Now for Something Completely Different

“Far From the Madding Crowd,” by Thomas Hardy, 1874

Far from the maddening crowds in London is Wessex, a rolling land of farms and villages in the English southwest near the coast, including the possible towns of Casterbridge and Weatherbury.  Wessex plays much the same role for Hardy as Faulkner’s haunted Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi does – a ‘place’ he set his literary roots. 

 

The plot?  The effect on a few lonely men in a small, weather-beaten town when a young and beautiful woman – Bathsheba Everdeen - arrives and becomes a prominent farmer.  It is like a bomb going off.  Though vain and haughty, three men are struck by her beautiful fragments – a smart, young sheep-herder, a block-headed gentleman farmer and a roguish, profligate soldier.  Twisted love in all its blandishments results.  Hardy favors the capable sheep-herder over the twain, but not Bathsheba, who makes a coltish mistake.  A discerning reader may weary of their tiresome obsession with Bathsheba.  It does not end well as you might divine, but then it does.

A cast of men and women farm workers harvest corn, oats, wheat or sheer sheep and take care of livestock, while house servants cook and clean.  Bathsheba calls them 'the workfolk.'  They are the Greek chorus that grounds this tale in material reality and labor.  Oh, and one malter to get them all happy. The old sheep-shearing building on the farm looms great in unchanging significance, far above any castle or church. Wool has more meaning than religion or military power in this bucolic tale. These are the people that do the work and they are not mere background.

Upon these simple rustics are visited the qualities of tragedy and comedy experienced by archaic kings.  It seems at the same time that every man-jack can sing or play or is required to, as the brightest times are done up in fiddle, tambourine, dancing, ale and cider.

The class issue is very clear, as Bathsheba Everdeen goes from young and broke to the owner of a large estate through inheritance.  Part of her attractiveness is her money and status, unlike any poor but handsome washerwoman.    Bathsheba becomes the lady of the house and runs the farm herself – something few women would attempt at this time. 

 

A romance or a story of collective labor?  PBS 'workfolk'

In the story, small things lead to great calamities.  An overly-enthusiastic dog; a silly Valentine; a broken fence; a boot-spur.  Ignored nature plays its part in fire and rain. Beware.

Details in abundance overflow.  Nature’s every budding flower, trilling bird and blowing storm gets its time.  Emotions down to the last grimace, blush, stutter and thought.  Class always overhanging.  Early feminism’s reluctance to marry, as Ms. Everdeen is a comely modern woman.  Her marital hesitation is unexplained, then oddly broken.  And there is humor – Hardy makes fun of them all, unbeknownst to the players.  This includes his cynicism towards religion.  Here the dullest bullocks crib their thoughts from the Bible.

Old words, clichés and phrases pepper the text.  The book involves many convoluted paragraphs that only resolve into understanding at their termination.  Even the names have obvious significance: Bathsheba Everdeen, from the lustful Bible and Anglo-Saxon farmsteads - her last name echoed in the Hunger Games films; Oak, the sheep-herder; Boldwood, the older farmer; Troy, the soldier.  Like southern gothic, English gothic also invites a death or two.  We ape the writing of the greats – ‘tis normal for a lowly scrivener.  Enjoy!

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Jude the Obscure” (Hardy); “Independent People” (Laxness). 

Bought at Chapman Street Books, Ely Minnesota.

The Kultur Kommissar

June 29, 2020

Is MMT TNT?

“The Deficit Myth – Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy,” by Stephanie Kelton, 2020

Reading about MMT is a little like being Mr. Natural in an R. Crumb comic when his head goes ‘bleewy’ after eating an Alice in Wonderland upside-down cake.  It turns the conventional political logic on its head.

Cartoon Thinking - U.S. With Empty Pockets

Kelton was a somewhat conventional Keynesian economist until she started to look into how monetary and fiscal policy in the U.S. actually works.  She was hired by Bernie Sanders in 2015 as the Democratic Party economist for the Senate Budget Committee, but found that both parties believed in what MMT'ers call the deficit myth, even Sanders.  What is the deficit myth?  It is a bundle of deceptive understandings, but at bottom it claims that the U.S. government has to pay for everything through taxes or budgeting, even with a sovereign currency. (Not every country has one…)  This ignores the ability of the U.S. government to create money. Because of this household economy mentality, the deficit or debt becomes a scare tactic that has to be avoided at all times. Yet MMT indicates that Congressional approaches like PAYGO, debt ceilings, budget scores and the Byrd rule are essentially useful fictions for not just Republicans but Obama, Biden, Schumer and Pelosi too.  In effect the whole political regime is partially lying to us.

As anyone paying attention or studying history knows during the Depression, World War II and especially after the end of the gold standard in 1971, federal U.S. debt doesn’t actually matter. It is basically just an accounting fact, not a real debt.  After 1971 and especially recently the massive defense budgets, the huge tax cuts for capitalists and the rich, the repeated trillion-dollar rescues of Wall Street and the financial system, even the present pandemic funding, show that no one asks at the time ‘how will we pay for this?’  It is because the capitalists and their political lackeys already understand the government deficit is a present myth, but persist in the illusion for the rest of us in order to cry poverty and impose different versions of austerity on the U.S. working class.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) challenges the notion that a country with a 'sovereign currency' can run out of it – unlike a normal family with a budget, a U.S. state or a corporation. Kelton thinks that the real purpose of federal taxes should be limiting inflation, encouraging certain behaviors and creating equality – not to raise money.  MMT claims that spending comes first in the federal budget, not taxes and borrowing, which come later.  Marx maintained that money comes into its own in a commodity economy, originally starting as a commodity itself and is based on labor and leads to profit.  MMT disappears all this, per Keynesianism.  MMT'ers think money was created by the government to pay taxes.  For MMT inflation is the real problem, as a country with real full employment, which MMT supports, can overheat and generate inflation.  However, this debt in a capitalist context can lead the markets to react negatively.  Kelton says the most important issue is use-values – the real benefits that exist for the population - not what the accounting ledger is saying.

Kelton organizes the book around her list of MMT myths propagated by this  narrative, though she almost never mentions capital or classes.  We’ve all heard these stories our whole lives: 

Myth One:  The U.S. budget is like a household budget.  She mentions that the Republican head of the Senate Budget Committee in 2015, Mike Enzi, used to run a shoe-store in Wyoming and he understood the U.S. budget as if he was running a shoe store.  Unless a household or shoe store has an untraceable $20 printing press in the basement, they are totally different.

Myth Two:  Deficits are created by over-spending.  According to MMT, the evidence for overspending is inflation, not the deficit.  She references Japan’s enormous, long-running deficit and minimal inflation.

Myth Three:  The National Debt is a burden on everyone and will have to be paid back.  Actually the deficit hawks and doves are both wrong, as the national debt is mostly a number on a computer.  Treasury bonds will always be paid off, even though they really aren’t for raising money.  According to MMT it allows the Fed to drain excess reserves and hit interest rate targets.  But it also fills the coffers of the banking industry with interest payments.

Myth Four:  Government deficits impede private investment.  The deficit actually adds to private and state wealth, as a negative on one side of the ledger is a positive on the other side for individuals, corporations and states.

Myth Five:  The trade deficit means the U.S. is losing.   A trade deficit is evidence of a ‘stuff’ surplus.  Again, a negative on one side, a positive on the other.

Myth Six:   ‘Entitlement’ programs like Social Security and Medicare are financially unsustainable.  Kelton ignores the more common fixes, like raising the SS tax level.  MMT says the U.S. can never run out of money, so no program that is legally required can fail as long as real good and services exist to support it – like hospitals, medical staff or medicines.  Kelton recommends making Social Security and the rest of Medicare legally required.

It is Easier to Create Digits on a Computer screen but...

Kelton then discusses the deficits that really matter in the U.S.:  Jobs, education, infrastructure, climate, health care and democracy deficits, not some abstract math figures on a spreadsheet.  She claims that with a proper understanding of money through MMT, a ‘people’s economy’ can be constructed.  She optimistically and naively thinks that the U.S. can use these same methods internationally, as the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency.  Financially weak countries in the world that peg their currency to the dollar, or that borrow in currencies other than their own, or are in debt in dollars are at a disadvantage and cannot be said to have a ‘sovereign’ currency - which is the majority of countries.  

Kelton’s most consistent program idea is a public jobs program that hires everyone who is unemployed or under-employed at socially useful tasks, with adequate wages and benefits.  Socialists have called for this for years and even FDR adopted it.  This is the public jobs option.

Now more negatives, as like Universal Basic Income, MMT is also a modern argument for some strategies of capital. 

Problem 1:  Fiat money is already the method by which the government props up Wall Street, the defense industry and the Pentagon and hands out billions to corporations and the wealthy in tax breaks.  They never ‘pay’ for this funding, these tax breaks, these almost zero-interest loans or asset-purchases, they just credit these entities from a computer at the Federal Reserve or the Treasury or sell Treasuries they know they can pay off. 

Problem 2:  If you don’t need taxes to fund the government, then the corporations will argue you can leave tax havens, tax loopholes, rich individuals and billion-dollar corporations alone.

Problem 3:  An economy that is operating at ‘full capacity,’ as planned by MMT, will still be an economy without environmental sustainability and social controls, along with labor exploitation. I.E. there is no sense of planning or workers power here.  Quantitative easing has not actually created a fully functioning economy, even with the trillions injected.

Problem 4:  The MMT argument implies that both capitalist parties will settle their factional disputes.  This implies that each wing of capital behind each party now have the same particular interests, when they actually don’t.  While united around supporting capitalism, they differ on what capitalist groupings to prop up.

Problem 5:  MMT is a form of Keynesianism.  Capital relies on scarcity and if money is no longer scarce, then capital is weakened.  Capital relies on unemployment to discipline the proletariat, so a permanent public jobs program will also weaken capital.  Capital relies on deficit myths in propaganda, so if these myths are punctured, capital is weakened.  U.S. capital is based on imperialist exploitation of labor and countries in other parts of the world, including its use of the dollar standard.  As a result, few countries in the world actually have a 'sovereign currency.'  Capital relies on profit through labor, but MMT will negatively impact profit and in fact does not understand that money and crisis is related to profit problems.  Instead she believes that “capitalism runs on sales,” not production, as befits a Keynesian.  Will capital give up these advantages?  Felton believes that their ‘misunderstanding’ of fiat currency is just that, and that if only the capitalist politicians would ‘see the light’ the world would change.  She has ignored politics, profit and classes in the process.  

Problem 6:  Taxes and budget changes actually DO provide some funds.  MMT claims they are totally unnecessary for funding.  For instance, she does not discuss the looting of the Social Security Trust fund by politicians to justify other expenditures.

Problem 7:  Felton couches her optimistic narrative as something that will benefit ‘all,’ thus evincing no understanding of class politics, productivity, labor or capital.  She is a professor at Stony Brook University, so her class position as part of the professional strata of the middle class may have something to do with this. In this sense she is quite conventional - but her promotion of MMT is not.

At any rate, a very useful book to understand some aspects of capitalist monetary & fiscal practice, not the one you learn in school or in the propagandist media.   But it ignores the Marxist view of crisis and labor exploitation.

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Debt & Capital,” “Debt – the First 5,000 Years” (Graeber); “J is For Junk Economics”(Hudson); “I’m a Gettin’ Gone,” “The American Jobs Bill Speech,” “Who is Ron Paul?” “Paul Krugman & the Class War,” “A Culture War Debate,” “Lockout Over,” “Zombie Capitalism.”         

P.S. - Here is a harder take on MMT from the International Marxist Tendency: 
Marxism v MMT. Marxists oppose MMT as a superficial analysis of capital.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 25, 2020

North Country Cooperators

“Grocery Activism – the Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota” by Craig Upright, 2020

Minnesota has a long history of cooperatives, from the populist movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s around the Grange to the upsurge that brought the Farmer-Labor Party and the Non-Partisan League into power in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact it had the most cooperatives in the whole U.S. for many years. In the 1960s / 1970s opposition to the Vietnam War among local radicals spurred the development of a ‘new wave’ of co-operatives, based on unpackaged cheap bulk food and organic food in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, which again led the nation in numbers.  The value of this somewhat dry study is it describes the real nature of the cooperative movement in the U.S., which does not have the revolutionary implications claimed by Marxists like Richard Wolff.

Upright got interested in cooperatives in the 1980s and is now an assistant professor in Winona, MN.  He details the first wave of cooperatives that developed in the early to mid-1970s as part of a huge anti-government movement that opposed war, capitalism and the corporatization of food.  A second wave of cooperatives followed, but mostly in smaller Minnesota towns which had a history of earlier co-ops and were familiar with the practice as a form of local self-help.

The defining moment of the urban cooperatives in Minneapolis/St. Paul was ‘the Co-Op Wars’ in 1976 when Maoists from the Co-Op Organization violently took over the People’s Warehouse as a base for ‘the revolution’ which they saw as coming soon.  At the Selby-Dale Cooperative store which they controlled, they sold cigarettes, beer and ordinary canned goods, at a time when very little organic food was canned.  They aimed to make the co-ops ‘serve the working-class’, similar to a 7-11 but cheaper.  They lost that fight, as the People’s Warehouse went broke a few months later after confrontations with the counter-culture food faction.  The latter faction was the majority in the co-operatives and they established their own distributor, DANCe, to replace the People’s Warehouse.  This fight crystallized the nature of the Minnesota cooperatives, which were ultimately part of an alternative cultural movement, not one tied to or able to overthrow the state or capital.  Essentially they became an early sign of ‘ethical’ consumerism, which is now a common selling angle far outside co-ops. 

Upright defines the initial success of the new wave of co-ops to their being the only sources for organic and bulk food at the time.  They promoted small local farmers, healthy and organic fare, less packaging, little processing, fair trade and vegetarian / vegan options which none of the established food retailers carried at the time.  Upright sees the organic tack as the key element undermining the unhealthy processed food sold in chain groceries, which were grown with large oil and capital inputs, drugs, artificial chemical fertilizers and toxic weed killers, expensive labor-killing machinery, exploited labor and toxic preservatives meant to keep them on shelves forever.   This is still true today, though there are plenty of canned organic options available now unlike in 1976.  The U.S. government opposed organic food for many years until they were forced to issue an organic certification in the early 2000s. Earl Butz made fun of organic methods in the 1970s, saying it would lead to mass starvation.  What Butz wanted to hide is that organic methods had been used in agriculture for millennia and world-wide many peasants and small farmers still practiced it. According to Upright, mass attitudes changed with Earth Day in 1971, when the environment became a mass issue in the U.S.

Confrontation Between Co-Op Organization and Co-op Majority

The new wave co-ops were non-profits and at first used volunteer labor - you could buy food but also had to work as a member of a ‘worker cooperative.’  Issues were decided democratically by all the volunteers.  Later in the 1980s skilled managers took over and most co-ops became ‘consumer cooperatives’ but still retained their non-profit status and some aspects of democracy.  Some worker-owned or volunteer-run cooperatives still exist, but they are not the majority.  Now co-op groceries must compete with massive organic food corporations like Whole Foods, but they retain their viability because they are more trusted, not corporate and rooted in local neighborhoods, farms and oppositional politics.  CSAs, buying clubs and farmer’s markets became part of the same cultural/political movement around food and these are now embedded in many communities. 

I mention Richard Wolff because for years he has been advocating a path to socialism through cooperatives – sort of a peaceful, ‘cool’ revolution which would ultimately undermine the high-powered capitalist oligopolies controlling the economy and government.  His repeated citations of the massive Mondragon cooperative in Spain are well-known. Yet it is clear from the long history of cooperatives in the U.S. that they do not lead to socialism.  Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to start one.  At various times they are even promoted by the government as a sector addressing ‘unmet needs’ and given financial and organizational support.  What they actually do is train people to run their own businesses, to work somewhat democratically, to think outside the ‘profit’ box, to build practical skills centering around organization, to fight food insecurity and to break corporate culture’s toxic and unsustainable functioning.  In a real revolutionary upheaval cooperatives would be useful in helping show the way towards workers’ control of the economy, on a local, regional and national basis.  They can be an ally.  But absent that strong a movement and moment?  No.

Upright does a short history of the co-op movement in Minnesota and nationally, citing many of the early U.S. founders of organic agriculture like J.I. Rodale or what he sees as the origins of cooperatives in the English Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, formed in 1844.  He then focuses on the Minnesota ‘new wave’ co-ops that form the core of his story, highlighting how ‘cooperation among the cooperators’ became a strategy to spread and strengthen the cooperative movement in Minnesota. He uses research, historical documents and first person interviews to flesh it out.  The issue of how the co-ops linked up with organic and local farmers is only touched upon.  Upright seems unaware of Marx’s actual position on agriculture and food quality, which is not the workerist caricature pushed by the Co-Op Organization.  Overall this is a detailed study of what co-operatives actually are, not a fantasy of one kind or another.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens” and “Occupy the Economy”(both by Wolff); “The Latino Question,” “No Local – Why Small Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World,” “Anarchism and Its Aspirations,” “Viking Economics,” “Rebel Cities” (Harvey). 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 21, 2020   

Celebrate Summer Solstice!

Deja Vu All Over Again

“The Russians Are Coming, again – the first cold war as tragedy, the second as farce,” by Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, 2018

This book tells a familiar story for leftists, but one that might be unfamiliar to many experiencing the 2^nd cold war with Russia and now China.  Kuzmarov / Marciano retail the history of anti-communism and Russo-phobia in the U.S. since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to now.  Nothing changes, as the basic structures of U.S. capitalism and militarism remain the same, still bent on imperial exploitation of the whole world, thus seeing competitors and needing enemies.  

The authors start their mini-history with the 1919 invasion of Russia, when the U.S. sent 5,000 soldiers into Siberian Russia while carrying out Palmer Raid deportations of reds and anarchists in the U.S., those raids run by a young J. Edgar Hoover.  This was followed by the post-war 1940s-1950s McCarthyite purges of unions, jobs and the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party over reds and “Russian agents and spies”; nuclear escalation against the USSR led by the U.S.; the bloody wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia; the frequent U.S.-sponsored coups like Indonesia, assassinations, wars and death squads in South & Central America and Africa, propping up apartheid, all justified by ‘fighting the Kremlin.’  It was not such a cold war actually.

The sequence ends with the modern period, starting with open U.S. financial and political support for Yeltsin’s actions, and even at first Putin.  Then came Libya, Syria, Ukraine and now the failed Russia-Gate/ Ukraine-Gate scandals, all increasing the threat of new wars and nuclear confrontations.  Trump has just cancelled two nuclear treaties with Russia, while prior to that Obama funded a new massive nuclear arms ‘modernization.’  What was a global class war is now a competition for riches, but one of the national targets has not changed.

The authors name the few U.S. diplomats or figures that called for détente, co-existence or cooperation, but they were eventually drowned out by the urge to control Russia and its vast material riches by U.S. capitalists – especially from the defense sector, their generals and politicians.  The population usually goes along with it after the requisite propaganda offensive, demonization and fear campaigns.  Russia-gate became equivalent to ‘Pearl Harbor’ in the hysterical purple prose of the war-mongers.  At present the Democratic Party’s loyalists are even more hostile towards Russia than Republicans – quite a turn.  This new McCarthyism feeds into the lamest political conversations and commentaries.

Historically as they describe it, right-wing U.S. ‘thinkers’ considered Russia to be ‘Oriental’ or ‘Asiatic,’ not European, hence inscrutable, tricky, irrational, violent, subhuman– any insulting stereotype you can come up with.  Instead the authors show how time and time again the U.S. is actually the aggressor – from landing in Vladivostok in 1919 to sponsoring the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014 and subsequently pulling Ukraine into NATO – something they promised never to do.  The latest cold war action was impeachment involving Joe Biden’s son over a delay in sending missiles to Ukraine.  Even Obama did not want to send missiles to Ukraine, but the present neo-liberal Democratic and neo-con Republican politicians have coalesced around it.

New / Old Bad Guys - The Russian Mob

The authors point out that the ramifications of Russo-phobia or anti-communism were and are never just international.  Cold wars and hot wars allow the imperialist neo-cons and neo-liberals to red-bait or treason-bait any domestic forces who do not go along with their aggressive plans, while depleting the remains of the welfare state through burning profits in Keynesian military spending.  They red and Russia-baited Jill Stein in 2016 and Sanders in 2016 and 2020.  Some would even say that cold-warism functions primarily inside the U.S. as a right-wing club wielded by both parties to impede change.  Everyone who doesn’t want to be aggressive towards another nuclear state is somehow a “Putin puppet” and can be written off.  It takes international politics off the table.

In U.S. and U.K. culture and movies, the Soviet KGB has been replaced by Russian mobsters.  A Russian accent?  Boris and Natasha?  Villanelle.  Ominous! Nyet!

This book is an interesting read that details the voluminous facts of history since 1917 supporting their contention, starting with an exposure of Woodrow Wilson as a U.S. expansionist, backed by corporations with financial interests in Russia.  And so it still goes.

Prior reviews on this subject on the blog, use blog search box upper left:  “The New Cold War” (Cohen); “Oil” (Sinclair); “St. Petersburg,” "Look at the War-monger Facts," "Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives" (Cohen); "The End of Free Speech."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 17, 2020

Yeah, we’re open…enter, call or knock.     

Or Reform...

Defund or Abolish the Police?

Before I get started, May Day has been selling left-wing books on anti-racism and anti-fascism, warrior police, slavery, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, the prison-industrial complex, Reconstruction, the Civil War and anti-capitalism for years and years.  We probably have the best selection in town. Will we expect a deluge of readers coming into our store?  I would hope so, but the deluge has not started yet.  Even though we are a block from the University of August Learning, which mainly trains its graduates to fit into a slot in a corporate office.

Now…

A somewhat confusing debate about defunding or abolishing the police has started across the U.S., and especially in Minneapolis where 9 of 12 Democratic and Green City Council people came out for ‘disbanding’ or defunding the police.

While groundbreaking, their disband or defund demands are vague and somewhat undefined and without a time line. Minneapolis Council person Lisa Bender went on CNN with Mayor Frey and I was told she bombed explaining it.  Which shows that certain Democratic politicians, if given enough pressure, will support things they don’t understand and will probably bail on later.  Duh.

I’m for abolition of the police.  Many think this can happen in a capitalist society gradually.  I disagree.  This is a longer-term goal that coincides with the rise of community assemblies.  As one of their duties the assemblies would organize armed and non-armed patrols in neighborhoods, guided by class consciousness.  They would start out as a part of a ‘dual power’ situation allied with union, soldier and proletarian assemblies and defense guards, but also alongside the inevitable existence of ruling class armed bodies (the police, etc.) and things like city councils.  This is the other pole of dual power. At some point the new assemblies may be able to completely replace them through a social revolution.  I mention ‘class consciousness’ because some ‘community controlled’ police in a capitalist society might just be a sad racist cartoon of the present police – depending on the neighborhood.  Racist vigilantes are not unusual as we have seen - and I've seen. 

So police abolition is a goal that coincides with political dual power and ultimately social revolution.  It would be part of a process that eliminates poverty and the class structure, disbands the institutional color and ethnic caste system, decriminalizes many things like drug use or sex; and handles non-crime issues with specialized people.  The issue of crime and classes are intimately linked, as white collar crimes and ‘blue collar’ ones will slowly disappear in an equal, just society.  None of this will happen in the present violent class and caste-riven U.S., the most unequal ‘advanced’ capitalist society in the world.

DEFUNDING

Lets look at defunding.  If most city budgets allocate half the funds to the police, then this money would be used to transfer funds to new social programs and their workers.  They would deal with houselessness, drug and alcohol addiction, family conflicts, mental health crises, accidents, traffic guidance and maybe even fist fights – but operating in the streets.  The remaining percent would go to the police for actual crime prevention, response and backup.  One cop I listened to on NPR said 10% of their calls are really about crimes.  Let’s find out what the real level is in each city.  If it is similar, a police budget cut of an equivalent percentage might be reasonable.   Of course that assumes that police actually ‘fight’ crime, but as low reporting of rape, untested rape kits and very low arrest rates for many smaller crimes like car theft or petty arson show, they are not really dealing with all crimes.  So the 10% stat might be low-balling, as it is just based on calls.

Even in this scenario, petty larceny like a fake $20 bill or a stolen loaf of bread (I'm lookin' at you Jean Valjean...) fall through the cracks.  Is it even police business?  There are many issues like this.

Then we have the issue of protests, strikes and occupations – political issues, not crimes, but ‘who’ would handle those?  Send our mayors or chosen community ‘leaders’ or capitalists down to the protests to negotiate?  Just try it! That would be like sending out one side to counsel the other. This indicates that police/social worker teams are inadequate on the class conflict level, even after defunding.  The cops would likely show up again, as they did in the last few weeks.

Autonomous Zone - Seattle

Now what you might notice is that all the problems of poverty and class society still exist in this scenario, just a possible reduction in lethal force and better treatment of non-crime issues.  In the defunding strategy homelessness, poverty, unemployment, bankruptcy, drug and alcohol addiction, evictions, family troubles, mental health issues, accidents and suicide all continue, but are treated as social or health issues, not yet criminal matters.  The obvious question comes up then - why don’t we go to the main source of most of these ‘social’ issues, the class system, the money system? Or are these problems only a product of ‘bad’ people or God’s will, as right-wingers, racists and religious fundies claim?

ABOLITION

This is where the proposed solution of abolition/disbandment comes in. Teachers, cops and social workers can’t really deal with the basic problems of a class and caste society.  They can only ameliorate them - or make them worse.  Especially in the U.S., which is no mild social-democratic sheep but a ravenous, militarized and bloody predator that has armed its police like soldiers patrolling Iraq for years.

The long-term goal is to replace police with socialized and democratic neighborhood assemblies empowered to solve problems and stop crime.  This would be in a U.S. that transcends the corrupt Congressional system and a bought-and-paid-for bourgeois democracy.  An armed workers democracy based on community and workplace assemblies is the future of political power.  Unlike the liberal utopianism of police 'abolition' under capital the only real times police were removed were in situations of revolutionary upheaval - 1870 Paris, 1917 Petrograd, 1919 Budapest, 1927 Shanghai and no doubt other examples - anywhere the armed proletariat took power for a time or permanently.

We saw the beginnings of this in Minneapolis when neighborhoods enforced curfews and protected themselves - mostly from racist white arsonists.  The American Indian Movement protected Franklin Avenue for instance.  In Minneapolis the site of the shooting on 38th & Chicago is now walled off while in Seattle there is a 6 block autonomous zone next to a closed police station guarded by the leftist Puget Sound Gun Club.  These temporary occupations have occurred in the past in Athens, Greece and various city square occupations all over the world.  Or the Chiapas, Mexico and Naxalite forest zones in India, which have lasted longer due to using armed force.

REFORMS

What will we really get if the power structure has its way?  Minneapolis police chief Mederia Arradondo laid out some incremental reforms like renegotiating the police contract, getting better data and barring chokeholds, with the Democrats in Congress advocating much the same thing.   In an interview on MPR Arradondo seemed somewhat tentative talking about the vicious head of the Police Federation, Bob Kroll, which does not bode well for his negotiations.  Nekima Levy-Armstrong, a prominent spokesperson in Minneapolis and former leader of BLM, an attorney and advocate of black capitalism, backed Arradondo’s ‘inside the system' approach.  Arradondo by the way is of a darker complexion.

So this is what we will be offered – neither defunding or abolition - but more tweaks and diversity.  Biden, tone-deaf as usual, has called for more funds for police!  This makes sense given he was one of the architects of the modern police state.  What do we call the Democratic Party / Arradondo / Levy-Armstrong approach?  “Reform,” a tired, lying word.  This is another reason why the Democratic Party is a far more effective evil and block to substantive change than even many Republicans. It is because they claim to be your 'friend.'  To the rulers there can be no basic change in policing in Minneapolis.  They have created this monster and for them it is too late.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  "Rise of the Warrior Cop," "The New Jim Crow," "The Bloody Shirt," "The State of Jones," "Slavery by Another Name," "Hidden History of Guns and the 2nd Amendment," "The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows," "Ferguson Facts," "Bad Cops, Bad Cops," "The Wire," "Fear of a Black Rebellion," "Loaded,""Are Prisons Obsolete?"
Red Frog

June 14, 2020

The Accidental Anarchist

“Darlingtonia,” by Alba Roja, 2017

This is political fiction about the uncovering of a massive surveillance plot by the tech industry, the CIA and the U.S. government up to the President.  The central character is a rich millennial art girl, Dylan, from Greenwich, CT working for a tech firm in San Francisco, OingoBoingo.  She helps blow the whistle on a civilian psychological manipulation program run through social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram called “Darlingtonia,” named after a carnivorous California plant.  Dylan (right…) and her work friend Ricky are sort of young Julian Assanges in this tense and breathless tale. Of course you don't have to be an anarchist to blow the whistle.

The book is a fast read, which leads to a somewhat predictable and happy ending.  You are never quite sure what the big secret is until the reveal about part-way through the book.  Unfortunately the central character is somewhat unreal, going from a Taylor Swift listening, high-end coffee swilling, Netflix watching, food-ordering, iPhone addict who might be boring and autistic - to somehow subversive, even cheering the burning of her own gentrifying upscale apartment building.  But then she has $300K in the bank.  She is truly the accidental anarchist.

The book, written by an anarchist collective, describes present San Francisco, Oakland and Watsonville in obsessive detail – freeways, BART stations, streets, coffee shops, tech headquarters, restaurants and bars.  The exact time is brought up consistently like some ticking clock.  Current themes of lesbianism, police violence, gentrification, weed, warm Latino families, homelessness, sex workers, dickhead frat boys in tech work, sexual violence at work, goth or hip clothing and food, food, food come up frequently.  Dylan herself is a somewhat irritating obsessive about food, her eyeliner and blue lipstick, her moto-jacket, her long showers  - all repetitive - the dumb shit upscale people love.  In the process bodies are dropping – at least 4 - in a somewhat movie-like unreality.  In the end, Dylan and her girlfriend Alexis happily run away to Washington State with her $300K, thinking the government will fall and the revolution is at hand – or some fantasy like that.  It didn’t after the Snowden revelations and it wouldn’t now.

The essence of the Darlingtonia GSX program is to use the random audio and video feeds from every ‘smart’ phone, every selfie, every purchase, every post on Facebook or Instagram, every Facetime, Messenger, Zoom or Skype call, even bio-metric data, to build psychological profiles of every U.S. citizen in order to manipulate their feelings about capitalism.  What this ignores is that the U.S. education system, legal structure, military and police forces, bourgeois political parties and corporate and semi-corporate media already attempt to control attitudes towards capitalism, and until recently, have done quite a good job.  Not to mention that this amount of data would probably overwhelm even the best algorithm or that the NSA mines much of this already.   The addition here is the psychological angle.

Dylan’s role at work is creating advertising for OingoBoingo’s ‘dream game’ that mines individual’s dreams and fears - and has 400M users! It is used by GSX to paint psychological portraits of the games’ users, allowing them to be manipulated in various ways – even in person. A key flash drive and murder become the focus of the book, but Dylan and her lover oddly ignore them for awhile.  OingoBoingo tries to get the program approved in China, but that deal is wisely rejected by the Chinese CP after the libertarian CEO melts down in front of them.  Russia and China are described by the media and government as the enemy throughout this surveillance scandal instead of the real perpetrators, even after Wikileaks publishes the whole packet of documents exposing the manipulative alliance between tech firms and the government.

A very culturally current and ‘hip’ novel a bit reminiscent of Tom Wolfe, hitting themes that young millennials might not be bored by, a semi-dystopian fantasy that relies on a few heroic individuals ‘changing the world.’  Of course individualism is a central component of anarchism, libertarianism and even capital, so this is no surprise.

Other prior reviews on this topic below, use blog search box, upper left: “The Unseen”(Bellestrini); “Anarchism and Its Aspirations,” “Good News” (Abbey); “The Bomb”(Harris); “Something in the Air”(Assayas); “The Dispossesed” (Le Guin); “Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs” (Johnson).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

June 11, 2020   

Psycho-Politics

“McMindfulness – How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality,” by Ronald E Purser, 2019

Purser is an orthodox Buddhist and also a management professor, but he opposes neo-liberal capitalism and its use of ‘mindfulness’ as an individual mental control tactic.  So he partly parallels an anti-capitalist view but from an ‘ethical’ Buddhist perspective that sees social issues as paramount.   A strange bedfellow here.  He quotes another orthodox Buddhist who calls mindfulness psycho-politics “in which contemporary capitalism seeks to harness the psyche as a productive force.”  I.E. a form of bourgeois cultural hegemony. 

 

The book is very repetitive.  It includes sections on the use of mindfulness training in corporations, the military and schools, along with its growth as a private self-help industry associated with flawed university studies and breathless media promotion.  Purser goes into mindfulness’ philosophic and religious roots, its role as an ersatz ‘medical’ treatment and its effect in individualizing social misery. The key player in mindfulness in the U.S. is Ph.D Jon Kabot-Zinn, the inventor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 1979, which now has 600 clinics world-wide.  Since then mindfulness has been promoted by celebrities like Goldie Hawn, Oprah and Arianna Huffington, pushed at Davos and politicians like Ohio’s Tim Ryan and used by corporations like Google, KFC, Salesforce, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Monsanto, Aetna, Ford and Yahoo.  Google even had a resident ‘jolly good fellow’ who pushed mindfulness on their stressed and over-worked staff.  The U.S. National Health Institute has spent $100M on mindfulness and one program at the University of Wisconsin got $7.5M.   No shit.  

Mindfulness is supposed to promote ‘non-judgmental and present-centered’ experience… the zombiefied calming of stressed individuals or making managers more efficient.  It is a quietist and anti-intellectual practice involving ‘watching’ the body, feelings, mental states and things. It comes out of Buddhism but Kabot-Zinn turned it into an ostensibly secular practice in order to adapt to U.S. capitalism.  In spite of that Purser notes its’ practitioners code-switch between that and the Buddhist dharma – a practice called ‘Trojan Horse’ Buddhism – depending on the audience or buyer. 

Purser is not against mindfulness as a practice itself, but when it is disassociated from social change it becomes something else. Stress is defined by it as always an individual problem, not a social one. Mindfulness is the latest iteration of the happiness industry; the positive psychology movement; the prosperity gospel; Transcendentalism as practiced by Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and James, corporate wellness programs, Transcendental Meditation© and therapeutic ‘white savior’ liberalism.  It claims to transform society when in fact it only acclimates individuals to be more productive employees and obedient citizens. 

Kabot-Zinn replaced religious language with bio-medical terms to secularize it.  The mindfulness industry uses many academic studies based on ‘science’ to prove it works, but these studies have many flaws noted by other researchers, as only 0.25% of them were deemed accurate.  Purser calls it another ‘sciency’ fad like diets or exercise regimes, but its embrace by the powers-that-be makes it more than just a fad. 

Kabot-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness Inc.

Purser attends sessions, employee training, conferences and sales events for mindfulness and these are illustrative.  He notes in the 8 week session he attended that all the sad participants were suffering from unemployment, harried schedules, child-rearing, overwork and other social problems and they were mostly women.  The Google employee seminars were about adding to your emotional or mental ‘capital,’ as employee disengagement or burnout are threats to productivity.  As in the past, opposition to the boss is implied as a psychological problem.  The sales meeting about how to start clinics in a $542M industry was full of the typical entrepreneurial deceptions and verbiage.  After all, it’s all based on profit.

In schools Purser suggests mindfulness programs like Quiet Time violate church and state divisions and can have actual negative effects.  He also looks into mindfulness as a technique in the U.S. military developed by the University of Miami to “optimize warrior performance.”  The military spent $7M on that program while overall it has spent $125M on various programs to create resilient soldiers, including $31M to the University of Pennsylvania – all including mindfulness.  Kabat-Zinn, a former opponent of the Vietnam War, now peddles his kamikaze/Samurai ‘Zen’ skills to the military too.  Andres Breivik, the Odin-worshipping fascist who killed dozens in Norway, practiced mindfulness.  Psychopaths and snipers can be mindful. 

As an atheist I have my doubts about the social uses of ‘orthodox’ Buddhism, as they seem quite invisible.  Nor do the pogroms in Myanmar and Sri Lanka by Buddhists against Muslims and Hindus shed happy thoughts on this religion.  But nevertheless Purser does a good if repetitive job detailing the negative effects of U.S. and U.K. mindfulness programs in the context of corporate capitalism.  If you are interested in the system’s psycho-logic hegemony, buy this book!

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left: “Psychology and Capitalism” and "Capitalism on Campus ( Both by Roberts), “The University in Chains” (Giroux), “The Happiness Industry,” “Lost Connections” (Hari).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 6, 2020 

Celebrate D-Day and the crushing of the Nazis on the western front.