industrial mining.

Kara traveled in person to the mining areas of the DRC between Lubumbashi and Kolwezi in the southern part of the country where huge deposits of copper and cobalt are located. This area is called Haut-Katanga and Lualaba. He compares conditions there to a continuation of King Leopold of Belgium’s rubber and timber empire and Lord Leverhulme’s palm nut plantations, which were little more than murder and slavery outposts.  As Roger Casement and Joseph Conrad discovered, the Congo was the real ‘Heart of Darkness.’ After independence from Belgium in 1960 and the execution of left nationalist Patrice Lumumba by locals with the help of the CIA in 1961, the government in Kinshasa has been dominated by one comprador dictator after another.  64 years of Mobutu, two Kabilas and now Tshisekedi.

HOW IT’S DONE

At present Chinese firms control 15 of the 19 biggest mining sites and companies in the DRC’s copper belt.  This gives them majority control of the mineral at the heart of electric batteries - cobalt. The hand digging is done by ‘artisanal’ miners called creuseurs, who are local families using primitive tools to dig the ore - heterogenite - out of the red ground and put it in sacks.  They get paid mostly by Chinese middle-men – negotiants - between $1 and $2 a day depending on its purity. The middle-men then transport the ore to mostly Chinese brokers – comptoirs – at ‘depots’, who sell to the large combines. 

Other minerals like tantalum/coltan from the DRC are key to making electronics, with the DRC producing 40% of the world’s supply.  Gold, silver, copper, diamonds, lithium and more are all mined there too, many times using these same primitive methods. These ‘artisanal’ miners dig 30% of the cobalt and 26% of the tantalum world-wide.  45 million miners work in the sector of ‘artisanal’ mining, called ASM. Kara does not have their percent in the DRC however but guesses it might be over 30%. Virtual slave cobalt is laundered by this hidden chain of diggers, negotiators and buyers that lead to the large processors, refiners and finally, battery producers. Both informal and industrial sector ores are mixed at the source. 

The ‘artisanal’ workers in the DRC might be the most exploited proletarians in existence, especially given the trillions cobalt is valued at as a commodity. The race for it started in the 1990s, principally for electric cars, and is now dominated by the Chinese.  This became part of the Chines “Belt and Road” initiative, as the Congo got a paved road for trains of semis to haul these minerals out to Zambia and on to China and Europe.  Nearly the only people getting rich inside the Congo are those connected to the government, along with their cronies.  It is a country that suffers from the capitalist ‘resource curse.’ 5.4 million deaths in the Congo have been attributed to fighting over control of ‘conflict’ minerals since 1998-2003.  Fighting has broadened in the north recently, led by Tutsi guerillas backed by reactionary Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who wants a ‘greater Rwanda’ evidently. 

If you are one to cheer Chinese ‘revolutionaries’ – a quaint way to put it at this point in history – you should examine how the export of capital from China is actually working.  Given the deep reformism of uncritical pro-China lefties, this might be difficult. In 2021 China processed 75% of the world’s cobalt and it was not just state-run or funded outfits doing this. And that brings up the obvious question – can a national state industry heavily exploit workers and nations overseas?  There is an obvious answer.

TRAVELS

Kara traveled to the DRC 3 times as a journalist, taking the road to Kolwezi from Lubumbashi’s airport.  A pass from a local administrator saved his life at one point, as everything in the mining belt is heavily guarded by armed police, soldiers or company militias. Because he looks Indian, he was able to avoid some problems, and was helped by local Indian guides.  While every consumer-facing company claims their production line is exempt from child labor, virtual slavery, bloodshed, health problems, environmental ruin and the like, Kara never saw ‘inspectors’ from Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)-certifying organizations like the GBA or RMI, nor proof their guarantees were working. It was ‘labor-washing’ from top to bottom, nice words on pages with no enforcement. 

High concentrations of lead, uranium and cobalt, along with other heavy metals, are found in the bodies of diggers, children and everyone in the copper belt, along with vegetables, chickens and pigs. It is transmitted in the air, water and soil, with lung problems being common.  Cancer rates are rising, the clinics are inadequate and water runoff is not monitored by the Congolese government even though the 2002 Mining Code mandates this. Local groups that talked to Kara attempt to protect miners, including about land disputes, yet get little traction.  According to Kara billions in Chinese money guarantees the government does nothing. The uranium for the Manhattan Project was even sourced here in Katanga in the 1940s. It is a poison zone. 

In an interview with a Chinese mid-level mine manager named Hu, Hu said that the problems with Africans is that they are lazy and disorganized.  That is why they are poor.  Hu added that if they didn’t receive so much foreign aid, they’d work harder.  Sound familiar?  Exploitation is always accompanied by racism or some other dominant class ideology.  Even by the ‘revolutionary’ Chinese, who have replaced Europeans and Mobutu’s Zaire/DRC state mines, which were sold off by Kabila to foreign firms. 

Kara tells many, many stories of poverty-stricken villages, of massive, tunnel and hard-scrabble mines, of the people he visited. Many locals work at mining because there are few jobs otherwise. Single females are subject to rape on a frequent basis and are paid less, so sometimes they work in groups.  Children are not paid.    There are girls with babies digging; children grabbed by commando militiamen forced to work; remote mines that tunnel underground like an anthill; diggers who work for the Congolese Army, which in turn sells to Chinese firms. The Army sometimes used force to gather or move workers to digs, but many were afraid to tell Kara their stories. 

BACKGROUND and FOREGROUND

Kara retells a mini-history of the Congo, from its European discovery in 1482 by Portuguese sailors, through slavery times, then as a Belgian colony, the journey of Stanley & Livingston, ‘independence,’ a neo colonial rebellion in Katanga led by Tshombe that led to the execution of Lumumba; and years of dictators … all overlaying the material riches of the country, profit being the real and continuing ‘heart of darkness.’        

The biggest mine in the DRC, TFM – Tenke Fungurume - is 1,500 square kilometers, the size of London.  The roads are choked with check points, semi-trailers, motorbikes, diesel and dust.  This mine is now 80% Chinese-owned, after going through U.S. hands, producing 150,700 tons of cobalt in 2021, an underestimate.  Forests were cleared, thousands were removed from their homes to build and expand it and there have been a number of riots. The ore is processed on-site using sulfuric acid, which gets in the water and air. 

Glencore, the Anglo-Swiss mining giant, owns the large Mutanda mine just west, which also removed residents. Because of Mutanda, locals realized there was something valuable on their land and started a co-operative named COMAKAT next door.  In a huge pit Kara estimated that he saw 15,000 men and boys hacking at the rock and earth for cobalt ore. This mine produces 180,000 tons a year and COMAKAT takes 20%, some of which actually went to the miners at a higher rate than other privatized mines.  There are several other cooperative artisanal mines in the region.  Kara also visits two small NGO-run artisanal mines, which allegedly prohibit child labor, have water and toilets on-site, sometimes supply workers with protective gear, shield women and might pay $3 a day.  But there were problems of failed or reduced payments, forged birth certificates and mixing ores with other mines, so he thinks both NGOs failed to do what they claimed.

Kara tracks instances of uranium smuggling by Chinese contractors.  He visits the biggest child-labor mine in the copper belt, Tilwezembe, full of horror stories. Most children work in the mining sector, as ‘public’ schooling is not funded in the DRC very well, so a fee is required.  Or they are too tired from working to pay attention even when they do attend school.  He interviews a government mining official from Kinshasa who claims all the critical NGOs are lying about conditions in the DRC mining sectors.  He also accuses the foreign mining companies of tax evasion by under-counting their tonnage or hiding the cobalt in copper data, which Kara finds to be a legitimate complaint. Kara finally arrives at Kolwezi in his drive, which he calls the ‘Wild West’ of EV production, the California gold rush if you will. It is a city of 1.5 million, full of migrants from all over Africa, including India and China. You can easily see the pits around Kolwezi from Google Earth or Google maps.  He finally visits the worst site of all, Kamilombe, where a mine is also a grave.

This is an enlightening book, though the stories and narrative all run together after a while into a withering mix. He visits nearly every mining complex, region, village, town and small mine along the route, interviewing dozens who repeat the same points.  But the main point is obvious.  Neo-colonial capitalism has turned parts of the supposedly independent DRC into an exploited hell-hole.  He is reluctant to blame capitalism as a whole, professes to be a pacifist, but he’s still a damn good reporter.   Lumumba’s last written words were “Long Live the Congo!” “Long Live Africa!” and Kara endorses these words.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  ‘Congo,’ ‘Casement,’ ‘tantalum,’ ‘cobalt,’ ‘Lumumba,’ ‘colonialism.’

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / February 24, 2025

Now a Legitimate Art Style

 “Socialist Realist & Social Realist Art in Ukraine,”1930s-1970s, Georgia Museum of Art

This unlikely exhibit in Athens, Georgia, USA presents a selection of social realist and socialist realist painting from Ukraine when it was a workers’ state.  It shows large construction projects, kolkhoz workers, WWII images, Victory Day illustrations, depictions of buildings going up, factory canvases, portraits, still lives, landscapes, children, old people and Lenin with Krupskaya. They are in two rooms, with the bright lighting sometimes obscuring the image.

As a socialist, it is always interesting to see how a museum frames the paintings in their text descriptions.  Most of the descriptions indicate how the paintings were ‘subtly subversive’ to Soviet dogma, which is appropriate language for a museum in present-day Georgia.  Socialist realism changed during this period, from the so-called ‘Grand’ style (?) during Stalin’s reign to the so-called ‘Severe’ style (?) afterwards.  Most of these paintings were done after 1953, so there is that. The museum does admit that the value of socialist realism is being reevaluated now that the USSR has fallen.  Is it now a legitimate trend for U.S. art critics, when before it was attacked as just a propaganda tool used by the USSR?  High-end abstract, pop, digital, post-modernist and shock art in the U.S. never depicts the working class or work in any form, so this admission by the curators might reflect something. 

Outside the halls, as an intro, were 3 examples of social realist paintings from the U.S., including the most contorted, depressed welder ever by a painter named Bender.  Another was a dark image of a blast furnace of some kind by a painter named Marsh and a Minneapolis flour mill / factory depiction by Mac le Sueur. None of these paintings were described as subtly subversive by the curators.

So back to Ukrainian painting in most of the 1900s. All of these works are done in oil paint, sometimes impressionist, sometimes the oils thickly put on.  The styles are mostly loose as it is rarely a straight, photo-realist depiction.  One of the most outstanding canvases is a huge ‘reddish’ work of a young woman at a train station waiting for her soldier to return from WWII.  Welcome bunting litters the platform, the train and everyone else has left and she is alone on the platform, stunned.  It is by Andrej Babenko.  Another is a small landscape by Konstantin Synytskyi depicting the raw, dark soil of Ukraine, with yellow-green shoots coming up. Anyone who has lived in farm country recognizes this.  Particularly vivid is a painting of a huge ship being built in dry-dock on the Black Sea, probably in Odessa, with one small worker shown down below, done by Ivan Petrov.  There is another impressionistic sketch of prisoners in WWII with battered faces, guarded.  There is a portrait of a strong but ambiguous Ukrainian woman shown with a man’s hat on, reflecting the goal of sexual equality.  Another large one is of Lenin and Krupskaya at their dacha outside Moscow, having tea and reading at a table, illustrated by Andrei Lysenko.  As the curator said, it humanizes Lenin, which would be a shock to the majority of the U.S. population.

The curators admit that the Bolsheviks treasured past art, even from ‘the West.’ This is obvious from any tour of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg/Leningrad.   Some of these paintings reflect that, including a haystack in snow that reminds one of Monet’s many haystack compositions around Giverny. Others are similar to classical paintings in the Italian tradition or from earlier socialist realist Ukrainian works.

This collection is similar to the paintings in the galleries at the Russian Art Museum in Minneapolis, which might like to borrow some of them.  They are not ‘Russian’ in the nationalist sense, they are part of the Soviet labor realist tradition that was common in the many countries that made up the former USSR and central and eastern Europe.  It might be said that, unlike the U.S., the Soviet Union was a more ‘painterly,’ classical society, given images were not primarily transmitted to the population by a TV picture tube until later.  This show is a reflection of that. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “socialist realism,” “Soviet Art,” ‘art’ or ‘social realist.’

Kultur Kommissar / February 21, 2025 / This is the last year of the blog. 

Workers' Power? Report From the South.

 “Indivisible”Protest in Athens, Georgia, 2/17/25

I attended a rally in front of Athens City Hall, part of a national on-line protest site, Indivisible, whose slogans were:  “We the People, Not the Billionaires,” “Not My President” and “Protect Democracy.”  The demo was mostly focused on Musk. According to Wikipedia, it was started by Democratic Party Congressional staffers in 2016 who ‘wanted social-democracy,’ not a Trumpist plutocracy.  In 2020 Indivisible endorsed Joe Biden, who is not a social-democrat.  It is not clear how many chapters they have at present but my guess is they were moribund during the Biden years.  In 2016 they claimed 3,800 chapters and yesterday, they said they have added 400 out of an unknown total.

In their list of things over the coming month, they are calling for a national general strike on March 14.  Does this general strike call have any labor-union support?  I see none yet.  We need sit-ins and occupations of government offices by fired workers and their co-workers right now, with union and community backup.  If possible don’t leave, don’t quit, anticipate Friday firings, don’t retire if possible.  Lock the doors to DOGE.  Occupy the Government! 

The word 'indivisible' comes from the Pledge of Allegiance, which is a very conservative borrowing, while it also implies that there is no class split or differing class interests in the U.S.  The U.S. is actually very 'divisible.'  

At any rate the rally in this medium-sized college town attracted about 200+ people – mostly old Euro-American hippies, musicians, academics and the like, with a smattering of younger people and 4 African-Americans that I could see.  It was called at the last minute, so it had a virtually useless bullhorn, a few disorganized marshals and a fear of breaking the law if they walked two blocks to the gates of the UGA campus without a permit. Toothless chants like “Musk Must Go” and the singing of “We Shall Overcome” was the tenor of the rally, with little U.S. flags waved to assure everyone they were still patriots.  This mood existed until a former federal Agriculture Dept. worker gave a sharp speech about workers being laid off.  That was followed by several angry speeches mentioning fascism given from a pickup truck bed, one from a activist formerly from mining centers in Harlan County, a Jewish anti-fascist, another from a local journalist, a gay activist and lastly from a not-so-angry philosophy professor.  

I was told by members of Indivisible #10 that there were between 200-400 members locally, as they had been recruiting in the last few weeks.  They made it clear they were Democratic Party aligned.  An older member told me their group was hiding unpapered immigrants in a town outside of Athens.  At one point a religious nut waded into the crowd yelling, trying to disrupt the speeches.  The marshals had allowed him to penetrate the perimeter.  Various people blocked him and he was slowly moved out after various face-offs.  The marshals were fearful the police would arrest anyone if they did block him in a more organized way.  They should prepare for worse.

The protest did not draw a link between limiting bourgeois democratic rights and the actual push for privatization of government functions.  No left group showed up and no union was present at this rally.  It lasted an hour.

This only hints at what will be necessary to stop Trump and Musk.  The actual Left will be able to recruit from groupings like this when they see that lawyers and chants are not going to be able to do the job.  The key is the federal workforce and their unions.  In Athens that means the EPA, the Agriculture Department and UGA researchers, but every single area in the U.S. has federal workers of some kind.  A postal workers’ strike might be the next big shoe that drops, as they have just rejected their contract offer nationwide.  What DOGE and  Trump are doing is the biggest attack on federal workers since Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers in 1981.  We need workers’ power!

P.S. - Their call for a national general strike on March 14 seems to have vanished.  I'm still looking...

P.P.S. - A labor protest in Athens on Wednesday was attended by about 30 people from the small local union at UGA.  Seems 'Indivisible' didn't show up.  It was called by the Federal Unionists Network at:  Save Our Services

More:  A secretive workers' network inside federal agencies is organizing.  They have to occupy their worksites, appeal for help from community and unions and block DOGE.  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/26/altgov-elon-musk-doge-federal-workers

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “South,” “Athens.”

Red Frog / February 18, 2025

Edumacation

 “The Education Wars – A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual” by JC Berkshire and J Schneider, 2024

Profitable privatization of everything is the ultimate goal of consistent capitalists and this book talks about the battle against it.  Trump’s incompetent Education Department pick, wrestling magnate Linda McMahon, along with Project 2025, plan to diminish or eliminate the department completely.  The Department’s Civil Rights Office will be the first target on her list, with masking next.  This only emphasizes what has been a long-running battle in the U.S.  The capitulation to charter schools by the neo-liberal Democratic Party and the teacher union leaderships enabled this whole plan as its junior partners.  The implementation of a national voucher system, charter schools and ‘school choice’ is the wet dream of Christian nationalists and Libertarian capitalists alike. Look out.

This book puts privatization squarely at the center of the discussion.  Privatization has allowed shabby educational quality, re-segregation, de-unionization, the return of ‘state’ supported religious schooling and vast amounts of corporate welfare for educational incompetents and grifters.  Its real effect will be to increase inequality.  According to the authors it is behind every sex ed. objection, book ban, CRT and DEI complaint, GLBT issue, Marx accusation, mask opposition, anti-woke whine, prayer in school demand and general irritation about ‘failing’ public schools. 

The idea that the schools can solve all social problems is another burden and fantasy put on the public school system and its teachers.  Schools can’t solve poverty, a thing generated by capital, yet are blamed for it. The authors paint a picture of years of complaints against public schools since the ‘common’ school system started in the 1800s – over anti-family attitudes, atheism, communism, integration and now ‘anti-patriotism.’ Essentially modernism is the enemy.  Remember the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee?  This created an avalanche of anti-evolutionist anger from religious Southerners.  None of this is new but the authors maintain that what is happening now is new – a return to a system of separate and unequal education, but now privatized using public monies. 

The authors include facts that counter the image of a failing national school system, first drummed up in the Reagan years.  They cite the actual national rise in test scores, the inclusion of more and more students in democratic and egalitarian school systems, increasing quality and education of teachers, a broader range of subjects taught, an increase in higher level classes and 80% satisfaction with schools by locals. They have no regional statistics to cite, just national averages, so it is unclear what states, locations or regions might lag behind - like the South or the rural U.S. They cite the democratic control of schools by local school boards, unlike charters run by unelected businessmen.  Some states like North Carolina, Arizona, Iowa and Florida have no educational requirements for charter ‘schools’ at all, so they are black boxes of unaccountability.  And then there is the farce of inadequate ‘home-schooling.’  Let’s face it, nearly all parents with their mail-order curriculum are unable to teach children better than the efforts of dozens of trained teachers across a broad array of skills.

The Supporters of Private Education

Rich people have always supported private education because they could afford it and it would give their children a leg-up in the ‘meritocracy.’  Their children were not being taught nonsense and they made sure of that.  However ….

Reactionary religion is at the center of much of the opposition to public schools according to the authors. The plan by Christian nationalists and Catholic right-wingers is to destroy the division between church and state.  Courts now allow public monies to fund religious schools because it would be ‘discriminatory’ not to. Obviously the ambiguous wording of our First Amendment is flawed in the modern context.  30% of present ‘sectarian’ schools and home-schooling programs – maybe 2M kids - use fundamentalist Christian curriculums about dinosaurs and humans; women limited to having babies and heterosexuals the only ones endowed with legal rights.  You can guess the rest.  Yeshiva schools in New York offer little English or math, no science or history but lots of Jewish law, prayer and religion.  You can imagine what Islamic schools are up to.  It’s really a sign of the decay and stupidization of U.S. culture. 

Then there are ‘parental rights.’ And no, it’s not the rights of parents not to spend their tax money on shitty private schools. It’s the right of other parents to block any knowledge or facts about history, geography, culture, critical thinking or science. Not to mention enriching some education capitalist. As the authors note, real parental ‘rights’ should not interfere with the well-being of the child and the interests of society. A functioning bourgeois democracy needs them, as does a workers’ democracy like socialism. The authors claim that parental rights are already protected by U.S. courts. They show case law examples like the Amish being allowed to pull their kids out of school at eighth grade due to their religion.  This seems to open the door to every religion wanting to live in the 1800s.

Children’s rights are not considered, obviously.  Brainwashing the young is needed by the political Right to refresh their voting base, so their access to actual knowledge is secondary to the ‘parental rights’ movement. The authors depict events in which ‘parental rights’ bills were defeated in state legislatures due to them being seen as imposing the views of a strident minority on public education.  Specifically 11 people have filed most of the bills, as it’s been an organized effort by astro-turf reactionaries. 

Vouchers were thought up by libertarian economist Milton Friedman in 1955 and immediately adopted across the whole South as a way to combat desegregation. That is their vile origin story.  Statistics show that voucher and charter schools are worse than public schools and studies and news reports since then confirm that.  “Since 2013 the record is dismal,” according to researcher Josh Cowen.  “Independent studies in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington D.C. have shown impacts on test scores on par with the results following catastrophes…”  Low budget religious schools in strip malls or a church basement are not going to succeed in actually educating children.  “Scale” is key, as it allows wider benefits in an educational system.  The Right’s erroneous slogan, after all, is “Students, not Systems!”  This is the logic of home-schooling or no schooling at all. 

Edumacation at the Mall

The authors note that in many small towns the school is the anchor for the whole community. Some Republicans, such as those in Alaska and Georgia, have resisted ‘defunding’ public schools because in many rural areas that is all there is, but their resistance might be bludgeoned away.   Vouchers ‘bust budgets’ and in states like Arizona, New Hampshire and Wisconsin studies showed they mostly served students that were already in private schools.  The authors’ run-down of cheery successes defeating reactionary efforts in school board elections, legislatures and state propositions all come prior to the November 2024 national election of Trump’s team.  We are now in new terrain.

Oddly they completely ignore the specific issue of charter schools, revealing a Democratic Party reticence to take on the real beast in the room.  Charters are mentioned twice in the book in passing, though they are certainly linked to vouchers. A recent news report in the Minnesota Star-Tribune showed that 100s of charter schools in the state were doing below average, with only 27 above average.  This is what we and our children or grandchildren get for our tax money.  

Solutions?

The authors make a plea to preserve public education unconnected to any other issues. They call the present the last version of this particular culture war and are also clear it is about privatization.  Yet they include no economic details on ‘following the money.’  I.E. who is getting wealthy from vouchers and charter schools, or the many instances of scandals, school closures, graft, theft, bankruptcies and double-dealing. They do not answer the question of what companies, on-line or mail-order firms are getting rich or how much money vouchers and charters take from public education – all the financial math and criminal nitty-gritty.  The book is couched in ‘good democracy’ liberalism, which is essential as far as it goes.  But it does not go far enough. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  ‘charter schools,’ ‘education,’ ‘libertarianism.’   

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / February 15, 2025

In Non-Revolutionary Conditions

 “Revolutionaries” by Eric Hobsbawm, 1973

While dated, this book has something to say about present conditions for revolution, stasis or barbarism. The book is a series of essays written in the 1960s and early ‘70s mostly about European politics which I’m going to sample.  It describes how revolutionaries - specifically western Europeans in the British, French, Italian and German CPs; anarchists and dissident Marxists - dealt with this issue in the Twentieth century: “What happens to a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary situation?”  This, of course, is a key question for Marxists. Hobsbawn was for many years a historian and member of the British CP even after 1956, yet was not fond of Stalinism.  He became a EuroCommunist – a current that is moribund today.  He opposed the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, supported the Prague Spring and criticized the French CP for its failed support of the May-June 1968 rebellion in France.  This is all reflected in this historical analysis, which poses as an ‘objective’ view avoiding the ‘ultra-left’ and the Stalinist right.

The period Hobsbawm looks at in the 1900s is now long gone, given the collapse or destruction (Yugoslavia!) of most ‘state-socialist’ European states after 1991 and the victory of nearly all anti-colonialist movements. So we know what happened to 'revolutionary parties in non-revolutionary times' even more than he did.  The ending of this period might be news to some Marxists oblivious to change and who can’t give up on nostalgia, but it demands a forward look.  What can Hobsbawm contribute? 

Hobsbawn carefully looks at the membership and movement of workers, intellectuals and various types of socialists and communists in and out of the revolutionary orgs – which he considers mainly to be the CPs.  He comments that turnover was always high.  He notes that few in the KPD were from the original Spartacist organization and didn’t survive Hitler except in the GDR; that the Italian CPI grew from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands in the armed fight against Italian fascism - and kept those members for years; that the PCF was ‘bolshevized’ – i.e. Stalinized – which allowed it to create a hard carapace protecting it from ideological change; that Spain was the one area in Europe where anarchists retained their influence after the 1917 Revolution in Russia; that the British CPGB never really had much influence due to the presence of the Labour Party.  Yet all these parties are either non-existent now or shadows of their former selves.  A new day has arrived.

Do present left groups even track actual members, class origins and present jobs, former memberships, tenure and turnover, skills, education, social ties, age, gender and location, like an historian would do? Or in a database? It is doubtful. Hobsbawn notes that many Russian workers in 1917 outside of a few cities barely knew the difference between a Bolshevik and a Menshevik.

This leads him to one of his methods of dealing with non-revolutionary times, when ‘the barricades’ are not on the agenda – the popular front.  He is incapable of distinguishing it from the united front given his politics, but he thinks it a transitional method without using that fraught term.  An anti-fascist front is another transitional organizing tool, as he noted in Italy.  These fronts allow syndicalists, socialists, social-democrats, communists and even some liberals to work together against reaction, allowing small groups of revolutionaries to break out of isolation. Hobsbawn, also quoting Zinoviev and Lenin, extends this to seeing actual anarcho-syndicalists – not the middle-class ‘anarchist’ - as revolutionaries who can be worked with.  In Spain he accuses the CP of ‘sectarianism’ towards anarchists and perhaps Trotskyists – which might be some kind of understatement.  Nevertheless he thinks the CP had the correct policy if only they had a bigger base.  What that policy was is not exactly clear from him except perhaps better military organization.

Hobsbawn touches on the role the Comintern-Cominform had in dictating politics to the sections of the ‘International,’ to the point where almost no one disagreed, and the parties became arms of the Soviet CP.  Yet the parties that showed some independence – the Finnish and the Austrian – actually grew because they were able to chart a more accurate, nationally-relevant course.  He comments that almost every organization will develop some sort of ‘bureaucracy’ – the question is how powerful it becomes. 

1968 French General Strike - "Workers Students United We Will Win" 

Hobsbawn, as far as general guidelines, declares that ‘confrontation’ is not a policy, implying this is all ultra-lefts have in their playbook. He opposes both passive ‘waiting’ for a revolutionary situation and ‘forcing’ the issue, so timing becomes everything. This is part of a discussion about Marx in England, who opposed Fenian terrorism yet marked police violence as an ‘educational’ tool for proletarians.  Marx wanted to ally with all non-reformist English workers according to Hobsbawn, especially from Chartism.  After a while Marx considered the Irish question to be of most importance, as British rule in Ireland was a vicious, colonial version of capitalist rule in England itself.  Marx saw fighting the occupation of Ireland as making English workers more class conscious – a transitional method indeed.  Not to mention the high proportion of especially oppressed Irish workers in the U.K. itself. 

On theory, Hobsbawn like most CP intellectuals in his use of language, favor’s Marxism as a ‘scientific’ method.  This might mean that it is as precise as a ‘hard’ science … or, more likely from this book, that Marxists reinvigorate theory with modern facts instead of dogma, servility and repetition.

In a chapter on coup d’etats, Hobsbawn makes the point that there are two kinds of civilian resistance – the pro-forma kind limited to talk, voting and institutional bargaining – and mass labor action, like united fronts, sit-downs, occupations, political strikes and anti-fascist mobilizations.  He has a 1968 chapter on the insurrectionary value and problems of urban cities across the world, lastly focusing on Paris.  This precedes a chapter on the most surprising event of all, the French uprising in May-June 1968 that came within a hairbreadth of overthrowing the Gaullist political regime.  This, again, in a country that was in an ‘objectively non-revolutionary’ situation. 

Hobsbawn sees the first stage of the 1968 rebellion, started by the students of Paris in early May, leading to the largest general strike in French history later that month, the second phase.  Hobsbawn comments that the Government's refusal to shoot the students and retreat as spurring French labor into action.  Of course shooting them might have also done the same thing - and sharpened the stakes even more.  It should be remembered that most French labor unions were led by Communists or Socialists, unlike in the servile and anti-communist U.S. where unions don’t exist in many mass workplaces.

Hobsbawn points to the failure of the ossified PCF to push for a new ‘popular front’ government out of this crisis.   DeGaulle claimed a ‘Communist revolution’ was on the horizon instead and eventually regained the initiative.  As Hobsbawn says, the test of a Party is not its eagerness to throw up barricades but in its ability to see that bourgeois rule is vulnerable and cannot go on in the same way – and to act on that.  The PCF tailed the masses and failed even as a reformist political force to focus on the key target.  The moment – perhaps lasting only a week– was lost.  Hobsbawn, via Touraine, notes that a technocratic, 'white collar' strata entered Left politics during May-June, not simply the blue-collar working-class. This strata, based on new technologies and skills was becoming increasingly important in 1968.  We now have a similar situation in the U.S., as a white-collar and tech workforce grows using new technology, yet in the face of inequality.  

Lastly Hobsbawn has a section on ‘intellectuals’ in the class struggle– an archaic word and concept nowadays given the spread of higher education and self-education.  He might compare them to the middle-class professional strata or white-collar workers, but he claims their education is not ‘vocational.’  So a generic liberal arts degree?  At any rate he insists that most small revolutionary parties in ‘the West,’ along with Peruvian guerillas or Indian Naxalites, are full of intellectuals.  To Hobsbawn, given most ‘intellectuals’ are not primarily driven by material needs, they are instead driven by feelings about how life is blocked without revolution; about how society is fundamentally flawed.   He then tells his own story of being a middle European Jew whose family left Germany in time, in the formative interwar years and addresses the 1960s radicalization as ‘perhaps’ temporary.    

All in all an interesting selection of essays dealing with how to think about revolution in mostly non-revolutionary conditions.  But certainly a modern take is necessary, since this was written 52 years ago.

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Hobsbawn,” “Marx,” “Ireland,” “May-June 1968” "Paris" or PCI, PCF, CPGB or KDP.

And I bought it at May Day Book’s excellent used and cutout section!

Red Frog / February 12, 2025  This will be the last year of the blog.  It has been going for 19 years.