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 Jewish anti-fascist, another from a local journalist, another from a gay activist, and lastly from a not-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 blocked 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!

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, 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 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 technocratic 'white collar' strata entered Left politics during May-June, not simply the blue-collar working-class. This strata, based on new technologies and work, was becoming increasingly important in 1968.  We now have a similar situation in the U.S., as a white-collar and tech workforce grows on newer technology 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.

Abstraction Over Subtraction

“Nickel Boys” film by RaMell Ross, 2024

This is a film whose ‘style’ – a jittery, out-of-focus, occluded home movie method – is designed to create a dark mood without making things clear.  I’ve read the book so I knew what was being suggested or barely mentioned.  The chief conceit was to begin the movie through the central characters eyes -  Elwood - as a first-person view. We never see him.  Finally when he gets to the “Nickel” reform school (in 1963?) we see Elwood as others see him.  Staring at shoes, upside down shots, views from above, too much of his grannie, extreme close-ups, partial views, flashbacks, flash-forwards, back of head views, donkeys and alligators, a long running time – the film uses ‘art house’ methods that actually detract from the story to emphasize a disjointed feeling.  Perhaps that is the feeling of jail for the director. 

Elwood and Turner

This claustrophobic film never quite loses that approach, as if it was done on an iPhone.  However, given the real, racist underpinnings of the story, it will still depress the hell out of you.  As I grow older, I’ve lost my patience for ‘arty’ explorations like this, though they might please some film critics.  At one point I could sit through 6 hour movies, abstract plots, symbolism, dreamscapes, obscurity, jerky film-work and the rest.  Now these artificial methods just seem pretentious and class-based, though certainly brain-teasing. 

This is another terrible tale about exploitation, murder, cruelty and Jim Crow in the 1960s Florida panhandle.  In the U.S. it could be an “Indian” boarding school in the past, or a privatized teenage ‘reform’ school right now.  The Dozier state reform school exploited its black, Latino and white boys, making them work long hours in farm fields for free, similar to Parchman Farm in Louisiana and many other places.  Like indentured servants, the boys are promised they can leave for good behavior, but in reality they only leave when they 'age out'… if they leave. Dates and ages are vague in this story, which actually undermines the plot.  This fact is never made clear, nor that every inevitable infraction drops them back down the ‘leaving’ scale, as also happened to indentured servants. 

The managers steal state food from the black side of the school for profitable sale to the locals.  Like all prisoners, some boys do free work in town for upstanding citizens.  Like Auschwitz, the town of Marianna next door knew what was going on.  Did they know about the small ‘white house’ where beatings were administered, hot boxes in the attic, rape, disappearances and over 100 graves in the woods and fields?  Not clear. 

Most of this is hinted at, like a dream.  Nothing in the film is about the effort to close the 111 year old school which happened in 2011, nor the men who returned to testify against it.  As I recall, there were no indictments either.  It’s a story of almost complete black victimization.  A constant is references to the 1968 manned flight of Apollo 8 to underline the fact that this is not happening in 1868, as it’s a relatively modern story.  But again, too much of that, too much of MLK, who inspired Elwood, too many unnecessary clips of the 1958 Curtis/Poitier prison movie “The Defiant Ones.”  The ‘funniest’ part is how the racists can’t classify the one Latino kid shown, and shift him back and forth between the segregated barracks.

Elwood forms a friendship with another Nickel boy, “Turner,” who really understands how things work – and it’s not related to lawyers, inspectors or the good graces of journalists, at least in 1968.  It’s about power. This political difference is implied, but it relates to a liberal versus a revolutionary response to institutional crime. The differences are not totally separate of course, but they reside in a basic understanding of armed force and mortality versus thinking that formal ‘democracy’ is all there is.    

Instead of being a major release, this film will sit in the art-house market when it shouldn’t.  We saw it in an ‘art-house’ theater so there’s the rub.  It cost $23.2M to make, and has pulled in $2.4M so far, and that tells you something about the popularity of art-house style. A review of the original book by Colson Whitehead, “Nickel Boys,” which is not written as jagged, experimental historical fiction, is below.

P.S. - RaMell Ross, an academic and documentarian, was interviewed on NPR on 2/13.  The discussion was mostly about how he shot the film, his aesthetic practice and himself.  It was a very abstract interview.  Nothing was said about present prison, youth corrections facilities or teenage reform schools, as if Dozier school methods have faded into history.

Prior reviews blogspot on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Colson Whitehead,” “Jim Crow,” “Nickel Boys.”

Kultur Kommissar / February 9, 2025 

Note:  This will be the last year of the blog.  I have fiction to get to.

"Humanitarian" Bombs

 “To Kill a Nation – The Attack on Yugoslavia” by Michael Parenti, 2000

This book is a hard one to read, because it provides a grim ‘negative’ to the usual view of this conflict.  It is a counter-narrative to the pro-war propaganda of the U.S. media and some European media during the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1991-2000.  It goes into detail about the Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian and Kosovo struggles, which, given the complexity of actors and locations, has never been clear.  But one thing is obvious from this book – the intent of the U.S. and NATO was to foment ethnic nationalism and division in pursuit of cheap labor, privatization, mineral exploitation, debt, minimized economic competition and political control.  In a word, social counter-revolution.

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic state born out of the socialist and anti-fascist struggles of World-War II.  It combined peoples of many ethnicities, religions and regions, led by Josip Broz Tito, with a significant state and cooperative sector.  It had ‘un-Balkanized’ the Balkans. To capitalist Germany, NATO and the U.S., this could not stand - especially after the collapse of the USSR. 

Parenti discusses each part of Yugoslavia in turn, making these main points.  1. Serbs and pro-Yugoslavian ethnics were the main target of ethnic cleansing, as 1.3M Serbs were driven out of their homes. 2. The anti-Serb and Milosevic propaganda by Clinton and NATO was heavily flawed – full of lies, rumors, exaggerations and provable falsehoods.  3. The Rambouillet negotiations were fraudulent on the part of NATO, which led to the targeted bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia.  4. NATO’s allies were many times the dregs of fascism and the far-right. 5. The whole NATO operation was illegal by international and U.S. law. 6.  The excuse for intervention and bombing was ‘humanitarian,’ hiding neo-colonial and imperialist aims.  7.  The main target was any residue of socialism.

Yugoslavia up to 1980 had free education and health care, inexpensive housing, transport and utilities, a right to an income, 90% literacy and one month vacations. 60% of the economy was in the public sector or in self-managed cooperatives.  It also had problems, especially after the death of Tito.  It had taken on too much IMF/World Bank debt, which led to the privatization of banks and industrial concerns through ‘restructuring.’  It had weakened its federal system in favor of ‘provincial rights.’  It had earned the wrath of NATO for its independent role in the Non-Aligned movement. The collapse of central and eastern European workers’ states had left it exposed to predators.  The book does not cover events after 2000, such as Milosevic’s indictment or Montenegro’s independence.  

The press, led by celebrated journalists like Ted Koppel, Bill Moyers, Frontline and Silvia Poggioli, all propagated stories given them by the U.S. State Department, Clinton, NATO, right-wing separatist leaders and third-hand sources repeating unchecked rumors. It was journalism at its worst. Madeleine Albright, the butcher of Iraqi children, was another ‘source.’  Many independent journalists and agencies found little to nothing to substantiate their stories. There were fabricated atrocities.  There were instances of false flags by separatists, blaming others for their own crimes.  Instead Serbs and Yugoslavs were demonized as terrorists, Communists or genocidal, deserving of whatever happened to them.  The Serbs were the only nationality that had no legitimate role in the fate of Yugoslavia according to this press. 

The U.S. selectively supported ‘self-determination’ – which meant ethnic cleansing and the end of multi-culturalism for Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Roma, Muslims, Orthodox, Turks, Gorani, Kosovars and the like in these new, weak mini-states.  Guns, money and aid poured into separate republics of Yugoslavia from Germany and the U.S. starting in 1991.  In 1992 the U.S. got the U.N. to fully embargo hold-outs Serbia and Montenegro, which Parenti calls the most sweeping sanctions ever instituted at the time.     

     1.   Slovenia. The wealthiest part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia declared its independence first in 1991. Yet Slovenia resisted many of the free-market dictats until 1999 when it allowed foreign firms to buy Slovene land and capital to have free movement, while increasing austerity for labor.

     2.   Croatia.  The separatist movement was led by Franco Tudjman, who believed genocide was ‘in harmony with nature.’  Tudjman was a successor to the Ustashe, who backed the Nazis in WWII, running ‘the Auschwitz of the Balkans,’ Jasenovac, that liquidated 750K Serbs.  Trudjman’s forces drove more than half a million Serbs from their homes in Croatia, with NATO bombing Krajina’s Serbs as an aid. Croats even attacked Croatian Muslims and visa versa.  In 1999 the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) found no advances in ‘democracy’ in Croatia, just an authoritarian and criminal ethno-state. 

     3.   Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Bosnia had no ethnic majority between Serbs, Muslims and Croats.  The 1995 Dayton ‘Accords’ declared Bosnia to be two states, and instituted a neo-colonial administration run by the U.S. and EU., with the IMF playing a central economic role, including controlling the Central Bank.  The chosen leader was another crypto-fascist, Alija Isetbegovic, who had been a member of the Young Muslims in WWII.  They recruited for the Nazi SS during the war. NATO aerial attacks allowed Isetbegovic’s faction to win against Serbs and more liberal Muslims.  Nearly all Bosnian state assets were sold off at fire-sale prices, as was normal for the counter-revolution throughout central and eastern Europe.  In a way, Bosnia became a neo-colonial protectorate according to Parenti, a process he describes as ‘third-worldization.’ 

     4.   Republika Srpska. A partitioned area for Bosnian Serbs, NATO disapproved of their close relations with Serbia and instead promoted a right-wing monarchist as President, Biljana Plavsic. He purged leftist officers and dissolved the People’s Assembly in 1997, while NATO took over the police in the republic, firing many, while seizing all radio and TV stations. The biggest issue between the sides was privatization.  When Plavsic lost the next election, the winner was deposed and a series of NATO assassinations followed that helped eliminate further opposition.

     5.   Kosovo.  The Kosovo ethnic war waged by the fascist/criminal KLA (Kosovar Liberation Army) was the excuse NATO needed for the bombing of Serbia for 2.5 months straight in 1999.  The KLA purged every non-Albanian ethnic group with terror attacks, assassinations, burning houses and Orthodox churches, finally reducing the non-Albanian population from 60% to 15%.  All this in pursuit of a ‘Greater Albania,’ much like Hungary's current appetite for a 'Greater Hungary" in Transylvanian Rumania and Vojvodina in Serbia. They were armed by NATO countries and aided by Clinton’s CIA.  The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo was of non-Albanian ethnics, which was aided by the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo too.  Yet it was in Kosovo that the false allegation of ‘genocide’ was leveled at … the Serbs.      

Parenti discusses a long list of atrocities claimed or actual in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.  NATO and tabloid press claims of mass murder and death camps ‘on a genocidal scale’ or mass rape and rape camps, or use of poison gas, were found to be lacking when investigated by independent sources, including official ones like the U.N., the FBI and the EU’s Committee on Women’s Rights. Phrases like ‘killing fields,’ Milosevic as “Hitler” and ‘holocaust’ were used to drum up support for the war. Parenti understands that both sides committed war crimes, but the singular and only focus on the Serbs was politically motivated and not born out.  Yet humanitarian orgs like Doctors Without Borders, the Green Party and various left-liberal luminaries all piled on. 

The siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia became a press focal point in ‘92-’94.  Parenti blames the Serbs for most of the damage at Sarajevo and Vokovar, along with others.  Yet he goes into detail on how the Bosnian Muslim forces actually perpetuated the siege by rejecting negotiations to harvest sympathy. They were responsible for some of the 3 main massacres reported in the press as Serbian-caused.  The Croatian shelling of Mostar created more dead than the Sarajevo siege, but went unmentioned, as they were dead Serbs.  Christopher Hitchens, no friend of the Serbs, says that NATO knew this.  This was similar to the massacre and disappearance of hundreds of Serbs in Krajina. In Srebrenica, Moyers reported 7,414 Muslims were killed.  Investigators found only 70 bodies.  Damage from the battle in Dubrovnik was partly caused by Croat gunners placing themselves on the old city walls. And so on.

Everything done by NATO, Clinton, Genl. Wesley Clark and others was illegal under the U.N. Charter, NATO Charter, the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Act. This is why, since the 1950s, the John Birch Society and other U.S. forces have called for limits or ends to various U.N. programs or entities.  It is now Trump's turn.  Albright instead pushed for a separate court for the Yugoslav conflict, outside the normal U.N. legal structures, called the International Criminal Tribunal.  The Rambouillet negotiations were designed to make the Serbs reject them, as unpublished demands of NATO included free entry into all of Serbia.  It was an agreement to be occupied as a vassal state.  The $5B Trepca mining complex in Kosovo, the biggest in the Balkans, was also to be privatized, which gives you an idea of the economics behind these ‘negotiations.’ It was agree to occupation or be attacked.      

The Serbs rejected the ‘peace’ treaty, which Parenti calls a real declaration of war.  NATO followed with round-the-clock bombing against Belgrade and elsewhere.  They hit:  the Chinese Embassy, anti-NATO Serbian TV and radio stations, 164 socialized or cooperative factories, the headquarters of the Socialist Party, fertilizer plants, energy facilities, water utilities, public transit, hospitals and apartment buildings. Even the Yugo auto plant was bombed, which finished that brand.  Yet no foreign-owned concerns were hit, nor pro-NATO, anti-Milosevic radio or TV stations. NATO used banned cluster, depleted uranium, anti-personnel and poison munitions, not just conventional bombs. This assault resulted in 2,500 dead and 6,000 wounded. 

That is the sorry story of the destruction of Yugoslavia by ‘humanitarians.’  The book has far more detail if you are interested in the full picture.

Prior blogspot reviews, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Yugoslavia,” “Quo Vadis Aida?” “NATO.” 

And I Bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / February 6, 2025

Brutal

 “The Brutalist” film directed by Brady Corbet, 2024

This is a Jewish immigrant story set in the aftermath of World War II.  The physical and mental traumas inflicted by that war play out in this drama, which parades as an actual biopic of a famous architect.  It is really pure fiction. The dark term “brutalism” was first hurled at Soviet-era buildings as a form of anti-communism, but recently it has been used to describe many buildings in the U.S. and elsewhere.  It is a style of austere modernist architecture using concrete, rebar and steel related to the work of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, Corbusier and others.

Toth shoveling coal and meeting his benefactor.

The film sees this form of building as an unusual art.  But the central project of the film, a huge, blocky construction at the top of a high hill in a small Pennsylvania town, seems absurd.  It is the ‘dream’ of a wealthy benefactor as a monument – or mausoleum – to his mother, incorporating a gym, theater, library and Christian church built “for the community.”  László Tóth, a Hungarian Jew, is charged with designing it. The role is played by Adrien Brody as the tortured immigrant and Jewish genius, a role this actor has patented.

The class question is central, as the benefactor treats Tóth like a talented servant, both praising and belittling him and finally raping him in a drunken scene.  The film, like the lightless catacomb Tóth is designing, is claustrophobic.  You are stuck with this family, their huge European-style house (an Andrassy mansion in Hungary actually) and their obsession with this construction, which few in this small town would enjoy.  We later learn it was inspired by Tóth’s time in Buchenwald, which accounts for many of the tiny rooms with high ceilings.  Yes, really. And the gym shower room?  The stated inspiration is a ridiculous conceit by the writers.  Some of the shots of this structure were really parts of actual ‘brutalist’ buildings built during the workers’ state period in Hungary.

Anti-Semitism is a constant in the film, as Tóth, his crippled wife and her mute niece finally settle in the guest house at the mansion. His wife’s legs had been damaged by hunger in the Dachau camp. The niece might have been raped by Soviet soldiers in Budapest.  Prior to that Tóth is fired by his Americanized friend for a library project that resulted in non-payment and a false allegation of hitting on his beautiful wife.  The wealthy treat these immigrants as curiosities.  The benefactor's son tells him they are only tolerated, until finally he is fired.  People in town have questions about his religion, politics and more, even after he agrees to include a Christian church with a cross shining on its Carrara marble font.  The Zionist niece decides to move to Israel as a form of ‘alia,’ leaving Toth and his wife.  The implication is that they will be welcome there, unlike the U.S., so its a subtle prop to Israel.

An actual Hungarian 'brutalist' department store

The story pretends to show how ‘the American Dream’ – a ridiculous phrase even now – is difficult for Jewish immigrants and presumably all immigrants.  However the film ends with an ‘epilogue’ at the 1980 Venetian Architecture Biennale that pretends to show Tóth’s successful life of architecture after the final construction of the epic ‘community’ center.  His wife’s grown niece makes a speech about how it is not ‘the journey’ in life, it is the ‘destination’ – implying that his buildings have made Tóth a great success, no matter how brutal the journey.  So its a meritocracy really, while the ‘brutalist’ is not just Tóth, it is his capitalist benefactor, anti-Semitic U.S. culture and striving for the ‘American dream’ too. 

This overly-long film is up for 10 academy awards, as Holocaust films usually have some credibility and gravitas, no matter how fanciful.  It’s frankly Oscar bait. It is a chore to sit through and predictable in a liberal way.  The occasional pounding music is far too loud and the main project not believable at all.  The central character, who was an accomplished, middle-class architect pre-war, trained by the Bauhaus, somehow doesn’t seek a job at a Philadelphia firm.  He instead finds himself shoveling coal after being fired by his friend, hanging at jazz clubs, shooting up heroin and befriending a black worker.  This all seems somewhat synthetic and in a word, fake class-wise.  My advice for this claustrophobic film?  Avoid unless its moody atmosphere intrigues you.

Note:  The film was shot in Hungary, now a center for film production due to cheap wages and skilled cinema workers.  It's the European version of Atlanta. Here is a Bloomberg article on French Communist so-called 'brutalist' architecture projects:  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-01/new-book-explores-brutalist-architecture-of-france-s-communist-party?srnd=homepage-americas

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “holocaust,” ‘immigrant,’ ‘architecture.’ 

The Kultur Kommissar / February 3, 2025            

Kumbaya? Pollyanna? Or Real Threat to Capital?

 Anti-Fascist Front / Left United Front?

The Trump administration, managed by the Heritage Foundation, a clown car of dangerous appointees and cash from Silicon Valley billionaires, is finally trying to realize their 50 year plan to privatize and destroy any aspect of the 'administrative' welfare state. Sending 'buyout' e-mails to millions of federal workers; arranging camps for millions of undocumented workers; trying a funding freeze on programs for millions of indigent workers; firing a good number of internal inspectors and pardoning their fascist street bullies is their memo to the actual working-class. The Republicans are going to the hard, Libertarian right on nearly every political and economic issue per Project 2025, in a shotgun approach designed to destabilize any opposition.

Back in the Day

Like a pretend Gulliver, the Republicans 'might' be restrained by the courts, their own overreaching and even by some Lilliputian Democrats. It's as if Fox News is now running social reality, with the White House Blonde telling us that it's not just violent thugs, shop lifters or traffic violators - they understand every undocumented worker to be a criminal and probably every federal worker to be a woke leech. This while the kleptocracy associated with the Trump crime family, Cabinet office holders and oligarchical government contractors gleefully feed at the tax trough and issue crypto meme coins.

If you sense that capitalist leadership has turned a 'corner,' perhaps even fallen into a hole, you'd be right. Desperate right-wing radicals and incompetence in the service of Ayn Rand and Mussolini reflects a capitalism in disarray. It's actually a sign of weakness. Trump’s re-election, along with gains by other authoritarian forces across the world, marks the beginning of the end of liberalism as a dominant capitalist strategy in developed bourgeois states. Consent is no longer required. A larger and larger faction of the capitalist class is moving towards autocracy and hyper-nationalism given its inability to grow profit or ‘growth’ in any other way.

Tariffs and deportations, tax cuts for the rich, along with decimating the government's role, could prompt a deep recession or worse. Recent reports of farm workers not showing up for work will cause fruit, meat and vegetable shortages. The decimation of the health system could add another pandemic to the mix. The acceleration of anti-global warming efforts will only supercharge disasters, which are now reflected in the fraught U.S. housing sector. Trump's threats to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal reflects the new interest in direct territorial acquisitions by a 'greater' Israel and Russia. Climate, war, poverty and crime are forcing millions across the world to move. A large increase in poverty, racism, unemployment, homelessness and violence will be the domestic result.

This marks what some leftists for years have called ‘late stage’ capitalism. This time it seems quite real, especially with climate change and the increasing lack of credibility by the liberal or centrist parties, starting with the U.S. Democrats. The result will be both an increase in fascist and reactionary mobilizations defending the turn, and a responding increase in class struggle. This could lead more and more people towards revolutionary solutions, especially the young. What is going to be required is unprecedented. How should the actual Left respond?

GROUPS

In my town the socialist left is made up of small groups with influence in the anti-war movement, the labor movement and even the local Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. The Minneapolis City Council includes some supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a social-democratic organization with a main strategy of turning the Democrats to the left … for now. Other city council's across the country, like Chicago, also have DSA'ers on them. DSA has been losing members since the Sander's movement fell apart, yet still has around 50,000 members on paper. Also in town are the China-liners in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO); Trotskyists in the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt); neo-Marcyites in the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and former IWW anarcho-syndicalists in the Workers' Solidarity Circle (WSC?). All these organizations are somewhat small but other groups in town like the Socialist Workers' Party and the Communist Party are smaller. I even talked to two quirky Enver Hoxha fans, an absurd hangover from the past.

FRSO, RCA, SAlt and PSL all had their own 'anti-Trump' rallies alone.  Instead DSA blocked with the WSC for a large meeting – the only groups smart enough to actually work together. Now I don't want to echo the fascist brownshirt who organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, which failed because they couldn't refrain from killing and injuring their opponents. Yet the hard Right – the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, 3%ers, Patriot Front, etc. – have been growing since that shit-show. The pardon of their members after January 6 is a green-light by the Trump Administration for future violence and actions. The point is that we need our own united front against this turn. I've been called a 'Pollyanna' by isolated and hardened sectarians who believe the slogan 'workers of the world' is possible but a modicum of Left unity isn't ... which seems a pretty absurd contradiction. As if the Left is so rotten that some kind of joint work is impossible. Is that true? 

The 'small group' mentality mentioned by Lenin is among us. My intimate experience with a good number of groups is that each thinks they will be catapulted to stardom by their own individual efforts and skills. In a complex class structure like the U.S. with its various strata of proletarians, the odds that 'one party' can be the only force left standing or relevant is almost absurd. Even in Russia after the 1917 revolution there were 3 groups that could have participated in the government, as 2 were invited in by the Bolsheviks. In the German revolutions it was not just the Spartacus League that attempted a council republic, or the CP later. Recently in semi-successful attempts by the actual Left to influence politics, it was a Left electoral united front in Sri Lanka and France that gained a level of power.

Power is what the labor movement needs and the emphasis should be on 'long-term' power, not just episodic marches or events, which have become increasingly ineffective. They are huge, then they shrink time and time again. The George Floyd protests and the Gaza marches are only the latest examples of this. If you think your picket line of 75 anti-war people or performative rituals of banner-waving will lead to peace or power, you are deeply mistaken. It's the left version of writing a letter to your Congress person.  

Transitional approaches are key to this, not micro-demands and reformist isolation. Trade unions are forms of long-term power, but they are not revolutionary organizations. They make bargains with their employers or the state. They are part of 'normal' capitalist functioning, though normality is now slipping away. While tethered to the milquetoast Democrats, even trade unions could one day join transitional efforts like independent labor candidates, a Labor Party or a United Front against Fascism. Non-profits and single-issue activist and community groups, of which the Twin Cities is overrun, are also forms of 'long termism,' but are isolated and nearly always reformist.

The Heritage Foundation, the Republican Party, the inheritors of the mantle of the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, worked together for years to get to the point of the second Trump regime and Project 2025. On the other hand the leadership of the Democratic Party has no goal except to maintain things as they are. They have no emancipatory social agenda except perhaps weakly alleviating some of the problems of capitalism. Their recent defeat only puts paid to their long-time abandonment of working-class needs.

A united front against fascism and a Left united front, (which would still allow organizational independence,) based on transitional and long-term approaches, is the only thing that can revive the labor movement and defend the class at this point. Many people secretly agree and have for years. However few organizations understand the gravity of the present situation, which is actually 'over their heads.' Conditions will force some of these groups to work together on a longer-term basis, along with pressure from their own base or the working-class at large once they understand this problem of the Left.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “DSA,” “anti-fascist,” “united front.”

Red Frog / January 30, 2025

A Freethinker Pillages Heaven

 “God and the State” by Michael Bakunin, 1882 / 1970

This is Bakunin’s most famous book, or fragment of a book. It excoriates religion much like Nietzsche was doing a bit later.  It points to the state’s use of religion to dominate the population.  And to be complete in its instinctual hostility to all overlords, it also attacks the ‘savants’ of science as to any assumptions that they can also rule.  Bakunin’s comments about science’s limitations are a veiled attack on Marx and some followers’ claims of ‘scientific’ socialism.  Marx and Engels were his main opponents in the First International, as Bakunin stood for revolutionary socialism and anarchism against the claimed ‘doctrinaire abstractions’ of historical and economic study carried out by Marx and Engels. “Instinctual” is the word used by Paul Avrich in the 1970 introduction to refer to Bakunin’s politics. 

Religion and the religious establishment during the 1800s were an even more oppressive force than now in western Europe and north America so this piece, like Stendahl’s 1830 book Red and Black or Nietzsche’s 1882 statement “God is Dead,” was invigorating to those who were sick of the Christian church’s prominence.  Something like this might be appropriate to theocracies dominated by Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam even now.  What is missing in the book, which is somewhat extraordinary, is any mention of labor or capital.  The ‘trinity’ of Church, State and ? is absent one important leg!  So what does Bakunin, the “revolutionary of the deed,” a leading subversive in the 1848 upheavals, a son of the Russian landed gentry, have to say?

Bakunin denounced “...all the tormentors, oppressors and exploiters of humanity – priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners, monopolists, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats.”

While the introduction claims Bakunin had no truck with a scientific analysis of history, the book says otherwise, seeing it as a useful goal. Bakunin was a materialist and dialectician, and in this volume he turns Rousseau’s aphorism on its head by saying this:  “If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.” His identification of humanity as a higher animal is the ability to think and to rebel.  This leaves out the ability to work, which seems significant for a materialist.  He makes fun of the Bible’s Book of Genesis, where Adam & Eve are punished for gaining ‘knowledge,’ a fruit given them by Satan's serpent.  It seems even then the Christians had to abolish thinking and put faith in its place, while denouncing the knowledge-giver as evil.  The curse continues.

Bakunin says Christianity began with absurd tales, the myth of original sin and a crude, jealous Jehovah and was refined into an abstract monotheism. He asserts understanding the world can be had by purely natural, materialist means, through experience, reason and later science.  This is actually the real, daily, common-sense understanding of religious people as well, in fact all of humanity.  He posits that all thought originates from the human brain, a physical thing, and not some ‘spirit.’ He opposes all the philosophers who dabbled in religion and idealism, starting with the ‘divine’ Plato and ending with Voltaire, Robespierre and Rousseau.  The latter were emblematic of bourgeois compromises with religion in their pursuit of “a semblance of belief”, which appeared in later bourgeois Socialists.  He calls religion a ‘collective insanity.’  He understands that society has physical, ‘animal origins.”  He thinks religion is a historic but necessary error in the development of humanity, even in its morphed form of ‘spiritualism,’ but that time is over.    

The states in Europe during those days were consecrated by a Church, either Protestant or Catholic.  He said the former better fit capitalism. This state, like all states, was an agent of ‘slavery.’ 

Bakunin then switches gears and denounces a government of scientists too, as they would institute another kind of slavery – that of abstraction.  This he also associates with ‘the German communists.’  Bakunin’s assertion that all science is ‘abstract,’ and does not deal with individuals seems to be an abstraction itself.  For instance, a doctor setting a broken leg knows the nature of infection, the skeleton, blood, muscle, ligaments and tendons.  He puts a rod in an individual’s leg, not some abstract human, to allow them to walk again.  Bakunin recognizes the general role of science – “the absolute authority of science” - even a science of history in the fight for emancipation, but believes that ‘philosopher kings’ and scientists will be slavers in power. “The mission of science is to enlighten life, not to govern it.”  So what would his position be on vaccines? An impermissible attempt by science to govern life?  That would be libertarianism, a product of his false dichotomy regarding science.  He prefers the method over the men, who he thinks will form another ‘class.’  This, the introduction notes, was prescient in another way.  Oddly, Bakunin thinks former ‘bourgeois students’ will bring science to the masses, which will democratize the matter out of the hands of an elite.

A good chunk of the book discusses the history of philosophy in Greece, Rome and France.  This is a somewhat rambling, impressionist weave, attributing the monotheism that refined Jehovah to the influence of the Roman conquest, ‘Oriental’ mysticism and Greek idealism.  He attributes materialism and naturalism to paganism, as against what followed with Christianity.  Bakunin shows how the idealism of religion leads to the very material result of slavery and exploitation. He says the ‘fall of man’ was caused – solely – by God’s manifestation on earth.  You will note that Bakunin here falls into idealism himself, just as he identifies humanity only with thinking or rebellion.  As if there was no material reason for slavery or exploitation except Church and State.  Yet there is money to be made!  This is a laughable mistake for a materialist to make.  Later materialists like Feuerbach, Hegel and Comte reduced religious metaphysics to psychology, and Bakunin agrees.  Like Marx, Bakunin attributes the attraction of religion at the time to not just tradition, upbringing, power or wealth, but to the ‘sigh of the oppressed creature.’

All in all, a somewhat disappointing sojourn into atheism and anarchism.  I have no faith in describing socialism as thoroughly ‘scientific,’ as it gives an aura of invincibility that only bolster’s bad claims to truth.  Social ‘sciences’ are just that.  But actual scientific truth can also penetrate the social sciences, as there is no wall between them.   

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  ‘atheism,’ ‘religion,’ ‘anarchism,’ ‘philosophy.’

And I bought it at May Day Books, which has many anti-religious tracts and also several shelves of anarchist material.

Red Frog / January 26, 2025