Capital: Vampire of Body & Soil

“The Robbery of Nature – Capitalism and the Ecological Rift,” by John Bellamy Foster and B. Clark, 2020

This is an excellent history and polemic propounding Marx’s understanding of the ecological rift between capital and nature, a rift between the natural metabolism of the earth and the social metabolism of capitalist society.  Just as workers are robbed of their time, health and productivity, so the soil and all of nature is robbed because it is treated as a ‘free gift’ by capital.  This has created the present existential ecological crisis which can only be solved by a social revolution of the associated producers that leads to a sustainable society.

Guano Digging by Chinese Slaves

The book, which started as articles in Monthly Review, has modern implications, as Marx’s thoughts directly refer to present situations.  Factory farming and animal treatment, poor working-class diets, starvation and hunger, right-wing Green thinkers, the depopulation of rural areas, deforestation, air and water pollution, the degeneration of the soil, nitrogen dead zones in the oceans, animals as food and imperialist / colonialist extraction are all the kinds of issues Marx and Engels dealt with in the 1800s.

Philosophically Foster and Clark use the ideas of opponents of Marx and Engels on the issue of nature to expose their own falsity.  They defend Marx and Engels from some in the Frankfurt School like Adorno and Herkimer, deep ecology Greens and eco-socialists like Schmidt and Moore, semi-Marxists like Harvey, social-democrat techno-utopians from Jacobin, bourgeois anti-Marxists like E.F. Schumacher and those who thought Marx only paid cursory attention to colonialism. They contrast conservative ‘first wave eco-socialism’ with more Marxist ‘second-wave eco-socialism.’  They explain the concepts of exploitation and expropriation – twin motors of capitalist functioning.  The heavily rely, as Marx did, on the vast difference between use-value and exchange value.  Capital is based on the latter, not the former.  They show the consistent links between the ‘young’ Marx and the mature Marx.  They discuss productive, non-productive and reproductive labor.

Marx wrote 500 pages on the exploitation and expropriation of Ireland as his main study of colonialism.  Not only was the country seized, the land stolen and the Irish peasants exploited, but the fertility of their rich land robbed, as foodstuffs were sent to England even during the famine.  This process is still going on across the world – for example Mexico is the U.S.’s Ireland now, while Columbia’s fertile soil provides cheap flowers to every super-market in the U.S.

Foster/Clark study the role of women in the initial stages of the industrial revolution, noting that they provided over 60% of the workers in the textile factories, while nearly all servants were women.  Proletarian families had so little time due to long work hours that mothers did not even have time to breast-feed their babies and gave them alcohol or drugs to quiet them down.  As a result there was almost no housework being done in many working-class families.  There was no ‘free’ time to do it.  Hovels were filthy, clothes torn, cooking consisted of simple adulterated bread and tea with an occasional potato, and education non-existent. They suggest this is one reason why Marx and Engels did not intensively study reproductive labor at home.  Marx called female servants ‘little slaveys’ for working 18 hours a day for almost no money.  (This is not the prettified Downton Abbey.)  As the later 1800s went on, the share of women wage-workers went down due to protests by the labor movement, which understood that the reproduction of the working class was becoming impossible.  Engels noted that this increasing gender-segregated homework was also a ‘free gift’ to capital, like nature. 

Animal cruelty cages - nothing new.

Foster/Clark discuss Marx’s role as a food theorist, given bread, tea, beer and sugar were all adulterated with toxic additives.  Bread had pearl-ash, chalk, stone­-dust, sawdust and alum added to it – much like the toxic ingredients found in many modern processed foods.  Workers had no vegetables and little protein and suffered many dietary diseases like rickets and scrofula.  In the process they examine “English High Farming” of the time, which some writers claim was ecologic and sustainable.  It was only partially that and mostly the beginning of industrial farming.  Marx opposed the transition of English agriculture from a wheat economy to a meat and milk economy, as this led to hunger for the working classes - as the rich ate the meat and drank the milk.  It also employed far fewer farm laborers, hurting employment.  What might Marx think of bio-fuels?  Marx wrote against the “system of cell prisons” for animals and called them “disgusting.”  Nothing has changed in factory farming, it has just gotten worse. He was also against the large private monopolies on land, now our modern agri-business.  They point out that many leftist critics of Marx’s view of agriculture have either not read him thoroughly or have shallow critiques.

The authors also defend Marx from eco-socialists who falsely accuse him of ‘speciesism’ – especially for his use of the labor theory of value.  Marx and Engels understood the difference between humans and other animals, but also the similarities, as humans have ‘corporeal’ bodies too.  Capital considers animals to be ‘machines’ or ‘resources’ to be used and profited from.  Degrading animals is part of its degradation of nature and humans.  At one point in industrializing Britain women were even cheaper than horses to pull barges, so the barge owners switched to women!  But without human labor, nature will continue on its own path.  As if horses want to pull barges!

Foster/Clark explain the Lauderdale Paradox, which correctly states that scarcity is the key to private wealth.  So scarcity is embraced by capital to prop up exchange value and privatize everything.  Every neo-classical economist starting with Say and Malthus wanted to hide and then get rid of any concept of use-value - one that satisfies an unpriced basic human need outside the commodity economy.  Which is why in the present corona pandemic they are dumping milk, killing chickens and culling cow herds and the USDA is not buying surplus produce, leading to massive waste.  All while cars line up for miles at food pantries in Texas.  Selling ordinary tap water in bottles indicates the commodification of formerly free water.  What is next?  Green reformists want to price every natural ‘gift’ into capitalist economics.  Which, while impossible, would commodify everything - the ‘logic’ of capitalist economics!  The failure of carbon credits should tell us all we need to know.

Of most philosophic interest is the chapter on attempts by deep Green ecologists to denigrate human labor, hide capital as a deeply exploitative system and substitute a trans-historical idea of ‘energy’ labor as the real source of all value, not human labor working within nature.  I.E. to my mind basically ending up as pagan sun worship for all the heat and photo-synthesis!  It certainly makes sense as a religion but it doesn’t work as an analysis of capital.  Foster/Clark have this to say about this misfire, an argument Marx and Engels also dealt with long ago: 

“Ahistorical, idealist attempts to envision the internalization and integration of social and environment costs within the market system, or see nature as the true source of value, only play down the social (including class and other forms of oppression) and ecological contradictions of the capitalist system … To put a price on a forest, so that its work/energy is not longer ‘unpaid,’ that is, to commodify it – to turn it into so many millions of board feet of standing timber – is not more likely to save the forest than the lack of a price.” 

“All this suggests that sustainable human development requires not the incorporation of nature into the system of value, but the abolition of commodity value itself.”

This book is a revealing take on Marxist, non-Marxist and semi-Marxist attempts at ecologic theory, with very clear implications for the present and future.  The authors end with a look at modern capital - its vast waste, unproductive labor, planned obsolescence, fake recycling, expensive advertising, useless and poorly made products, inefficient industrial farming and throw-away consumption patterns. Imperialism is the highest point of capital and it has created the social environment we live in now.  Marx long ago made the salient point that an increase in capitalist development will bring increasing strain on the natural environment.  The world is approaching that end-point now.

P.S. - Their analysis of ‘first wave eco-socialism’ ignores the development of the USSR, which might have prompted the environmental criticisms of Marx by the European Frankfurt School.  The USSR's later industrializing leadership and Party failed to follow Marx and instead became Promethean and ‘productionist,’ laying waste to parts of nature.  In their criticism of Jacobin they cite a Promethean quote by Leon Trotsky from Literature and Revolution.  Indeed his writings on nature were in error.  What the authors omit is the practice of the CPs in the USSR and China, which make Trotsky's quote small potatoes.  Though of course nowhere near the natural holocaust being perpetrated by capital at present.  I am awaiting Foster's next book covering environmentalism in 'really existing socialism.'  The reason that book won't be written is because Foster and Monthly Review are weak or past supporters of Soviet and Chinese CP practice and lines, but rarely mention it anymore. 

Other prior blog reviews related to this book below, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Ecological Revolution,” “Marx and the Earth,” and “Marx’s Ecology” (all by Foster); “Fear of the Animal Planet,” “Catastrophism,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “History of the World in Seven Cheap Things,” “Civilization Critical,” “Marx and Human Nature” “Anthropocene or Capitalocene,” “This Land,” "Tropic of Chaos," "Four Futures," "The Rise of China" or the word “ecology.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog

April 27, 2019

Under the Economy is the Proletarian Body

The Corporeal Body

 
If you wondered about the contradiction between the needs of capital and the corporeal needs of human beings, the pandemic certainly shows it up.  The idea that selling (any)thing rules all – the ‘economy’ - is shot to hell.  The idea that we are not part of nature or animals is shot to hell.  Corporeal materialism is true.  Magic does not suffice.  The idea that things like nail-salons, sports events and religious services are ‘essential’ is over.  Prayer doesn’t prevent pandemics and of course it never did.  Even though right-wing armed European-Americans think they are somehow immune because of their skin color, they are not. Now we see that a capitalist economy that prioritizes commodification – exchange value over use value – is fragile and somewhat ridiculous.  Small businesses that are supposed to be the outlet for our dreams are revealed as rickety fronts.  Their debt rot is visible.  Even the over-profusion of restaurants says something corrupt and sad. Bankruptcy awaits them.

"16 Tons" - "Muscle and Blood, Skin and Bones" - All Good for Labor

Lurking under this, besides the vulnerability of our bodies to sickness and death, is hunger, another corporeal need.  Workers, mostly minorities, jammed together to process pigs are now sick, while migrant workers in the fields in California don’t even get protective gear.  The Bacon Eaters fear for their pork, but we should all fear for the food supply, as this basic fact of life has become estranged from the population.  Very few in the U.S. can grow their food anymore, unlike during the Depression, because corporate agriculture has moved so many proletarians off the farms and the land.  Growing corn for ethanol?  You can’t eat or drink that.

Let the old people, the poor, the African Americans and Latinos die say the hard-rightists, channeling libertarian capitalist logic.  We must give trillions to the banks, oil companies, airlines and cruise ships through the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.  We must save the bogus GDP.  Forget paying workers 80% directly through their employers, as in Denmark and Britain.  Forget free health care – you get sick, it’$ on you!   Here’s $700-$1,200 - your Trump change.  Large connected businesses and franchises get the small business loans and good luck, boys, getting unemployment in time.  Credit card debt to the big banks and mergers by big capitalist outfits are the future. Hey, did we swindle Nancy and Chuck and Sanders on the various bailout bills!  Yet they wanted to be swindled.  It is called bipartisanship.

This is another recent terminal embarrassment for the bipartisan rulers after Iraq and the 2008 meltdown.  It is another embarrassment for the Democratic Party, which thinks it can go back to ‘normality’ – cruel capitalist normality. Hating China is their new bipartisan Biden / Trump / Pentagon slogan, as if this is something new.  Forget the Republicans, they are merely a crime syndicate at this point.  In November the bill will come due and the hard-right will be armed.  If they lose, their billionaire Republican backers will have a choice.  Bloody faction fight or not.

Be prepared!  Time to unite and fight.
**Related to this point is a recent meeting of Constitutional scholars on a 'civil war' scenario this November...https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/election-doomsday-2020-heres-how-scholars-fear-the-trump-biden-race-could-go-terribly-wrong/

Red Frog

April 24, 2020

From Internet to Book

“The Populist’s Guide to 2020 – A New Right and a New Left Rising,” by Krystal Ball & Saagar Enjeti, 2020

These two hosts from the popular internet show “The Rising” fill this book with individual commentary chapters on ‘core rot’ in the U.S., the election and individual candidates, the media, identity politics and theories of change.  They take a somewhat simple class line as their lodestar.  They seem to be trying to combine ‘populism’ from the left and right on certain agreeable issues.  Enjeti is a Republican who opposes libertarian economics while endorsing conservative social issues, though he barely talks about them.  So he is lukewarm in his support for Trump and also barely talks about him.  Ball is a firm Sanders’ backer who trashes the other candidates with facts and excoriates the U.S. and the Democratic Party for failing the working class.

They are both actually funny and work with facts to undermine the corporate media narratives like Russia-gate, Ukraine-gate and the pathetic impeachment attempt.  I’ll center this review on Ball, though Enjeti semi-accurately reams both Democrats and Republicans on finance issues from a capitalist perspective.  Neither is a socialist of any kind, so their critiques only go so far, nor are they as sharp as more left-wing journalists or comedians.  Ball is a former MSNBC journalist who was purged along with people like Ed Schultz for being too left.  She joins a increasingly long list of leftish journalists who have run afoul of their corporate news organizations.  The recent shutdown of Truthdig, purges of leftists at Alternet, ownership changes at Salon that led to an exodus, pro-intervention commentaries at the billionaire-owned The Intercept - all bode further ill for muckrakers and critical journalism.

Ball likes polls and finds many that confirm U.S. citizens know that Washington is controlled by corporate interests.  She finds Sanders, Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard as interesting candidates who were consistently torpedoed by the corporate-controlled media.   She reams neo-liberal diversity fakes like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Deval Patrick  and ‘wine-track’ candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg.  Amy Klobuchar is never mentioned.  She sees only Sanders and Biden to be real, representing opposing views of the future within that party.  She knows Biden has no answer to what is going on in the world except more of the same – which is what got us to Trump.

Ball points out that the Democratic Party leadership has no moral authority anymore except in narrow circles of the upper middle-class.  For instance Barney Frank, of Dodd-Frank fame, now sits on the board of a bank!  She takes on the new cold war and Russia-baiting pushed by military and CIA spooks.  In a side-note, she calls for an end to the drug war and full legalization as a way to deal with the opioid and crack crisis affecting the proletariat.  They both look into the well-known media cover-ups from NBC and ABC news over Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinsten – who were both connected to elites.  Ball skewers MSNBC, her former employer, for becoming the InfoWars of the Democratic Party, which actually damaged the left.  Even Bush-era neo-cons are now welcomed there in the big tent of ‘anti-Trumpism’ – the main politics the Democrats have now.

IDENTITARIANISM

Of most interest is Ball’s take on identity politics.  It is clear that being a woman, Latino or African-American politician is not the criterion EVEN for Democrats, given the Republican politicians and appointees that are women, Latino or African American.  Almost no one votes on this basis, but don’t tell that to diversity liberals. Only if candidates are almost identical will someone prefer a minority if they care. 

For instance the media made out that Sanders and Warren were almost identical, but anyone looking at their politics and history see large differences.  As Warren said, “I am a capitalist, but markets need rules.”  She sponsored the “Accountable Capitalism Act” in 2018.  On the other hand Sanders describes himself as a ‘democratic socialist.’  He, not she, first came up with bigger, partly-transitional programs like the Green New Deal, Free College, Medicare for All and others.  Ball describes their approaches as technocratic (Warren) and mobilizing the population (Sanders) – representing two different theories of change. (Whether this is true is another matter…)  So Warren supporters, disregarding these large differences, claimed it was ‘sexism’ not to vote for her.  Now she is on Biden’s short list for VP or Treasury, so that should give you an idea of where she actually stands with the DNC ruling elite and their politics.  When AOC endorsed Sanders, the upper-middle class feminists melted down over the endorsement.  AOC was supposed to endorse a woman or minority, damn the politics.

In a way, it is just changing the face of the oppressor.  As Ball jokes, when will the media celebrate Andrew Yang’s Asian-American diversity, Tulsi Gabbard’s Samoan diversity and Sander’s Jewish diversity?  Never.  The endorsed candidate of many national security types and billionaires, Pete Buttigieg, was supposed to corral the youth vote due to his ‘youth.’  He was actually the kind of young person old, rich people like!  Even gay organizations did not endorse Buttigieg.

Ball reams the elite media mono-culture which has no clue about the working class, still thinking they are just a bunch of yahoos.  Even when unions are supposedly a base of the Democratic Party – which shows the abusive relationship neo-liberals have with labor. The Working Families Party, a fake independent labor group, threw their support behind Warren, a former Republican with no prior ties to the labor movement.   Juan Castro fell behind Sanders with working-class Latino voters.  Biden got more working-class ‘black’ votes than so-called ‘black’ candidates.  And so on… pure identity politics failed on its own logic.

Ball doesn’t understand the concept of special oppression within the proletariat, which identity politics tries to rip off, so ignores it.  She also does not mention the red-baiting and Russia-baiting by the CIA, Democrats and press that hit Sanders during the Nevada primary, though that perhaps happened after this book went to press.  Red-baiting is another ideology that unites Republicans, Democrats and even social-democrats, Schactmanites and anarchists – all united against ‘totalitarianism.’  See this popular front!

Liberals doing this don’t realize they practice their own form of bourgeois totalitarianism.

Ball notes the victory of a Democratic Party candidate for governor in Kentucky, Andy Beshear.  As she notes, the teachers strikes and right-wing acts by the Republican Bevin gave Beshear the victory – especially because he centered on economically populist themes.  So now we come to another real flaw in Ball’s logic.  Her unstated angle is to make the Democratic Party a ‘working-class organization.’  Not possible, no more than Sanders could.  The actual Left has to concentrate on building a new mass-based, labor-populist party from the ground up.  If it starts winning, it will begin to take proletarian democrats, independents, former non-voters and unions with it.  There is no other choice.

P.S. - I do not analyze why these two share a show, but it is probably because it draws more viewers.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left: “Bullet Points and Punch Lines,” “Chapo Trap House,”  or use the words ‘Sanders,’ ‘journalism,’ ‘Russia-gate / Russiagate’ or ‘Labor Party.’

Call or knock for a book.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 21, 2020

Socialist Rifles

“Good Guys With Guns – Why the Left Should Arm Itself,” by James Pogue, Harpers Magazine, April 2020

I think even the left-liberals are getting nervous.  This is very straight-forward praise of the idea that knowing how to use guns should be something the ‘left’ – which has various meanings in magazines like Harpers – should do.  Pogue grew up in a rural area and while conflicted about the idea of owning a gun given the many unnecessary gun deaths in the U.S., still decided to buy a Remington 870 Pump Action shotgun.  He also joined the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), which gets high praise and becomes the focal point of the article.  This is Harpers, remember, not the latest edition of the Black/Red Armed Revolt journal?

The long article starts off with Pogue’s personal struggle and background, which seems to be somewhat leftist.  He’s a reporter and has interviewed many right-wing militia types, who he calls ‘pedantic,’ ‘small-minded,’ ‘cruel and callous,’ ‘evasive’ and basically repellant.  Which sums up the National Rifle Association (NRA), at least psychologically.  So he went looking for left-wing groups and found the SRA.  he also checked out the John Brown Gun Club, which provides armed security for left demonstrations in Seattle and Portland, and Redneck Revolt, which showed up armed at Charlottesville to oppose the rightists.  He prefers the SRA, which says ‘we’re not a militia, we’re not a cult.”

The SRA was named-checked by Georgia rapper Killer Mike, while the North Georgia chapter got national notice for helping during Hurricane Florence in 2018 and also by the NY Times.  Pogue goes to a meeting of his local SRA chapter in California.  They are clearly working-class, multi-ethnic and young, mostly holding precariat jobs.  He goes on skeet shoots, stays at a self-defense campout in the woods and attends their national convention July 2019 in Denver.  As the SRA puts it, members cannot be cops, but they can be “working-class, progressive, anarchist, socialist, communist, eco-warrior, animal liberator, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, PoC and LGBTQ.”

The SRA was rejected for membership in the mainstream National Shooting Sports Federation (NSSF) after rightists attacked their application.  The NSSF said it was because the SRA has “discriminatory beliefs against law enforcement and the rich” while the NSSF “stands opposed to socialism.”  Perhaps because of this, SRA membership is rocketing up, as it is sort of a left-wing version of the NRA, believing in “community defense” not white racist defense.  Pogue profiles some of the members, whose proletarian jobs, sexual orientation, former homelessness and initial unfamiliarity with left-wing ideas all mark an organization more welcoming than the NRA. 

Pogue goes on to praise anti-slavery revolutionary John Brown and journalist Ida B. Wells, who advocated a Winchester in every black home.  And Eugene Debs, who, after the National Guard massacred miners in Ludlow, Colorado, said that when the law breaks down and becomes oppression, “an appeal to force is not only morally justified but becomes a patriotic duty.”  He notes that Martin Luther King’s request for a conceal and carry permit was denied by the State of Alabama in 1956. 

Pogue also argues that while citizens are not as well armed as the U.S. government, “depth of will, much more than matching firepower, is the real key to sustaining a rebellion.”  Police and soldiers (and fascists) think twice when dealing with those who have access to weapons, which is his logic behind the civilian need for AR-15s.  Especially when many people hold them!  Statistics show most assaults (82%) murders (64%) and suicides (nearly all) are carried out using handguns.  Suicide of mostly working-class men is the leading cause of gun death in the U.S., which tells you that there is also a mental health issue here.

Pogue’s article in Harpers is immediately followed by a more traditional short liberal one which celebrates a Harlem gun group having their ammo confiscated by police.  It thunders against ‘extremist groups, black or white’ and “ultras, antis and other fanatics.”  And so it goes, snug in the safety of the police, the army, the fascists - and the criminals. 

Marx and many other Marxists were quite clear on the need for the proletariat to be armed.  The SRA is carrying on that tradition.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Loaded,” “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment,” “Panzer Destroyer,” “A Culture War Debate,” “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “The Outlaws,” “Rebellion,” “A Fascist Edge, “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety,” “The Ultra-Right,” “Charlottesville,” “US/EU Meddling.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!  … which has a large section of left and ‘leftish’ periodicals. 

We are on lockdown now, so please knock if you need to.

Red Frog

April 18, 2020

University Bleak House

“Capitalism on Campus – Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market,” by Ron Roberts, 2018

This book is a little like finding one cockroach in your kitchen, then prying the side molding to discover a whole gang of cockroaches in the wall.  The single cockroach in this case is sex work – i.e. sex work undertaken by students to pay their tuition, fees and room and board.  According to Roberts it is a topic no U.K. university, official student group (the NUS) or government wants to deal with.  In the process of doing research on this issue, or trying to do research, Roberts illuminates the neo-liberal façade of the University – not just in the U.K. but also in other countries like the U.S.

And boy is he pissed.  Anyone familiar with ‘higher’ education knows that it is riven with careerism, jealousy, mediocrity, thought control and bureaucratism. If one was to look into its ties to the intelligence services, the military and many corporations, the image gets even darker.  No longer are modern Universities in the business of freely exploring knowledge as such.  Roberts thinks they have become thoroughly marketized, oriented towards the need of powerful social and economic entities.  Students are now ‘consumers.’  Necessary research and departments are those that bring in corporate money.  Administrations full of what he calls ‘failed academics’ carry out the job of protecting the University’s ‘brand’ and their own behinds, along with their allies.  This is the source of university profits – ah, tuition.  Social promotion and lower standards are normal for students and faculty alike.  And all the while, students fall farther and farther behind in loan debt.  In 2017 £50K was the average U.K. student debt.

Which is where sex work comes in.  Escorting, prostitution, lap-dancing, stripping, dancing, internet video, pornography and chat sites are very high-earning activities.  Roberts’ studies indicate that around 5%-6% of U.K. university students engage in these, mostly to pay education bills.  German studies show a bit higher rate of 7%.  In 2013 30% of U.K. students knew of someone working in the sex trade.  In some cities the majority of sex workers are students.  The proportion has grown since tuition fees were reintroduced in the U.K. in the 1990s.  In 2017 they could raise fees up to £9.25K.  Roberts estimates that student sex work contributes between £5.16M and £6.41M to schools.  So there is a direct parallel between the privatization of higher education in the U.K. and the resort to sex work. 

This is why modern, numerous and well-paid university administrators who are committed to the neo-liberal project don’t want to deal with the issue, while discouraging or threatening Roberts’ research into the topic.  Sex work directly implicates higher tuition, huge student loans and class filtering brought about by the universities moving to a market orientation.  Sexual panic and prudery by administrators also animate part of the discussion, as can be guessed.  This relates to sexual assaults on campuses, which are even higher in the U.K. than the U.S.  You can’t sell your university to parents with images like this and ‘image’ is everything nowadays. 

Roberts writes in the somewhat florid and repetitive style of Henry Giroux, who he quotes a number of times. As a leftist he leans to the intersectional identity aspect befitting so many academics.  Roberts contends the university is ‘dead’ – but of course if it actually were dead its death wouldn’t be such a secret.  He contends that many academics know there is something deeply wrong, but stay for the perks and paychecks.  This is no different than any number of corporate employees.  Neo-liberal practices against academic freedom contravene EU, UN and British codes but universities still motor on. 

Roberts indicates that sometimes ‘ethics’ boards are used to discipline those doing research into forbidden topics.  In the U.S. this is similar to the IRB. Roberts knows that the infantilization of students is also part of this, as over-blown ideas of student ‘safety’ are an obsession for administrators.  In Britain universities can claim that academic freedom is limited by reputational damage, which if taken to its logical conclusion would limit much research and speech.  Even the so-called National Union of Students (NUS) ignores the sex work issue, as most of its bureaucracy go on to Party or corporate careers.  Universities are tested with ‘satisfaction’ scores logged by student customers, not through educational attainment.  Many top administrators – professors, school heads, deans, chancellors – as he puts it:  “…lack the basic rudiments of a successful publication record.” 

Altogether a revealing read about academe from a left-wing psychologist. 

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Psychology and Capitalism” (Roberts), “The University in Chains” (Giroux), “The Happiness Industry,” “Lost Connections” (Hari), “In and Out of the Working Class” (Yates), “A Marxist Education (Au),

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 15, 2020

Due to the virus lockdown and a robbery, if you wish to get a book, please call ahead or knock vigorously and you ‘should’ be let in. 

Certified Urban Indians

“There There,” by Tommy Orange, 2018

This is a series of chapters which seem to be short stories, then connect into an intertwined picture of Native living in urban Oakland, California.   There is no overall plot except modern Native survival in the concrete world of houses, streets, the BART and freeways. This is not ‘the Rez.’  This is the city.

Yet even in the city there is no real ‘there, there’ according to Orange.  He contends it is not a grounded place for Native Americans, reflected in the many moves the characters make. The common problems of urban Natives exist – alcoholism, poverty, rape, petty crime, violence, drugs, suicide, the removal of children from homes.  But also solidarity, humor, reading, music and kindness.  The kids have tech skills while some adults work as proletarian bus drivers, postal workers, grounds-keepers and social workers.   

Orange concentrates on Native traditions, especially massive pow-wows, dancing, drumming and music.  The “Big Oakland Pow-Wow” becomes a narrative focal point, as most of the characters show up there in one way or another.  It does not end well! Pow-Wows are where inter-tribal natives from all over the country are ‘braided’ together.  The NoDAPL camps in North Dakota also ‘braided together’ different tribes, but on a political basis.  Orange’s angle is a kind of apolitical Native cultural nationalism, unconnected to any greater struggle.

The most political event in the book is the occupation of Alcatraz island in San Francisco Bay by American Indian Movement (AIM) members and their supporters in 1970.  But its depiction is sad and depressing, showing it to be an errant failure.  No other political events happen, as the focus is on cultural issues like the celebratory pow-wows.  This might be an effect of Orange’s MFA training.

Some of the central characters are Oklahoma Cheyenne, some of mixed ancestry.  Family and older women, especially Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, play a key role.  Of most import Orange understands that Natives, the indigenous, are here, now.  Orange says that “the problem with indigenous art in general is that it is stuck in the past.”  To him Natives are not figments of the past, they do not want to live only in the past, they are as modern as modern can be, living “in the present tense.” And that means still oppressed but still resilient, living with a future.  Orange has many modern references, from Facebook, drones to 3-D printing, to emphasize this point of modernity.

A revealing and perhaps familiar read, even for upscale gringos.  The long-time sadness stories will appeal to them. This is what gets recommendations from the NYT and the Washington Post, especially if you include quotes from Baudelaire and Genet.  Yet telling individualized sad stories is not enough.  It is part of a recent U.S. tradition of dysfunction narratives that appeal mostly to liberals.  Misery foretold, misery alone, misery together, but misery left.  Without political action, misery remains.  

This is Orange's first book and perhaps his second will 'get bigger.'     

Other prior blog reviews on indigenous issues, use blog search box upper left:  “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States” (Dunbar-Ortiz) “New Zealand Now,” “Are White People White?  Are Black People Black?” “Sami Blood,” “Northland,” “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence,” “Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes,” “Indian Country Noir,” “The Heart of Everything That Is – Red Cloud,” “The Hidden History of Guns and the 2^nd Amendment,” (Dunbar-Ortiz) “No is Not Enough”(Klein), “The Open Veins of Latin America (Galeano), “Red Gas.”

And I bought it at May Day Books, which has a large selection of Native books.

Red Frog

April 12, 2020

No Pie in the Sky When You Die

“We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years” – “Utah Phillips sings the songs and tells the stories of the Industrial Workers of the World.” 1984 Philo Record

This is a classic record of 18 labor, leftist and revolutionary songs by Utah Phillips, I.W.W. member and folk singer.  Recorded live in Canada, he sings, talks, tells stories, jokes and gets his audience into sing-a-longs, much like Pete Seeger.  The song writers vary from ‘the unknown proletarian’ of the title, to T-Bone Slim, Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie.  Accompanied by his strumming guitar and strong voice, Phillips makes fun of preachers, religion, scabs and brown-nose workers.  He takes aim at the bosses and their cops.  He celebrates unions and solidarity.  He pats hoboes and Wobblies (IWW members) on the back.

Classics include “The Preacher and the Slave,” “Casey Jones – the Union Scab,” “Bread and Roses,” Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” “Solidarity Forever” and “There is Power In A Union.”  Many of the tunes borrow the melody from popular songs, twisting them around.  “Onward Christian Soldiers” becomes something else entirely.

Check Phillips out on You Tube: 

I will not obey

Hallelujah I'm A Bum

Many of Phillips’ songs are included in a small red booklet of words and music titled “IWW Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent” sold at May Day.  It includes 41 songs that have been sung in the U.S. labor movement for years, including The International, Union Maid, Dump the Bosses Off Your Back, Joe Hill and Banks of Marble.  Here in Minneapolis we had an activist-connected Labor Chorus that attempted to bring back singing to U.S. unionism, a role music had in earlier times in the U.S. union movement.  This is much like the role of singing in the British Labor Party and its associated unions.

Music is a universal language.  May Day carries many books with left-wing takes on music.  Dylan, Patti Smith, Punk, Joplin, Grunge, Blues, Folk, Hip Hop, etc.  Call or knock to ask about them.

Prior blog reviews on music, use blog search box, upper left:  “In Search of the Blues,” “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “Let Us Now Praise the Dead,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Zappa Plays Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “Life” (Richards), “Echo in the Canyon,” “Just Kids” (P Smith), “The Long Strange Trip.”

In Tribute to John Prine – “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.”

Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore

The Kulture Kommissar

April 9, 2020

The Invisibles - the Working Class

“No Longer Newsworthy – How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class,” by Christopher Martin, 2019

I learned most of what I needed to know about journalism the day my high school editor and teacher censored a story I had written about a local radio station, which shed light on the station’s exclusive search for profits.

But there is always more to learn.  This is an excellent dissection of the newspaper industry and its turn away from a mass working-class readership towards professional-strata and managerial elites.  Martin looks at the rise and fall of labor reporters, who at one time were valued journalists covering unions, strikes and collective bargaining, to be replaced by workplace ‘lifestyle’ angles.  He has statistics on the frequency of pro-labor words in news slowly disappearing and individualist, careerist phrases substituting.  He details the change-over from publisher-owned newspapers to corporate and hedge fund-owned newspapers solely oriented towards shareholders and profits, which resulted in layoffs and news changes.  In this section he names publishers, papers and chains by name.  He examines Editor & Publisher (E&P), the bible of the newspaper industry and how various newspapers’ promotions changed over the years to reflect upper-income target audiences, with 1970 his ‘turn’ date. Martin tracks how newspapers changed the way they depicted transit strikes from sympathy or factuality to fore-grounding consumer traveler irritations and anger.

Because of the resulting ideological class gap due to these changes, Martin thinks this gave right-wing media a chance to make their culture-war appeals to lower-income or blue collar workers. The industry also never realized their declining circulation might have something to do with their bland, upscale focus.  Martin does not highlight the changing class background of many of the reporters themselves, nor the 6 media companies that control most of the media in the U.S.  Yet it is basically a story of the complete seizure of the U.S. newspaper industry by neo-liberal capitalism.  Of course much of this can be applied to television news too.  Anyone in journalism, in J-school or who reads a newspaper needs to get this book.  It is a good companion to Manufacturing Consent by N. Chomsky.

Details, Details

Martin has a wealth of vivid details fleshing out this story which culminated in the election of Trump in 2016.  The question that petit-bourgeois elites were asking was, where did these formerly invisible people come from?  As part of his analysis, he takes apart the 2016 election in Iowa, where many counties switched from Obama to Trump, with Clinton only winning the most populous 5 counties.  Trump had echoed some of the same themes that Sanders had about NAFTA and the working class. 12% of Sanders primary voters switched to Trump as a result. The Des Moines Register endorsed Clinton, one of 57 out of 100 top newspapers to do so, while only 2 endorsed Trump. The Register’s own statistics show their readership to have 10% more college degrees than Iowa’s population as a whole. Martin mentions that the recovery from 2008 had not hit Iowa’s rural counties, which are the vast majority in the state.  Similar facts could probably be cited in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Ohio.  The ‘press’ had lost its influence because they ignored economic and social reality for the majority of people.  And the working class is the majority, though Martin does not have a very precise definition of the working class.

Picture Opportunity. But 500+ Still Got Laid-Off

In detail, Martin dissects the Indiana Carrier layoffs that Trump made so much out of during the campaign.  He shows how the press ignored the real facts, as, like Trump, many of the reporters couldn’t tell a furnace from an air conditioner.  They did not look into Trump’s claims to save jobs in detail, and dropped the story before many Carrier jobs were lost to Mexico in the same plant, along with other plant shutdowns nearby.  He also looks into the press’s treatment of the Hostess Brands bankruptcy in 2011, which ignored management fuckups, the intervention of vulture hedge funds and the many concessions unions made to keep the firm afloat.  Instead reporters dwelt on the public’s love of diabetic Twinkies©. I.E. the consumer is the one hurt and unions are to blame.  He also scans the coverage of the recent wave of teacher’s strikes, which highlighted how little coverage there had been before.  Some newspapers are so lacking in knowledge about labor that they wouldn’t know a two-tier pay scale, low wages or corporate incompetence if it bit them on the ass.

Martin knows that language frames journalism – journalism is not objective reality, it is a narrative story.  He notes astutely that newspapers use terms like ‘middle class’ or ‘working families’ or employee, substituting for ‘workers’ or ‘working-class.’ Noticeably, the union movement has also made this retrograde step.  There is even a ‘3^rd’ party that is called the 'Working Families Party,' a name that avoids class, introducing a cultural component appealing to the right.  You see, every worker does not have a ‘family’ or children.  This hints that the politics of the fake-independent WFP are a left-shadow of the Democratic Party.  And indeed they are.  Martin also investigates the use of the Republican phrase ‘job killer’ and its use by 4 mainstream news organizations - the AP, New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.  In the period he looked at it was misused in news stories without verification 91.6% of the time. This is how ‘news’ becomes propaganda.

Martin skewers the clichés drizzled out by newspapers when workers go on strike, especially transit strikes.  The most popular are photos of people sleeping in airports, stuck in traffic jams or walking disgustedly to work.  A little boy with his dreams shattered features prominently.  The commuters or travelers are always quoted and they are angry or irritated or inconvenienced.  If a commuter or traveler told a reporter that they supported the strike, you would likely not get quoted.

One of the most revealing is how the NYT was one of the first to trumpet their monied readership in E&P. While many earlier papers promoted their wide demographic reach and had some sympathy for the working class (exempting African Americans of course), the Times wet their pants over how wealthy, employed, educated and tuned into the stock market and consumption their readers were.  As Martin points out, ‘consumer’ has replaced ‘citizen’ in mainstream journalism due to the control of advertisers.

A useful pro-union book to background what has happened to journalism, which is now populated by too many blow-dried, elitist talking heads or rightist or centrist editors that, as Greenwald says, serve as stenographers to power.

Other prior reviews on journalism and language, use blog search box, upper left:  “Manufacturing Consent” (Chomsky-Herman), “When Journalism Was a Thing,” “The Post,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “Empire of Illusion” (Hedges), "Understanding Class," “Keywords - the New Language of Capitalism,” “Propaganda” (Bernays), “Advertising Shit in Your Head,” “Psychology and Capitalism,” “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” “Turning off NPR,” “Kill the Messenger,” “NPR Completes Editorial Assassination,” “Doublespeak” “Arundhati Roy...on Minnesota Public Radio.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 5, 2020

Up North!

“Northland,” a 4,000 Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border,” by Porter Fox, 2018

This is a travelogue and history of the northern U.S. border with Canada.  Fox starts his travels at the eastern border on Passamaqoddy Bay in Maine, traveling by flat-end canoe and 5 horse motor east up the boder-line St. Croix River.  Then he jumps over to a Great Lakes freighter hauling ore pellets and wheat from below Montreal through Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron, docking at Thunder Bay, Canada on Superior, stopping at various ports like Hamilton.  He canoes parts of the border in the Minnesota Boundary Waters where the voyageurs traveled and then visits the Minnesota “Angle” protruding into Canada.  Fox follows that with a drive through northern North Dakota fracking country and Williston, visiting the NO-DAPL camps along the way near Cannonball, ND.  He continues his drive along the ‘medicine line’ of the Montana/Canada border after visiting the Little Bighorn Battlefield.  Then over the Rockies and through Idaho, foot trekking the North Cascades in Washington like Jack Kerouac before hitting the west ocean border point in Blaine, Washington.

In the process Fox tells the story of French explorers like Champlain, Brule and La Salle who were the first European-Americans in these areas; tribes that straddle the border – the Passamaquoddy, Mohawk, Sioux, Blackfeet and Lummi; the extensive efforts of surveyors trying to track through this sometimes trackless wilderness, following rivers, lakes and the 49^th parallel; the fauna, wildlife, mountain peaks, rivers and woods that he encounters - and bits of politics, present and past.  Fox is an experienced canoeist, growing up in a small town in salty, seaside Maine.  He now lives in Brooklyn, but still has a basic feel for northern lands, though he hasn’t seen all of these.

Fox interviews many people along the way – activists at NO-DAPL fighting the pipeline; a militia leader in Idaho; lodge owners along the border; the ship’s captain and its cranky, odd and formerly violent crew; arctic explorer Paul Shurke, who takes him into Minnesota’s multi-lake boundary waters; a native American historian in Maine.  Of most import is his focus on indigenous peoples that live along the border, a theme repeated over and over, as the border separates their homelands.  The name 'medicine line' for the northern border means 'good' medicine, as fleeing native Americans like Sitting Bull could escape pursuit by U.S. soldiers.  When Sitting Bull returned to a U.S. reservation he was assassinated, so that puts fact to the name.  Maybe the U.S. should be christened 'bad medicine.'  Fox makes it clear to his fellow coffee-drinkers in Brooklyn that native Americans are not a thing of the past.

Fox’s use of the term ‘northlands’ returns the north to its rightful geographic place, as northern states are sick of incorrectly being called ‘the Mid-West.”  He reminds U.S. citizens that Canada is actually nearby, the north is a real place and that the center of the world is not the reactionary Sunbelt. This is a fascinating journey, though it skips over parts of the border as that would take much longer to travel.  While I might quibble with his archaic description of Ely, Minnesota, I’m assuming the rest of the book is not so nostalgic.  The book will increase your deep geographic and historic knowledge of the northern borderlands, though it only includes small maps.  Just use a larger map while you read.

Other prior reviews related to this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The North is Not the “Midwest,” “The Heart of Everything That Is ( Red Cloud),” “The Dharma Bums,” (Kerouac); “Sulfuric Acid and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area,” “A Less Modest Proposal,” “Stop Tar Sands Oil,” “Oh Canada,” “Factory Days (Gibbs).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 2, 2020

Mayday is closed due to the virus and a robbery.  If you want a book, call ahead or knock and you might be let in.  We can also mail out books.