Revenge is a Dish Best Served Hot

 “Black 47,” film directed by Lance Daly, 2018

This film is about the year 1847, the year of the worst Irish famine.  During the famine, a million died and another million left for the U.S.  A deserting Connaught ranger, Martin Feeney, who fought for British colonialism in Afghanistan and India returns to Ireland.  He finds his mother starved to death and his brother hanged; Ellie, his brother’s wife who he wants to take to the U.S. in dire straights; the pigs of the local tax collector rooting around his family house. The locals look down on him for his role in fighting for the colonial occupier.

Returning 'Home'

A squad of the Royal Irish Constabulary supervised by the British land-owner’s bailiff arrive to evict Ellie and her children, proceeding to destroy her cottage.  Death and destruction follow in the bitter cold.  Feeney decides on revenge.  He now realizes who his real enemy is.  In the process, he gains an unpredictable ally. The film becomes a bloody action film.  If you are an anti-colonialist viewer, revenge will be thoroughly enjoyable, a dish best served hot.

The film focuses on the various crimes of the English colonialists:  Harsh sentences are handed down for minor crimes by British judges.  Grains and food are exported to England by English landowners while the Irish starve.  Nasty evictions from tiny cottages are carried out due to non-payment to the local colonial land lord.  Independence activists in the Young Ireland movement are brutalized in prison.  Arrogant Church of England ‘Soupers’ attempt to convert starving Catholics by offering them soup.

This film joins the small club of anti-British colonial films – Gandhi, The Patriot, Braveheart, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, The Wind Shakes the Barley and Jimmy’s Hall (the last is reviewed in the blog below).  Other films depicting British crimes – the 1943 Bengal famine; concentration camps in the 2^nd Boer War; the bloody British partition of India and Pakistan; the anti-British independence struggle in Iraq; the ethnic handover of Sri Lanka to Sinhala elites; the British forbidding discussion of Italian war crimes in Ethiopia; the crushing of the De Mau Mau in Kenya are a minority, as opposed to the heroic role of England in WWII.  This film joins the former club and is on Netflix.

By the way Black 47 was also an Irish rock band based in New York.  Listen to their great political song titled James Connolly on YouTube.  Black 47:  James Connolly

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left with these terms:  Jimmy’s Hall, Abortion Referendum in Ireland, The Immortal Irishman, The Plough and the Stars, James Connolly, 1916 Rebellion Walking Tour, The Irish Literary Trail, Brexit, The Dream of the Celt. 

The Kultur Kommissar

October 30, 2020

Negation of the Contradiction

 “The Principal Contradiction,” by Torkil Lauesen, 2020

If you thought this book is about dialectics or dialectical materialism, you’d be wrong.  While nodding to some of the terms and a bit of their history, it is mostly a repetition of various Maoist positions or an attempted extension of Mao’s ideas in his work “On Contradiction.’ 

The 1927 slaughter of Communists in Shanghai by the nationalists in the Kuomintang followed the USSR’s order to Mao that he form an alliance with the Kuomintang.  The Kuomintang was even inducted into the Comintern!  Instead after this disaster Mao oriented towards the massive Chinese peasantry.  Lauesen explains that the ‘principal contradiction’ in China changed to being between the peasants and landlords, according to Mao, not between workers and capitalists.  The Chinese bourgeoisie became a ‘secondary contradiction,’ though prior to this it was the main 'contradiction' to the working-class.  We know Mao supported ‘new democracy’ in 1949 – a popular front block with a wing of the Chinese bourgeoisie.  Lauesen doesn't say when that stopped being the ‘secondary contradiction.'  The word ‘contradiction’ used in this sense seems to be a fancy way of saying ‘opposing enemies’ or historical conflicts between two discrete things.

This is one of the problems in the book.  Mao’s denunciation of the USSR in 1964 as ‘capitalist’ and his 1971 block with U.S. imperialism against the USSR is never explained in the book, although now Lauesen realizes this was a vast mistake.  How did the Helmsman get it so wrong?  This was the largest split in the global class war in history, a foolish and pro-imperialist version of Lenin's split with patriotic Social Democracy in 1914. Lauesen goes on to state that Engels was wrong as to the applicability of dialectics to natural phenomena, a position also taken by Lukacs.  Yet Marx understood the connection between capital and its degrading effects on nature, as humans are part of nature.  This conflict is internal to human existence.  Lauesen's position is contradicted by Lauesen’s and Mao’s own use of natural examples of dialectics.  Lauesen even cites Niels Bohr on his use of dialectics.   Or as Engels put it:

"Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst..."

Lauesen’s description of Mao’s work On Contradiction is opaque, except for praise, so there is no light shed there.  Lauesen never explains how struggle against a ruling clique in a post-revolutionary society is ‘class’ struggle, not an anti-bureaucratic struggle.  How did a new capitalist ruling class suddenly emerge? When was the counter-revolution?  A 1956 Khrushchev speech?  A 1979 Deng speech? How did a new phase of capital – state capitalism (a new contradiction?) suddenly appear unbeknownst to Marx, Engels or Lenin?  Is this ‘dialectics’ or something else?  Lauesen states it as a fact only.

Many writers have pointed out that Mao’s idea of dialectics is not Marx or Hegel’s.  Dialectics is the scientific and essential logic of development, not a political program or practical or theoretical advice, not just a description of opposing sides.  ‘Contradiction’ in this sense is within a ‘thing’ or process.  For instance a commodity under capitalism has both use-value and exchange-value, but it is merely an apparition in a store window until it realizes its exchange value when sold.  The contradiction exists within it.  Just as capital is socially produced but privately appropriated - internal to the process. Or humanity is part of nature, not outside it.  Or the Chinese Communist Party before 1949 when it ostensibly represented the working-class.  But it was overwhelmingly based on the peasantry, included a nascent bureaucracy and in alliance with a ‘patriotic bourgeoisie.’ The CCP itself contained contradictions!   

The triad 'thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis' is not used by Lauesen in this context.  This triad is not derived from Hegel but was used occasionally by Marx.  These terms usually refer to a combat of ideas, though if used to describe historical conflict or class conflict, this might unsettle the winner! See this essay on the difference between the dialectical use and the more common use of words like ‘contradiction’:  A. Wolf Compares Marx-Hegel to Mao on Dialectics

So what is the mysterious ‘principal contradiction’ now, according to Lauesen?  It is ‘catastrophes’ - war, including nuclear war; environmental destruction and pandemics.  How this conclusion is about dialectics is beyond me.  These seem to be obvious problems created by the capital system, though he left out growing fascism, economic contraction and inequality.  You don’t have to be a dialectician to come up with this.  Lauesen goes on describing capitalist history, war and the present conditions of U.S. global hegemony.  None of this seems new.  Like Samir Amin, he thinks that ‘nationalism’ will restrain imperial corporate capital and a new Bandung will arise. The few states opposing the U.S. might wish that but the reality is that imperialism’s reach is far broader now than in 1955 or 1961. 

At any rate, at best a basic practical guide on how Mao thought politically, but not about Marxist dialectics. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject:  “Maoism and the Chinese Revolution,” “China’s New Red Guards,” “The Communist Necessity,” “Reason in Revolt.”  

P.S. – I urge readers to become a follower of this blog, so you’ll be able to read reviews as they happen.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 27, 2020

Anti-fascist Series #5: "Only Paradox is True"

 “Against the Fascist Creep” by Alexander R. Ross, 2017

This overly-detailed, swirling history looks at the ideological bases of fascist ideology, starting with pre-WWII thinkers that influenced Mussolini, Hitler and Franco.  Then switching over to the modern period, Ross details how the different strands of fascism – mysticism, nationalism, Aryan racism, anti-semitism – permutated into modern organizations, creeping from the fascist right into conservative orthodoxy, such as the block between Italy’s buffoon Berlusconi and the neo-fascist National Alliance.  Ross exhaustively covers every ideological, organizational and personal twist and turn in European and U.S. fascist and alt-right thought and actions, layering the book with thick slabs of names, acronyms and history.

3^rd POSITION IDEOLOGY

The themes of the book are several.  One somewhat disturbing one is that some anarchists, Marxists, socialists, Greens and 'deep' Greens later orient towards fascism.  Fascists ostensibly oppose neo-liberalism, so they occasionally sound like leftists.  Some former Sanders’ supporters became Trumpers while Boogaloo Bois try to join BLM actions.

Of most interest is the legacy of the Nazi ‘Stermabtielung’ – paramilitary storm troopers or ‘Brownshirts.’  Their leaders were liquidated by Hitler on “The Night of the Long Knives” in 1934.  They were led by Ernst Rohm and Gregor Strasser and advocated an assault on the big capitalists.  Given fascism is basically a form of rule by the capitalists, Hitler had to act.  “Strasserism” became an ideology that groups have adopted to this day, which has been falsely labeled as a ‘3^rd Position’ between socialism and fascism, based on a ‘white revolution.’   ‘3^rd Position’ fascists have attempted to infiltrate, split or turn leftist groups or actions, but many times were unsuccessful.  Some have even stolen left slogans and symbols, such as a 2008 demo in Dortmund, Germany featuring anarchist black/red symbols and the slogan “Against war and capitalism” - which was held by a neo-Nazi organization.

The phrases ‘national Bolshevism,’ ‘social nationalism,’ ‘national anarchism,’ ‘anarcho-capitalism’ and ‘autonomous nationalists’ are used as other descriptors of the ‘3^rd position.’  The most weighted example Ross came up with is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which promotes and blocks with ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist groups in Russia.  They all like Stalin as a ‘strong national hero’ as opposed to the cosmopolitan and Jewish Trotsky.  Ross terms this a ‘red-brown’ alliance – something that might only be possible in that country.  Actually the dissolution of the USSR and the eastern European workers’ states saw fascist organizations grow throughout, especially during NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia and the emergence of neo-Ustashi Croatia.  The Greek fascists of Golden Dawn, whose leadership was just convicted of being criminals, fought in these nationalist wars as well.  Ukraine has allowed open fascist fighting groups to join its army.  Ross examines the Ukrainian coup based on the Maidan Square occupation, which was taken over by ultra-rightist groups.  Fascist groups slithered out of the woodwork in Germany when the Wall fell.

MYSTIC ULTRANATIONALISM

Another somewhat ignored strand of fascist ideology is the role of mysticism, the occult, magic and pagan religion, though many U.S. fascists embrace Christianity.  The worship of Odin and other Norse gods; the combining of Hindu and Aryan myths; the strong belief in a Nietzschean superman leader; the supremacy of violence; the leading role of the male and other ‘natural’ hierarchies.  The ostensible failure of reason and science is replaced by a belief in various archaic ideas – even Satanism.  All evince a retrograde and barbaric politics, underpinned by violence.

Rightist Militia in Charlottesville - "We Love Violence."

Most well known is the focus on   ‘blood and soil’ – a geographic understanding of humanity that demands everyone stay in one place, rooted to their archaic culture and neighbors, pledging allegiance to ‘their’ nation and especially to their own ethnic or skin color group.  In practice if carried out fully it becomes ethnic cleansing. Fascists call these groupings ‘races’ but there is only one race, the human one.  This ‘flag waving’ nationalism remains constant from group to group, which Ross calls ‘palingenetic ultranationalism.’  (Palingenesis means rebirth, so it’s a circular concept.)

So migrants are the enemy de jure and Europe is the ‘Caucasian’ homeland… even though the Caucasus Mountains are in Azerbaijan, Georgia, southern Russia and Armenia. One fascist theory is that humanity was born in the Arctic and migrated south, degrading as it went.  Of course this colonial theory is the opposite of what anthropological science actually says happened – humanity arising in east Africa around Olduvai Gorge.

While most of the book concerns Europe, Ross also covers developments in the U.S. – the racist and violent skin-head scene, 3^rd Position fascists like Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance and the like, up to Ron Paul, libertarianism, Occupy, 3%’ers, Patriots, Trump and the alt-right’s white successionism.  He's missed developments in the last 3 years or so.

After reading this overly detailed history, which functions almost like a reference book, you are waiting for some kind of political conclusion.  The biggest left takeaway is to beware of who your new friends are or where some of your old ones are going.  It is a good antidote to naiveté.  Most importantly, the falsity of a joint ‘left-right’ rebellion against ‘the system’ is just that.  False.

FASCISM & BIG BUSINESS

You will note that most of these beliefs actually prop up the logic of capital, bourgeois state nationalism and the class system, while splitting the working class into warring skin colors, ethnicities and nations.  Ross only touches on this.  This is why Marxists have always noted the closeness between capital and fascism.  The capitalist class, the conservative parties, the church, the landlords and especially the military – all eventually supported fascism in Germany, Italy and mostly in Spain.  While Ross spends most of his time on ideology, he does mention some material issues.  The largest banks and corporations in Germany funded the Nazis.  In the U.S. local banks and corporations also helped U.S. fascist groups like the Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund while producing products for the Wehrmacht.

In the U.S. presently there is a solid group of U.S. capitalists behind Trump – bankers, casino magnates, real estate developers, gas & oil tycoons and bosses in construction, fast food, transport & Silicon Valley (Forbes, 2/29/2020). Ironically in Germany and Italy fascists conquered power through the ‘democratic’ system, which should give our bourgeois democrats pause.  Trump is a conservative like Hindenburg or King Victor Emanuel, opening the door to the armed alt-right and the fascist fringe. Franco used a civil war to come to power after uniting Spanish nationalists behind his army, opposing a liberal section of Spanish businessmen.  In the U.S. the ruling class is split too, but the bulk is realizing Trump is unreliable for their broader purposes, which is why Biden is corralling most corporate cash.  This bodes ill for any fascist ‘coup’ but not for a small but corrosive ‘civil war.’

The best book on the financial and material links between capital and fascism is Daniel Guerin’s classic book Fascism and Big Business, also available at May Day.

P.S. – Local activist Kieran Knutson, who is now running for president of a CWA Local, is interviewed in the book as one of the founders of the 1990s Anti-Racist Action here in the Twin Cities.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use upper left blog search box with these terms:  “Proud Boys and the White Enthnostate,” “The Real Red Pill,” “No Fascist USA,” “Fighting Fascism”(Zetkin); “The Ultra-Right,” “It Can’t Happen Here”(Lewis); “Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety,” “The Coming Storm,” “A Fascist Edge,” “Clandestine Occupations,” “Charlottesville, Virginia.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 24, 2020

Anti-Fascist Series #4: Know Your Enemy

“Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate – How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination,” by Alexandra Minna Stern, 2020

This is an analysis of the modern U.S. alt-right in its variations.  It does not focus on hard-core Nazis, Klan or street-fighters, which many in the alt-right have tried to distance themselves from, as well as the religious right which seem not to be in her definition of alt-right.  It ignores class, economics and anti-communism, which is typical of academic liberals.  It details the various cultural strategies and divisions within the alt-right, trying to create a broad picture of the continuum between what she calls ‘alt-light’, alt-right, white nationalism and white supremacy. 

Because of this Stern can reasonably say that characterizing everyone as a ‘fascist’ is inaccurate, much like the ignoramuses on the right who call everyone to their left a ‘communist.’  She studied these fearful reactionaries and anti-Covid mask snowflakes so we don’t have to. But as her sub-head reads, she seems not to understand that the alt-right is merely another historical iteration in a long, long ‘American’ tradition. The American imagination has always been warped.

As pointed out in the essay below, The Real Red Pill,” red-pilling is an alt-right cliché stolen from a leftist film.  To them it means seeing the true reality of white identity and gender roles.  She thinks the ultimate goal for the alt-right is a 90% white ethnostate, harking back to ‘year zero’, 1965, when 90% of the U.S. population was ostensibly ‘white.’   1965 is the year the Hart-Celler immigration act passed, allowing increased migration from non-European areas.  

Stern, like so many liberals, maintains the idea in her language that there are multiple races, not one human race.  This is an idea also promoted by the alt-right as part of their view of biological essentialism – natural talents built genetically into each ‘race.’  As part of this the alt-right is reviving discredited 1970s ‘scientific’ racists like Hernstein, Shockley and Jensen, who claimed different ‘races’ had different IQs.  Of course intelligence has nine aspects, not one, not to mention the fact that IQ tests are deeply flawed.  The alt-right is also obsessed with eugenics, much as U.S. racists in the early 1900s were, including Theodore Roosevelt.  They were prominent until the advent of the Nazis.  This kind of racism justifies capitalist class stratification, which is its prime role, unbeknownst to either Stern or the alt-right.

Stern discusses the Proud Boys, who she first portrays as a bunch of mild-mannered anti-feminists open to all ethnicities.  But they blocked with Patriot Prayer and came to Charlottesville, along with being indicted in New York.  She dwells on Identity Europa, which is based on upscale frat boys who want to mainstream white identity politics.  They are well-dressed and ‘in shape’ yuppie white nationalists.  In her discussion she covers websites like the the Daily Stormer, Counter-Currents, American Renaissance and VDARE and others, along with less well-known racist groups. 

Stern claims that the basic difference between Republicans and Democrats in 2016 was over skin color and ethnicity, ignoring any economic issue.  Stern never mentions the existence of capitalism hovering over all of this, like a professorial goldfish that can’t see the water or its own bowl.

Well-Dressed All Male Alt-Right Racists

As a feminist Stern spends a lot of time on various right-wing women on the internet who yearn for many, many white babies to support the ‘white race’ and being supportive handmaids of ‘their man.’  As Stern puts it, they “check their gender equality at the door.”  They promote home-schooling and will probably be unable to work outside the home because of the baby flood.  According to Stern, much of the alt-right came out of the 1990s internet manosphere of men’s rights activism and trolls, which denigrated women and feared transsexuals.  She estimates that 90% of alt-right activity happens on the internet in sites like 4chan, 8chan/8kun, Gab and Bitchute, which tells you how abstract it is so far.

FISSURES

Like the left, the right also has divisions.  Most alt-right groups are all male or nearly so.  So there are splits in the alt-right between misogynists who hate women, love male solidarity and even verge on homosexuality and those who understand that the white Cascadian ethnostate or even national white people need breeders, so they caution against putting women down too much.  Similar splits exist over the few homosexuals and Jews in the U.S. alt-right, who are largely castigated by most. 

Some white identitarians want versions of white supremacy -– Jews to Israel, Mexicans back to Mexico, Asians and Africans to return ‘home,’ etc.  What they will do with indigenous Americans is murky - maybe 'allow' them to go to Canada. Others advocate ‘separate but equal’ – a white ethnostate in the northwest area of the U.S. in Idaho, Washington and Oregon.  It would be 90% white, with controls for ‘character’ and sexual orientation, allowing a few honorary ‘non-white’ people in.  Even some ‘white’ people would not be qualified in this new Confederacy.  Although she does not mention it, the only way this would be accomplished is ethnic cleansing.  This conception includes a black belt nation in parts of the south and Aztlan in the southwest, as part of an ‘ethnostate’ skin color balkanization of the whole U.S.  Sort of like 'Partition' in India and Pakistan.

 However the main split on the right is between the hard-right killers – Nazi, Klan, Atomwaffen, Rise Above Movement, etc. – and the alt-right figures trying to mainline their ideas without Klan hoods or swastikas.   According to Stern, Charlottesville set the whole movement back, as well as reducing the role of Richard Spencer, who invited the many factions to ‘unite the right.’ 

INTELECTUAL ROOTS

Stern’s principal interest is teasing out the intellectual roots of alt-right concepts.  One key issue is political time, which the alt-right sees as circular and cyclic, not linear as do liberals or a sort of spiral/zigzag determined by class struggle and dialectics, as do Marxists.  While most refrain from a return to deep ecology primitivism, they desire an ‘archeo-future’ similar to the science-fiction story Dune, which combines feudal social relations with magical high technology.  Of course, they have no clue over the connection between high-tech labor and an advanced social structure.  In that sense they are against modernism without an economic analysis.  Like Trump, they want to jam open the “Overton window” of narrow political possibilities, and accelerate every reactionary policy and law they can in the time they have.

The pressure of a supposed disappearing ‘white’ majority in the U.S. by 2050 makes them sweat, hysterically claiming this demographic shift means ‘white genocide.’  So linear time is not on their side.  In a way they want a simple world of clear sexual roles and geographic skin color sorting, absent any consideration of economics – the opposite of the increasingly complex world they face. They are irrationally fearful of leftists, as their multiple panics over ‘antifa’ attest.  Their bet on vast rural areas is also against the trends of modern capitalism, which concentrates people in urban areas and mechanizes agriculture.

Stern points out that many of the higher-end ideas of the alt-right in the U.S. come from elite ultra-right French intellectuals and even borrowings from European Marxists – like the Gramscian, Frankfurt and Badiouist concepts of cultural struggle, wars of position and hegemony.  The right calls this metapolitics.  Alt-right metapolitics avoids the concept of class, as do liberals and black nationalists.  Yet the groups inspired by rightist European theories look down on the working-class ‘knuckle-draggers’ in their own movement.  At some point it might become a replay of the German black shirts and brown shirts… another fissure to keep an eye on.

(The ultra-right is much weaker than they think and, due to support in high places, prone to violent adventurism.  Be prepared!)

 Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “No Fascist USA,” “Fighting Fascism”(Zetkin); “The Ultra-Right,” “It Can’t Happen Here”(Lewis); “Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety,” “The Coming Storm,” “A Fascist Edge,” “Clandestine Occupations,” “Charlottesville, Virginia,” “The Real Red Pill.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 20, 2020

Anti-Fascist Series #3: BluePillers in Disguise

 The Real Red Pill

 One of the key phrases of the alt-right is that they took the ‘red pill’ made famous in the 1999 film The Matrix.  The pill was offered to Neo by Morpheus.  It would reveal to him the true nature of reality, and send him into an unrecognizable world much like Alice in Wonderland – “down the rabbit hole.”  Also on offer was the ‘blue pill’ which would allow Neo to continue to live in a software delusion called the Matrix.  Neo took the red pill because he realized something was wrong.  But he didn’t become a fascist, white supremacist or an alt-righter.  Quite the contrary…

This key right-wing cultural meme of red-pilling stolen from The Matrix is so full of flaws it again shows the incompetent nature of the alt-right.  Like the 3 Stooges, they basically can’t get anything straight, especially meta-politics embedded in culture.  They are no different than the vicious teenagers dressed like Neo in long, leather coats who shot up and killed students and teachers at Columbine High School in 1999.  This wasn’t the message of the film except to perhaps the underdeveloped emotional brain of a kid.

The right-wing use of the term ‘red pilling’ was used first in the 1990s ‘Manosphere’ matrix of incels and men’s rights losers.  These are mostly chauvinist males who can never get a woman to like them.  Modern whiny little comedy bros like Bill Burr, who just appeared on Saturday Night Live, harp on women so much I have to wonder if he made up a wife to cover for him.  She’s probably a mechanical doll.

The shallow alt-right idea is that the Matrix film rebels ‘oppose the system’ like they do!  To them the ‘system’ is feminist, multi-national, democratic, socialist and equal.  As any Marxist and most people paying attention know, reality is the exact opposite.  In fact the alt-right fits better with the real matrix that exists now, which is unequal, anti-working class, exploitative, capitalist, mostly oriented towards white and male elites and actually undemocratic.

THE MOVIE

Lets look at the film The Matrix and the real red pill.  First off, I have to say that in a political context like this film, the color red has represented revolutions against capitalists and feudalists since the French Revolution when red hats and red flags waved in the streets of Paris.  Their hats were based on red Phrygian hats worn by freed slaves in Rome, 100s of years earlier.  Politically it denotes revolutionary change, not counter-revolutionary change, affirmed by the red flags of the Russian, Chinese and other social revolutions.  This political association existed in the U.S. until very recently, when CNN oddly started using the color red to denote states won by Republicans in elections.  This doesn’t change the meaning of the color in politics.  Sorry but culturally the ‘red’ pill is communist.  One comic wag even suggested that the ‘red’ Republicans and the ‘blue’ Democrats are merely two pills leading to the same group of oligarchs dominating our capitalist matrix.  Don’t take either pill!

So who are the rebels against the Matrix?  Well, they could have been picked by a cultural Marxist.  Their leader Morpheus is Laurence Fishburne – a very tough black man.  Two women, including Neo’s romantic interest Trinity, are part of the pack, along with two more black men and two white guys.  Neo likes Trinity and she him, so he’s no incel.  Nor is he a chauvinist, much to Alt-Right chagrin. The Prophet helping the rebels is a middle-aged black woman living in a run-down apartment.  So the rebels are not an isolated bunch of overweight white men sporting beards and AR-15s, they are a dreaded unified group covering various geographic origins.  Yet who betrays the rebels in the first film?  A whiny white guy, Cypher, who lusts after the illusions of a steak, money and status, not the austere but real underground life of the rebels.   Yeah, a white guy.  Did the identitarian alt-right notice that?  No.

The ‘agents’ are digital machine men that look like they came out of the 1997 film Men in Black policing aliens. They might be reminiscent of the FBI but they are definitely the “Joe Friday” police type of detective – even the slow verbalisms of the top agent, Agent Smith, reflect this.  Their backup in the movie are all police.  They are dressed as identical corporate men in suits and ties, sort of frat-preppy Proud Boys with jobs.  They are not the right-wing stereotypes of African-American gang-bangers or ratty anti-fascists.  Nearly all of the real alt-right loves killer cops, and spends time defending them against Black Lives Matter.  Here the cops defend the Matrix as you’d expect.  Another fail.

VAMPIRES

What is the biggest secret of the Matrix, besides the fact that it is a digital facsimile covering a real world?  The terrifying heart of the Matrix is how the machines milk the bio-energy of humans.  It is a graphic portrayal of the exploitation of human energy and health – muscles, blood, bones and brains.  It is a gruesome picture of exploitation, as the machines are basically vampires living off the life force of human beings.

Karl Marx equated capitalism with vampirism. For instance, in Das Kapital, Marx describes his subject as “dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Capital is the ‘dead labor’ - much like a machine, which is called ‘fixed capital’ by Marx. So the red pill has revealed the real secret to Neo – humans are merely objects of use allowing ‘the machines’ to survive and control.  While the alt-right ignores capitalism and the rich, or when they do, lie about it, here is revealed the secret every Marxist knows – capital exploits and uses workers, even when they don’t know it as they sleep blissfully in their pods.  The alt-right loves capitalism, so they are actually on the side of the blood-suckers.

Are the machines running the software in the Matrix ‘just’ machines?  Or do they really represent something or someone human, as Marx mentioned?  Well the machines existing now that run our digital matrix are actually ‘the internet’ of computers, cell phones, routers, fiber lines, transmission towers, server farms, power grids, software programs and software code, with banks funding them.  This is all dominated by libertarian billionaires and their corporations, in league with the U.S. government’s NSA.  The real matrix is the World Wide Web, which the alt-right has thrived in, living in their basements as they do.  It seems transparent that the movie Matrix’s ‘machines’ are a stand-in for the software- enabled machines that run capitalist and world society now.   The machines are fixed capital.  And who actually owns this fixed, dead capital in the real world?  Capitalists.

What came before the Matrix in the film?  Well, Neo sees the real world is a ruin.  War between ‘machines’ and humans created it, as in the Terminator series. The ruined cities and nature underlying the Matrix can be seen as the dystopian results of imperial war and climate change.   Both of which the alt-right love.

ORIGINS

Who are the Wachowskis, who both wrote and directed the film series? Cranky old guys who want a whites-only country?  No.  They are both trans women, Lana and Lilly, who were formerly men.  Not very alt-right, that…  They also wrote and produced “V for Vendetta” and “Cloud Atlas.” The former is an anti-royal anarchist film targeting King James I, which made those Vendetta masks worn in left and BLM protests popular.  The latter is a compendium of stories of people fighting cruel nursing homes, racist ship captains and anti-gayness; a criminal oil industry company; a Korean dictatorship.   None of this has anything to do with the alt-right.

Who wrote “Alice in Wonderland” in 1865, a book that might have inspired "The Matrix"?  Lewis Carroll, an English writer, wrote it as a parody of Oxford and Christ Church Victorian popular culture.   The biggest enemy is the reddish Queen of Hearts, whose attitude towards Alice is “Off With Her Head!”  The Queen is a member of the House of Lancaster, which became the overbearing Lannisters of Game of Thrones.  Royalty is not the precinct of Marxism, but it certainly is a favorite of reactionaries and rightists, who love inequality and yearn for a Dune-like feudal future.  Carroll was no fan of royalty or power.

 Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane wrote the song White Rabbit based on Alice in Wonderland, also riffing off these pills:  "One pill makes you larger; one pill makes you small..." The Airplane were a very left-wing hippie band from San Francisco singing in another song, Volunteers:  "Got a revolution, got a revolution..."  So the origins of the red pill meme are actually the opposite of alt-right.  Indeed, the whole film contradicts their fantasy.  It is actually a leftist film, though flawed with an individual white savior as in so many ‘hero’ films.

According to an analysis of modern alt-right and Fascist thought, (“Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate”) even the method of the culture war that the red pill idea came from was inspired by Marxists like Antonio Gramsci and the European Frankfurt School.  The pragmatic ‘intellectuals’ in the U.S. alt-right also borrowed much of their analysis from French rightists.  So these red, white and blue flag-wavers can’t even think this shit up on their own!

The conservative and alt-right’s cultural heroes are isolated comics like Dennis Miller, low-grade rockers like Ted Nugent or Nordic black metal, light-weight actors like Adam Sandler and Chuck Norris, B-list celebrities like Reagan and Trump and bi-polar A-listers like Kanye West.  What do you expect from a cultural perspective reeking of nostalgia, the 1950s, the occult, authoritarianism and archaic myths like Odin, the Nordic sagas or Teutonic Knights?  The alt-right’s idea of ‘red pilling’ is a cosmic joke of misunderstanding.  They are actually the blue-pillers of the capitalist Matrix pretending to be otherwise.

P.S. - The follow-up "Matrix-Resurrection" film is a romantic disaster, a copy of the earlier films which fucked-up and undermined those films at the same time.  From the Critical Drinker:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8n8WdpW9tA

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Gramsci,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Monsters of the Market,” “The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism.”   The book “Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate” will soon be reviewed as part of this anti-fascism series.

The Cultural Marxist

October 16, 2020

Anti-Fascist Series #2: The 1980s

“No Fascist USA!” by Hilary Moore and James Tracy, 2020

This book covers anti-fascist activity in the 1970s and 1980s, especially after the election of Ronald Reagan, focusing on the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee’s (JBAKC) 13 year effort against the Klan, Nazis and others. 

For those who lived through this time in left politics, this is familiar territory.  The alphabet soup of fascists and racists in those days is different than now.  At that time besides the KKK and the Nazi Party it was the Aryan Nation, Posse Comitatus, David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People, Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, White Citizens Council, the Order, the Minutemen and others. 

What is obvious is that fascism is embedded in bourgeois U.S. politics and its economy, as it openly appears again and again.  After Mexico was expelled from 5 states, indigenous people sent to reservations and the slave South destroyed in 1865, it still needed a domestic movement.  This started with the violent destruction of Reconstruction in the 1870s; continued in the 1920s when the Klan marched in their thousands down Pennsylvania Avenue to celebrate years of Jim Crow; came out against the labor movement in the 1930s; opposed the 1950s-1960s’ Civil Rights movement; then reappeared in the 1980s during the Reagan administration and into the 1990s.  Now the racist / fascist “Alt-Right” supported by the Trump administration has come out to scapegoat again.   Over and over, like some sick Groundhog Day.

This book describes the JBAKC’s efforts in Texas cities, small towns and suburbs around Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York and in Chicago. 

JBAKC was what I would call an ultra-left group that had problems working with other groups, with extreme rhetoric, with stupid tactical decisions, with isolation from the working class.  At the end, the book admits this.  They supported other ultra-left groups in the U.S. like the Weatherman and their ‘above ground’ supporters, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, along with revolutionary nationalists in the Republic of New Africa, the Black Liberation Army and the Puerto Rican FALN.  They say nice things about the Progressive Labor Party’s fight against racists. The JBAKC were gutsy, and did believe in self-defense and later learned to work in temporary coalitions with other anti-fascists.  They were clearly not socialist, but saw themselves as white people ‘supporting’ national liberation struggles.  In a sense they never understood the material reasons why so-called ‘white’ proletarians actually materially benefit from anti-racism.  Their main attitude towards all ‘white’ people, like so many present liberals, was concerning white privilege.  Which means their revolutionary attitude in a capitalist society only went so far.   

JBAKC first got started out of New York in the late ‘70s when black prisoners in upstate prisons wrote asking for help against Klan organizing among guards and white prisoners.   During their existence they did research to ‘out’ Klansmen and other fascists and protested police killings and brutal racist thugs like the “Cowboys” in the Richmond, CA police. They organized confrontations and rallies, worked in coalitions and appeared before city councils to get Klan rallies banned.  They supported prisoners, worked with left-wing punk bands, opposed Klan border patrols, even held anti-Klan 5K-10K runs in the Bay area.  They once got physically attacked by the ultra-right Jewish Defense League in an LA suburb for their opposition to Zionism and support of Palestinian rights. 

The modern takeaways from this book is that an openly pro-racist president conjures up fascist support, as Reagan did.  That both physical AND propaganda action is required against fascism.  That ‘ignoring’ or normalizing of fascists by liberals or conservatives is how they reclaim legitimacy and electoral power, allowing them to hurt minorities, labor and leftists.  That the same ‘freedom of speech’ liberal ACLU line still with us now was used in the ‘80s too.  The JBAKC opposed it then – as fascists are not polite debaters, they are domestic terrorists.  That you need a cultural side, as the JBAKC worked among young punk rockers to counter fascist skinheads in the punk scenes in Chicago and San Francisco.  That fascists are big supporters of the police and police murders of minority people in the ‘80s too.  And that some police reciprocate, as shown in the travesty of the 1979 killing of 5 anti-fascists in Greensboro, North Carolina by the Klan and Nazis, which the local police, BATF and FBI enabled.  Oddly in the last week the City Council of Greensboro finally 'apologized' about the role of their police in this incident - 41 years late.

Again, same stuff, different decade.  The liberals lying to you about how ‘the arc of progress ascends to heaven’ are pulling your leg.  This is a good book for present anti-fascists to learn the pros and cons of prior movements, as some now might see themselves in this history.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Fighting Fascism”(Zetkin); “The Ultra-Right,” “It Can’t Happen Here”(Lewis); “Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety,” “The Coming Storm,” “A Fascist Edge,” “Clandestine Occupations,” “The Way the Wind Blew” (Jacobs); “Charlottesville, Virginia,” “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “Panzer Destroyer,” “The Unwomanly Face of War,” “Enemy at the Gates,” “Life and Fate”(Grossman), “Cloudsplitter” (Banks) or reviews on prior U.S. leftist organizations:  CLP, PLP, RU/RCP, DRUM, WU.

And I bought it at May Day Books excellent anti-fascism section!

Red Frog

October 13, 2020

Frustrated Revolution

 “3%”- Netflix, Seasons 1-2 (spoilers)

This is a dystopian Brazilian series that closely parallels modern authoritarian Brazil.  It concerns a ‘future’ utopian society called the Offshore that functions like a libertarian high-tech island beach spa and vacation paradise.  But it’s only open to 3% of the population.  The rest of the 97% have to live in a poverty-stricken sunken favela surrounded by desert.  There is no explanation of why there is a desert, but perhaps a result of the burning of the Amazon. The residents of the favela are the people unable to pass “The Process” – a series of complicated tests for all Inland 20-year olds that filter for ‘merit.’   Those who pass with ‘merit’ take a submarine to the elite island paradise; the rest return to misery and ostensible unhappiness in the Inland.  Kind of a less bloody Hunger Games.

Obviously riffing off the 1% of billionaires that dominate present capitalist societies, it also includes an Inland religion that worships the Process.  The ‘two Founders’ of the heavenly Offshore are treated by the religion a bit like Adam & Eve, but this understanding hides a crime.  Colorful festivals, sort of like Carnivale, are held on the day the Process starts each year.  The series is a send-up of the whole concept of a meritocracy, which originated as a sarcastic joke in England, much as the phrase “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” did.  Our own social Darwinist ‘process’ – class background, money, school, geographic origin, college tests, degrees, entrepreneurship, individualism – are the subtext for those paying attention.

What emerges from the Inland ghetto in response to the 3% is The Cause / La Causa – an underground group attempting to stop the Process and overthrow the 3%.  The group is made up of rejects from the Process who deny that all deserving people pass or want to go to the Offshore.  They send moles through the Process to undermine it from the inside.  Ultimately in frustration some want to resort to offensive violence.  A group of the street-wise form a close bond that is useful in their fight against the 3%.

There are some who refuse to take a side and ultimately one of these is a treacherous liberal ‘innocente’ - though she is not the worst.  She is the person the writers want us to be most sympathetic with.  This is why Season 3 starts off with a wonderful counter-cultural ‘third way’ commune, which then follows a Malthusian and undemocratic logic.

Like most liberal pacifist shows, the issue of forbidden violence by the oppressed is a crucial issue.  It is only allowed defensively by the writers.  The Process and the 3% have very high-tech agents and a military called the Division, along with surveillance, even within the Inland favela.  Each person has an implanted tracking and control device embedded behind their ear.  The ruthless ‘best’ people of the 3% are not afraid to use force.  Their slogan is that suffering is good for character building – someone else’s suffering that is.  They also have an alliance with a gang that does their bidding within the ruined city.

One character’s whole family has always passed the Process, and he thinks that an overwhelming desire to win by any means is the route to success.  He is what passes for an aristocrat in the shabby city.  Every child believes they will pass, and this ‘hope’ is what keeps the religion and the city alive, putting up with it for 105 years(!)  The winners must leave their families and, unbeknownst to them, submit to sterilization – which is the real reason for the recruitment of new 20 year olds.  There is no room for children or families in this utopia. Like so many modern dystopias, the sources of food, buildings or technology is magical.  No one seems to work in either in the Offshore or the Inland.  They just have romances and do exercises, or mill about and sell things in shredded clothing.

This concept of an Offshore ‘heaven’ is borrowed from the fantasies of some over-stressed worker who would just love to sit on a beach all day eating fruit, drinking champagne and having sex while doing nothing else – dull as that might become.   It shows the human creation of all religious ‘heavens’ and the vulgar source of all corporate / libertarian utopias.

A modern and interesting series that focuses on the issues of class and meritless ‘merit.’  There are two more seasons but I doubt it ends well.  This series, along with others, shows that Netflix is sourcing content from all over the world.

Other prior blog reviews on streaming series, use blog search box, upper left: “Thieves of the Wood,” “Ozark,” “Deadwood,” “Game of Thrones,” “Rebellion,” “Stateless,” “Hannah,” “The Peaky Blinders,” “Black Sails,” “Tremè,” “Vikings,” “Fargo,” “Damnation,” “Handmaid’s Tale,” “Hunger Games,” “Comrade Detective,” “The Wire, "Mayans M.C.”

P.S. - Seasons 3 & 4 do end better than expected...

Sorry for watching another one!

The Kulture Kommissar

October 10, 2020

The New Cold War, Part II

 “China 2020” – Monthly Review, Vol. 72, No. 5, October 2020

This edition of Monthly Review focuses on China exclusively. It includes a revealing article on the current trade war between China and the U.S., which is part of a new cold war.  Unfortunately it never mentions Russia as a target of the new cold war as well.  It has two helpful articles on two lonely but successful Chinese rural cooperatives.  Lastly an article on debt growth in China.  They are all written by “critical Marxist” professors from Beijing, Fujian, Chongquing and Hong Kong, China.  “Critical Marxism” seems a phrase that is redundant.  John Bellamy Foster’s introduction notes the variegated nature of the Chinese economy, calling it ‘unique’ and “indeterminate, neither entirely capitalist nor entirely socialist.”

In a way, this edition tries to hide the gap.  The two stories on successful cooperatives/communes that resisted the tide of privatization or the 1982 Household Responsibility System (HRS) is set against a sea of monetarism, individualism and the market in rural areas.  References are made to a new initiative by the CCP, “rural revitalization,’ attempting to ‘delink’ (S. Amin’s concept) the Chinese economy from imperialism and build it up internally.  But the essence of this revitalization is undefined.  Foster insists that China’s land is public property, but like Mexico, the land can be and is being ‘transferred’ to large private agricultural entities and real estate developers by peasant households and local governments.  One article is seemingly happy at this prospect. They hope that “top-down and bottom-up movements are integrated into delinking…”  Hmmm…

Of most use is an excellent analysis of labor arbitrage and unequal exchange vis-à-vis the U.S. and China.  The authors look at the last 40 years of production and trade between the two, in different sectors.  China traded 50 hours of Chinese labor for 1 hour of U.S. labor in 1995, but now the ratio is 7 hours to 1 hour in 2014.  Between 1995 and 2014, 43 out of 55 sectors transferred value to the U.S. from China – to the tune of $100B.    The remaining sectors advantaged China – technology, agriculture, pharmaceuticals and others.  These are the sectors that are now subject to the trade war.  The authors understand that Trump is a representative of one faction of the U.S. ruling class, which they call the ‘continentalists’ as opposed to the ‘globalists.’  So this is really a capitalist competition issue, it is not about ‘unjust’ methods.  And you wonder why Huawei, TikTok and WeChat are suddenly at issue?  It’s not ‘security’ as it’s been reported that TikTok, like all software platforms, shares data with U.S. police.  Talk to Mark Zuckerberg instead…

The authors also dissect the claim than the Chinese currency, the yuan, is undervalued.  They say that by 2010 China’s GDP/Balance of payments left the yuan in a ‘reasonable’ relation to the exchange rate with the dollar. 

Two articles discuss the socialistic functioning of the Zhoujiazhuang and Puhan rural communities.  Zhoujiazhuang rejected the HRS in 1982 and continues as a very successful and well-off cooperative involving almost 7,000 people in 6 villages.  As part of membership every farmer must convert to organic agriculture.  It is run on a democratic basis, producing food and fruit in an increasingly productive way for sale and consumption.  It plows most money back to the farmers, with 30% for general social needs.  The cooperative/commune gives low-interest or no-interest loans and provides ecological agricultural advice, medical clinics, schools and elder care.  Mao denounced it’s method in 1963 as ‘trivial,’ ‘impractical,’ and only for ‘intellectuals.’  Its leader was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution but when he was released the method was reinstated. 

Scale is important, as cooperatives that are too small cannot survive, while those that are too big become bureaucratic and unwieldy and unproductive.  The CCP vacillated, first ordering very large communes, then small ones, then abandoning the idea entirely. This commune found the right size.

The second example is the Puhan rural community, which handled finance by first being involved with a capitalist micro-finance firm that charged too high an interest.  They rejected this for relations with a Hong-Kong non-profit that charged lower rates.  Ultimately they formed their own mutual-aid credit union, distributing profits like Zhoujiazhuang.  They also promote ecological agriculture and in the process, like Marx, focus on soil fertility. 

What is true is that cooperatives exist even in the interstices of the capitalist world. Certainly Zhoujiazhuang seems highly developed and there is great potential in the Chinese countryside given its revolutionary history and present economic structure.  Yet Cuba has a far higher rate of organic agriculture than China at this point.  So while these stories are encouraging, they don't clearly relate to the direction of China or its class character.  This is something the authors might have wanted to show by implication. 

 Anyway, a good MR edition to keep up with events concerning China.

May Day stocks many left-wing newspapers and magazines, including Monthly Review, Jacobin, Labor Notes and others.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Musings of the Professors,” “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital,” “The Fall of Bo Xilai,” (all on Monthly Review) and “Two Sea Changes in World Political Economy,” “Is the East Still Red?” “From Commune to Capitalism,” “The End of the Revolution,” “Jasic Factory Struggle,” “China’s New Red Guards,” “The Rise of China,” “Maoism & the Chinese Revolution,” “Striking to Survive,” “China on Strike.”        

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 6, 2020