Kia Ora! Problems in Paradise…

New Zealand Now

New Zealand is a beautiful place, where nature takes few breathers.  You want to take see biomes and micro-climates in close proximity or take nature photographs that never quit?  The South and North Islands are one big yawning monster of fjords, mountains, glaciers and glacial lakes and rivers, waterfalls, seashore and ocean, beaches, caves, vineyards, sheep ranches, rain forests and small roads, all crammed together within short distances.

Cathedral Cove - North Island NZ

But that is not exactly what I want to talk about, not yet.  The indigenous people of New Zealand, which is an island colonized by the English, are the Maori, a Polynesian people.  New Zealand can be considered part of Polynesia to my mind.  They make up 15% of the population.  There is a Maori language TV station.  Maori greetings are even given out by white people at gatherings.  Tattoos are big.  Every single museum has a Maori section.  It is treated as a second language in many government projects. 

Maori’s fought at the battle of Gallipoli and were heavily bloodied, and also in WW II in the southern theaters, though Maori radicals led by a female, Te Puea, organized resistance to conscription in WW I.  This is a story omitted from the current Gallipoli exhibit in Wellington’s Te Papa museum, as was the fact that Gallipoli was a monumental Churchill / British failure that acted as a prod to New Zealand’s own independence.  On the surface at least, the identity politics side, Maori’s are treated with dignity… certainly more than indigenous people in the U.S.  Only perhaps in Hawaii do indigenous people have a real presence in the U.S. 

However, as with all questions like this, there is the real side.  Poverty among Maoris is high.  Bouncers and panhandlers seem to be mostly Maori.  Maori’s live in remote rural areas, some that are neglected by the government.  Lower life expectancy, graduation rates, higher unemployment, crime and health issues are the familiar flip side to political correctness.  Land is a particular sore point, having been taken from Maoris consistently since the beginning.  In fact it is almost as if ‘respect’ replaces actual social progress as the goal of the white ‘liberal’ New Zealand power structure.  This is a familiar pattern under the neo-liberalism of the market economy, there as it is here. 

New Zealand was the first country in the world to guarantee the vote to women, which measures its progressiveness.  Maori men were allowed to vote in 1867 for four designated seats, which was probably also a first.  But it also had its broken 1840 “Treaty of Waitangi’ which the guerilla leader Te Wherowhero refused to sign. Guerilla war followed, led by Te Wherowhero and Maori radicals on the North Island in the 1860s, fighting from ‘pa’ headland fortresses and rain forest and mountain redoubts.  Land issues continue to this day, but were especially sharp in the 1930s. 

Maoris recently sent a message of support to Standing Rock, as indigenous people world-wide are watching that development in the U.S.  They, like their brothers and sisters in the U.S., are a real line of defense against the degradation of the imposing environment in New Zealand that I first mentioned.  But they alone ultimately can’t prevail. 
 

Maori Carving - Te Papa Museum, Wellington

As my traveling companion put it, New Zealand is a bit ‘too’ British still.  The minute the English arrived on the islands, they started clearing the hilly land to graze sheep and cattle, trying to make New Zealand into a replica of old England or Scotland.   This clear-cutting was for meat, wool and later milk and cheese production, which they still brag about.  This in spite of its ecological footprint, as grazing land takes up much more room than merely growing vegetables, wheat or fruit.  In the process they destroyed the native old-growth Kaui trees in the millions, deforested large swaths of rain forest (called ‘bush’ in NZ), denuded hillsides, eliminated bird habitats, imported the possum which ate birds eggs by the millions.  At present, chunks of New Zealand forest are monocultures of Douglas firs or balsams or other trees, planted for loggers after clear-cutting the hillsides for wood exports to China and suchlike.  Each tree identical, spaced, the same height, the same variety.  Basically turning some NZ hillsides into tree farms. 

This the Maori cannot stop, much as they might wish too.  Nor do the people running New Zealand want that. 

New Zealand is influenced by their ‘big brother’ across the Tasman Sea, Australia, and political developments in England and the U.S. – all of which have had conservative governments recently, slaves to the market system.  Their conservative prime minister just surprised the whole country by resigning on December 5th, so people are wondering what hidden issue or scandal prompted this.  The Labour Party in NZ is as hobbled as the social-democrats and Labor Parties across the globe by their own accommodations with capitalism, but they still remain the largest opposition.

New Zealand is also home to “Sir” Peter Jackson and the crew at Weta Studies in Wellywood, on the Miramar peninsula west of Wellington. He is the director of “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.” The former is possibly the premier formative myth of the 20^th Century for English-speaking people.   Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell’s focus on Greek, Roman or Biblical myth can’t compare, just as academics want to ignore more modern myths being created  by recent books or film.  James Cameron has also moved to Wellington to work on 'Avatar' 2-5.  (!)  'Avatar' itself was a film about the destruction of nature by capitalist mining.  New Zealand is littered with sites from the ‘Hobbit’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ films, close to Wellington and north to Hobbiton, and south to the South Island and Milford Sound.  The place really is middle earth, with a little CGI, spliced images and miniatures, yet still based on shooting the film in actual regional parks using actual steel pikes and silicon masks.

In “Lord of the Rings” the tree Ents rage against Saruman’s minions for destroying the forests to wage war.  The Ents might have to break out of fiction to deal with the deforestation that has taken place and is still taking place right in the middle of the real ‘middle-earth’ if the humans cannot do it themselves. 

Red Frog

December 28, 2016

True or Imaginary or Both?

"Red Gas,” by Edward Topol (Eduard Vladimirovich Topolberg), 1985

This is a story of the last days of the USSR.  It is 1983.  The gerontological leadership of the Soviet CP is still in power.  However, Andropov is dying, Chernenko is waiting in the wings for his 6 month tour, while Gorbachev is up and coming.  A large gas project centered on the Yamal Pennisula just east of the Ural Mountains in Siberia is to be completed, sending gas to Europe and earning the USSR billions in ‘hard’ currency.

Nenets family in a 'choom' - similar to a teepee

The towns of Urengoi and Salekhard on the Ob River are central locations – the latter a place where Trotsky was exiled during Czarist times.  The story is based on perhaps actual news reports of a serious fire in the gas compressor station at Urengoi in January 1984 which delayed the opening of the pipeline.  Due to censorship, the exact cause of the fire is not known, so Topol has constructed a perhaps fictional story of indigenous resistance and sabotage around this news event. 

It is the story of the Nenets people who live on the Yamal, also insulting called ‘Samoyeds’ by ethnographers.  They live similarly to the Inuit people of Alaska and Canada or the Sami of northern Scandinavia – living as reindeer herders, hunters and trappers of valuable furs and fisherman in the rivers and ocean, in spite of efforts by the Soviets to make them agricultural workers.  It is a familiar story of the destruction of the natural environment – the animals, forests and rivers; the importation of alcoholism and money; the rape of women and girls - the contradiction between a Russified industrial or agricultural economy in ‘socialist’ clothing and a hunter/gatherer society that refuses to be assimilated. 

The lead character is a female Soviet police investigator who is part of a task-force trying to solve the mutilations and deaths of 3 prominent Russian scientists & engineers in the Yamal by 3 escaping prisoners from a labor camp.  According to Nenets legend, an 18^th century liberator of the Nenets, Vauli Piettomin,  killed Russians and cut off their ears and penises, and this is what happened to these scientists too.  The story ultimately centers around the rape of two 12 year old Nenets girls.  A reader will figure out far quicker than the characters in the story who did what, though it is constructed as a ‘mystery.’ 

The best parts are the description of life in the bitter Arctic cold and that of the Nenets people themselves.   There are now around 40,000 Nenets still living on the Yamal.

Topol, born in Azerbaijan and the author of ‘Red Square,’ emigrated to the US in 1978.  Prior to that, he was a Soviet journalist who went frequently above the Arctic Circle, which gives the stories their reality.  The writer is anti-Soviet and anti-Russian, but he does paint a realistic picture of the sufferings of the Nenetsi.  Of note, in 2016 the warm weather in the Yamal exposed anthrax infected bodies from old prison camp burial grounds, which then infected locals and reindeer.  The past lives on.

And I bought it in Napier, New Zealand

Red Frog

December 25, 2016    

A Blast From the Past That Is Not So Past

TC LP Commentary: 1  Published on the Twin Cities Labor Party website in the late 1990s during Clinton time, re-published here with slight modifications.

In the spirit of Jonathan Swift, who suggested that the rich eat poor children so as to reduce the population in sad old industrial England, I make this suggestion -- perhaps with the tongue not quite so far in the cheek.

A Less Modest Proposal:

If you remember about a year ago, the lodge owners of the Lake of the Woods on the Minnesota side of the border were upset that fishing restrictions in Canada had decreed fisherman catching Canadian fish had to stay in Canada one night.  To protest this, and perhaps to circumvent this rule, a small group of inhabitants of the northern triangle poking into Canada decided they wanted to leave the United States and join Canada.

The Secret Country Just North - yeah, its up there...

The press swarmed around to cover this tiny can of worms, so to speak.  Reporters interviewed each disgruntled lodge owner and threw barbed comments at the Canadians for their protectionist fish.  Let us eat fish, as it were, no matter their nationality ... I suggest the Twin Cities Labor Party take a similar tack, though not with quite so short a line or tiny a boat. 

Minnesota -- from the north-flowing Red River to the St. Croix, from the Mississippi to the Minnesota River, from Lake Superior to the cold Boundary Waters, from the invisible line across the southern farms of the state to the invisible line along much of the northern part of the state -- should secede from the United States and join Canada. 

My father was a Canadian and my parents were married there.  Like others in Minnesota, the country up there is no stranger to us here.  We spend their money, pretending it is US money, and sneakily getting the same value for it.  We visit their folk festivals and lakes and shiver from their crumby weather.  Their lumber flows across our borders and builds our homes.  They even sound like us -- most can’t tell the difference between a Winnipeg accent and a Minneapolis one.  Let’s face it, Minnesota is just proto-Canada, lower Canada.

Let’s make it official.  Indeed, they have a better Social Security system than we do -- it is not yet in danger of being privatized.  Their health care system, poorly aped by Minnesota Care, is the best in North America and perhaps all of America.  Their public sector is not quite so starved for funds as ours.  Their public TV and radio has been around far longer than ours and is of higher quality.  Their labor movement is not quite so passive and demoralized.  We in the TC Labor Party want single-payer health insurance and this is the way to get it!  We would be blessed with a smaller military budget, with a life and car insurance system supported by the government and with a ready-made Labor Party, (yes, with all it’s problems) the New Democratic Party (NDP). 

Sitting Bull hid there from the U.S. Army and made the mistake of returning.  The slaves in the 1860s escaped from the United States to go to Canada, as it was the real terminus of the Underground Railroad.  The draft opponents who moved to Canada in the 60s-70s made it a more civil society.  We should look in the same direction as they did.  Although the progressive impulses of the Civil War and Depression have been long quiet until the ‘60s and early ‘70s, the new wage slaves should escape and go north to the “drinking gourd” as it were, and join the Canadian federation as a new province, the Province of Minnesota.  Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire should be next, then Washington and Oregon and even California, and perhaps North Dakota and Michigan.  We could lead a movement to have most of America secede from the new Confederacy centered in Washington D.C., Arlington & McClean, Virginia; and Texas and the former slave states.  Among other things, send the undemocratic electoral college, the Supreme Court and the Senate packing. 

Our State should vote with its feet -- succession is really a good way to end the tight embrace of corporatism.  Let’s let the U.S. government know we’ve about had it.

December 20, 2016

Red Frog

The Power of the Periphery

"Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” by Samir Amin, 2016

Amin is a unique theorist, combining Maoism, social democracy and progressive nationalism into an analysis of present-day imperialism.  This book combines an anti-imperialist analysis with a ‘geographical’ analyses – building on his earlier concept of the ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ which updates the concepts of the ‘global North/global South,’ or the ‘1^st world/3^rd world’ dyads.   He rejects the Bolshevik Party’s ‘underestimation of the peasantry,’ citing Stalin’s forced collectivization as the ultimate breaking of the worker/peasant alliance.  This criticism includes Lenin and Trotsky as well.  Regarding the latter, Amin’s comments echo prior Stalinist critiques of Trotsky (an ‘academic Marxist’), as well as making Trotsky’s very early role in calling for political revolution in Russia invisible.   Amin:  “At the risk of sounding pretentious, I have been part of a small current on the left that that had broadly foreseen what came to a climax between 1989 and 1991.” That actually is pretentious and inaccurate. 

Core and peripheries of global capitalism

Mao’s block with the peasantry and the anti-bureaucratic model of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ are touchstones in this group of essays centered around Russia, as well as the 1955 Bandung Conference.   I will list his main points, as these are ideological writings based on history for the most part.

1.   The comparison of Russia in either Czarist times or under the Bolsheviks with ‘imperialism’ or empire in the capitalist West is a factually false comparison.  The Czar was actually less brutal to subject nationalities than the British (or American) colonialists, while the Bolsheviks forged a USSR based on the integration of many nationalities, not subject to economic exploitation.  Russia and China did not extract ‘imperialist rent.’  The dissolution of the USSR was actually carried out by only two counter-revolutionary leaders in Russia and Ukraine over the heads of the population.

2.   Imperialism is always for the dissolution or ‘independence’ of multi-national states it opposes (Yugoslavia, Russia, China, etc.) while seeing the independence of Scotland or Quebec or Catalonia as forbidden.  (Amin actually is against the independence of Scotland, oddly, as he thinks it is not really separate from Britain any longer.)

3.  Amin, being a Maoist, believes that Russia was and China is ‘state capitalist’ and that ‘state capitalism’ seems to be a progressive step on the road to socialism.  He believes that this entails a ‘new’ bourgeoisie – a state bourgeoisie, i.e. a new class suddenly developed out of government.  I won’t analyze this position in depth, but it would logically lead to fighting for ‘state capitalism’ as a progressive step.  Unity with the incipient state-capitalists will make the fight for socialism that much ‘longer!’  He calls Stalinism’s goal a ‘capitalism without capitalists’ which seems to be strikingly similar. 

4.  Oddly, in his long, detailed, mostly social-democratic prescription for what should happen in Russia, he thinks a wing of Putin’s oligarchy might opt for independent development after the NATO coup in the Ukraine – a development which might continue the ‘long transition’ towards socialism.  In certain places he does echo Trotsky’s call for workers control and independent unions, though what he means by workers democracy is not clear given his adulation of the Cultural Revolution.  At one point he actually says that the first victims of the Soviet ‘realists’ were ‘communist militants’ - members of the various Oppositions, including the Left Oppostion.

5.  Amin thinks the Bandung anti-imperialist conference in 1955 can reoccur out of a present alliance against the ‘triad’ – Europe, US and Japan - by the “Euro-Asian” block – China, Russia and anyone else they can pull in, like Iran and perhaps now Indonesia and Turkey.  He thinks ‘delinking’ from the economic clutches of the imperial centers is essential, which certainly makes sense.  However, given 60 years have passed since Bandung, it seems unlikely that the revolutionary nationalism of that time will manifest itself as anti-capitalist in the present period, as it did then.  Capital has swallowed nearly all of the globe in a quite literal way.   

6.  Amin understands, as nearly all leftist historians do, that the expropriation of the workers states and socialized property in central Europe and the USSR (and for him, China) came out of the majority wing of the Communist Parties - the enterprise managers and their political representatives. 

7.   Amin’s analysis is partly based on geography playing a role in why Russia and China first broke with world imperialism, although he insists that Russia was not in the ‘periphery.’ 

8.   There can never be a ‘one world government’ or state, or a fully-globalized unitary capitalism, as exploitation by the center of the peripheries is essential to its functioning.  He calls leftists who think we are going to have ‘one world’ naïve.

9.    Amin believes that Islamic political fundamentalism is a form of fascism.  As a former resident of Egypt, his opinion carries weight, as he has seen its functioning first hand.  Amin thinks that imperialists like the U.S. and Britain have been using Islamic fundamentalism for years against the working class, anti-imperialists and revolutionary nationalists.  This should come as a shock to those ‘leftists’ who have embraced Islamic politics as ‘anti-imperialist’ or ‘revolutionary.’ 

10.   The USSR only had military parity with the US./NATO block, but never economic or social parity, given it was not an imperialist power.  The ‘global class war’ was really a ‘global class defense’ against aggressive imperialism.  Amin does not find evidence that the Soviets or Chinese or Vietnamese ever wanted to export ‘revolution’ except in the form of national self-defense.  The Cuban effort in Angola against South African apartheid was to help a pre-existing revolutionary nationalist government, not something they instigated.  Even the isolated offensive effort of Che Guevara indicates that this was so. 

11.   Amin calls for a ‘Socialism III” after the collapse of the 2^nd & 3^rd Internationals.  However, he forgets the 1^st International and makes the 4^th invisible.  Perhaps his number should be “V.” 

12.   Amin believes, unlike some previous socialists, that small-scale agriculture is viable in a workers state. 

13.   The destruction of the USSR and central European workers’ states after 1991 led to an explosion in the triad’s hegemonic military aggression and financial exploitation across the globe, while in Europe and in the U.S. liberalism and conservatism united against the ‘social wage,’ public ownership, labor unions, socialist ideas and working-class parties.  All you folks cheering for the destruction of the USSR? This is what you get. 

14.  Amin reminds us that the capstone to the push for ‘democracy’ in Russia was the disbanding and bombarding of the elected Duma in 1993 by Yeltsin’s military.   It was full of too many opponents of Yeltsin and the crash-course capitalism he advocated.  An assault cheered on by the ‘democratic’ U.S. press.  To top it off, the Communist Party virtually announced its capitulation by agreeing to the new Russian constitution.

15.  Amin indicates that the ideal of Liberalism is used by capitalism in the same way that the ideology of Socialism is used by bureaucratism (or in Amin’s words “state capitalism”) –  to hide reality.  American Liberals believe an ideology that has little connection to actual social reality for the vast majority, but it serves as positivist ideological cover for the whole project.

Altogether an interesting book by an eclectic Marxist thinker. 

Other books by Samir Amin Reviewed below:  "The Law of Worldwide Value" and "The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism."     Other book or event reviews or commentary on Russia:  "Russia & Stoli"'; "Soviet Fates & Lost Alternatives", "Ukrainian Pawns", "Women in Soviet Art" "Life and Fate," "Soviet Women," "Enemy at the Gates," "Ivan's Childhood," "Reinventing Collapse," How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin", "The Red Atlantis" and "Absurdistan." 

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

November 29, 2016

Punishing Vegetarian Teenagers

Archaic Thanksgiving        

I was listening to NPR and what made me turn it off was this.  Prior to Thanksgiving, they had a little ‘cultural’ segment on Thanksgiving meals.  They addressed the question of ‘restricted’ diets, pointing out that this caused problems in ‘1/3^rd’ of families, according to a mysterious panel of parents.  Now a ‘restricted’ diet could be for health reasons, for religious or political reasons, for cultural reasons.  The idea was that anyone who says ‘I’ll eat anything’ is the baseline non-problematic and ‘good’ way to be. 

Trying to Keep the Tradition Alive!

Food has become a political battleground, as anyone knows.  Problems with factory farming; drugs, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other additives in food; GMO methods, monocultures, global warming, food deserts, cruelty to animals, carbon production, health problems like heart attacks, strokes, hypertension and diabetes -  have all made food a war zone.  Turkey is not exempt from this.  Calling it ‘Turkey Day’ makes meat central, but that is a dodge.  This all reflects the impact of capitalist methods in agriculture.

Now people many times will eat food they don’t really want, to be polite.  The suggestion here was aimed specifically at teenagers who had become vegetarians.  They were encouraged by the mysterious panel of parents to make their ‘own’ dish to bring to Thanksgiving and share with everyone.  This is a very clever little punishment.  As Americans know, there are plenty of dishes on the traditional Thanksgiving menu that are vegetarian – yams/sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, pie, cranberries, green beans, corn, bread, even some stuffings can be made without meat.   Suggesting that the nasty vegetarian teenager bring in another unneeded vegetarian dish – when no one else has to – is the punishment.  Why not make the non-drinkers bring their own fizzy 'champagne' apple juice?  Or the damned gluten-free people bring their own bread rolls!  You can see where this ‘Thanksgiving’ is going…

When meat-eaters come to my Thanksgiving, I give them rock Cornish game hens or salmon.  No one complains.  I do not make the meat-eater ‘bring their own dish to share.’  As a parent I had vegetarian teenagers and we kept the meat separate from everything else.  Or else made a substitute meat dish.  Friends of mine who I eat with make a vegetarian entrée for me and everyone else.  It works.  But not for NPR… national government radio. 

Thanksgiving – like the 4^th of July, “Labor” Day, Christmas, Easter and ‘Memorial’ Day – are archaic holidays that are deeply problematic and yet never quit.  Thanksgiving is supposedly based on a single meal shared by Puritans and native Americans.  Actually it became a national holiday after it was declared by Lincoln in commemoration of the Union victory at Gettysburg.  So the national media almost never mention this actual reason so as not to offend the neo-Confederates in our southern midst, and plays up a mythological ‘day of peace’ between Europeans and native peoples.  All the while this Thanksgiving we can watch live-streaming coming from Standing Rock showing police lined up on a bluff like the 7^th Cavalry.  Police – the ‘Oil Protectors” and the “Corporate Protectors” - still out there defending the right to profit off global warming and clean water.  Thanksgiving is like the Red Wedding episode in ‘Game of Thrones.’  You sit down to eat a celebratory meal – and then you are slaughtered by the host.  For indigenous people, versions of the slaughter are still going on.

The nugget of Thanksgiving is eating a meal and sharing time with relatives and friends and even strangers.  Who can be against that?  Even with the endless articles about how to de-politicize the event or how to argue within families about politics.  Yet surrounding this normal human endeavor is a historical myth, and added to it is the watching of football and then shopping.  Football – a game that will be seen in the future much like boxing is now - crude and violent, loved by the military, damaging to the players and profitable to Big Sports in the extreme.  Now Big Sports is shedding crocodile tears over losing football viewers and we are supposed to be alarmed.  We should be thankful!  Then there is the push to go shopping on this day that is supposed be dedicated to ‘family?’  Even the Mall of America and some stores like REI are now seeing through this farce.   

A socialist movement will bring a new set of holidays that actually mean something, and change the meaning of the ones we have now or allow them to die a natural death.  Because these holidays are on their last legs, like so much of official society. 

Reviews of “Game of Thrones,” and books on the Civil War and commentary on NPR, below.  Use blog search box, upper left.

Red Frog

November 26, 2016

Contradictions

DID YOU HEAR A PIN DROP?

In the U.S. the contradictions are sharpening between capital and its 10% of adherents – the counter-revolution; and the working class in all its ethnicities and genders - the revolution.  This is not something dreamed up by Marxists – it is what happens naturally in an unequal, class-dominated society.  The full resolution of the contradiction is the victory of one side or the other.   That is external dialectics.

Alongside this, conflict is also increasing between capitalist groups within the U.S. - look at our two parties.  Conflict is also increasing between national capitals.  The Eurozone, the middle East, Ukraine and north Africa are examples of that.  Imperial aggrandizement, economic stagnation, financialization, climate change and inequality are affecting the whole world.  It has contributed to the present wars and failed states. It is not some mirage.  

Social conflict and politics will increasingly take center stage, as normality, apolitical thinking and passivity become more and more impossible.  De-politicization is becoming passe. Escape will be less of an option.  Optimally, mass revolutionary organizations are needed.  Socialist methods and ideas are the only thing that can successfully resolve this contradiction.  Unions need to drop pretending things are normal.  Organizations need to band together and form fronts.  Working-class organizations need to do the same thing.  This is it...a corner has been turned.

Red Frog
November 15, 2016

A Democracy of Dunces

Caligula on the Potomac?  Berlusconi on the Anacostia?  

The U.S. ruling class has lost control of the narrative.  This is quite a feat.  Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the corporate media, the leaderships of the Democrat and Republican Parties, the Washington “think” tanks, the neo-liberals and neo-cons – all failed at control.  The pundits and pollsters were all wrong.  Even the money-men were wrong.  The deep state intervened at the last minute in the form of the FBI and James Comey, a Republican supporter of Trump who was appointed by the ever so bi-partisan Obama, to give a nudge.  (And no, President Obama, we are not all on the same 'team.')  Only Michael Moore, Keith Ellison and one pollster saw what was coming.  Kudos to them.  But the solution was pathetic – a love letter to Hillary Clinton.    Sanders would have beaten Trump, but the ‘Democratic’ half of the ruling class had their nominee already appointed.

The Party Starts Now

Here is the 'silver' lining.  Trump may or may not do what he says.  The deep state will have a private conversation with him about that.  The National Security Counsel is not happy about his isolationism.  The bright side here is that the TPP is hopefully dead.  NAFTA ‘may’ get re-negotiated, but don’t bet on it.   Trump has vacillated on the issue of Social Security, but he will probably cave to both parties enthusiasm for 'debt' relief.  The ACA is now more vulnerable, as it’s costs were under the real control of Big Pharma and the health industry and that has become obvious to millions. 

War or direct confrontation with Russia in Ukraine and Syria is off the table for a short while – although elements of the state and the ruling class Parties still want that confrontation, so drones wars and interventions will continue, Trump or no Trump.   Will Saudi Arabia get more weapons?  They probably won’t need them after the enormous weapons buy under Obama.   Will millions of Latinos be deported?  Odds are the deportation schedule run by Obama will continue and increase - if that is possible.  After all, super-exploited illegal labor is the bread and butter of so many American businessmen, including Trump.  That may be the real reason mass deportations – like Japanese internment - will probably not occur.  That and massive resistance…

Trump, like a retarded ruling class figure, may get drunk in the White House, initiate toga parties, sleep with the interns, generally run roughshod over conventionality like some Roman ruler presiding over a declining empire.  For that is what we have here.  The ruling class is weak and has lost full control.  The Empire is in hollow hands, sort of like what happens when royals interbreed.  All will be televised in a reality show called “Trump House.”  But they will still take advantage of this disaster to the utmost.  Unfortunately the working-class forces arrayed against Trump and Clinton and their cronies are also weak.  The liberal/left are like Roman plebeians who married patricians, wandering the ruins after too many circuses – unable to unite, unable to get rid of an addiction to the smoking failure that is the Democratic Party, unable to form a coherent, organizational front , unable to mobilize even a section of the working class in a real way.  The leadership of the union movement is certainly a large part of that weakness, but black leaders are also behind the curve.  Will they have a ‘come to Jupiter’ moment?  I do not think so.  As to the actual Marxists, they are too small and divided to form a core to any present counter-attack.  

But that counter-attack will begin to occur now, willy nilly.  Not our President!  Revolutions are predicated on a society being unable to function normally and the future most see is anything but 'normal.'  I predict Trump will be besieged and worse. But certainly not from the 'bipartisan' majority of the spineless Democrats, who are still talking like its just another power transfer.

Another Democratic Party narrative and liberal political view has died too.  That is the ‘demographic’ argument.  I.E. we don’t care what the working class thinks – specifically in this case the ‘white’ part of the working class.   After all, all that matters is not class, just the color of your skin, your gender identity, your sexual proclivities or your age.  Let’s not talk about class!  The Democratic Party technocrats have danced around this maypole of ‘identity’ politics for years - but now the cows have come home to roost.  Some UAW staffers told me about 1/3^rd of UAW members voted for anti-union Trump because of his position on trade.  Nationally union households voted for Trump in the 40+% range. And this is because Trump’s position was actually right.  Trump even won more black people, Latinos and women than Romney!

CLASS is the key to unity and victory for everyone in the working class, of whatever ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation.  We are the majority.  Ignoring that is the intention of the upper classes, because it results in 'divide and rule.'  

The liberal professional strata (and hysterical liberal websites like Salon, Huffington Post, the Nation, the Guardian, Alternet, MSNBC and hordes of shallow millionaire political comedians on TV) couldn’t get beyond Trump’s racist and sexist comments and see he was also making class-conscious arguments much like Sanders.  They thereby assumed every Trump supporter was merely a bigot.  By doing this they actually disqualified themselves from ever building any kind of a successful movement.  Obama won the same 6 states twice that Trump won yesterday, which proves the point that there is more going on here than bigotry.   On his last day campaigning in Michigan, Trump actually said:   “Today the American working class is going to strike back, finally.”  Can you imagine the Wal-Mart lawyer in Clinton’s soul ever saying such a thing?  At least Trump had the more effective lie.  Again, this inability to think about class is INTENTIONAL. 

Black Lives Matter, the Dream Movement, the Standing Rock rebellion, Moral Mondays, Fight for 15, American Muslims, pipeline protesters, unions, anti-fascist organizers, youth, maybe even strikers  – all are now ‘under the gun,’ by an emboldened law enforcement, bigots, rightist vigilantes or militias.  But the darkest part of this is global warming.  The Republican Party and Trump do not believe it is occurring.  Coal – that inky black rock – is to be brought back from the dead, if words are to be believed.  Unfortunately at this point only a revolutionary movement can actually change the environmental situation fast enough to prevent it by overthrowing the capitalist class.  And that movement right now is too fragmented to succeed.  Am I exaggerating?  Most scientists know our time is almost up.  Do you?

As to that ‘pantsuit’ thing.  Pantsuits are normally worn by business women, not working-class women.  The first time I saw them frequently was in a stock brokerage in the 1990s, sported by female managers.  Clothing says it all and stickers on Susan B Anthony’s grave don’t change that.  The bourgeois leadership of the 'feminist' movement did itself a disfavor by backing a war-mongering, Wall-Street loving corporate manager – but then that doesn’t matter to them evidently.   They should examine the iron ceilings and drop ceilings and drywall ceilings and plaster ceilings hanging above working class women's heads instead.

Glenn Greenwald and Thomas Frank said today, especially Greenwald:  The Democratic Party will try to blame everyone else, except the reflection in its own mirror. Don't let them.

Red Frog

November 9, 2016

I Read a Liberal

“I Married a Communist” by Philip Roth, 1998

Roth is an expert in sociological and emotional fiction, tracking the life of Jewish people in Newark, New Jersey after World War II and beyond.  This book describes the tumultuous events that befell a single radical who came back leftist after the war and then collided with the McCarthy period.  His name is Ira Ringold, a big loud aggressive zinc miner who became a radio star.  Ira is one of those radicals who argues with everyone all the time.  The story is told by a young friend of Ira’s, Nathan, and Ira’s brother Murray.  Murray is an observant progressive high school teacher who thinks his brother is nuts.  The device of the ‘rational’ brother observing the radicalism of his kin is common in American fiction and this is no exception. 

Movies Lead to Books

Ira becomes a leftist in the Army when he meets an ascetic Communist Party hardliner, Johnny O’Day.  Ira returns home, finds his way into doing Lincoln impressions, then gets on a NY radio show as “Iron Rinn,” a show dominated by CP members.  Oddly enough, instead of marrying a working-class woman, he marries Eve Frame, a beautiful, neurotic film star and they live together in their upscale home in Manhattan.  As the marriage breaks up as it predictably would, Eve writes a book exposing Ira titled: “I Married A Communist,” under the authorship of two wealthy Republican friends, the Grants.  This book helps Ira lose his job and ultimately he ends his days selling colored rocks at a rock quarry in upstate New Jersey until he keels over dead.  

Like “American Pastoral,” (reviewed below) Roth has a fascination with the intersection of left radicalism and the Jewish experience in the U.S.  Why this book was written in 1998 is somewhat of a mystery.  But the impact of the anti-communist purges of the 1950s still holds sway in left/liberal circles, reflected in recent films like “Trumbo” & “Good Night & Good Luck.”  That fear is perhaps why so many of them refrain from Marxism and live in a cocoon of comfortable liberalism, just as Roth does.   The rich do not come out well in this book either, as the two central women, Eve and her harp-playing daughter Sylphid are dreadful characters in their own way.  Eve’s reactionary Republican friends the Grants fare even worse.

The real impact of the McCarthy period was not on the Hollywood 10 alone, as the liberal myth would have it.  This book riffs on that slant, as the people fired were cultural workers. It was primarily an assault on union members across the U.S.  For instance, 3,000 longshoremen were deported from the U.S. under the terms of the Walter-McCarran Act for being alleged Communist Party members.  In the unions, the Taft-Hartley anti-communist pledge was forced on unionists, which purged the unions of open leftists and destroyed left-led unions.  The Communist Party and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party leaderships were jailed at different times based on the Smith Act.  In 1954 membership in the CP itself was outlawed in the U.S.  All of this decimated American unionism and left the anti-communist ‘business unionists’ in control.  At this point we know the long-term results of that big business strategy - the defanging of U.S. unionism.

None of this is explicit in this book, only hinted at.  Roth is basically anti-radical in his portrayal of a specific kind of communism, though through his brother Murray Roth shows sympathy for Ira, flawed as Ira is.  Ira does follow every twist and turn of Soviet policy like the CP, which indicates that the American CP had no independent thinkers or perspective.  Roth in essence creates psychological depictions of radicals in order to dismiss them.  In this book, he even adds a vicious surprise at the end, as Murray reveals that Ira bludgeoned an anti-Semitic thug to death in an alley in Newark when he was younger.  To Murray, Ira had been running from his violent temper since, so Ira’s story becomes a story of emotions run wild, not politics.  Many readers, however, might not be as upset about this act of violence as the author is.

Let’s look at the two primary and only Communists depicted in the book.  Nathan finally meets the legendary O’Day, who lives in a tiny spare room in South Bend, Indiana, handing out leaflets to steel-workers coming off the job.  Nathan almost becomes converted into a labor radical upon meeting O’Day, instead of just being a University of Chicago student prey to a mentor who pushes ‘art for art’s sake’ and homosexuality.  O’Day is portrayed as a poverty stricken but relentless ‘monk’ of the revolution and indeed, there are communists like this.  When Murray calls O’Day to help Ira, O’Day denounces Ira as a sell-out, proving his intractable sectarianism. 

The other is Ira.  Angry, quarrelsome, never shuts up, physically threatening to his multiple enemies – the angry Jew as even Roth calls him.  There are communists like this as well.  They figure if they argue or give their opinion enough they’ll somehow convert people through their observations alone – a sort of idealism gone personal. Nevertheless you feel Ira is a down-to-earth, working-class man who is definitely kind to young Nathan and working class people in general. But no mass movement is in evident in the book, just these two personality types.  The one event that breaks this mold is when Ira takes Nathan to a mass Henry Wallace rally hosted by Paul Robeson early in the book.  Only here do you see that something more is going on. 

On reflection, the trauma of the 1948 Wallace campaign loss was the last time the CP ever endorsed anyone except a Democrat.  The failed independent Wallace campaign made them a permanent Popular Front party, appended to the Democrats like a leach to the leg of a very fat, very rich man – what we jokingly call at this point the ‘left wing of the impossible.’  For CPers being ‘close to the power’ in the Democratic Party seems to substitute for many things, especially after the 1956 Khrushchev revelations when the party shrank from approximately 75,000 at its height to 10,000 members.  Who knows what it is now, but it is far less than that. This nose for ‘power’ is important because for a time the CP proclaimed communism as ‘20^th Century Americanism.’ They were coming off a war-block between the USSR and the U.S. and hence had respectability and even some power in normal society, while also fancying themselves an arm of the Soviet bureaucracy.  All this was quickly shattered after Hitler was crushed – an event ironically carried out mostly by the Soviet Army. 

This book reflects the destruction of that movement but in a narrow way, obscuring the sweep of what happened, turning it into an individual story about two communist ‘types.’  There is a telling statement in the book that implies that ‘few have ever met a communist.’  And so the confabulated ‘images’ of communists on American television, movies, in the papers or books substitute for people's real knowledge.   Roth here, in spite of being sympathetic, has not really contradicted that portrayal, so he helped build the prye too. Anyone in the Marxist movement long enough knows that communists come in all types of personalities, just like most people.  The title of the book is also the title of Eve’s book, and that is not an accident either.  Though the title is also a sad reflection on the destruction of a man by the 'Red' scare. 

Prior Roth book reviewed below, “American Pastoral,” which is now an even worse movie through no fault of his own.

P.S. - 4/2021 - Roth's hand-picked biographer Blake Bailey has been accused of sexual abuse of minors, which should please his subject, who was such a 'ladies man.'  

Red Frog

November 6, 2016  

An Impossible Situation

"The Good Person of Setzuan,” by Bertolt Brecht.  Frank Theatre Premiere, October 28, 2016  (Directed by Wendy Knox, adapted by Tony Kushner)

This is a long, somewhat archaic play that actually speaks directly to the present.  It deals with the structure of a world presided over by ‘gods’ who want humans to do ‘good’ -  yet a world in which it is impossible to survive while at the same time doing ‘good.’  Getting money is the catch and the play’s constant theme, which is why the play is still relevant.  Given that we have to go back to a play written by a German Communist in the late 1930’s to talk clearly about how economics affects people shows the sad state of present theater. 
 

The Water Seller and Shen Te

As Erik Wright said in his book ‘Understanding Class’ about game theory, Marxists deal with ‘systemic power’ – i.e. ‘what game should be played.’  They do not just deal with the accepted institutional ‘rules of a given game’ or the even more low-level situational ‘moves within the fixed set of rules.’  The game itself is the issue and this is Brecht’s ultimate point.  What game do you want to play?   

The play was staged in the empty Rainbow Foods building on Lake Street in Minneapolis.  This was a large store bought by a competitor that owned a Cub grocery across the street, then closed it intentionally in order to drive more business to Cub.  The union workers at Rainbow were laid-off in the process.  Frank has staged the resulting large empty space as a homeless encampment – tents, mattresses, sleeping bags, junk, shopping carts… perhaps a sly commentary on that act.  You walk through this on your way to the play’s real site – the loading dock/shipping and receiving area in the far back of the store.  The loading dock has stairways, a huge fan hole, the dock doors and upstairs rooms, which all serve as the set.  Frank in the past was known for this kind of industrial staging, especially with plays dealing with poverty or hard politics.

Poverty is the norm in Setzuan (the original German spelling).  Shen Te is a young prostitute who shows hospitality to 3 gods by housing them for one night, and is given silver dollars in return.  Previously she had to sell her body in order to survive, though she knew it was wrong and optimistically hopes to make a change for the better.  Shen Te takes the money and rents a store, stocking it with tobacco.  However a horde of homeless relatives show up, who take things, thieve up the street and threaten her new livelihood.  The former owner has unpaid bills to a carpenter she had not told Shen Te about and he comes demanding payment.  Her new rich landlord lady knocks and demands 6 months rent up front.  Shen Te gives money to a young man she has fallen in love with, Yang Sun, money she borrowed from neighbors so he can be a pilot in Peking.  She gives out rice to the homeless.  She says she will testify to the police for Wang, the water-seller, who has been injured by the rich barber. She buys water from the water-seller on a rainy day.  She makes a deal with the barber to house her homeless relatives in his unused buildings, almost promising to marry him in the process.  The neighborhood loves her for these acts.

However, all this ‘giving’ makes it impossible to survive running the store, so she dresses up and pretends to be a penny-pinching and hardened male cousin, Shui Ta, to save the business. Through this device, the store begins to turn a profit by ending the charity process, and instead Shui Ta plays financial hardball.  Shui Ta ultimately appropriates some tobacco bales and starts a tobacco factory, employing the relatives and others, including Yang, her ‘lover’, and becomes a successful business person in Setzuan – the ‘king’ of tobacco.  Through this dual-identity device the play becomes a reflection of the battle between altruism and exploitation, between love and economic survival, between capital and something else, playing out internally.

In this play, Brecht is saying that capitalism and mercantile trading economies ultimately shape the psychological and social characteristics of the people in the ‘game,’ no matter what the individuals want.  Implicitly, everyone in society has dirty hands and cannot be completely ‘good.’  Even Frank Theatre accepts corporate donations, as they themselves point out. The real issue then becomes the degree of dirt. The water-seller, Wang, is the only person who exploits no one, but lives in rags with a damaged hand, though some say the water he sells is tainted…   

At the end of the play, after the dual identities are revealed, the cast asks the audience to solve this contradiction. Brecht is obviously hoping audience members will think that perhaps the ‘game’ is the wrong game and that a society not based on money might be a better alternative.  Unfortunately for most, the audience will perhaps leaven their money-consciousness with a bit more kindness, but leave the game unchanged.

This was a premiere and still a bit rough, but that is normal.  The play has well-sung songs as do most Brecht plays, some modern, but the words were difficult to understand.  One of the best scenes, reminiscent of the play “Oil and The Jungle,” was the song the workers sing while handling tobacco.  The humor is intermittent, the actors serviceable, the setting familiar to anyone who has worked in shipping, but perhaps exotic for others.

The play will run for the next 4 weeks.

Prior reviews of Frank plays:  “Love and Information” and “Things of Dry Hours.”  A U of M play, “Oil and The Jungle,” reviewed below, as well as the book “Understanding Class,” both referenced here.  Use blog search box, upper left. 

Red Frog

October 29, 2016

The ‘Harmonious Society’?

"China On Strike – Narratives of Workers’ Resistance,” edited by Hao Ren, Zohgjin Li and Eli Friedman

If Friedrich Engels was writing “The Condition of the Working Class in China” today he would use this book as some of his original source material.  This is a collection of interviews and some commentary on strikes in the Pearl River Delta around Shanghai, in Guangdong and Shenzhen provinces.  They reveal the actual conditions on the ground for the largest working class in the world.  Most of the strikes described here were from 2003 to 2011.  The authors contend that strikes are now more numerous and have moved into the interior of China.  This is because labor in the Delta has become more active and stronger, so factories there were shut down by capitalists to flee for safer havens. 
      

Real 'pink collar' workers in China

The conditions here are similar to what Engels described in the 1800s in England.  Rural workers forced into the city to work in factories – turning former peasants into factory laborers.  They then have to deal with forced overtime, bad food, low pay, illegalities, theft of wages, accidents, no unions, an unsympathetic government, police action, beatings, mass firings, hostile business owners and … growing resistance.

The strikes described here have a number of similar characteristics.  The workers telling the stories are mostly ordinary migrant workers, with only a few taking leading roles in strikes.  Most are from poor rural backgrounds forced to go to the city to earn money.  Most workers in these factories are young women, so their treatment is a proletarian feminist issue.  The strikes are mostly defensive and are similar to what happens at Wal-Mart or fast food franchises in the U.S., except more radical.  They involve factories of 30K to factories of 25.  Even one production line in a factory or smaller groups of workers will stop working.  They are mostly spontaneous, unorganized and militant strikes – what in the U.S. we call ‘wildcats.’  The workers block traffic, slow down production, shut off power, refuse to leave the plant or leave and don’t come back.  Sometimes a party or holiday atmosphere prevails.  Physical force is sometimes used in self-defense and bad supervisors are beaten in dark alleys.  The government unions are almost non-existent in these areas.  The police and other state forces are almost uniformly hostile.  Local government agencies like the ‘labor bureaus’ ignore the protests for the most part or urge workers to return to work as their ‘patriotic’ duty.  The media even informed on strikers in one instance, while in others they ignore the demonstrations. 

Workers in these stories did not fear being fired as much because there are so many factories that they could quit and go to another.  Many stories reflect workers going from factory to factory, although there are difficulties as companies will frequently not let them resign! The strikers fear being singled out, so they refuse to promote ‘representatives’ who will either sell them out or be attacked.  So they try to get the companies to negotiate with all of them.

The strikes are many times successful in small or even large ways, proving that shutting down production is what gets results – not filing lawsuits, petitions, arbitration or putting suggestions in a box.  However, no continuing organizations seem to exist.  Independent unions are not formed.  Independent socialist or worker’s organizations seem to be weak to non-existent and the evidence of a ‘left’ in the Chinese CP very elusive.  Yet the experience of the working class grows with each confrontation.  These actions were usually against private capitalist employers from Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, even the U.S., but also Chinese capitalists.  Those tall, beautiful glass towers in Hong Kong harbor that tourists love to moon over are the result of labor exploitation just across the water!  The Chinese work stoppages are focused on the very large private factory sector.  The state sector, which had active strikes earlier in the decade, is not portrayed in these strikes, but the authors contend they are also being influenced by these acts of resistance.

Specifics:  Worms or insects in the dormitory or canteen food.  Workers paying for their own required clothing or health care, even due to accidents caused by working conditions.  Paying for hot water in the dormitories.  Frequent wage cuts.  A wage rise accompanied by benefits’ cuts.  Non-payment of wages for months.  Inept or domineering supervisors.  Working forced overtime every day – even up to 17 hours a day.  Factories that shut down without warning, while the bosses flee, equipment is moved and wages go unpaid.  In this latter case, local neighborhood committees or local governments attempt to make up the difference, but usually don’t do it completely.    

Of most significance is the fact that even if some factories have better conditions (usually the high-end sector related to direct U.S. products), they cannot break the overall compact among the capitalist sector, as too high wages or benefits undermines capitalist unity across these Chinese localities. Low wages are the foundation of the development of the modern Chinese working class.  Many of these smaller factories are sub-contractors for the major factories and brands.  As such, the whole sector must control overall conditions or perish. This is the reason no program that only deals unilaterally with Apple products or Nike workers can raise general conditions or even their conditions. 

Of most significance is the role of the bureaucratic ‘workers’ state.  It does not generally kill, shoot, jail, blacklist or outlaw these actions outright, as is done in many low-end capitalist countries like India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, etc. This reflects its contradictory class nature. For instance, Chinese laws on minimum wages or overtime exist to ameliorate conditions for workers, yet they are not enforced by the government. Workers have to enforce them by their own actions.  As mentioned, sometimes stolen wages are recompensed by local governmental agencies or bodies - but not fully. Occasionally the police lay-off peaceful protesters, but this is rare.   

The general purpose of the Chinese state in these geographic areas is to enforce severe labor discipline for the benefit of foreign and local capitalists.  Just the government’s legal treatment of migrant rural workers during this period – the ‘hukou’ system - reflects its own hostility even to the farmer/peasant strata, the former main base of the Chinese CP.  These conditions indicate that the Chinese state is not in the hands of the Chinese working class, but a bureaucratic strata quite clearly separated from it.

This strata must and will be replaced in power by a true political revolution led by the Chinese working class - a class that we see here in action.   This political revolution will allow the development of proletarian political parties, working-class democracy, independent unions, factory and geographic counsels and revolutionary Marxist politics – not some pale imitation. These developments can then spread this revolution beyond the borders of modern China.

Other books on China reviewed below.  Use search box, upper left, with word 'China'. Also a reviews of "Revive the Strike," about U.S. issues, below.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

October 25, 2016