Moves to the Left?

Bernie Sanders Calls For Class War...

Sanders:

In a speech before the Iowa AFL-CIO Convention in Altoona, Iowa on Wednesday, August 21, Sanders called for winning the class war against the billionaires and the corporations.  Prior to this part of the speech, he laid out a program for vastly strengthening labor unionism in the U.S. regarding issues like card check, ending right-to-work-for-less laws (the open shop) and outlawing scabs.

"If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it's time that the working class of this country won that war."

https://america.easybranches.com/iowa/4146168 Des Moines Register video of speech

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GClPp-dqy6o YouTube video of speech

Sanders at AFL-CIO Convention in Altoona, Iowa

Notice the ‘if.’  Notice the polite medium-level applause, as this is the AFL-CIO, not an audience of socialists.  This wording is similar to his earlier call for a ‘political revolution’ - which did not jibe with his endorsement of Clinton.

As reported before, Sanders is both a sheepherder and a pyromaniac in relation to standard neo-liberal politics.  The dual nature of his impact is often ignored by social democrats and some leftists.

DSA:

In a move to the left given their long-held deep-entry practice, the social-democratic Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) voted at their August Convention in Atlanta to:

1.    Only endorse Bernie Sanders for president.

2.    Work for the formation of an independent political party out of the Democratic Party.

3.    Pressure Sanders to the left on international issues.

Whether this will mean any concrete action is left unsaid.  These developments might be related to the dissolution of the Schactmanite International Socialist Organization (ISO), many of whose members went into DSA.  It might also eventually lead to a split in DSA.

Red Frog

August 31, 2019

Pattern Recognition

“Seeing Red – Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science,” by Halton Arp, 1998 
Halton Arp was a working observational cosmologist who challenged the dominant theory of an expanding universe subsequent to a supposed Big Bang.  This book is a series of detailed scientific descriptions of his and others’ empirical work which indicates that the Hubble-discovered ‘redshift’ is not based on a (receding) distance or velocity from the observer, but based on the age of the objects being viewed.  Arp looks at young stars, quasars, companion galaxies and galaxy clusters and found that relatively equidistant objects had vastly different red-shifts, with the younger ones much higher. "Youth" was a function of energy and matter formed by the action of the universe. The former theory of redshift as meaning distance, velocity or spatial expansion – which even Hubble denied was the sole explanation – is the key ‘evidence’ of the expanding universe and Big Bang theory.

Galaxy and quasars with different redshifts connected

Arp might say we live in an infinite dynamic universe or an ever-changing universe instead.

Arp uses a fascinating and large selection of galactic charts, drawings and photographs proving his assertions, which laypeople can understand.  He also references how dominant cosmologists, editors and referees ignored data, claimed evidence was ‘a one off’ or ‘noise’ or made-up, denied telescope time and publication rights or ridiculed or slandered Arp with vitriol.  Science, as Marxists understand, is part of society.  Hence social pressures, careers, grants, money and prominence all play a role when a dominant theory is challenged. Material pressures can dictate ‘ideas.’  Publicly-funded telescopes and research were controlled by a small group of  academic scientists whose job was to publish ‘new findings’ - not ward off data that threatens old theories.  Yet they many times ignored Arp.  As retailed in Thomas Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” conservative science resists new ideas and data until it can no longer do so – and it does not do it by scientific means.  That is what is happening now, though the conservative ‘party-line’ still tries to rule cosmology with an iron fist.

The first observational evidence that the redshift was not always about distance or receding distances came in 1950s and has continued since then.  Arp and others observed the fact that powerful central galaxies and nearby quasars, stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters were not ‘colliding bodies or ‘distant objects’, as conventional cosmology maintains.  The red-shift was actually intrinsic to connected bodies, not a function of distance.  Nor do all galaxies have the same luminosity, so being ‘faint’ does not always mean they are farther away.

As somewhat of a literary aside, Arp favors the term ‘white hole’ at the center of galaxies, referring not to a compression of matter, but a nuclear fountain spewing out matter, as the images clearly showed older galaxies producing materialized matter.  He tracked how new matter is being created at the center of galaxies out of nuclear activity, creating mass-energy in different forms much younger than 15B.  The Big Bang maintains that all matter was created at the split second of the Big Bang.  He and others located evidence of materials older than 15 billion years.  Arp points out that congealed matter is still being created inside these galaxies and that the universe is not simplistically homogeneous or uniform.

The "Einstein Cross" - 4 Quasars and one Dwarf Galaxy

Through his and others multiple observations, Arp tracked jets and filaments of various types of matter ejected from active galaxies, mostly in straight-lines from galaxy cores, including characteristic opposed twin-ejections.  The new clusters, galaxies, BL Lacs, quasars and stars produced have higher red-shifts than the older objects.  The party-line decrees this could only mean they were distant, background galaxies, NOT in or near the parent galaxies or galaxy clusters or related to them. From the multiple illustrations of Virgo, Fornax, Centaurus and Andromeda galaxy clusters, as well as the single galaxies in the book, it is obvious they are connected.

In the process of arguing about the distance question, Arp and others debunk the “Einstein Cross” theory that claimed ‘gravitational lensing’ created the images of the 'cross' - 4 near quasars around 1 central active dwarf galaxy in the sky.  This central dwarf galaxy supposedly bent distant quasar light images around itself.  Actually no images ‘bent’ – these celestial bodies all exist at roughly the same distance.  Upon closer examination, the quasars and center galaxy were connected.

He also delves into the stepped values of redshifts, indicating that increasing or decreasing matter and time interact in such a way that electron spins change in a measured way, causing the redshift change.  The changes are not random, as standard redshift theory holds.  As he puts it somewhat poetically, if daily time is determined by the spinning of the earth, and the seasons by revolutions around the sun, perhaps matter time is based on the revolutions of the electrons in matter.  It gets deep, doesn’t it?  But also very simple and clear.  Arp on theory:  “This is the kind of theory we are looking for – simple, capable of being visualized – one that can connect together the puzzling observational facts that presently confound understanding.”  He is not talking about ginned-up fake science.  As an example, his theory of the age of particle mass leading to redshift values gets rid of the fantasy of ‘dark matter’ that so many Big Bang proponents have been looking for forever.

On a personal level, ‘Chip’ Arp continued his research in the face of rejections, even by compatriots like Fred Hoyle who also thought the Big Bang was wrong.  He seems to be a humble but persistent person who knows he has the facts – unlike the establishment scientists.  They reject facts that do not fit their theory, contrary to the scientific method.  This book basically puts the nail in the coffin of the redshift as proof of an expanding universe.  Arp died in 2013 in Munich, Germany.

Arp does not get into other issues related to the Big Bang like the magical ‘dimensionless singularity’ that supposedly started it all.  As he mentions, the word 'singularity' means it is outside known physics or science. The Big Bang is really a Christian origin story, dressed up in obscurantist scientism.  It has almost no empirical basis.  As Arp notes, essentially the majority of astronomers have recreated a medieval church.  The Big Bang  is theorized as the initial impulse of a universe that might also result in the ‘heat death’ of the universe, which Marx and Lenin opposed for scientific and philosophic reasons.  Present science should follow their lead and Arp’s.

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Big Bang Never Happened,” “Big Bang Goes Boom!” “The Philosophy of Space-Time,” “The Dialectical Universe,” “Reason in Revolt,” “The Big Bang Theory is a Situation Comedy,” “Marx and the Earth,” “The Ten Assumptions of Science,” “Ubiquity – Why Catastrophes Happen,” “Astrology.”

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent cutout/used book section!

Red Frog

August 28, 2019

The Spatial Fix Is In

“Spaces of Global Capitalism – A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development,” by David Harvey, 2006/2019

Harvey is the most prominent leftist geographer inspired by the Marxist method.  He’s always integrated spatial issues like land rent with labor exploitation. This book’s three essays start with a 2004 lecture about the contradictions between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism on the one hand, and the actual democratic needs of the working classes on the other.  He sees both isms as anti-democratic props to capital, as both have worked to reestablish class power for the rich.  According to Harvey, this is the ruling class’s main weakness since both ideologies demand authoritarian rule.  As a result the ruling classes have to constantly negotiate how to placate, control, confuse or defeat the proletariat, the majority. This is not news or shouldn’t be.

Choose the Red Pill

The second essay of ‘notes’ is more ambitious.  It seeks to integrate 4 theories of uneven geographical development into one theory inspired by dialectics and materialism.  Theory one is capital’s view that it only brings ‘progress’ to the backward across the world.  Theory two is Jared Diamond / Jeffrey Sach’s claims that the environment determines economies and societies.  Theory three is that imperialism underdevelops and exploits the periphery/global south/3^rd World for profit.  Theory four is a limited version of Marxism, which states that class struggle is the only motor in this process.

If this sounds fraught, well, he’s the one who wrote “Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism,” so complexity in his view is the nature of society. This book is mostly a theoretical discussion.  It has few references to actual events, so at times the text becomes a bit of a word salad.  Oddly, the rural/urban divide is never mentioned. 

Harvey discusses how ‘common sense,’ ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ hide ideology in the guise of being objective.  He applies 4 Marxian views – A. how capital accumulation embeds itself in socio-ecological life. B. how accumulation by dispossession works presently.  C.  the law-like methods of capital accumulation in space and time.  D. political, social and class struggle in various geographies.  He wishes to develop a ‘unified field theory’ of uneven geographical development, but these notes do not cohere to this reader, as they fail to link clearly to the 4 views he is trying to unite.

The third essay is a delight – defining the keyword "space."  Harvey starts with three categories that define space – absolute, relative and relational.  He applies this to 9/11, to Henri Lefebvre’s 3 concepts of space (experienced, conceptualized and lived) and to Marx’s analysis of labor and how that also fits.  Ultimately he creates two 9 point matrixes combining his and Lefebvre’s concepts, applied to either space or labor.  Post-modernists dwell on the cultural/idealist part of the matrix, while simplistic Marxists live in the purely mechanistic and factual part of the matrix.  Harvey insists that events can be plotted dialectically as they move across the grid into all 9 spaces.  As such he does not ‘weight’ any one space, which places him in a multi-dimensional philosophic category, but certainly leaning towards materialism - much like Marx.  In this essay Harvey challenges both Lenin and Einstein.

Other reviews on this subject below – use blog search box, upper left:  “Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism,” “The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism,” “Rebel Cities – From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution,” (all by Harvey); “Capital City – Gentrification and the Real Estate State,” “The Long Depression,” (Roberts) “J is for Junk Economics,” (Hudson) “Capital in the 21^st Century,” (Piketty) “Minneapolis 2040 Housing Plan,” “How to Kill a City," "Collapse. (Diamond)”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 24, 2019

Hijacking the Language

“Keywords – the New Language of Capitalism” by John P Leary, 2019

Language actually means something, as any politician, journalist and human being knows.  Words many times ‘become reality.’  Leary examines the changing words and phrases associated with what Ernest Mandel called ‘late capitalism’ and others less clearly call neo-liberalism.  What you notice about them is their euphemistic, upscale and ‘artistic’ ambience, which is meant to obscure their market and commodity-based intentions.  They reflect the usage of the upper-class, many times derived from management gurus, conformist academics, corporate journalists or capitalist economists.  They are mostly about white-collar work or environments, but have seeped into blue-collar work too.

Words Leading to Money

Leary has an alphabetized selection with an short essay on each imbued with his anti-capitalist understanding.  I’m going to be brief, and just give a hint as to what he thinks the words really mean now.  You'll have to read the book for more depth:

     1.     “Empowerment” – the opposite of actual power.

     2.     “Choice” – choosing between two or more corporate selections.

     3.     “Stakeholder” – actually just the owners or shareholders.

     4.     “Accountable” – blame the worker.

     5.     “Leadership” – corporate managers and CEOs.

     6.     “Artisanal” – expensive branding.

     7.     “Best practices” – better exploitation.

     8.     “Brand” – the commodification of everything, yourself included.

     9.     “Coach” – individualist training leading to more $.

     10.    “Sharing” – giving profits to the rich.

     11.     “Collaboration” – obeying management at all times.

     12.     “Curate” – choosing upscale items to buy.

     13.      “Flexibility” – doing what management says, part of late capitalist body analogies that 'naturalize' class domination.

     14.       “Creativity” – the merger of market and aesthetics.

     15.       “Conversation” – therapeutic fake consultation.  The short form of ‘hearing your story.’

     16.     “Content” – almost anything but mostly filler in a 24 hour cycle.

     17.     “Data” – pretend objectivity.

18.     “Design” – corporate control or plan.

19.     “Disruption” – upscale economic jargon for destructive layoffs and low pay.

20.     “Ecosystem” – the area inside a skyscraper or corporation.

21.     “Engagement” – pretending to enlist you in the 'Conversation.'
22.   "Entrepreneur" - romantic virtue profiteer.
23.   "Human Capital" - euphemism for labor, hiding human labor beneath the rubric of inhuman variable capital.  The grand-daddy of capital's rhetoric.  Capital colonizes individual human beings!

I could finish the alphabet but I won’t. I do have a beef with Leary's use of “DIY” (Do It Yourself).  Not in the sense that capital wants ‘you’ to fix all your own problems, but in the sense that few except the professional and capitalist classes have the money to hire people to always fix their cars, houses, computers, etc.  Yes, it is marketing, but fixing things yourself is unavoidable.  I.E. the proletarian going to Lowes to replace a leaky pipe is not following some capitalist meme.  However, there are not many of these over-eager misunderstandings.

Many of the terms have recycled meanings from older capitalist ideas - from Taylorism, from the work of Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, Sun Tzu.  No one can still use 'the Protestant Work Ethic,' 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,' 'positive thinking', 'yankee-know-how' or the prosperity gospel without being called on it.  So these terms have been modernized and 'humanized' by management gurus like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, or economists at the University of Chicago and press like Fast Company or The Harvard Business Review.

In other words, what used to be an old-fashioned sweatshop is now a lean, flexible and sustainable entrepreneurial environment!  If you are sick of hearing this euphemistic and jargon-heavy crap day in and day out at your job, on TV or on the radio, at school, on the internet or from people you know, then you’ll enjoy this book.

Other reviews on this topic below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Doublespeak,”  “The North is not the Midwest,” “All Art is Propaganda,” “Manufacturing Consent,” “Propaganda,” “Rich People Things,” “When Journalism Was a Thing,” “The Post,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “Empire of Illusion,” “Turning off NPR,” “Kill the Messenger,” “NPR Completes Editorial Assassination,” “All Art is Propaganda,” “J is for Junk Economics.”   

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 16, 2019

Look Up in the Sky!

“Astrology – Fraud or Superstition?” by Chaz Bufe, 2002

This small pamphlet is part of a series of pamphlets on religion or anarchism that May Day just got in.  Each is $1.  If you’ve thought of astrology as a harmless cultural oddity, embedded in newspapers, dating and expensive phone lines, you would not be far wrong.  But it is more than that.  As Bufe points out, it is part of the magical thinking which runs rife in the U.S. – especially through religion, over scientific issues, even in the treatment of history and politics.  Tens of thousands earn some kind of a living off of astrology, much like priests, imams, rabbis, swamis and preachers do from bilking believers.  39% of U.S. citizens believed astrology was ‘scientific’ in 2002.  Today that number is might be smaller due to the drop in religious thinking across the board. 

Orion - Shooting Down Bogus Ideas

Bufe lays out the ways that astrology is false:

     1.        It is based on the ‘principle of correspondences.’ This means Mars being ‘red’ relates to blood, war and iron.  Which might work in a Greek play or in a cultural analogy, but nowhere else.  Astrology is actually one big word association game.

      2.        Astrologers cannot explain how astrology works, though they think different ‘vibrations’ from different celestial bodies affect humans 'differently.'   Yet all matter and motion throughout the universe is similar, not different.

      3.        Uranus, Neptune & Pluto, which were discovered after astrology as a method started, are not used in calculations.  Nor are many other celestial bodies recently discovered.  Astrology is historically-based and missing planets!

4.        The supposed ‘vibrations’ from planets or stars would be far weaker than earth’s gravity, genetics, life in the womb, diet, environment or the arms of a midwife at birth.  What about their effect?

5.        Astrology does not take into account the inverse square law, a basic of physics.  It says distance plays a role in weakening the effect of light or gravity or what-have-you.  Yet for astrology the effects of a near planet like Mars or a constellation 100 million miles away are no different.

6.        Astrology ignores precession.  The Earth wobbles, which means since astrology started, and the Tetrabiblos was written two millennia ago, those who rely on it are now off by almost a full sign.  I.E. even the sky we see is changing.

7.        Natal astrology is based on the time of birth.  They claim a mother’s body shields a baby from astrological ‘radiation’ until birth.  However, it seems odd that the wood, concrete, iron and steel of modern buildings cannot stop this ‘radiation.’

8.        More liberal astrologers claim that celestial bodies only give ‘indications’ of astrological forces.  As Bufe puts it: “…taking such a position, astrologers are saying in effect that for unknown reasons the positions of some of the stars and planets are indications of the undetectable effects of unknown types of undetectable forces emanating from unknown, undetectable sources.”

9.        There is no empirical evidence of this ‘radiation’ or ‘vibration.’

10.   Scientists have repeatedly tested astrological theses on large groups of humans and no correlation has been discovered between birth date and personality or anything else. 

11.  Feelings are not a substitute for facts.  One scientist gave 150 believers of astrology exactly the same horoscope and 94% of them recognized themselves in it.  It was the horoscope of a mass murderer.  Hey, maybe they were all mass murderers!

12. The theory behind signs is that the Sun is backgrounded by a different animal constellation 12 times a year.  However, since constellations are not the same size, this is actually not true.  The sun takes 5 days to traverse Scorpio and 38 days to get through Taurus.

The Babylonians who invented astrology believed the sun rotated round the Earth; modern astrologers still use Earth-centered charts, as if Copernicus had never existed. Astrology fits as some kind of magical thinking back-up as religion fails.  It takes the natural interest in the universe, in the stars and planets, and turns it into a magic show.  Of course the universe IS magical in another sense – but not in that way.  Bufe puts it somewhat harshly, befitting a non-political pure atheist:  “It is simply based upon credulousness, ignorance, irrationality and the eagerness of human sheep to be led.”

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Rise of the Nones,” “God is Not Great,” “Libertarian Atheism versus Liberal Religionism,” “Female Genital Mutilation,” “Annihilation of Caste,” “Bright Sided,” “The Jesus Comics,” “The Dark Side of Christian History,” "The Left and Islamic Literalism," “The Da Vinci Code.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

August 13, 2019

Click, Clack, Click, Clack

“The Pancho Villa Underground Railroad,” by Johnny Hazard, 2015

This fiction book is set in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  It starts as a sort of anarchist / leftist travelogue about radicals moving around the U.S. attending protests, then travels into Mexico.  It bounces between Minneapolis events and Chihuahua (Villa territory) then Cuernavaca (Zapata territory).  It is written in a fragmented, episodic style that is frankly hard to follow.  Sort of a post-modernist impressionism doing inward-looking hipster riffs.  It name-drops various radicals, organizations, events and cultural references, including the legendary peasant revolutionary Villa who once invaded New Mexico for a short time.  It even mentions Minneapolis’ own Palmer’s Bar and May Day Books, as Hazard is a local author.

The Train is Waiting

The ostensible plot centers around a young woman, Iris, who plays some kind of role in anti-government bombings in Columbus, Ohio, then flees as a fugitive.   Left politics and direct action are atmospherics.  Feminism is an undercurrent.  The roiling Mexican left in Cuernavaca around the 9/11 attacks shows its roots in the proletariat.  It has fragmentary pictures of life in these Mexican cities, which some may like.

I have to be honest.  This book is almost unreadable.  It is like someone with ADD writing while on weed, jumping from thing to thing to thing.  Perhaps the author should try poetry.  I enjoyed the Minneapolis references, as anyone living here would do.  But without depth it just comes across as poetic slumming.

Other similar fiction reviewed below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Good News,” “The Bomb,” “Something in the Air,” “The Dispossesed,” “Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs,” “Palmer’s Bar.”

The Kulture Kommissar

August 11, 2019

WTF Series #9 - Triumph of the Flow

Motorcyclist Rant

I ride and I’m watching.  Motorcyclists, like bicyclists, scooter riders and pedestrians, have to carefully observe the driving behavior of the people behind the wheel of massive killing machines – ah, I mean cars.  In spite of the large number of vehicle deaths in the U.S., no one yet wants to outlaw them. I've named cars, SUVs, vans and pickups as ‘retirement vehicles’ given the apparent ease necessary to pilot one.  So here’s the deal.

See Me, Feel Me, Hear Me...

I call it the flow.  It is a zen concept in which you adapt to the flow of traffic you are in.  The steel river. It means total awareness of others, as driving is really a social experience.  You can tell clueless or anti-social drivers immediately.  The ‘flow’ means you don’t drive too fast, you don’t drive too slow, you fit into the pace, you adapt.  That pickup that thinks it is in a ‘race’?  Take a pill, asshole.  That person who is driving 10 miles under the city speed limit?  Go back to a country lane and try again.  Don't stop in the bike lane like you are some delivery vehicle - otherwise that bicyclist has to swerve into possible traffic, as you just blocked their flow.  Awareness of others means using blinkers, stopping diddling with a phone at stoplights or anywhere, not suddenly stopping in the middle of a street, going around cars turning left, using all the lanes on a freeway and if you are slow on the freeway, staying on the right!  Those people on the fast lane going exactly the speed-limit like self-appointed cops?  Blocking the flow again.

If confused about location, pulling over or driving around the block or taking the next exit works better.  Hey, even learn to read a map or use a GPS.  Those who do something stupid like crossing many lanes of traffic to save a hair of time are the worst. Blocking the flow.  Rushing to stop.

Knowing what lane to be in beforehand helps the flow.  Weaving between lanes hurts it.  Looking for stoplights and stop signs coming up – in other words, anticipation, helps the the flow.  (Stop signs are actually many times stupid – in Ireland they use “Yield” instead just to be more real, which also saves gas and brake wear.)  The flow means not rushing up to a stop light and jamming on the brakes.  In fact brake wear is the biggest sign of a bad driver – and it also means excessive gasoline use.  Both costly habits. That jerky rabbit style of driving?  They should grow up.  You've seen people that put their brakes on constantly while driving, like every 10 seconds.  At every curve or intersection?  What is up with that?  Check experts who ‘high-mile.’ They teach how to approach lights or stalled traffic.  It does not involve acceleration - it actually means coasting like a kid on a bike.

The flow means using all lanes available, including the infamous ‘zipper’ merge.  I once had to argue with an alleged ‘professor’ that making a highway even smaller by queuing in one lane instead of the available two was against the laws of physics or plumbing.  I have been run off the road several times by Minnesotans thinking they are in a line for a movie instead of on a two-lane highway becoming one. Our MNDOT finally told people to use both lanes. Or people who merge onto a freeway and assume everyone is going to move over.  Legally, the ones on the freeway have the right of way.

Many cities have a combination of city drivers and country drivers.  The latter tend to be somewhat lost, slow and uncertain.   Their grasp of ‘the flow’ is questionable. (In Minneapolis, that means Wisconsin plates…)  Yeah, you know who you are.  Or recent immigrants from countries where driving is a new experience.  Motorcyclists see you hesitating about everything. 

Florida has the most vehicle accidents, which probably means the worst drivers.  Tennessee, Arizona, South Carolina and North Carolina are next worst - note - all in the U.S. south.  Minnesota is one of the safest states in the nation (#3), along with Massachusetts, North Dakota, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Vermont, and Alaska - mostly northern states.  

And don't get me started on parking lots - one of the worst places for fender benders or little accidents.  That lazy ass attempting to park closest to the doors?  Parked in a lane?  Lord...Then there are the people who have forgotten how to pass on a two-lane highway and will follow a slow vehicle for many miles. Blocking the flow...

I’ve ridden motorcycles for 44 years without an accident with another vehicle.  Motorcycles stop faster than cars, accelerate faster, maneuver better and provide better visibility for a rider’s eyes.  Which all helps – but we need some zen help too.  Don’t assume we are always watching all the erratic driving like a hawk.  I know motorcyclists can be pains in the ass – especially those Harley-branded riders who think their loud pipes are some kind of safety procedure.  After 6 drinks and no helmet, I’d say not.  Or the jock boys in shorts and wrap-arounds winding up their sport bikes into the ether.

Walking or riding a bicycle in the global South - which I have done in Hanoi and Hue, Vietnam and Phnom Penh, Cambodia - relies heavily on the flow and awareness of others. You cannot do it otherwise.

Electric scooters and motorcycles and any kind of bicycle are actually the future – zombie technologies like gasoline and large, heavy vehicles are doomed except for those who need them.  Some day you might have to leave your retirement vehicle and join us in the flow. So go with it!

May the lights always turn green for you...

Other posts on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “The Outlaws,” “Spring is Here.”

The Red MC / August 10, 2019, updated 9/10/24

A New Paradigm?

“Riot, Strike, Riot – the New Era of Uprisings,” by Joshua Clover, 2016.

This is an attempt at understanding the changing configurations of the proletariat.  It references events worldwide (and thus attempts to get credence from that), but it really extrapolates the model of Oakland Occupy as a model for the U.S.  In the process it fails as an international analysis.  In Oakland a combination of youth and what Clover  calls ‘surplus populations’ under capital – presumably the unemployed and the destitute - occupied a geographic square, engaged in property damage, blockaded the port twice, then set up a mass democratic social structure – the Oakland ‘commune’ - for a short period of time.
  

His theory - which is elegant and well-written as Clover is a professor, poet and music writer - is that the proletariat under capital has gone through 3 periods of resistance.  They are a period of geographic riots based on the high prices of basic items like food, which centered around the marketplace and ports.  This corresponds to the early period of rising mercantile capital.  The second is the period of strikes, as more and more the locus of rebellion centered on oppressive waged work in factories.  This corresponds to the period of industrial capital and the industrial 'revolution.'  The third period is a return to what he calls ‘riot prime.’  This period returns to riots that focus on the issue of consumer prices and the circulation of capital through transport.  But now tending towards a new social configuration in the context of declining world-wide financial capital - the present.  He calls the dominance of financial capital part of ‘exhaustion capitalism.’

Clover seems to be a anarchist of some kind, hostile to traditional party politics of the reformist or revolutionary type and also against stagnant forms of Marxist ‘analysis.’  His challenge to what he calls ‘workerist’ Marxists is that he thinks they still focus on the strike as the main path to social revolution.  Not the Marxists I know...  He insists this ignores the lived existence of the racialized ‘lumpen’ who now live outside the confines of waged work and instead live on the dole, in the non-productive economy, as peddlers or even criminals - or whose pay and labor is so precarious as to be almost non-existent. Anarchism has always relied heavily on this strata.

A great quote from Marx about the immiseration of the proletariat backs him up:  “the working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.”

I think he’s got something here, with a large caveat.  The caveat is this, briefly:  Clover’s idea of a deindustrializing ‘center’ society is a thesis that borrows from bourgeois sociology, which wishes to hide the working-class that exists in ‘center’ countries like the U.S.  Clover conceded Kim Moody’s thesis that U.S. transport and warehouse workers are a new mass force, but this fits in with Clover’s slant that consumption and the transport of goods are now key in center countries.  For this he might be called a ‘consumerist’ or "Keynesian" for his focus on a consumerist U.S.  Because the book is ostensibly about the U.S., Clover does not discuss the re-centering of production to the capitalist periphery or social revolutions, political revolutions and attempts at revolution in other countries that rise above strike and riot.  Nor does he conjecture about a future ‘strike prime' such as massive general strikes in a city or region or country, as has happened in countries like India and other countries recently.

Occupy Oakland Port Shutdown

What is powerful, though not new, about Clover’s thesis is that he captures the degeneration of stable waged work as the hallmark of capital flows and the confrontations that are now occurring.  They are not yet in production facilities but around geographic consumption and transport issues – especially the price of gas, food and housing worldwide (and in the U.S. health care and post-secondary education, which have taken on an electoral form…)  ‘Real estate’ rentier capital is now the main repository for wealth in the world.  This is why housing and city square occupations and blockades of roads, freeways, airports, ports, pipelines, dams and terrible infrastructure projects are so prominent as forms of resistance.  Occupy and the ‘yellow vests’ rebellion in France are cases in point, as is the NoDAPL protest at Standing Rock and the U.S. city and town rebellions against police brutality.  The politics are contained in the acts themselves – basically calling on capital’s machinations and ‘business as usual’ to stop. This is not being carried out by the solidly waged workers alone, but by every strata of the proletariat.  However as yet they have not really succeeded except in small ways.

The issue of ‘non-violence’ obviously comes up, as looting, arson and broken glass are inevitably part of any riot – a pejorative word when used by the corporate media but for ultra-leftists a holy grail.  As Clover points out, liberals (and conservatives) get involved on the basis of pacifism, calling for the state to have a monopoly on violence while calling the ‘zero-price’ setting of looting or property damage the same as violence against people. 

In the broader context, Clover does not think riot and strike are counter-posed, nor aspects of anarchism and socialism.  This is not news, of course. He thinks the confrontation of ‘riot prime’ is directly against the capitalist state, not against the capitalist workplace.  Anarchists see the 'state' as the main enemy at all times.  As such, he ignores sites of capitalist production, which ultimately have more power than any average riot.  He ignores the fact that riots also affect small businesses and public buildings, as well as innocent workers and civilians.  We saw this in Minneapolis. This is a book which captures some present conflicts between capital and the proletariat in the U.S. – but perhaps not in a more organized future.  

(Clover is a contributor to a new academic left journal out of the Bay Area - "Commune" - sold at May Day Books.)

Other reviews on this topic or mentioned in the book below, use blog search box upper left:  “The Precariat,” “On New Terrain,” “Rebel Cities,” “This Changes Everything,” “How Non-Violence Protects the State,” “Tropic of Chaos,” “Detroit,” “Black Panther,” “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “The Coming Insurrection.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 6, 2019