College Library Browsing #17: Excuse Marcuse?

 “The Philosophy of Praxis – Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School” by Andrew Feenberg, 2014

The reason I picked up this book is to see Feenberg’s analysis of the Frankfurt School. Feenberg is a Canadian prof and philosopher who studied under Marcuse and participated in May-June 1968 in France.  The Frankfurt School (FS) were a group of mostly German cultural and political theorists –Adorno, Benjamin, Habermas, Horkheimer, Marcuse and so on.  They are sometimes grouped under the title of ‘critical theory,’ which seems rather bland.  I’m going to focus on several chapters, not the book as a whole.  Praxis is a fancy name for practice and action in the application of a theory.  It is the bridge between understanding and political implementation. Every skill is a product of ‘praxis,’ from carpentry to ice skating to revolution.

Praxis involves going beyond philosophy.  Marx contended that social change would change ideas – hence ‘philosophizing’ in the abstract would eventually end.  Since ideas are imminent in society, nature, labor and the human body, resolving the contradiction between capital and labor would empty present society of much nonsense.  Just as the demise of religion is not the work of argument so much as the work of social and economic change.

Feenberg says that the FS was inspired by Marx and Lukács, especially on the topics of nature and reification.  Reification means turning a relation or human into a thing, and, conversely, a thing into an active subject.  Lukács saw this as a result of commodification and a form of alienation.  Feenberg uses it perhaps too frequently.

These Marxist thinkers are all marked by their time in history.  In the aftermath of WWII, the FS became pessimistic, seeing a failure of praxis and certainly rationalism in the light of Nazi crimes.  They ignored the anti-colonial revolutions, the ‘state socialism’ of east and central Europe and the semi-proletarian victory in China after the war. Hence their focus was on bourgeois cultures of consent; hegemony; ideology; false consciousness; commodity fetishism; reification; consumerism and art.  Most avoided political engagement in any practical manner.  Angela Davis was told by Adorno to stay away from 1960s radical movements as they were unworthy of intellectuals.  Lukács made fun of the FS as living in ‘the Grand Hotel Abyss,’ an ivory tower on the edge of a vast hole.  Marcuse was the only one that took a more involved tack with the New Left.

Feenberg is not that fond of classical Marxism and makes some stereotypical asides about Marx.  He does not see revolution on the agenda anywhere.   He embraces Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man,” which was popular with early elements of SDS in the U.S.  Marcuse insisted that capitalist technology and science would, if continued, be oppressive unless it was completely redirected towards human ends under socialism.  I don’t think many, even Marx, would disagree. Feenberg comments that Marcuse missed technical fixes already implicit in society, like disability ramps and curbs, when he denounced nearly all current science or technique as exploitative.  Marcuse thought the main problem with tech and science is not quantification or method but its purpose for profit, i.e. ‘valorization.’  

Regarding nature, in 1972 Marcuse pointed out that nature has a value beyond capital or even labor.  This, as anyone who has studied Marx’s environmentalism, would not upset the old man either.  Nature has its own right to exist, and this is not romanticism but a simple reduction in alienation and an embrace of cohabitation.  A mountain in New Zealand, Mt. Taranaki Maunga, now has ‘personhood,’ so it is already happening on the legal front.  Marcuse might have gone further to a form of aestheticism about nature - yet as anyone knows, nature can also turn ugly.

Feenberg thinks, while revolutionary organizing and even transitional organizing is not on the table, what can work is:  “That dimension is the horizontal work of establishing the framework of meaning within which activity goes on.”   Perhaps you can guess what that tortured formulation means, but it reminds me of ‘the old mole,’ patiently digging lateral tunnels underground until the time is riper.  Yet do moles always know what is happening above ground?  Will they meet other moles?  Certainly the ground under capital is becoming shakier and shakier perhaps because of all this isolated digging.

Feenberg sums up by saying that the ‘philosophy of praxis’ negates idealism – i.e. religion, bourgeois philosophy and ideas; scientism and the like.  Idealism sublimates concrete social realities, attempting to hide them from sight. A successful class struggle reconciles idealism’s false antimonies – opposites - and weakens or overthrows reified institutions, which in Feenberg’s meaning are markets, bureaucracies and technologies.  Abstract reason is transformed into dialectical rationality by this ‘metacritique’ of philosophy, as it is dissolved by praxis / practice / change in the real world.

For the FS the bureaucratized USSR or China had little relation to the Paris Commune or the Shanghai Communes.  Their pessimism concluded that the proletariat was not able to achieve power, even after 1968 in France.  Adorno descended into dystopian despair while Marcuse was inspired by the New Left’s cultural politics and began to advocate a ‘technological transformation.’  By the way we might be seeing this in the current rise of some green tech.  Feenberg constructed a simplified and partly erroneous chart showing Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Marcuse’s attitudes towards practice, history, dialectics, finitude and the unity of theory and practice.  I personally don’t see the point of this chart, except as a student exercise. 

Herbert Marcuse

Feenberg calls for the “democratic transformation of technology.”  His suggestions for the Marxist movement are somewhat vague, but quotes Lukács as to the ‘dialectical method’ being the key to Marxism, not specific facts.  In that context he argues that in various fields within capitalism now – in the media, in medical, internet and environmental arenas for instance – the ‘enlargement of the public sphere’ and the human dimension is contesting with the profit and alienation dimension.  He asserts that the road to revolution no longer runs just through the factory, but through these ‘cognitive’ areas. It’s not clear if he’s abandoned the former all together or not. He calls this ‘praxis’ “democratic rationalization.”  He has a point.  Seeing the development of socialist tendencies within capital is essential to understanding development, including after any social revolution.  It is similar to the fact that WalMart, Ford or Microsoft are fully planned internally, while the external ‘market’ economy is still chaotic.   

Feenberg makes the error of thinking that the FS somehow invented Marxist environmentalism.  It did not. He does agree that their focus on aesthetics is narrow … “but suggestive.”  Ahh, yes.  He makes a plea for a “totalizing critique” in the horizontal dimension… meaning a contest for state power is as yet far away in ‘developed’ capitalist countries presumably.  Feenberg has no practical suggestion on how this horizontal work of knitting below-ground oppositional elements together will actually happen.  Suggestions for independent labor candidates, for a labor party, for a faction within the NDP, for college, military, community, indigenous or work networks and committees, or a Left, united or anti-fascist front are missing, as is anything else more tangible.  It seems that various single-issue, oppositional organizations working in their fields will somehow, in some way, unite.  They won’t.  These particular moles are blind.

Feenberg defends Marcuse’s aesthetic slogan of “The Great Refusal” in the face of bourgeois co-optation and the social-democratic one of “A Long March Through the Institutions.” So how has that ‘long march’ turned out?  This reminds me of Samir Amin’s point that it would take ‘centuries’ for socialism to be established.  We don't have that long.  Feenberg insists, in 2014, that this ‘long march’ is the only method of ‘mediation’ and praxis for the Marxist movement. He calls this work ‘radical reformism,’ a language we have heard from the U.S. DSA too.  I’m not sure how radical these contestations are, as none have achieved actual power.  So Feenberg is essentially still a Marcusian, even after the demise of the New Left. 

Feenberg mentions the alternative of ‘repression and recession’ once, which now seems to be the direction capital is going, even in ‘central’ capitalist countries.  If they succeed, there will be no institutions left to ‘march through.’      

To find prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Lukacs,” “Marcuse,” “Frankfurt School,” “praxis,” “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart,” “Benjamin.” 

And I got it at a college library!

Red Frog / March 24, 2025

Remember Me to My Memoir

 “Class – A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger and Higher Education,” by Stephanie Land, 2023

This is technically a follow-up to her book and 2021 streaming series “Maid.”  (Reviewed below.)  Your first thought as a reader, if you know this, is what happened to the money she earned from that film and book?  Well, it’s not here because she evidently wrote Maid after going to the U of Montana / Missoula for writing, which is the subject of this memoir.  Here she’s still the struggling single mother, juggling her child, school, work, dates, money issues, car problems, isolation, divorce and ex-husband in a hair-raising reality that never quits.  If you’ve lived through all or parts of this – like having a child, fashioning an impossible schedule or worrying about money all the time – it will exhaust you in the telling, just as it exhausts her in the doing.

I’m not a fan of memoirs and this book hints at one reason.  Believe it or not, you are not the only one who has gone through this, or varieties of this.  But Land is pursuing a writing degree and in some sweet and unnecessary day, an MFA, so this was evidently part of her process.  For those blissfully unaware of single motherhood and divorce in poverty, this book will fill you in. For others, it might provide comfort, knowing others have the same problems you do.  For the rest – ah, reads like a mundane story about class, or a boring one about an ordinary life.  It’s not quite ‘The Jungle’ or ‘Native Son,’ but it touches on that feeling in a modern, feminist, 2023 way.  You could call it ‘poverty lite.’ 

As was noted in the review of Maid, this is a Horatia Alger story about pulling yourself along by your bootstraps.  Land is not a leftist and rarely theorizes about anything in her life.  Land has moved from Seattle to Missoula, Montana to go to university. Her daughter Emilia is finally getting into kindergarten, so now Land only has to cover Emilia’s child care on weekends, after school and evenings.  Still no small feat. The exe is repeatedly missing in action, grudging about child support, toxic to talk to and now he’s 100s of miles away.  Land’s still doing cleaning jobs and getting freebies.   She’s rock climbing and hiking, counting nickels, food stamps and filling every moment with capitalist survivalism and budgets.  As she notes, she’s spent hours convincing government aid programs she wasn’t a secret millionaire or fraud.  She delights in a court judgement forcing her exe to come up with $700 a month in child support, but this involves a further court battle.

Dating is problematic – time-consuming and chancey - while indirectly involving her daughter.  If you find her love life interesting, so be it.  I don’t. But she seems to and here’s another memoir rub.  As has been said about them, memoirs are the literary style of neo-liberalism. It’s all about me!  The problem here is the level of unnecessary and personal hum-drum detail.  I don't care what she ate for lunch at school. Her somewhat dysfunctional love life leads to pregnancy, then thoughts of an abortion.  She does not exactly know who the father is to boot.

Land’s struggles at the U of Montana are another arduous stretch.  On her arrival she’s categorized as ‘out-state.’ So she has to take out huge loans to pay the freight, and later more loans to cover costs. Her own white-collar parents, a therapist and project manager, had no interest in her going to college, claiming they couldn’t afford it.  So she’s fallen in class status by being a proletarian single mother and maid, and her father still won’t help.   Land wants to rectify this fall, and become a college professor eventually, to ascend to the professional middle class.  Knowing what we know today about the few actual tenured and high-paying positions in universities, this seems like a dicey proposition.  But that goal buttresses the ‘Horatia” side of this story.

For her pregnancy, Land visits a Missoula ‘Crisis Pregnancy Center’ that discourages abortion and decides to go through with the childbirth.  At the same time she receives a reduction in SNAP food stamps.   She then receives WIC food benefits for pregnant mothers that limits their food intake severely and she has to go to food banks.  Her exe challenges the divorce court increase in child support and bad-mouths her in front of Emilia.  Her ex-boyfriend is angry at her about the pregnancy.  Her daughter is having behavior problems at school.  Emilia is regularly late for school, and is starting to resist her mother.  Land has applied for her beloved MFA.  She has to juggle cleaning and a nanny job, class times, being sick and pregnancy visits too. She has to appear in court on the child support appeal, is ruled against and settles for less.  It’s a chaotic life and she has chosen some of it.

Land eventually graduates with a B.A. and has a baby girl soon after.  Emilia is happy to have a baby sister.  Before she graduated, one of her longest essays in her senior independent study in writing is “Confessions of the Housekeeper,” which is probably a foreshadowing of Maid.  The prof liked it and I do too, which is why you should watch the Maid series or read the book.  Because this one, in contrast, is a slog - unless slogs are your kind of thing.

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

And I got it at the public library!

The Cultural Marxist / March 20, 2025

College Library Browsing #16: Bolivar & Marx

 “Marx and Latin America” by José Aricó, 1980

This short analysis is a classic of independent Latin American Marxism.  It is an inquiry into Marx’s – and by extension the Marxist movement’s – mistakes concerning Latin America’s specific social reality - up to around 1926. Aricó’s analysis is erudite and detailed and he ends up explaining how Marx got it wrong, why it happened, and how he began to get it right.  Aricó challenges the notions of Marx’s Eurocentrism, the idea that every society has to go through capitalism and that developments in the colonial or oppressed world are irrelevant to the class struggle in the ‘center’ countries. In fact it is the reverse.  He indirectly challenges the old idea that the indigenous have little role to play in the fight for socialism.  

If Marx making a mistake and later beginning to correct it shocks those dogmatic ‘lefties’ who think everything is set in stone – well, then, you are not living in a real, changing world.  That is precisely what Marx grasped after the European revolutions of 1848.  Marx’s theory developed as he observed the benefits colonialism accrued to capital, reviving its fortunes, and the subsequent weakening of the proletarian movements in Europe. Aricó especially cites Marx’s writings on Ireland’s key role in the English social revolution – regarding Irish workers in England and the Irish national struggle against English colonialism. It was also expressed in Marx’s positive appraisal of the Russian peasant commune – obshchina or mir – aiding the development of socialism in Russia.  It was still an agrarian country with very little capitalism in 1875 at the time he wrote this. 

Regarding Latin America, this relates to the ‘national’ question in developing societies as they emerged in the 1800s from tribalism, tributism, so-called ‘Asiatic’ features, feudalism, colonialism and the consequent building of socialist movements in Latin America.  Argentina, Brazil and Peru all had sections associated with the Socialist 2^nd International, so a good material grasp of social reality directly related to their strategies.  Aricó’s touchstones are Gramsci, Mariategui and Luxemburg, all original thinkers and not associated with Soviet Marxism.  This work is surrounded by 1 essay, 2 prefaces, 1 introduction, 9 appendixes and an epilogue, as befitting a work of academia, but in itself it is only 53 close-packed pages. 

The problems Latin American Marxists saw were based on what Marx wrote.  Marx fervently disliked Bolivar and politically compared him to Napoleon III, as a caudillo with no connection to the population.  This came out especially in an encyclopedia essay penned by Marx about Bolivar in 1858.  Marx also wrote in 1848 that the U.S. invasion of Mexico was a plus, supposedly bringing capital to underdeveloped agrarian lands. Of course that is not all it brought!  Marx hinted that Latin America’s social structure was raw and its leaders irrational, to the point that Bolivar’s ‘war of independence’ reminded him of Hegel’s concept of a ‘non-historic people’ operating in a social vacuum.  No one uses this concept now, even though in 1951 W.Z. Foster endorsed it.  Foster’s comments reflected the ‘scientific’ and dogmatic style of the CPs, who unquestioningly accepted everything from the USSR.  Aricó points out Marx’s attitude towards Bolivar was also perhaps part of a political battle with bourgeois historians who treated Bolivar well or as a one-sided hero. 

Another concept involved is a somewhat obscure one - that a ‘state’ is created by a real nation according to Hegel. Hegel believed that without a state of some sort a ‘national’ people do not exist for all practical purposes.  This seems to be a reactionary idea, as some nations like the Palestinians or Kurds are without an official state and yet exist. Marx opposed Hegel on this and denied that only the state produced civil society.   Which is why he looked askance at the weak, subservient states produced by early upper-class, creole Latin American leaders.  Specifically, Bolivar’s top-down dictatorial state in actual fact became a place of chaotic military rule, unable to organize production or much of society.  Bolivar himself was no Zapata, Hugo Blanco, Che Guevara or Tupac Amaru, but an educated militarist from the upper class.  Watch one episode of the dull series on him and you’ll get an idea. As Aricó notes:  “Bolivar … saw the masses as having more capacity for destruction than construction.”  Bolivar’s weaknesses were not individual, but expressed the conditions from which he arose.

This hints at one cause, up to the 1990s, of why so many Latin American countries were run by caudillos or military dictatorships - though in my mind that probably had more to do with the Cold War and the global class war.  Aricó himself escaped Argentina for Mexico, running from Argentina’s anti-communist dictatorship and murderous ‘dirty war.’ Aricó himself seems to note some truth to this view of the weaknesses in Latin America.  He also discusses Marx and Engels’ notion of national battles that advance proletarian agendas or retard them. 

Aricó faults Marx for his narrow view of Latin American history, including ignoring information on class struggles involving peasants, indigenous and workers against the colonialists, landlord patron class and creole city rulers. Latin America was clearly not a place of ‘non-historic’ peoples.  Bolivar wanted independence from colonialism, but also realized the necessity for a Latin American Union – an LAU similar to the EU.  Today this level of continental coordination and integration is still unachieved, even on a bourgeois level.  This is probably due to the role of U.S. imperialism in the hemisphere.  Even the embrace of the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ by the Venezuelan government and Socialist Party has not seen a breakthrough.

Aricó attacks claims that Marx was ‘Eurocentric’ thusly:  “The result (of these claims – ed.) has been a fragmentation of left-wing thought, divided between accepting authoritarianism as an inevitable cost of any process of mass democratization, or else seeing elitist liberalism as the only possible means of bringing about a new society…”  Aricó ends the essay by clearly pointing to the crisis of Marxism as a failing ‘state philosophy’ which his work is intended to counter.  Aricó wrote this in 1980, so he’s referring to Soviet Marxism.

Marx in the 1860s noted the progress of proletarianization in Turkey, India, Poland and Russia.  Today – 2025 - capital has injected itself into almost every social and economic relation across the world, even though pre-capitalist forms still exist, along with post-capitalist ones.  This is an example of combined and uneven development.  Pre-capitalist ones like debt or virtual slavery are used to accrue profits anyway.  Subsistence farming sustains peasants who sometimes contribute to the labor economy.  Criminal gangs inject their cash into the capitalist banking system.  And dominant state ownership funds private enterprise, such as in China. 

While formal independence has been declared in nearly every country, with exceptions like the Western Sahara and certain oppressed nationalities, who can actually identify a country that is truly ‘independent’ in the economic or even political sense anymore?  No one. The world is instead working as a ‘division of labor.’  A world economy, a world proletariat, a world social structure, a world environment has more and more come into existence with the spread of imperialist capital.  This was the prediction of Karl Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg and communists since then. So the colonial debate about Marx in the 1800s is really moot, except to certain enduring anti-communists, even those dressed in anti-colonialist colors.  This book will be ammunition in their face.

Prior blogspot reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Latin America,” “Peru,” “Bolivar,” “Mexico” “Mariategui.”

And I got it at a college library!

Red Frog / March 17, 2025

Anti-Fascist Series #16: General Eco

 “How to Spot a Fascist” by Umberto Eco, 1997

This famous essay was referenced by Chris Hedges in his work “American Fascists,” a book about U.S. Christian Dominionism.  Eco’s analysis is popular with left liberals as a take on the present Trump movement.  Eco, the Italian author of “Name of the Rose” and “Foucault’s Pendulum,” grew up as a boy under Mussolini and remembers the day that Mussolini was overthrown in 1945. His description of ‘Ur-Fascism’ intentionally avoids a specific historical or economic frame and sounds like later cultural and intellectual descriptions of ‘general’ fascism. Eco is not a Marxist, though he recognizes the leading role of the PCI in the armed Resistance in Italy and seems somewhat irritated by it.

These are the 14 culturo-political points Eco thinks identify a fascist movement, though they could also identify conservatives of various stripes.  That is a weakness here, though these points are based on his observations of ideas found in real Italian, Spanish and German fascism.  It is obvious that these fascisms sought to ‘improve’ on conservatism, even though their ideologies were not identical.  Yet Eco’s 14 points ignore a very significant reality.  That is classic fascism’s role as a violent and dictatorial bulwark against the working-class, unions and the Left in support of the profits of the capitalist system.  That key point is missing.  He does not even include Mussolini’s simplistic point about ‘corporatism’ as fascism.  I guess these are not ‘Ur’ enough for him.

This is his Ur-Fascism: 

     1.   Traditionalism.  It is born out of a Catholic reaction to rationalism and the French Revolution, as interpreted by fascist 'theoretician' Julius Evola in Italy.  Truth already exists, so further searching is unnecessary.  The past holds everything. (This method is actually a link to post-modernism and AI too.)

     2.   A rejection of modernism.  The European Enlightenment and the ‘age of Reason’ are both rejected ideologically.  While technology is embraced, science is not, which is an obvious contradiction.  

     3.   Irrationalism.  Action is preferred over thought, leading to anti-intellectualism.

     4.   Dissent as betrayal.  Critical thinking and dissent are opposed. Distinctions only impede ‘clarity’ so simple binary thinking is preferred.

     5.   Difference.  The opposition to ‘intruders’ and ‘others’ is across the board.

     6.   Appeal to the frustrated middle classes. This is the point where Eco finally touches on class, as he observed that these Italian classes, when in economic trouble, moved towards fascism.  Marxists also observed this phenomena.  Note, his use of the term 'middle class' means the petit-bourgeois business, professional and farmer strata, not the working class.  The working class actually exists below the middle-class.

     7.   Xenophobia.  For those without an identity, the ‘nation’ provides one.  Eco links this to an obsession with conspiracies as a substitute for actual knowledge.

     8.   The Enemy.  The needed and chosen enemy is both extremely strong and full of weaklings.

     9.   War.  Life is permanent war. Eco hints that this eventually leads to Armageddon.

     10.               Elitism.  The poor, the sick, the laborer, the weak, etc. are all inferior.  This translates to a hardy embrace of the class system and a leadership cult.  He, however, does not mention the issue of a leader explicitly.

     11.               Death cult.  This is the cult of the military hero.

     12.               Machismo.  Women, gays, lesbians and non-conformists are all inferior.

     13.               Populism.  Individualism is denied, and only ‘The People’ exist.  Eco makes the point that ‘The People’ in this case are a ‘theatrical pretense,’ as the leader or nation dominates.  So Ur-Fascism opposes “rotten parliamentary governments’ in the name of ‘The People.’

     14.               Newspeak.  Eco borrows Orwell’s concept of words that slowly mean nothing, or become whatever power chooses them to mean.  As Eco puts it, “poor vocabulary and elementary syntax” are part of the method.  As you can see he’s a writer.     

Mussolini and Co. Caught by Partisans

The implication of this list is that the humanitarian “left” must be the mirror opposite of all these ideas.  For instance #9 implies that pacifism will answer fascism’s drive to war and violence.  Yet pacifism did not stop fascism in Italy.  This is relevant to some other points as well.

Eco, like Zizek, is a defender of the Enlightenment and the EU idea, the idea that nations should not wage war and instead work together and combine.  The EU itself came about due to the constant wars that wracked Europe.  This contradicts the pretensions of conservatism, the Right and Ur-Fascism which seek to destroy the EU and a misnamed ‘globalism.’  Eco understands that racism and hostility to ‘non-EU citizens’ is still rampant in Europe, but this falls short of tariffs, sanctions, fascism or war.  This thin volume adds two Eco essays - one on forms of censorship as either silence or noisy nonsense – and another on the ‘European’ idea of a 'humanist' but capitalist form of internationalism.

Given liberals and many impressionist leftists are now calling Trump or the Republicans ‘fascists,’ Eco’s Ur description might warm their hearts.  Certainly many of these 14 points show up in Trumpism.  However the bloody dictatorship of capital is not yet upon us in the U.S., so in a way this description minimizes what classic fascism was, or can be. A Marxist analysis of fascism can be found using prompts below. 

P.S. – Kash Patel, Trump’s new FBI Director, is a clone of J. Edgar Hoover.  He’s coming hard after BLM, anti-fascists like Antifa and Left organizations, while ignoring fascist violence.  You may simplistically think every FBI director is exactly the same - but that lack of subtly could be your undoing.  

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Anti-fascist series #,” “Chris Hedges,” “Zizek,” “Orwell,” “Evola,” “Zetkin,” “Trotsky.”  

And I got it at May Day Books used/cutout section!

Red Frog / March 14, 2025                                                                        

Iranian Rebellion

 “The Seed of the Sacred Fig," film directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, 2025

This film was done in secret and its director is now in exile in Germany.  It is a parable about the oppression of women, and many others, in Iranian society, but compressed into the life of a single family.  The title supposedly comes from an Iranian saying about a fig vine that strangles other living plants.  In this case, the ‘seed’ of this fig is clearly theocracy.  The film has its roots in the 2022 protests that started with the murder of Mahsa Amini by the Morality Police over her hijab.  The film includes real footage of these protests as supposedly seen by the principal characters, usually filmed on an iPhone.

Fraught discussion at the dinner table

The family is the father, Iman, who is promoted to a judgeship in a ‘Revolutionary’ Court in Tehran.  His job is to sign death warrants and prison sentences given him by higher ups without any investigation as to innocence or guilt, which bothers him.  But he does it because it will come with a higher salary and a bigger, better apartment.  He is also gifted a gun to defend himself. Iman, like is wife Najmeh, are on board with the promotion, as they are very observant Muslims and believe everything the government does is the ‘will of God’ – including the hijab ban.  Their two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, are not so sure.

Iman unfortunately gets this job right at the start of the protests, so he is in court all day and part of the night ‘processing’ protesters.  The issue that begins to break the family is a student friend of Rezvan gets sprayed in the eye by buckshot while in her dorm or at a protest.  Najmeh supports the police actions, but also nurses this girl in secret because her daughter brings her to the apartment.  The parents want the girl out of the apartment and she is later arrested and disappeared.  Both Iman and Najmeh warn the children not to back the protests or go out in the streets. We hear chants of “Death to the Theocracy” and “Women, Life, Freedom” under their windows and later see women waving headscarves in the air.

Rezvan argues with her parents about the protests and feminism and somehow Iman’s gun disappears from his drawer too.  He is intensely suspicious of his daughters, thinking they took the gun, and sends them to a fellow police interrogator. He is given another gun by his boss.  His name and address is then posted on the internet as a criminal judge and the family flees to a run-down, empty town in the hills.  From here the film becomes a horror story, as the girls and later the mother fear Iman’s rage over their refusal to tell him where the gun went.  Inman locks them up in rooms as ‘liars,’ as the women try to protect each other.  The first gun appears – hidden by little sister Sana - who escapes, then frees the others.  Iman chases the three of them around the shabby ruins with his gun until he corners Sana and, after a shot, falls through a crumbling roof to his death. 

This is a parable of how a family dominated by a religious, state-tied father is similar to the whole of Iranian society run by a council of violent male mullahs and a ‘Supreme” Leader.  Women play the role of a key revolutionary contingent in this battle.

For the geo-political, non-Marxist pod-casters and liberal cultural relativists, Iran and the hijab are heroic examples of the ‘battle against imperialism.’  And indeed Iran has been subject to war and invasion from Iraq, endless U.S. sanctions, threats, bombings by Israel, dropped nuclear treaties, a U.S. backed Pahlavi dictatorship and more.  Yet it is not the U.S. that will liberate the Iranian people from theocratic capitalism, it will be the Iranian working class, peasants and minorities who will do it, in alliance with others in the region. ‘Anti-imperialists’ who support theocracy by opposing popular internal movements against U.S. ‘enemies’ are actually the real enemies of the working class in the Middle East.  This film is an excellent historical and social document of that struggle. 

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

Kultur Kommissar / March 11, 2025

Civil Strife and Secessionism

 “The Next Civil War – Dispatches from the American Future” by Stephen Marche, 2022

This book is a mixture of speculative fiction and journalistic reporting, using present facts to populate a possible coming reality.  These two views take their turns in the telling. Marche imagines some kind of civil war will break out in the 2030s, though he understands that there has been a slow-burning one for years.  His outlook is of a dismayed bourgeois liberal looking at the fraying institutions in the U.S. with little understanding of economics or the dual ‘Party’ nature of political decay.  To Marche it is a question of partisanship run amok. 

The book is marked by making specific predictions based on the situation in 2022, though conditions have changed quite severely.  The ‘guvmint’ is now in the direct hands of billionaires and dictatorial Libertarian privatizers, not a female Democrat. 

The fiction part is a ‘sovereign citizen’ and ‘Constitutional’ sheriff’s revolt against the repair of a run-down bridge in a rural town.  Fixing the bridge by the federal government would force residents to drive the long way around.  The Sheriff’s standoff attracts a host of armed right-wingers.  It profiles a young, isolated loser radicalized by the internet who decides to shoot the female President as part of his intervention in history. It is a return of a virus that the government and part of the population can’t agree on how to combat, involving a NYC producer who temporarily visits her 'red-state' sister and mother in Davenport, Iowa.  This visit is compounded by a financial crash in the markets. It is a hurricane barreling into New York City, even when it is protected by 3 water gates. New York is flooded and mostly destroyed, while climate refugees run.          

The fact part is Marche’s visit to the largest gun show in the U.S. in Oklahoma and a recounting of the large number of killings done by fascists of various kinds in the U.S.  He looks at the various right-wing ideologies that combine and develop, mutating in a kind of viral reactionary soup. He includes a psychological profile of assassins and mass shooters.  He analyzes the predictions of climate modeling on drought, farming, food and property issues.  He interviews losing alt-right figure Richard Spenser.  Marche retails the stats on the vast increase in inequality in the U.S., which he attributes to the 2006 financial crash especially.  He predicts a severe economic contraction, based on a theory of capitalist cycles and inequality.  Like most liberals he thinks inequality is unsolvable, citing an ostensible failure of the workers’ states to reduce it far below capitalism.  Yet they did.

As you can see, Marche’s theme is interrelated crises, cascading crises, multiple crises, threat multipliers all at one time, which the capitalist system cannot handle.  What he doesn’t mention is that profit rates are the only goal, which makes crises absolutely inevitable and multiple serious crises liable to lead to some kind of barbarism if not confronted in a mass way.  

Marche predicts violence is the result, sort of like those dystopian films of zombies, riots, thieves, killings, refugees and civil war.  Marche visualizes a dirty bomb dropped from a drone on the Capitol dome, a sort of domestic 9/11 that rearranges the synapses of the U.S. population.  A pivotal event so to speak, a match dropped on a dry prairie, but the reverse of Mao’s idea.  He first pictures a sort of war of ‘all against all’ – not defined by any geography.  He wonders whether the Left will be armed.  He thinks the military’s occupation and counter-insurgency tactics will not really work, showing that he expects the military to protect the state and that it will not split.  He predicts a military dictatorship that will end ‘the Republic.’  All this is marked by a breathless liberalism. Yet the real Left will be armed.  Many cities will be redoubts of resistance to fascism.  The military will split.  It could become a class war – if all this actually comes about as he thinks.

Marche posits that the solution to this conflict will be a splintering of the U.S. – but done rationally like a reasonable divorce, though probably also violently.  The country is done as he puts it.  He discusses secessionist movements in California and Texas, though secession is illegal but ultimately will be accepted as a logical solution.  He endorses the conventional map of ‘blue’ and ‘red’ areas, of Democratic zones and Republican zones, suspiciously like the 2020 electoral map.  He has no thought for class, but only psychology, identity and such as the sources of division.  The first Civil War was based on a very grievous and potent economic construction – slavery.  The present economic structure that plays a similar role now is wage slavery and capitalism itself.

Marche’s cheery and cheesy map of the U.S. split into 4 pieces looks like this:  #1) Cascadia – California, Oregon and Washington; #2) the Texas Republic alone; #3) the South, Mountain and Central states, called ‘The Republic of the United States’ and #4) Minnesota all the way over to Virginia, as ‘The United States.’  Hawaii would be part of #4 and Alaska #3. Seems there is no role for Canada or Mexico, while some states would dicker about where to belong.  Colorado?  Arizona?  Nevada?  His plan was, I think the fictional basis for the movie “Civil War’ starring Kirsten Dunst, reviewed below.    

Marche did not anticipate ‘sovereign citizen’ billionaires directly taking over the federal guvmint and becoming the ‘not so deep’ state, an anaconda of attempted Orbanism.  Is this really a prelude to a geographic civil war waged by bourgeois factions of Democrats and Republicans?   Or by the working classes against the rich and corporate government instead? It seems to be our choice, not his.  

Marche claims at the end that “The United States needs to recover its revolutionary spirit.”  He advocates ‘starting over’ as the “ghostly Constitution, worshipped like a religious document, is strangling the spirt that animated their (the founders’) enterprise.”  Not sure what any of that means, but these words don’t seem to relate to a 4-way secession.  At any rate, a think piece book for people who don’t think about these things, with some thoughts, scenarios and solutions untouched.

Prior blogspot reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Civil War,” ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming.’

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / March 8, 2025

A Female Writer From the GDR

 “Crossing – A Love Story” by Anna Seghers, 1971

This short novel was written by the top female writer in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), who became famous during the Weimar period as a youth.  Seghers was a long-time member of the Communist Party / Socialist Unity Party but resisted their command to write socialist realist prose.  She favored modernist methods instead, considering them to be as worthy as socialist realism.  

I’m not sure from this sample if this is an improvement.  There is little modernism here except the story within the story.  This straight-forward novel is like a hundred other novels about unrequited love – not that I have read those books. It seems entirely conventional, and could be a love story on the NYT best-seller lists.  I would have preferred more social content.

It is a man's life-story told to a fellow passenger on a Polish ship crossing the Atlantic from Salvador in Bahia, Brazil to Brunsbüttel, Germany in the 1950s.  A doctor, Ernest, buttonholes an engineer, Franz on deck and begins to describe his long love affair with a young girl he met in Rio, Maria, that continues to haunt him up to the day he came onboard.  Like Franz, we the reader are trapped in the telling as the ship glides by prison islands, dolphins and flying fish, crosses the equator and transits under the stars of the Southern Cross and then Ursa Minor. 

Franz is a listener, much like the reader is forced to be a listener. At first, Franz wonders why Ernest is telling him this intimate story, but gradually, like the reader, he wants to find out what the hell happened.  It is an 18 day voyage after all.  The book is shorter than that thankfully.

Segher’s herself was in exile from Europe during the Nazi period in Germany, living in Latin America and Mexico.  She crossed the Atlantic via ship 3 times, twice to Brazil, so the story comes out of those experiences. The exoticism of Brazil is apparent to any European reader – its foods, climate, religions and people - which is why Europeans might have read this book, and not just for the love story.  The side trip to Bahia and its African-American population is more exoticism.  Yet this is not B. Traven.  There is no class struggle, just pity for the poor.  Seghers was mentioned in the film 'Goodbye Lenin' in a nostalgic way, so she's not an unknown quantity. 

The plot, to be short, is that Ernest met Maria as a young boy in Rio, they grew close, he returned to Germany after the war to study and get money for her to follow, and he waited too long.  Maria finally got married, either committed suicide or died in an accident, or did not die but faked her own death.  It’s a mystery and Ernest could never figure out which story was true. The upshot was his love was never realized due to his slowness and abandonment of Maria.  After Franz hears the end of the story, he tells Ernest to forget this damaging life-long obsession and go on and find another woman. Life is short, yes? 

The background to the tale is World War II, the liquidation of the Jews, the formation of the GDR by socialists and anti-fascists and so on, but only as historic ‘color’ in the background. The central drama is an individual’s unrequited love, or actually two people’s failed romance. This is a standard plot in the U.S.  It is a somewhat sad story that will leave little impact except to remind you that love, like everything else, is not forever, and timing is key. Go for it or make up your mind not too, but do not pine like Ernest … unless, like him, you can’t stop. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “GDR,” “Brazil,” “Socialist Realism” or ‘love.’

And I got it at May Day’s excellent used and cutout section, which has fiction!

Kultur Kommissar / March 5, 2025 - Happy International Working Women's Day!

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.  Many are still literal collaborators.  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. They are the other wing of the collaborationist Democrats. “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.  

P.S. - Fascists in Hungary and Europe gathered in Budapest, wearing Russian and Nazi symbols, to celebrate the resistance by Arrow Cross and SS units to the Soviet Army in the battle of Budapest.  2/8/2025.  

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