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Marxists on Elections

The question of elections has become key because of the mass social-democratic candidacy of Bernie Sanders, an unprecedented event in recent U.S. politics.  There are at least four positions among Marxists and labor people on running in elections and on Sanders.

#1 is to never participate in elections, which is the position of many ultra-lefts and anarchists and some union syndicalists. 

#2 is because Sanders is running in the bourgeois corporate Democratic Party, it is unprincipled to vote for him, a position common to some Trotskyists and Maoists.  

#3 is because Sanders is running a ‘Trojan Horse’ primary candidacy within the Democratic Party without any bourgeois support, it is principled to vote for him, a position of other Trotskyists.  

#4 is the long-entry position of many leftists in Democratic Socialists of America, some Maoists and the Communist Party, who have been voting for or attempting to change the Democratic Party from within for many years and always vote for a Democrat.  This is also the position of the labor bureaucracy in the U.S., though ‘changing’ the DP is not even on their agenda.

Riffing off a 1964 speech by Malcolm X

Missing from this description is how the specific Sanders’ candidacy is advancing socialist goals or retarding them among the U.S. population, irrespective of perfect programs.  I think his candidacy is advancing certain transitional proletarian goals, as well as the movement for socialism itself.  A version of socialism has come out of the closet in a mass way for the first time since the 1930s.

I want to take aim at Position #1, which has been with us for years and was a topic of discussion in FB's 'Marxist Discussion Group.'  To do this I had to re-read parts of “Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder” by Lenin; SWP leader Doug Jenness’s 1970 lecture “Lenin as Campaign Manager” and parts of professor August Nimtz’ new 2020 book “The Ballot or the Streets or Both?” All are available at May Day Books.

Both Marx and Engels made it clear that working-class suffrage, elections and bourgeois-democratic rights were extremely significant, though not the end point of socialist struggle.  Lenin also carried on this tradition, as the Bolsheviks ran in elections to the Russian Duma (its parliament), also forming electoral blocs or boycotting – running even in 1917!  In a bourgeois-democratic republic like the U.S. a significant mass of proletarians still think elections are the only form of political change.  Lenin, like Marx and Engels, understood that running in elections can play a transitional role to the rising of new forms of mass working-class democracy – the commune, the soviet, the council, or what we in the U.S. might  call ‘assemblies.’

  

I’ll just list some quotes that I dug up to refute Position #1:

1.  “Parliamentarism has become ‘historically obsolete.’  That is true as regards propaganda.  But everyone knows that this is still a long way from overcoming it practically.” (Lenin)

2.  “…participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament even a few weeks before the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory not only does not harm the revolutionary proletariat, but actually helps it to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be dispersed; it helps their successful dispersal and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism ‘politically obsolete.”  (Lenin)

3.   “… the Russian experience (relates) … to the importance of combining legal with illegal struggle.” “… how very useful during a revolution is the combination of mass action outside the reactionary parliament with an opposition sympathetic to (or better yet, directly supporting) the revolution inside it.” (both by Lenin)

4.  “You want to create a new society, yet you fear the difficulties involved in forming a good parliamentary group made up of convinced, devoted, heroic Communists in a reactionary parliament?” (Lenin)

5.  “On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know where they stand.” (Engels)

6.  Marx “knew how to break with anarchism ruthlessly for its inability to make use even of the ‘pigsty’ of bourgeois parliamentarism, especially when the situation was not obviously revolutionary, but at the same time he knew how to subject parliamentarism to genuinely revolutionary proletarian criticism.” (Lenin on Marx)

7.   One of the goals is “…to win the battle for democracy,..” (1848 Communist Manifesto)

8.  “Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and be elected… (1848 Program of the Communist Party of Germany)

9.  “That everywhere worker’s candidates are put up alongside the bourgeois-democratic candidates…” (1850 Address by Marx/Engels)

10.  “…the possessing class rules directly through the medium of universal suffrage.  As long as the oppressed class, in our case, therefore, the proletariat, is not yet ripe to emancipate itself, it will in its majority regard the existing order of society as the only one possible and, politically, will form the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme left wing.” (Engels)

11.  “In election propaganda it provided us with a means, second to none, of getting in touch with the masses…” (Engels)

12.  “…the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers’ party…” (Engels)

13.  “Refusal to participate in elections in principle is a naïve, childish doctrine.”  (Jenness summing up the electoral position of the 2^nd Congress of the Communist International.)

14.  “…the Communists must learn to create a new, uncustomary, non-opportunist, and non-careerist parliamentarianism” (Lenin)

15.  “We must work to accomplish practical tasks, ever more varied and ever more closely connected with all branches of social life, winning branch after branch, and sphere after sphere from the bourgeoisie.”  (Lenin)

All of this might also relate to the abstentionist slant of Position #2 and the reformist slant of Position #4 over the unique and dual role of Sanders in this presidential campaign.

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  Use terms “Sanders” or “elections.”  In Mayday’s stock: “Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder,” “Lenin as Campaign Manager,” “The Ballot or the Streets or Both?”

Red Frog

February 28, 2020

Get Ready for the Next One

“Who Killed Olaf Palme?” (Guardian Podcast 2020) ; “Who Killed Malcolm X?” (Netflix documentary 2020)

Assassination is the favorite tactic of security states, entitled business owners and fascists.  Our own government ‘security’ forces have killed a number of high-profile leftist leaders outside the U.S. and also inside the U.S.  Presently across the world most of the targets are left-wing ‘trouble-makers’ - journalists, earth and animal protectors and leftist politicians.  These two documentaries discuss two significant assassinations against left-wing figures carried out in Stockholm, Sweden and New York, U.S.A. on 2/28/1986 and 2/21/1965.

Olof Palme

Olof Palme was the elected leader of Sweden from the Social-Democratic Party. (Note to Paul Krugman: the European version of a ‘democratic socialist’).  He was from the left of the Social-Democratic Party and supported non-alignment, visited Cuba, was tough on the USSR, opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam and opposed apartheid in South Africa.  This podcast discusses the long hunt for the real killer of Palme after the original suspect was acquitted.  The podcast interviewer is clueless about why anyone would still care about the assassination.  She interviews mystery writer and journalist Jan Stocklassa who became obsessed with solving the murder.  Palme was gunned down on the busiest street in Stockholm while returning from a movie with his wife.  The original police investigation did not secure the scene, missing several clues.  It idiotically focused on the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) as the source of the trigger-man, though Palme himself was not an enemy of the PKK.  Subsequent investigations went nowhere.

Through an offhand comment by a person he was interviewing, Stocklassa discovered that Steig Larsson, the left-wing Trotskyist author of the “Millennium” trilogy (“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” etc.) had been investigating the killing for many years until his death.   Stocklassa is eventually led to a storage locker outside Stockholm by the editor of Expo which contained 20 boxes of material Larsson had accumulated on the Palme assassination. 

After scanning, OCR’ing and reviewing the material Stocklassa became convinced that Larsson’s theory on who killed Olof Palme was correct.  It involves a fascist trigger-man in Sweden, a go-between Swedish businessman who lived overseas and the South African “State Security Bureau” (BOSS) who wanted to shut up Palme regarding apartheid.  Stocklassa found a phone that had been left at the scene and claims the Stockholm police are updating their investigation.  

Who Killed Olof Palme? Podcast

Malcolm X

Malcolm X was the leader of a breakaway faction of the black Muslim Nation of Islam (NOI).  In the last year of his life he became a standard Muslim and a Pan-African socialist. At the time of his death many wanted him dead, beginning with the NYC police, the FBI, the U.S. government and the leadership of the NOI.  This 6-part Netflix series tracks the investigation by another civilian, Abdur-Rahmann Muhammad, a practicing Muslim who remained astonished that the police had not solved this murder either. 

Audubon Ballroom after the Assassination

Abdur-Rahmann’s investigation involved FOI requests to the FBI, reviews of NYPD files, discussions with people involved in the NOI and the Nation’s military wing, the Fruit of Islam (FOI), and videos.  The documentary also has interviews with many principals, including Tony Bouza, head of the police ‘red squad’ in Manhattan (BOSSI).  Abdur-Rahmann affirms prior investigations that two of the three people convicted of the assassination were innocent.  The one guilty one, Talmadge Hayer/Hagan, was injured by one of Malcolm’s  bodyguards and caught. The two innocent men convicted on fuzzy ‘witness’ testimony were sent to prison for 20+ years.  It is not clear from the documentary who the ‘witnesses’ who implicated them were, as 9 FBI informants were in the audience at the Audubon Ballroom. Abdur-Rahmann's investigation shows there were a total of 5 shooters - 4 getting away.  Those 4 were known to the FBI but never revealed to the NY prosecutor, a pompous ass who thought he did a great job in his investigation.  The murder scene was not secured.  Another shoddy police investigation, which is the mark of political assassinations world-wide. 

The police BOSSI squad surveilled Malcolm for years, spending money on constant tails, recording and photos.  On Bouza’s orders no protection was offered to Malcolm after the fire-bombing of his house in Queens a week before the assassination.  Nor were police in evidence at the Audubon except in a remote location in the building.  Bouza said protection would have been ‘expensive’ so they left Malcolm unguarded.  No one looks at how expensive the surveillance was!  Additionally a key bodyguard, Gene Roberts, was a BOSSI police agent.  Bouza calls Malcolm a ‘thug’ in the documentary.  J. Edgar Hoover said to “do something about Malcolm X.” Elijah Muhammad’s son said in NYC that we need to “cut out his tongue and send it to my father.’  They all wanted Malcolm X dead.

The jailed shooter Hayer named his 4 other accomplices in an Affidavit and said the other jailed ones were innocent.  The real accomplices all came from Newark, New Jersey NOI Mosque #25.  Abdur-Rahmann identifies the individual who killed Malcolm with a shotgun as William Bradley, who then changed his name to Al-Mustaffa Shabazz.  There is film of Bradley outside the Audubon after the assassination. Abdur-Rahmann talks with many former members of Mosque #25, with Corey Booker, with NJ Lt. Governor Sheila Oliver and they all play dumb about Shabazz, even though it seems common knowledge in the Newark Muslim community that he was the killer.

In Manning Marable’s book on Malcolm X, there was information that the FBI had an agent or informant or conduit inside Mosque #25.  This is not discussed in the documentary.  It is clear the FBI was protecting the 4 other shooters.  They had sent poison letters to the NOI before the split, trying to increase hostility between Malcolm and ‘the Prophet.’  The FBI always uses ‘fronts’ – just like the South African State Security Services – to do the actual killings.

There is no statute of limitations on murder, but don’t hold your breath for the NY police or prosecutors to reopen the investigation.  

P.S. - A recent comment by SWP comrade Roland Sheppard, who was in the Audubon when Malcolm was shot, reveals that he saw the shotgun shooter Bradley kill Malcolm.  When he was called for questioning to the police station, Sheppard also saw him in the bathroom there.  The man then went into an office in the police station that was presumably his.  

 https://rolandsheppard.com/?page_id=9163&fbclid=IwAR0zZw_wZAKVSqvw4gj2GEcYtPqZLcshIiKLDDQfd1A_SGDAmEl6slgrfGc  

P.P.S.  - A written memory by Roland, who was at the Ballroom on the day of the assassination:  https://rolandsheppard.com/?page_id=891&fbclid=IwAR3beafVnSt6zj4Dm9Sj44adKC6Ob8nXP1a7YFIYzNUr_3-s6Oah6Ld0abQ

Other prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left:  “Malcolm X – A Life of Reinvention,” “American Assassination - The Strange Death of Paul Wellstone,” “Orders to Kill” and “The Plot to Kill King,” (both by Pepper) “They Killed Our President,” (Ventura) “The Devil’s Chessboard,” (Talbot) “On the Trail of the Assassins,” (Garrison).

Red Frog

February 25, 2020

Puttin' on the Mitts!

Bernie Needs to Toughen Up His Debate Performances

I watched part of the Democratic debate before the Nevada caucuses.  It was clear that Bernie was a target, both for the ‘moderators’ and certain other candidates.  Socialists watching might have shaken their head over Bernie’s glancing defense of ‘democratic socialism’ and the attacks of other candidates.  Bernie is like a bulldozer, but he's not the most subtle or supple of debaters.  Nor is he a hard-core Marxist.  So let’s give him some advice:

Time to play hardball with MSNBC / MSDNC

Chuck Todd

Getting the debate off to a rousing red-baiting start, Chuckie announces Sanders as “democratic-socialist senator Bernie Sanders.”  No other candidate gets a description before his name.  So here is what Bernie should have said:

“Chuck, Chuck, I notice that you singled me out for my politics, but no one else.  Let me help you in that regard.  Like this, ok?

“We have raving capitalist billionaire and former Republican mayor Mike Bloomberg!”

“We have consistent neo-liberal former prosecutor Amy Klobuchar!”

“We have gay Christian mayor of a very small town, Pete Buttigieg!”

“We have shy capitalist and former Republican Elizabeth Warren!”

“We have the former vice president and the senator from MBNA bank, Joe Biden!”

And you Chuckie, who is MSNBC owned by?  Comcast, the most beloved corporation in America! (wait for audience laughter…)  If I was on RT, you’d call me a Russian agent.  So you should be introduced as ‘pro-capitalist journalist and Comcast tool, Chuck Todd!’”

Hallie Jackson (moderator)

“Hallie, I noticed you compared my so-called ‘lack of transparency’ to Donald Trump because you can’t remember that I released my heart-attack records.  Quite a comparison. Really?  I expect you to ask Bloomberg about his stent too.  Why is it that the ‘rap’ against me is I’m old when 4 candidates up here are in their 70s?  No one tells 78 year old Bloomberg he’s too old to run ...  because he has money!”

Bloomberg

Responding to Bloomberg’s poke about his ‘3 houses’:  “Well, Mike, if I tried to self-finance my election, I’d have run out of money before Iowa!  But I got my staff to research you and in 2011 you had 11 houses.   What do you need 11 houses for?! My question is, how many do you have now? 20?”

Buttigieg

“Listen up, kid.  You call me ‘divisive.’  Where have you been the last 40 years?  Oh yeah, partly in diapers.  Well let me remind you that there has been an intensified class war against workers in the last 40 years.  Some young people know this, which is why they are voting for me, not you!  If there is ‘dividing’ being done, it is by the billionaires and the rich.  Now you want to sling empty platitudes and sing Kumbaya like some Boy Scout leada?  The only bi-partisan deal you will get will be one the Republican Party likes!  Oh, by the way Platitude Pete, wanting to get rid of "Citizens United" and still accepting corporate PAC money is called hypocrisy.  As to ‘socialism’ – youse a smart guy, went to Oxford and Harvard and all.  Your dad was even an academic interested in Gramsci and socialism. You know very well the many types of socialism there are, so don’t play stupid with me.  As to ‘my way or the highway,’ the highway has been owned for the last 40 years in the Democratic Party by people like you – lightweight neo-liberals.  How can I 'burn' that down? You’re real beef is that I’m on what you think is your highway.  Well, as they say, the middle of the road is a dangerous place to be.”

Klobuchar

“Amy, I liked what you did with the snowstorm, I really did.  But yore just confusin’ the field running for a cabinet position, you know?  And hey, the USMCA you’re so proud of supporting?  Republican Chuck Grassley said it was 95% the same as NAFTA, so congrats on making the same mistake twice!”

Biden

“Joe, Joe.  Really?  We’re buds but being the male Hillary Clinton isn’t doing you any favas, you know?  Iraq, the banks, the crime bill, Anita Hill, NAFTA, the drug war, the bankruptcy bill, opposing busing, trying to cut Social Security and Medicare, all your billionaire donors – Jesus!  You have so many skeletons and even fresh bodies in your closet, I can hear the rattling from here!  Give it up already.  That boat has flown.”

Warren

“Look, Elizabeth, you’re the best debater on stage.  You know I offered you VP and Treasury.  Think about it.”

“Democratic Socialism”

When Todd called him a democratic socialist in the introduction, Bernie’s head went down like a turtle, as if someone had taken a shot at him.  Yesterday the CIA virtually called him a Russian stooge right before the Nevada caucuses with no facts listed.  The CIA is getting its untraceable heart attack medications ready in case that stratagem doesn’t work.  

As to 'waging war' on the Culinary Workers union, here is what he could have said:  "You know, the Culinary Workers have an excellent health plan.  Like the farmers from Saskatchewan did in Canada, who self-financed their own health care and spread it to all of Canada, I just want to spread good health care to everyone in the U.S.  But if you want to leave a job at the casinos and the union?  What happens to your health care then?"

As to socialism, here is what Bernie could say about his kind of socialism:

“Let me explain my socialism to you, since you’re so ignorant it hurts. I even have to stand next to a multi-billionaire let in by the DNC.  You know that ‘share the wealth’ thing in Alaska with the oil money?  A socialist plot!  How about the North Dakota state bank?  Goldman Sachs won’t like that.  Cooperatives and worker-owned companies all over the country?  More socialist plots!  Eisenhower’s interstate system?   Part of a planned economy!  That internet thing before the profiteers ruined it?  Government instigated.  The post office?  No wonder the Republicans want to destroy it.  Medicare and Medicaid?  Sponsored by a known socialist, LBJ.  Unemployment insurance and social security?  Another socialist plot by FDR!  The TVA?  The GI Bill?  The VA?  Get real. Or what about public schools?  You know, 'public,' which is like socialist?  Which is why conservatives are pushing charter schools to privatize education!  Hey, even fire departments and trash pickup – though they are trying to privatize those now too.  Or municipal liquor stores?  Socialist drunks!  Muni power plants?  Collectivized energy!  There used to be real ‘non-profit’ hospitals, but those have been changed into something else.  Thank you capitalists!  It's called a 'mixed economy' frankly and that is what I'm for.  Finally the Green Bay Packers.  Yes... no billionaire is going to run away from Green Bay, Wisconsin because it is their team.  Which is why the NFL’s billionaires banned any more municipal ownership.

That is just in this country.  Canada just north of us, Iceland, England’s NHS, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy – all have more aspects of socialism.  The ‘Nordic model’ is to try to have universal health care, universal education, universal housing, universal employment – what’s not to like?  Denmark is the happiest country in the world.  Know why?  Yes, they dabbled in democratic socialism.  Denmark! Damn them, right?   

This country is not happy though, no matter the stupid jingoism.  For a so-called advanced country it has the most suicides, the most murders, the most mass shootings, the most use of anti-depressants, the worst labor laws, the longest working hours, the worst treatment of children and mothers, the most poverty, the most racism, the most heavy drug use, the biggest prison population, the most police shootings, the biggest military budget, the most invasions by one country – I could go on.  Listen, Trump called the Democratic Party ‘radical socialists’ a week ago.  Obama was baited as a socialist too.   Anything that helps people is baited as socialist, including here in the Democratic Party and by the DNC.  Grow the fuck up.”

Now whether the U.S. can actually become a ‘democratic socialist’ paradise and do this through the Democratic Party is another matter.  Nor is Sanders pledge to endorse any Democrat.  But that is a debate for another day.

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  Use the word "Sanders."

Red Frog

February 22, 2020      

Campism

“Bullet Points and Punch Lines - the Most Important Commentary Ever Written on the Epic American Tragicomedy,” by Lee Camp, 2020

Lee Camp is one of the most prominent left-wing comedians in the U.S. He’s even been compared to George Carlin, but I’m not sure Carlin ever denounced imperialism.  Camp works from the dirty facts that mainstream comedians and media ignore, punctuating the misery with swearing and sexual metaphors that emphasize how ludicrous the system is.  It’s called satire!  Endorsed by a whole host of leftish luminaries and targeted by the New York Times (which retracted large bits of its hit piece eventually) Camp proves he is smarter than a bag of hammers.

This book covers many of his most important factual finds, crimes his team found searching the journo-sphere for muckraking dirt.  First off is $21 trillion in unaccounted spending from the Offense Department budget between 1998 and 2015.  Surprised?  You shouldn’t be.  The Pentagon has never been audited until last year, though audits were legally required since the early 1990s.  They were finally audited in 2019 and, yes, they failed the audit.  The Pentagon is basically a large black box full of money sloshing around, invisible to Congress or the public, where figures are made up and our cash is stacked on pallets and doled out to buy temporary or permanent friends.  That includes the whole military-industrial complex.

I’ll list some of the embarrassing factual issues that Camp retails, which track the capitalist narratives of militarism, racism, Wall Street profiteers, environmental danger, surveillance, election interference and plain media stupidity and cover-ups:

             1.                  Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia … Coups?  What coups?

             2.                  Why is it that every country the U.S. sanctions or invades had dropped the dollar as its reserve currency?

             3.                  Lies and wars against Spain, Vietnam, Iraq and Syria.

4.                  100,000 ignored whistle-blower complaints at the Pentagon.

5.                  If you’re country is ‘socialist,’ has oil and minerals or drops the dollar, the U.S. government has a plan for you.  Bill Maher and Nancy Pelosi clap for Juan Guaido!

6.                  Trump’s military drops a bomb every 12 minutes, higher than Obama and Bush.  Nothing to see here, move along.

7.                  Artificial intelligence versus real intelligence.

8.                  The corporate media never talks about the animal torture industry.

9.                  4% of corporate media coverage of the California fires mentioned climate change.

10.            The earth is a piping hot fajita!

11.            Wall Street – a Ponzi scheme you should get in on.

12.            Curing disease depresses profits.

13.            Citigroup and Goldman Sachs chose most of Obama’s 2008 cabinet - and other facts of Wall Street’s influence.

14.            Massive British psy-ops election interference in 2016, a.k.a. Cambridge Analytica.

15.            The pathetic Russian version a.k.a. 8 Floridians and a dog.

16.            ‘Only Blue Lives Matter’ has always been official policy.

17.            Black folks live in a sacrifice zone.

18.            Julian Assange is the good kind of dickhead.  His list of accomplishments.

19.            The “Resistance®” gave Trump unlimited war powers, unlimited surveillance powers, unlimited trade authority, unlimited ability to kill ‘suspected combatants’, unlimited control of election structures and unlimited ‘hostility.’

20.            The Washington Post counts Trump’s many real lies, then lies about them.  The NYT Ivy League hit piece on Camp gets dissected, digested and newly directed.

You get the idea.  Of recent significance, Camp, the Greyzone Project and others have tracked how Democratic Party software operatives, in league with Microsoft, a cyber-security firm called Galois connected to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and some neo-cons are all involved in creating ‘free’ open-source election software called Electionguard© that is being recommended for use in all U.S. elections. These same Democratic Party people show up during the prosecution of the failed Russiagate conspiracy as the software ‘authorities’ behind media-darling and discredited software outfits New Knowledge (also connected to DARPA) and Hamilton68.  They show up again in a Russia-blaming ‘false flag’ operation in the Alabama senatorial race.  Not in the book, but the same people have been identified as movers behind the Shadow© app and ACRONYM in the sabotaged Iowa primary.  See a pattern?  Paper ballots anyone?

At any rate, larded with mostly gentle humor, the book is a factual and easy read about the corporate monsters hiding in the closet.  Don’t open that door!

P.S. – We understand Lee Camp will be appearing in Minneapolis in May in a comedy show.  May Day Books will be selling his book at a ‘book talk’ or comedy show at the Hook and Ladder Theater, hopefully co-sponsored by Women Against Military Madness.

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Chapo Trap House,” “Multi-Millionaire Comedians,” “The Jesus Comics,” “What Can You Say About Bill Maher?”  “The Ponzi Factor.” Or use the words “Greenwald” or “Russiagate.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

February 18, 2020  

The Latino Metropolis

The Latino Question – Politics, Labouring Classes and the Next Left,” by A. Ibarra, A. Carlos and R. Torres, 2018

This is one of the most recent analyses of the Latino/a question in the U.S. from a Marxist point of view.  It is marred by a certain academic style, but makes basic points in contradiction to identity or ‘intersectional’ views as usually put forward by Democrats, African-American or Latino nationalists, liberals or left-liberals.

It is based on interviews with migrant workers in California’s agriculture areas, co-operative workers in San Francisco and low-wage workers in Milwaukee. Most Latino/a immigrants in the U.S. are from Mexico, secondarily from Puerto Rico, thirdly from the Caribbean, Central and South America.  They remind us that one of the founding acts of the United States besides indigenous genocide and African-American slavery was the conquest of upper Mexico – Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California.

Around 1910, prior to the Mexican revolution, the U.S. started building railroads in Mexico to move produce and raw materials north.  Since that time, though interrupted by the Mexican revolution, U.S. capitalists have used Mexico as an economic colony providing cheap labor, minerals and food.  This is the material root of the migration and production patterns that continue today.  The Bracero labor program that operated between 1942 and 1964, the 1947 Taft-Harley law which crippled union power, the 1986 GATT trade agreement, the 1988 NAFTA agreement and now the present 2020 USMCA all create a depopulated and poverty-stricken rural Mexico while destroying local Mexican businesses in towns.  Even Pemex, the crown jewel of the Mexican Revolution, is now mostly privatized.  Some present migrants actually have parents and co-workers who were in the Bracero program! This is why immigrants have gone to ‘el norte’ for so long.

The authors emphasize the labor and economic issues behind the U.S. government’s chauvinism, illegality and racism towards Latino/as.  Their analysis is based on the EMT – the ‘empire migration theory.’  They also work from Gramsci’s idea of conquering the ‘cultural’ and ideological side of capitalism, which they call ‘cultural political economy.’

They contest pure identity views that are separated from economics, along with ‘critical race theory’ or with ‘intersectional’ views that either ignore class or ignore the fact that all identities are embedded in the capitalist system. It is quite evident that many times the words ‘Latino’ or ‘black’ are merely short-hand terms for low-paid labor.  The terms actually contain class content.  The authors note that there are classes within the Latinx community and lumping them together is inaccurate and stupid.  30% of Latino/a voters voted for Trump in 2016 for instance.  Like the African-American community, there are rich entrepreneurs, small businessmen and professionals whose material interests diverge from the majority of the low-paid proletariat.

Latino/a Warehouse Workers on Strike

Through interviews the authors reveal the value of cooperatives to Latino/as as sources of higher material benefits and as actual democratic spaces.  They delineate the difficulties between minorities in co-ops who need material benefits and mostly European-Americans who see co-ops as more of a cultural process.  The authors’ emphasis on co-operatives is similar to Richard Wolff, as both see them as gateways to a future non-capitalist economy.  However the authors also make the claim that co-operatives challenge the state, which is a stretch.  Their recommendations for practical action outside ideology are limited to co-ops and community and union organizing.

One chapter discusses the ‘cultural appropriation’ of Mexican food in Los Angeles by upscale European-American chefs creating ‘nouvelle cuisine’ while at the same time nearly every restaurant in LA is powered by low-paid Latino/a labor hidden in the back of the house.  The 2006 “Day Without a Mexican,” when millions of Latinx workers stopped working in cities across the country to oppose a reactionary immigration bill, provides a modern inspiration for the authors.  It led to immigrant labor organizations throughout the U.S. and the real possibility of future large-scale U.S. labor mobilizations led by Latinx workers.  The development of Los Angeles as a “Latino Metropolis”’ a Chicano/a one, is one example.  It is producing organizations like Warehouse Workers United within the largest concentration of warehouses in the U.S.   

While the sole focus of the “Latino Question” in the U.S. media is on ICE, the Wall, ‘La Migra’ and 11M unauthorized immigrants, most of the 60M Latino/as in the U.S. are legal in one way or another. The government's intention is to terrorize the whole workforce, as workers of various legalities are deeply connected.  Yet as the joke might go, “you invade our country, we ‘invade’ yours!” A timely and interesting book, but a bit too oriented towards academics.  Nevertheless a good Left addition to the literature and applicable to the present day, not just hazy days past.

Other prior reviews on this topic, us blog search box, upper left:  “Drug War Capitalism,” “NAFTA 2,” “Viva Zapata,” “Frida Kahlo,” “USMCA Fraud,” “The Lacuna,” “Mayans M.C.,” “Pancho Villa Underground Railroad,” “Open Veins of Latin America,” “American Made,” “Building the Commune,” “The Diary of Che Guevara,” “Mariategui,” “Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens” and “Occupy the Economy” (both by Wolff); “No Local,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “The New Jim Crow,” “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Super-Size Wages!”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

February 14, 2020

The Past is Not Even Past

“Blood and Earth – Modern Slavery, Ecocide and the Secret to Saving the World,” by Kevin Bales, 2016

This is a journey into the origin of granite counter-tops and headstones, digital devices, fish and shrimp, beef and gold.  In a global economy, commodities are laundered from land and earth through labor to transport, production and sales, ending up in your living room or kitchen.  We aren’t supposed to know anything except they are the new things we just bought.  Yet some of that ‘stuff’ comes from the estimated 35M modern slaves in the world.

Bales has written a number of books on the topic of modern slavery, and here he ties it to environmental degradation.  Export economies based on illegal labor decimate the land, mangrove swamps, forests, jungles, water and animals because the slavers don’t give a damn.  While Bales himself doesn’t see the connection between our world capitalist commodity economy and slavery, like crime they seem peas in a pod.  His solutions are better government, better auditing of sub-contractors and better laws.  He thinks “heroes of the new economy” like Peter Thiel will save us, along with informed consumer choices.  Don't laugh.

Lessening consumption, including certain imported foods; reducing the production or purchase of “cool” throw-away electronics or even labor action are not on his radar, let alone anti-capitalism or class war.  He complains that slavery undercuts the capitalist ‘free market,’ but he ignores the fact that these products get sold in that very market.  Both methods revolve around earning profits after all. Indigenous slavery in the silver mines of Potosi, Bolivia was the foundation of many European banks.  Chattel slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean and the U.S. South was a great boon to the capitalists in the U.S. north and in Europe, something that Marx would call a form of ‘primitive accumulation.’  All this is still going on.  In a way his book contains its own contradiction.  It’s like discovering a massacre by two perpetrators, then recommending steps against only one of them.

THE SITES

Bales visits a granite mine in India producing headstones and countertops worked by families of debt slaves, including women and children.  He slips into the eastern Congo and spies on illegal cassiterite, coltan and tantalum mines worked by slaves, guarded by gangs of killers and rapists, some just children.  When the militias are not selling blood minerals they cut down mahogany trees for lumber and charcoal or they kill mountain gorillas and hippos in national parks for sellable meat.  He visits an island shrimp farm in a decimated mangrove in southern Bangladesh full of deceived and bullied children sometimes forced to work 24 hours a day in cold water.  These protective Bay of Bengal mangroves sequester four times the carbon of ordinary forests or jungles and they are being cleared for seafood farms.  He interviews a woman working in a shrimp processing factory in nearby Khulna city that is full of brutalized and irregularly paid women.  He studies the decimation of Brazil’s Matto Grosso and Amazonian frontier forests by slaves.  The jungles are being replace by eucalyptus trees for paper, cocoa trees for chocolate, soybeans for cattle feed, pastures for cattle ranges or raw wood for charcoal making.  He describes slaves hand-making bricks in primitive ovens in Pakistan using old tires and used motor oil as toxic fuels that spew ‘black carbon.’

Bales visits the debt-slaves working gold mines in Ashanti Ghana, mining gold laundered through the good capitalists of Dubai’s gold market.  The silicosis-laden quartzite where the gold specks hide will kill many of these slaves, while nearby streams are polluted with toxic mercury from washing out the gold, the air from toxic mercury vapors emitted from heating the gold. 1/3^rd of Ghana is now deforested due to gold mining.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Bales looks at the striking parallels between debts and fake fines that lead to debt bondage across the world now and those Jim Crow practices that led to spurious arrests and fines in the U.S. South.  Under Jim Crow arrested African-American men had to ‘work off’ their fines by slaving for private capitalists in iron ore mines, turpentine camps or cotton plantations.   One of the ‘crimes’ was loitering, which I might add is still heavily used in the U.S. South against African-American youth. 

Bonded Labor / Bonded Land

The Problem

Deforestation, especially in Latin America, Asia and Africa, is perilous to carbon capture, as forests and water bodies are the key natural ways to absorb carbon.  Whether deforestation is done by legitimate capitalists or illegal slavers it amounts to the same thing, though the worst deforestation comes from slavers according to Bales.  National parks and protected forests, treaties or laws mean nothing to them, so attempts to slow or reverse deforestation won’t work as long as illegality and slaveholders function.

Few of these governments care, as they back the local capitalists or slavers and state bureaucrats get a cut of the proceeds.  Corporate audit programs are frequently inadequate – taking the word of suppliers - or deceived.  In Khulna industrialists run small factories that serve as Potemkin villages for auditors, where the building is clean and the workers are told to lie to the auditors.

Bales saw hope in Brazil with the election of Lula and the Workers Party in 2006.  They put into place a working anti-slavery effort that began to free slaves and stop illegal deforestation.  But the large Brazilian landlords began to fight back with assassinations, the favorite tactic of the fascist right.  Bales also documents how local government and police did not back the effort.  Now the landlords have used corrupt legal processes to install Jasir Bolsonaro instead of Lula.  He is allowing the destruction of the Amazon as we speak. So ‘success’ within a capitalist, bourgeois-democratic context is actually inherently reversible.  That should lead us to another solution about how to solve slavery and the destruction of the environment.

This is an illuminating book about the impact of modern slavery on humans and nature, but its proposed solutions are almost purposely inadequate.  It brings home the fact that slavery is not something just in the past.  You might conclude that socialist ‘abolitionism’ is the order of the day.  And even that the only way to crush the slavers is with a new anti-slavery ‘blue-jacket’ army.

P.S. - The Conversation reports 2/14/20 that while chattel slavery may be illegal in every country, it has never been criminalized in half of the world (94 countries).  I.E. you cannot go to jail for keeping slaves in those countries.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Slavery by Another Name,” “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “Slave States – the Practice of Kafala” and the word “slavery” for reviews related to older versions of slavery in the U.S. and Caribbean.

And I got this at the Athens, Georgia library!

Red Frog

February 11, 2020