Busted Trust

 “Antitrust,” by Amy Klobuchar (last 2 chapters), 2021

If you are wondering why I’d review part of a book by a known centrist and neo-liberal, I’ll tell you.  It was loaned to me by a neighbor who is a Democrat.  I also wondered why someone who has almost never opposed corporations in her home state of Minnesota would even write this.  Perhaps the ideological threat on the left is becoming more real.  Monopoly is an old word from the late 1800s, first talked about by Theodore Roosevelt, the fake ‘trust buster’ of the early 1900s.  Evidently Klobuchar realizes this kind of rhetoric might again be relevant… at least in regards to some companies.

I read the last two chapters of this 355 page book to spare myself the time.  They are titled “The Path Forward” and “Conclusion.”  This will give me an idea if Klobuchar wants to repeat what was suggested over a 100 years ago (forward thinking, aye?) or something different.  It will tell me if she understands that capital always leads to monopoly – properly termed ‘oligopoly’ in this day and age.

Marxists have dealt with this issue since the beginning, not having to wait a hundred years. U.S. Marxists Baran and Sweezy wrote a whole book titled Monopoly Capital in 1966 when Klobuchar was 6. (Book reviewed below.)   Marxism understands ‘monopoly’ to be another form of capitalist competition.  Baran and Sweezy estimated it basically ended price competition among the big firms. Michael Roberts challenges B/S's perspective, saying the price similarity is not that great. https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/07/11/capitalism-has-the-leopard-changed-its-spots/  If you look at ANY sector of the U.S. economy today, it is dominated by 2-3 to 6 large corporations.  This is properly called ‘oligopoly’ - a term avoided by Klobuchar for good reason, as it exposes the real issue.

MARX, LENIN & LUXEMBURG

In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) Marx wrote about the functioning of capital:

1. “Everyone knows that modern monopoly is engendered by competition itself.”

2. “In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.”

In the same work, Marx describes what competition also does, as Klobuchar loves the chimera of wonderful competition:

3. "Competition engenders misery, it foments civil war, it 'changes natural zones,' mixes up nationalities, causes trouble in families, corrupts the public conscience, 'subverts the notion of equity, of justice,' of morality, and what is worse, it destroys free, honest trade, and does not even give in exchange synthetic value, fixed, honest price. It disillusions everyone, even economists. It pushes things so far as to destroy its very self."

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) Marx in a section on The Competition Among the Capitalists describes the greater accumulation of capital by larger capitalists, to the ruin of smaller ones. Lenin took these ideas further in describing how large capitalists then exported capital around the world, providing the basis for modern imperialism, the ‘highest stage of capitalism.’  Luxemburg continued this point by maintaining that the conquering of these new ‘frontiers’ by large monopoly capital was necessary under imperialism, until the last frontier is gone. 

Cracks in the wall?

“THE PLAN, BOSS, THE PLAN”

So what does the lawyer and Senator from Minnesota actually say in her tome? My guess is nothing like this. Most of the book is a leftish history of anti-trust activity in the U.S.  Over the last two chapters, in 25 points, she advocates enforcing and enhancing existing anti-trust law – which somehow has not stemmed the tide over these 100 years.  Beefing this up are specific reforms to slow down, halt or reverse mergers, to initiate patent reform and to punish anti-competitive pricing.  Added to this is a familiar bevy of reforms to correct the corporatization of society, some of which are certainly supportable.  In fact, there are so many reforms needed here it reminds one of a man with 25 wounds all over his body covered by band-aids.  Or a boat with 25 holes in it.  Patch, patch, patch, patch...    

Specifically in her 25 points she aims at “Big Tech,” “Big Pharma” for lower prices and incidentally, China.  'True' monopolies like Amazon or Facebook might be her only real target.  She ironically asks that ‘antitrust’ not be used except historically, as ‘trusts’ are no longer a relevant term for large corporations. She harks back to Adam Smith’s hostility to monopolies and hopes everyone will combine to fight for ‘competition’ once again.  

Many of these ideas have already been promoted by politicians like Elizabeth Warren and academic Lina Khan.

‘DA FLAWS

This book reflects the pressure of the left on neo-liberalism, which has clearly failed.  To her credit, Klobuchar seems to be responding a bit.  However, the flaws in her whole approach are obvious.  In her solutions, Klobuchar leaves out nearly every existing oligopoly in the U.S. – banking, finance, insurance, oil, mining, energy, retail, media, auto, agriculture, tech hardware, aircraft, military - you name it.  She has ignored history and Marx’s point that competition begets monopoly in a capitalist system.  Remember the 'breakup' of AT&T/Bell in 1982, the last actual 'anti-trust' action?  AT&T is still one of the top 3 phone companies in the U.S. So ‘busting trusts’ will only allow the process to start again.  The recent lawsuit against Microsoft for bundling Explorer into its base software has now lead to Microsoft pushing Edge at every opportunity within Office.  It is a political version of Ground Hog Day.  

Instead, history points in another direction – forward, to the future.  The next step is for large corporations to be socialized without compensation, taken over by a workers’ government and their own work-force.  There is actually nothing wrong with Amazon, Google, Facebook or any other large corporation that various socialist approaches can’t fix.  It can be argued that a company like Amazon is actually more efficient than thousands of malls or stores.  This logic can be applied to other large corporations. It is also possible to create municipal, state and federal companies that compete with the oligopolies, starting in health care, high-speed internet service, energy and banking.  This she doesn't address.  She also ignores the international question.  The accumulation and export of capital by 'monopolies' leads to world-wide domination, not just national domination. 

Behind much of this is the romanticization of small business inherent in her approach.  It is as if capital was still in the 1700s when Smith wrote, full of small pin factories, not in 2021 with mega-corporations stretching around the world. 

More than that, does she mean any of this?  After all, the term 'centrism' for a politician hides someone who leans to the right.  Even in local politics, she's no enemy of corporate America.  Klobuchar supports the wolf hunt in Minnesota, where wolves are ‘harvested’ in the interest of the farm, real estate and hunting industries.  She wobbled on Enbridge’s Line 3.  Enbridge is the largest pipeline firm in north America.  She quietly supports toxic sulfide mining in northern Minnesota, initiated by two of the biggest mining conglomerates in the world. 

For her campaigns in the last 5 years, Klobuchar took money from United Health Group and Best Buy, both oligarchical firms in their sectors.  She also got money from 2 billionaires from Blackstone, the largest hedge fund and now real estate firm in the country. Other large firms?  Slim-Fast, Linked-In, Direct-TVs Hubbard, the GAP – all told a total of 15 motley billionaires from law, finance, real estate, agriculture and Hollywood.  I guess this is why we’ll call the smug Klobuchar a ‘trust buster’ – because she can’t be trusted, just like Teddy Roosevelt, in spite of her leftish feint.

7/9/21 - Biden comes out against tech 'monopoly.' 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left to search our 14 year archive of reviews:  “Klobuchar a Hot Dish Neo-Liberal,” “Just Mercy,” “Bernie Needs to Toughen Up His Debate Performances,” “Monopoly Capital,” “A Night at the Caucuses,” “The Populist’s Guide to 2020,” “Professional Degrees in Recent Democratic Party Politics,” “Crying Wolf,” “The Endless Crisis” or the word “monopoly.”

Red Frog

May 28, 2021

Unrepairable Men

 “Repairable Men”- short stories by John C Walker, 2014

If you don’t read fiction much, maybe short stories are your slug of coffee?  This is a group of 10 stories that show men to be pretty messed up.  Actually almost unrepairable. Set in the Central Valley of California around Fresno, and also in Oregon, these fathers, brothers, husbands and sons seem to put their foot in it big time.  They lose wives and girlfriends, their lives or toes, their temper and always their dignity.  I’m not sure what the point is, but it’s mostly depressing. 

Many of these men are small business owners and rural, so that explains some of the stupidity.  It is a familiar collection of damage.  A man calls his brother to kill the family dog.  A physically strong father tries to force his son to be a star baseball player.  Two sons humiliate a disabled Mexican farm-worker.  A boy ruins his father’s employee picnic.  A professor loses it at a faculty retreat.  An obnoxious husband forces his weak wife to raise wolves.  A father and son try to do impossible earth-friendly logging.  A wife moans over a dead rabbit to her uncomprehending husband.  A Vietnamese girl is handed a heavy Vietnamese sword by her father’s boss.  A man fighting the Nile Virus and ‘bird flu’ takes it too far.

Images from the book depict men with wrenches and wood bits for heads and arms.  In effect, they are tool heads.  A miasma of raisin farming, violence, food issues, racism, marginal women, drunks, infidelity and suicide are in the soup.   

Yeah, weird shit.  If you’ve met your share of damaged men or man-boys, you’ll wonder why women put up with them.  The women in these stories either leave or are somewhat pathetic.  Hey Walker, who is the audience for this?!  Is it men trying to correct their own flawed masculinity of tools, toys and toughness?  Or women who already understand this stuff?

There are bits of kindness and adaptability, but these exceptions are few.  A portrait of certain men, but certainly not all. 

Streaming Snapshots:

Underground Railroad:  So far, endless slavery misery and pretentious fantasy.  Clang, clang, rumble, rumble.  Distorted history that some will actually believe.  My suggestion is that modern African-American film makers start doing movies on the present.  The story of slavery is by now politically safe.  Underground Railroad is like a more artistic and cruel version of 1977's Roots.

Atlantic Crossing:  PBS soap opera about platonic romance between FDR and Norwegian princess.  She lectures him on democracy.  No mention of the Norwegian Vidkun Quisling, one of the greatest collaborators of WWII.  No mention of the Norwegian Labour Party which was dominant during this period – just some irritating anonymous ‘cabinet’ members who take advice from royals.  A royalist fairy tale that fits well with BBC fare.

Handmaid's Tale - S4. So far, June doesn't know whether to be a rebel or a mother.  Finally escapes the patriarchal sadism of Christian Gilead in Canada. 

Mare of Eastown and Too Close:  Misery trains running through dysfunction junctions.  Dead children! Kidnapped girls! Suicide!  Murder! Guilt. Sadness.  And a real Kate Winslet, which is the only reason MoE became what it is. It asks the question, are detective series now really soap operas.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews:  “The Permanent Guillotine,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Age of Uprising,” “Citizen Tom Paine,” “The Hermitage and Winter Palace,” “Redbreast,” “Viking Economics,” “Why the U.S. Will Never Be a Social Democracy,” "Sometime a Great Notion."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 24, 2021

Never discuss politics, sex and ...

 “Godless – 150 Years of Unbelief,” edited by Chaz Bufe, 2019

This is a rollicking stroll through the writings of free-thinkers since the early 1800s.  It is mostly essays from anarchists, feminists, labor activists, historians and autodidact intellectuals or writers.  Christianity is the main target, with side-swipes at Islam, Judaism and Hinduism.  Socialists understand religion is materially based in class societies and useful to the upper-class.  As such it is not just an intellectual struggle as so many pure atheists maintain, but will weaken and disappear when material conditions change.

So with that caveat, it is odd that, at this point in history, we even have to discuss this issue.  Science, logic, history, sociology, politics, economics and knowledge have accumulated to such a degree that almost anyone can see through the religious charlatans worldwide.  But nearly every ruling class finds the church or cathedral or synagogue or mosque or temple useful and there is the rub.  Many of these writers point out the hostility of the Bible and Christianity to women and to sex, while ignoring slavery, war, poverty and all manner of social crimes. 

Here’s a taste!

Johann Most (1883) – Most describes the “cloud lollers” and “terrorists of hell.” And God as the model for the “ideal despot” who “resolved to destroy all mankind by means of water” along with “his prison, hell, his handyman, the devil.  God to Most is an “all wise bungler,” head of a “malignant trinity.” Then there is Eve, “Adam’s bond servant.”

Matilda Gage (1893) – “Woman’s increasing freedom within the last hundred years is not due to the church but to the printing press, to education, to free thought …” “The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church towards women…”

Ambrose Bierce (1906) – “Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge of things without parallel.” “Pray, v. To ask the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”

Chaz Bufe (1996) – “Mystic, n. A man or woman who wishes to understand the mysteries of the universe but is too lazy to study physics.”  “Spirituality, n. A meaningless but uplifting term of self-congratulation often found in dating site profiles.”

Emma Goldman (1913) – Goldman eviscerates Christ’s ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ starting with idiocies like “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” “Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life.”  “The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the hereafter and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth.” 

Sèbastien Faure (1914) – “To create is thus a mystical, religious expression…” “God being eternal, the universe is also eternal, and if the universe is eternal, it is because it has never commenced, because it has not been created.”

E. Haldeman-Julius (1942) – “Inspired?  The Bible is not even intelligent.”  “If the Bible, which Christians believe is the word of God, is inspired and infallible, why does it have two distinctly opposite versions of many things?”

Joseph McCabe (1936&1943) – 3 historical essays by McCabe: into the roots of Christian traditions in prior pagan religions; how Christianity supported slavery for centuries; how the Judeo-Christian religion denigrated women from its beginnings.  This is great stuff!  No quote does it justice.

Pamela Sutter (2001) – “One in four Americans believe that God intervenes in sporting events.”  “Everybody wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die.” 

Chaz Bufe (2001) – “The overt racism of the Book of Mormon.” “When you talk to God, it is prayer.  When God talks to you, it is schizophrenia…” (quoting Mulder);  “Christianity has a morbid, unhealthy preoccupation with sex.” (Note: fundamentalist religion positions on lots of kids, abortion, masturbation, divorce, birth control, sex education, women’s orgasm, homosexuality, women priests, celibacy, Puritanism, marriage, being barefoot and pregnant, housewifery, rape, modesty, etc. etc. etc.)

S.C. Hitchcock (2009) – “The Oxford Dictionary defines faith as a “firm belief, especially without logical proof.’”  “The universe … would be neither created nor destroyed.  It would just BE.” (quoting Stephen Hawking, who in contradiction, also believed in the Big Bang.)

An informative book on a group of atheists thinkers and their writings on religion.  Note the positions denying the Christian origin myth of the Big Bang.  The collection also makes it clear that early feminists were hostile to the teachings of various churches.  A chuckle-fest for some, informative for others, a waste of time for those with their head in the clouds.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to search the 14 year May Day archive with these terms: “Rise of the Nones,” “God is Not Great,” “Libertarian Atheism versus Liberal Religionism,” “Female Genital Mutilation,” “Annihilation of Caste,” “Jude the Obscure,” “Spiritual Snake Oil,” “American Theocracy,” “The God Market,” “Religulous,” “Astrology,” “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” “The Da Vinci Code,” “The Dark Side of Christian History,” “To Serve God and Walmart.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

May 21, 2021

The Present Conjuncture

 “The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles,” by David Harvey, 2020

This is a series of essay on different topics, centered around Harvey’s reading of Marx – mostly Das Capital, the Grundrisse, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, the Communist Manifesto - along with his own analysis of the present ‘conjuncture.’  Much of this will be familiar to readers of Harvey or Marx or socialism, so I’m going to concentrate on new or significant points he makes in this book.

Harvey begins the book by saying he is for a peaceful transition to an anti-capitalist society.  His picture of a violent revolution where capital is “burned down overnight” seems out of the playbook of some infantile anarchist or nihilist, not actual Marxists.  In his scenario he also leaves out the inevitable self-defense against fascism, something he sees as rising.  Harvey ends the book with a description of the revolutionary side of capitalism, citing Marx.  This consists of the relentless development of technology to enhance profits, or as he puts it the “technological dynamism of capitalism.” Harvey, like Marx, points out that the capitalist developments in labor-saving devices and technology have to be taken over by the working class that built them.  This situation will then raise human society from the “realm of necessity to the realm of freedom” where all human basics are taken care of, with minimum work and more free time for everyone, not just a few.

Here are Harvey’s uncommon or most important insights:

1.     Neo-conservatism failed over the Iraq war.  Neo-liberalism failed during the 2007-2009 Great Recession.  These two projects have lost their political legitimacy.  Consequently a segment of capital is seeking to bloc with petit-bourgeois neo-fascist and ultra-rightists groups to protect their profit system. 

2.     Harvey almost says that blue-collar work and factories have disappeared in the center capitalist countries. He contends most profits now come from the deployment of fictitious capital in the markets or from rents in real estate, agricultural land or other capitalist property, like intellectual property.  This is similar to the position of Michael Hudson, but he doesn’t go as far in ignoring direct labor exploitation as does Hudson.

3.     Harvey contrasts labor-intensive methods, such as occur in Bangladesh, Cambodia or India, with capital-intensive development based on technology, i.e. Silicon Valley.  This is the real rub between China and the U.S., as the latter wants to maintain a monopoly on technological progress, while China is forging ahead with artificial intelligence, 5G, internet commerce, space landings and the like.  This is already reducing the capital transfer from China to the U.S.  Harvey calls this a development in the inevitable world-wide ‘equalization of the profit rate.’

4.     The Chinese ‘Belt and Road' Initiative represents China’s attempt to export surplus capital.  China is planning a high-speed Eurasian railroad from China to Europe, a modern ‘silk road,’ which will cut transport times in two.  This is part of what Marx called ‘the spatial fix’ for excess capital. 

5.     He intimates that China is capitalist but then hopes the CCP will turn towards socialism, so his class picture of China is muddled.

6.     A central problem of world-wide capital is what to do with their overwhelming amount of money!

7.     He thinks “a transition to socialism will be organized by movements.”  But he also highlights a bloc of 6 left parties in Brazil which put aside sectarianism.  He claims his book is an attempt to shape a program, but there is little evidence of programmatic conclusions.

8.     Harvey cites the 3% compound growth in the money supply (with help from quantitative easing) and production as destroying the planet and society.  In a way, capital is now too big to survive, but too big to die an easy death, given its invasive and globe-spanning character.

9.     Events in Brazil (and Chile before) highlights the bloc between neo-liberalism and neo-fascism.  This is also reflected in the ultra-rightist nationalist ADP in Germany, which supports neo-liberal market methods.

10. Tariff wars and immigration hatred are not part of the neo-liberal project, but they play a role in national capitalist competition and getting votes from a petit-bourgeois reactionary base.

11.   Harvey calls market and money-based liberal utopianism about abstract freedom to actually be a barrier to real freedom – which comes about when you don’t have to always worry about work, school, housing, health care, food, transportation, child care and utilities.

12.  China went from a cash to a cashless economy in 3 years.  300 million moved from the countryside to the city in 10-15 years – the biggest movement of humans in history.  The 4 largest banks in the world are Chinese.  4 of the top 10 tech companies in the world are Chinese.  There is no intellectual property law in China, so quick technological developments are common.

13.   Territorial power and money power dominate the world, but ultimately money power rules – especially after 1971 and the end of Bretton-Woods.  “State power becomes subservient to private capital.”

14.   Rosa Luxemburg understood the role of colonial capital in under-developing colonies, an example being Britain’s hobbling of Indian development. She also pointed out that as long as the whole peripheral world is controlled by capital and imperialism, primitive accumulation will continue.  Capital needs a frontier.  Once it runs out of frontiers it will fail according to Luxemburg. In his examination of geography Harvey does not mention regional differences within countries, such as the U.S. south.  These areas sometimes act as semi-peripheries or semi-frontiers.

15.   Harvey contrasts the concept of ‘rates’ and ‘mass.’  In other words, a 10% rate increase in wages for a worker making $40K results in far less wealth than a 5% increase in profits for a capitalist on a $300M investment. So a falling rate of profit is double-sided, not a unitary concept that always points downward. He supports Marx’s idea of ‘the falling rate of profit,’ though he seems to support it with this caveat.

16.    “Accumulation by dispossession” means absorbing companies through mergers;  privatization of various types of public property; forcing people or companies or real estate into bankruptcy or foreclosure and getting their property at a discount (‘creative destruction’); gentrification; land grabbing in the global south; shedding pensions; tax evasion; disaster capitalism; corporate welfare.

There are chunks of this book that are somewhat behind the times, especially his section on environmental issues.  He still thinks McDonald’s is the biggest U.S. employer, not Amazon and Wal-Mart.  Harvey understands that China will play a major role in the future of the world economy, as his points indicate.  He also discusses two different definitions of alienation, COVID, Hudson Yards and the brutal and immediate closing of the Lordstown GM Assembly plant, which ripped up the town, workers and social networks.  Ironically it was Trump’s move to get rid of a regulation limiting the production of SUVs which gutted Lordstown, as it was making the Chevy Cruz sedan.

An easy book to read, not clotted with academic terms, which might allow you to peer deeper into the corrupt soul of contemporary capitalism and configure some emerging solutions.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, search our 14 year archive using these terms: “Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism,” “The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism,” “Rebel Cities,” “Spaces of Global Capitalism” (all 4 by Harvey); “Two Sea Changes in World Political Economy,” “Is the East Still Red?” “China, the Bubble That Never Pops,” “China – 2020,” “From Commune to Capitalism,” “The End of the Revolution,” “Jasic Factory Struggle,” “China’s New Red Guards,” “The Rise of China and the Demise of the World Economy.’ Or terms like primitive accumulation, Luxemburg, fascist, China or Marx.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 16, 2021

The Wages of Nationalism

 “Quo Vadis, Aida?”film directed by Jasmila Žbanić, 2020             

This film is about the ethnic war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.  It reflects the consequence of imperialism’s destruction of the Yugoslav workers’ state, as well as that state’s internal national contradictions.  It focuses on the situation in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the July, 1995 massacre there. This is in the context of war and intense partisan ethnic hatred on both sides.  Bosnian Serb nationalists in the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under Ratko Miladić enter the town with tanks while Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) civilians crowd into and around a U.N. ‘safe space’ outside of the city. The key character, Aida, is a local U.N. translator with a family – a husband and two grown sons.  They are Bosniak. The family is fictional but ‘personalize’ the story as films tend to do.

Bosniak civilians inside U.N. compound

The film focuses on the flawed attitude of the U.N. Dutch ‘peace-keepers’ and the absence of a U.N. response to the invasion of Srebrenica by the Army of Republika Srpska under Miladić.  The whole town was supposed to be a ‘safe zone’ after 3.5 years of civil war.  Eventually the Bosnian Serb soldiers are allowed inside the U.N. compound, allowed to bus female and children civilians to a nearby ‘Muslim Bosnian’ town, allowed to bus the men ‘somewhere else’.  The U.N. is forced to evacuate their own compound, which makes no sense.  The U.N. demands that they have a soldier on each bus to make sure the civilians are safe.  Their soldiers are nowhere to be seen on the buses.  The Dutch soldiers are wearing ‘short pants,’ are very young and inexperienced, while their leaders buckle under the pressure of the aggressive Miladić. 

What is odd but most significant is that a local whispers to Aida that VRS soldiers just killed some Bosnian Muslim men right behind the U.N. compound.  The U.N. is either oblivious or ignoring the issue – and do nothing.  They continue the evacuation. Aida suspects this will happen again and tries to protect her husband and sons within the U.N. compound, eventually hiding them.  They are nevertheless discovered and bused out, as are all the Bosniak civilians in the U.N. compound, including the men.  The Dutch U.N. military leader claims she is fantasizing the killings or potential of killings.  He doesn’t investigate.  Aida never brings the subject up again in her many arguments – the odd part, as this seems to be key.  The U.N. soldier tells her not to create ‘panic’ but panic might be the best thing.  The more aware Bosniak civilians had run into the woods and not trusted the U.N. 

We see Bosnian Muslim men from the compound bused to a gymnasium, herded into it after dropping their wallets on a blanket and then shot inside from above with automatic AKs.  If this might remind some of trains dropping off Jews and leaving their suitcases outside a building, this is intentional.  Records indicate around 8,300 men of all ages were shot.

Aida eventually returns to Srebrenica after the war is over.  More Serbian civilians now live in the town, while her apartment is occupied by a young family – one of whom is one of the most aggressive VRS officers.  Later she discovers the exhumed body parts of her sons and husband.  Aida knew many people in Srebrenica when it was an integrated town before the war - including Serbs who became soldiers, some her own students. She takes her apartment back and begins teaching again – teaching young students who seem to be the only hope for the future.

V.R.S. and U.N.

The film does not mention the massacres by Bosniak Muslims of Bosnian Serb Orthodox civilians or any prior context of the destruction of the multi-national Yugoslav workers’ state by German and U.S. imperialism.  Nor does it mention British intelligence’s analysis that Miladić would not have gone into Srebrenica if not for an attack by 2,000 Bosniak Army soldiers from that direction.  The film is really a reflection of the poison of ethnic communal nationalism promoted by capital – leading to slaughters in places like India, Ethiopia, Israel and Yugoslavia. This is their ideology, not that of internationalism, which is the view of socialism. Proletarian internationalism is the only way to rise above these identity slaughters based on religion, skin color, language, tribe or nation. 

Ratko Miladić was convicted of mass murder (which the Tribunal incorrectly called ‘genocide’) by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in 2017 and now sits in prison for life.  The Dutch officials in charge were also rebuked, while in the Netherlands itself, compensation has been weighed for the men inside the compound turned over to the VRS and subsequently killed. The film got an Academy Award nomination.

The title seems to have little connection to the Verdi Opera Aida, or ‘quo vadis’ – Latin for “where are you going?" or "What are you going to do?"  Though Aida in the opera was a captive and asking "what are you going to do?" seems to be apropos, but generic.  Perhaps the title is just to give the film some aesthetic cred.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use the search box at upper left for the 14 year archive using these terms:  “The Paper / Novine,”  “Yugoslavia – Peace, War and Dissolution” (Chomsky); “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” "Siege of Jadotville."

The Kulture Kommissar

May 14, 2021

Play It Again Sam

 “Playing as if the World Matters – an Illustrated History of Activism in Sports,” by Gabriel Kuhn, 2015

Some socialists distain sports, but you cannot separate sports from the working class or human life.  Gabriel Kuhn is someone who has spent time on the issue, writing an excellent book on the sport and anti-fascist organizing of the Austrian Social Democrats in “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety - Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture."  This book starts with the revolutionary period prior to the victories of fascism in the 1920s-1940s.  After that it takes up sports organizing and activism in less political, modern versions– all with great color posters, vintage historic images, drawings and memories.  If you thought Colin Kaepernick or protests against the Washington Redskins’ name were something new, you’d be wrong.

By now nearly anyone paying attention is aware of the commercialism, hero glorification, nationalism, competitiveness and corporatization of capitalist sports. At this point the typical U.S. sports fan is someone who participates from their couch.  Readers would be surprised to know that for more than 50 years socialists in countries like Germany and Austria organized sports events based on anti-nationalism, opposition to professionalism, anti-fascism and working-class fitness.  Three workers’ ‘Olympics’ were held with thousands of athletes from many different countries participating, sponsored by the Socialist International.  Red Olympiads were held sponsored by the Communist parties and the USSR.  Sports like cycling, football (soccer in the U.S.), hiking, track and field, swimming, skiing and even chess were pursued by millions in federations and clubs outside the bourgeois orbit.

Fascism, in the service of capital, crushed all this in western Europe.  After WWII, the profile of activism changed. Kuhn paints pictures of U.S. sports figures like Jackie Robinson, and Roberto Clemente who broke the color line, supported by CP sports writer Lester Rodney.  Trotskyist C.L.R. James focus was on democratizing cricket.  Kuhn looks at the Communist role in creating the Tour de France; union reps like U.S. baseball’s Marvin Miller; protests in 1968 at the Olympics and in Paris; Muhammad Ali’s refusal to kill Vietnamese; the leading role of ‘state socialist’ countries in promoting women in sports; leftist and anti-fascist sports clubs in countries like Brazil and England; the campaign against apartheid South Africa's sport matches. 

Boycotts of reactionary Olympics were organized in 1936 and 1968.  The Olympics’ is run by a collection of bribed bureaucrats, the IOC, that has been described as a gang of thieves who exploit the public purse to line the pockets of private entities.  Which is why there have been consistent attempts to prevent the Olympics from being held in various cities. Global football’s World Cup is not far behind, as we saw in the milking of Brazil.  The recent stopping of a FIFA football ‘super league’ in Europe says something about football fans’ power.

International Workers' Olympiad

In response to the bourgeois approach to sport, Kuhn describes groups that have formed community sports clubs in various cities across the world.  Events have been organized by feminists, GLBTQ and disabled athletes.  Parallel People’s Olympics have been staged.  Football (soccer) ultras have injected politics into matches, along with a surge in activist athletes in the U.S. like Kaepernick.  Sport nurtures health, physical fitness, collaboration and physical/social intelligence.  But right now U.S. ‘professional’ sports is rife with profiteering, billionaire browbeaters, stadium blackmail, head injuries, winner-take-all competition, sex abuse, denigration of women’s sports, sweatshops, exploited cheer-leaders, racist team names, gentrification inside stadiums, nationalism in global events and endless advertising even on athletes clothes.

May Day carries other left books on sports.  This includes Dave Zirin’s books and Kuhn’s own book on the Austrian approach to sports mentioned above and his book “Soccer vs. the State.”

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box in the upper left to search our 14-year archive:  “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety - Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture"(Kuhn); “Hey, How ‘Bout that NFL?” “Reflections on the Olympics 2012,”  “The English Game,” “The Queen’s Gambit,”  “Concussion,” “Missoula – Rape and the Justice System in a College Town,” “Super Weed Bowl.”  Also by Kuhn “All Power to the Councils!”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist  / May 11, 2021

A Left Sketch Book

 “Blackshirts and Reds – Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism,” by Michael Parenti, 1997

This book is a constant seller at May Day so I thought I’d read it.  It is what I would call a ‘sketch book’ – briefly explaining various issues from a Marxist point of view.  Parenti seems close to the U.S. Communist Party and Monthly Review, a Khrushchevite or Bukharinite in his overall analysis.  The book suffers a bit from being dated but what he says is ‘mostly’ true, though he ignores certain debates within the socialist movement, especially related to Trotsky and Mao. 

Parenti gives capsule descriptions of how fascism succeeded in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s through alliances with the whole capitalist class.  He considers fascism to be capital’s final solution to class struggle.  He covers the post-WW2 period of national revolutions and social revolutions across the world that upended colonialism and imperialism for a time, with help from the USSR and Communist movements.  He focuses on the anti-communism of certain anarchists and social-democrats like sacred cow Noam Chomsky, who celebrated the counter-revolutions in eastern Europe and the USSR along with the NYT.  He also points out the creeping privatizations and capitalism in China, Vietnam and Cuba – this in 1997. 

Parenti’s best chapters are on the problems within the ‘state socialist’ countries (an oxymoron by the way, as actual socialism does not have a repressive state) during their years of existence.  They were things like disorganization, low labor standards, pilfering and poor consumer goods.  In contradiction to U.S. propaganda, he insists it was the dearth of consumer goods in comparison to the ‘West’ that caused the most dissatisfaction - not repression or lack of democracy.  He cites the issue of ‘capitalist encirclement’ as one of the great harms to the Soviet bloc, pushing it to arm itself instead of providing better housing and goods to the population.  Evidently ‘socialism in one bloc’ is not even possible.

Parenti has a great chapter on the dictatorial introduction of the ‘free market’ in the USSR and eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing untold misery and a crash in living standards across the board for the proletariat and small farmers.  All this was promoted in the U.S. press as the introduction of freedom (to make profits) and democracy (by multiple instances of repressing left dissent by force).  He quotes many proletarians who regret their support for counter-revolution, who regret losing social support systems.  In a way, he sketches the workers’ states as somewhat similar to present-day Nordic social-democracies.  

He notes that the personal priest of Poland’s Lech Walesa was a vicious anti-Semite.  He especially takes aim at Vaclav Havel, the Zappa-loving philosopher king of the Czech Republic, whose untold dictatorial methods Parenti recounts.  Fascist and authoritarian groups and leaders exploded in eastern Europe and Russia after the success of the counter-revolutions.

Havel - Literary Counter-Revolutionist

Parenti ends with a sketch of the Marxist method in contradiction to post-modernist academic leftists who ignore class and pay attention only to culture.  In the process they misrepresent Marxists like Antonio Gramsci.  He adds a chapter on the defense of the concept of class against post-modernist and identitarian concepts and also against the apolitical myth of the ‘universal U.S. middle class’ we are so acquainted with.

A good introduction to a version of Marxist thinking.  It is especially strong on its inclusion of some of the problems of the workers’ states and the methods of the imperialist counter-revolutions that destroyed them in the interest of U.S. and European capital.   However the title is misleading, as fascism is not the focus.  Nor does he define ‘rational fascism’ except to note that conservative and neo-liberal politics flow into fascist methods like water into a streambed.  They are all capitalist ideologies.

(Not to be confused with his son, Christian Parenti, author of “Tropic of Chaos.”)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Secondhand Time - The Last of the Soviets,” “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives,” “The Contradictions of Real Socialism,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “Fear,” “Is the East Still Red?” “From Solidarity to Sellout,” “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism” or words like ‘fascism’ or ‘Marxism’ or ‘class.’     

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 7, 2021

War is Economics by Other Means

 "Siege of Jadotville” directed by Richie Smyth, written by Kevin Brodbin, 2016

Jadotville is a town in the mineral rich (read uranium, copper, cobalt, etc.) area of the southern Congo called Katanga. In 1961 Belgian army officers and Moise Tshombe, with help from the U.S. CIA, executed leftist nationalist Patrice Lumumba, who had wanted to nationalize mines in the Congo. Lumumba had been voted into office as president of the Congo. Tshombe joined a reactionary military coup by Mobuto Sese Seko to protect the private ownership of the mining industry in Katanga – mostly run by Belgian (of course) French and US firms.

Irish UN troops dig in.

Tshombe next tried to sever Katanga from the Congo. What is not remembered is that the UN under Dag Hammarskjold considered the Katanga secessionist rebellion an undemocratic usurpation of power and sent 'peace keepers' to Katanga's Elizabethville to separate the two civil sides. A contingent of 150 Irish soldiers were sent to a mining area and small cluster of buildings called Jadotville, south of Elizabethville, as part of that effort.

The UN occupied Tshombe's positions in Elizabethville. In response Jadotville was attacked by the combined forces of French, Belgian and South African foreign mercenaries and Tshombe's army, probably numbering over 3,000-5,000 men. The 150 Irish had never been in a fight and were all greenhorns. They did well.

They dig an extensive trench and foxhole system for defense.  When they are finally attacked, an Irish UN sniper kills the white-suited Belgian boss. Other Irish riflemen cut down the attackers while one forces two armed jeeps to overturn and crash. Another crew uses their small mortar to destroy the Katangese cannon and mortars. They spread out their ammo so it is not destroyed by a mortar round.  They use dynamite bombs to blast scores of attackers. The arrogant French mercenary commander has to order many attacks and retreats.

At first the UN command ignores them.  Then reinforcements are blocked and the Irish begin to run out of ammunition. A Katangese jet bombs and strafes them. The wounded pile up. A UN helicopter carrying some of the Irish wounded is shot down. And then UN president Dag Hammarskjold's plane, which was coming to deal with the situation, is shot down by a Katangese jet, killing him. The Irish soldiers hold out for 5 days. They're nearly out of ammunition. Should they surrender? They have no choice and end up in a Katangese jail for a month.

The UN ignores what the Irish company went through for political reasons after they are released.  They were even made fun of for surrendering.  From what I could tell, none died, though a number were wounded.

It is all here: the usual officious UN negotiator; the nasty Tshombe; the heroic leader of the Irish contingent; the experienced but treacherous French mercenary; the useless UN military general.

This is an historical battle film with a progressive political subtext. It tells a story few know, involving some key historical figures, killed by assassination, the favorite tactic of the right. In the end it is a demonstration of the viciousness of capital and imperialism in defense of their control of minerals anywhere in the world. And their need for locals to do their dirty work.  It is sort of the continuation of the bloody colonialism of Belgian King Leopold.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: “The Dream of the Celt,” “Secret History of the American Empire,” “Economic Hit Men,” “Washington Bullets,” “Modern Slavery,” “Last Train to Zona Verde,” “Land Grabbing,” “Black Panther.”

The Cultural Marxist

May 4, 2021