"Cha, Cha, Cha, Changes!"

 Reflections in the Woods

 I sit not far from the Canadian border, among white and red pines, cedars and birch, spruce, balsam and jack-pine; eagles, turkey vultures, loons, ducks, turtles, crayfish and frogs; jack-rabbits, deer, bear and the occasional wolf.  The water is still clear, the sky blue, clouds scattered.  It is as close to paradise as anyone is likely to get.   It certainly won’t come after you die. Yet some things are haunting the woods here in northern Minnesota.  Fire, heat, water pollution and gentrification.  But I can't call these 'snakes in paradise' because that would be an insult to snakes.

A couple of years ago a large fire south of Ely almost got into town.  Our County gave out money for cabins and rural homes to install metal roofs, so they wouldn’t go up in flames.   We were told to clear trees around structures.  Now the County is actually paying for removal of balsam, spruce and other easily-burnt trees and under-story.  Instead of thick woods, this clearing will make things more like a ‘park.’  The woods themselves are dry and 'crunchy' underfoot.  Predictions by the State of Minnesota are that with global climate change, our woods will slowly turn into an oak savannah.  I don’t see that yet. But it teaches one thing, even if your not a Marxist.  Things do not remain the same, even in an ‘eternal’ place that rarely changes.  Even the rocks move sometimes.

Few up here have air-conditioning.  Yet the increasing heat and hotter sun – and high-wind events – are causing shades to be drawn, canopies installed, fans to be purchased, even room air-conditioners installed.  ’90-degree days have increased. The wind is having more ‘blow-downs’ of groups of trees than remembered.  One massive one in 1999 (a derecho) leveled thousands of trees in the nearby Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

But healthy frogs, minnows, fish, turtles and crayfish tells me the water is not toxic or too warm as yet.  Yet, yet.  Not too far downstream (the water flows north here ... into Hudson’s Bay I imagine) a foreign mining company is trying to build a toxic sulfide mine called Twin Metals, one of two planned on this Iron Range, to get trace (.5%) elements of copper and others.  Their acid-poisoned water will eventually flow into our lake, into other lakes north of us, into the Boundary Waters and into Canada.  All for the ‘race for what’s left.’ 

Then there is capitalism, rentier capitalism.  The shores of many lakes are being gentrified, as the upper-middle class – executives and businessmen - buy up lakeshore homes or build giant white-pine 3-story lake homes where they can work via internet.  So every bit of property is up for grabs and previously quiet lake sides suddenly need boundary surveys – even for the tiniest slices of lake land.  Pink boundary flags flutter in the woods and ‘pins’ are inserted into the corner grounds.

This doesn’t just scare the animals, this scares the people that have lived here for many years – descendants of Finland, central Europe and where-ever.  The rich are coming!  The Republican Party is a proponent of all this – that is no secret.  But it doesn’t help that we have many prominent Minnesota Democratic Party politicians who wobble on climate change or support tar-sand pipelines, shady mining plans, wolf killing and back the right of the rich to control land and prices.  Governor Walz, senators like Klobuchar, local Congressmen – no allies of labor, indigenous people, youth or anyone but the monied – no matter what they claim.

The ground, as they say, is shifting under our feet.  But the ‘old red mole’ is also working away.

P.S. - The Greenwood fire south of Ely is 0% contained at present.  It is growing fast and unpredictable. Fear is in the air, not just billowing smoke.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews:  “Northland,” “Klobuchar is a Hot Dish Neo-Liberal,” “Tar Sands Oil,” “A Less Modest Proposal,” “Crying Wolf,” “Lockout Over,” “Grocery Activism,” “James-Younger Gang,” “A Night at the Caucuses,” “Sulfuric Acid,” “Factory Days,” “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers Again,” "The Race For What's Left."

Red Frog

June 29, 2021

Back, Back, Back in the GDR

 “A Socialist Defector – From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee,” by Victor Grossman, 2019

Grossman, a draftee in the U.S. army, swims across the Danube to the Soviet zone in Austria to avoid 5 years in Leavenworth for lying about his membership in the U.S. Communist Party.  It is 1951.  He is transferred to East Germany by the new German Democratic Republic (GDR) with other immigrants, given a factory job and a place to live, then offered an education and job in Leipzieg, and another finally in east Berlin, where he becomes a journalist for the GDR.   He writes about his personal experiences in the early days of the GDR, through the changes during the rigid Brezhnev period, up to the dissolution of the GDR in 1990 and subsequent disastrous effects of capitalist restoration on easterners.

The book combines both his own research as a journalist and his lived experience.  Unlike the somewhat simple anti-communist stereotypes of the GDR promulgated by series like Deutschland ’83, ‘86 & ’89 – Stasi, ‘grey,’ dictators, poor – Grossman’s experience was anything but, though he covered far more time than that series.  He still lives in east Berlin.  As a socialist he wanted the GDR to succeed, in spite of the massive hostility by West Germany and the U.S., both never recognizing it or having normal trade relations. 

NAZI’s

Grossman’s work as a journalist exposed the ‘de-Nazification’ of West Germany as a farce.  Many high-level government figures, especially under the ‘Christian Democrat’ Konrad Adenaur, were ex-Nazis.  The first head of West German intelligence was a former Nazi, Richard Gehlen.  This extended down to West German officers, judges, police, professors and teachers.  Even in 2020, members of German state intelligence and the military were linked to the fascistic AfD by the NYT.  On the other hand, the GDR purged their military, judiciary, police and teaching staffs of Nazis almost completely.  They subsequently had to train a whole new generation. The majority of the leadership of the dominant East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) (combining Communists and Social Democrats) were anti-fascists and many had fought in Spain.  This contradiction over how Nazis were handled reflects the fact that capital is far closer to fascism than liberals or conservatives want to admit.  Our own U.S. government imported many fascists into the U.S. under ‘Operation Paperclip.’ 

Grossman got married, had a baby and visited everywhere in the GDR.  He lists the many progressive moves made by the GDR.  Farmers were organized in cooperatives, and eventually all private farmers were incorporated, though they still held title to their land.  After the counter-revolution, farmers in eastern Germany tried to maintain their cooperatives, which had been successful.  After votes of the workers, factories and shipyards were slowly socialized.  East Germany’s one shipyard in Rostock had been destroyed by the war, while its one big steel-plant was too small.  Subotnick volunteers joined with construction workers to rebuild and enlarge both.  

According to Grossman, factories had libraries, canteens, day care and even entertainment venues.  Women were allowed equal legal rights in divorce, abortion, property and jobs – far ahead of most capitalist countries of the time. Long pregnancy leaves were basic.  Prices of basic food and fuel were controlled.  Fares on transport were low and stayed that way.  Health care and education were basically free.  Everyone was housed, though it took years before the GDR was able to give everyone a larger apartment.  Vacations were mandated, with many East Germans having holiday bungalows or ones connected to their work-places. In effect, all the basics of human life were guaranteed.

Karl-Marx-Allee in east Berlin

ISSUES

As to the negatives, Grossman pays particular attention to culture.  The ‘West’ used blue jeans, rock music and CIA-backed abstract expressionism to undermine the GDR’s ‘socialist realism,’ – a position which was not consistent.  The GDR promoted high-quality opera, theater (Brecht lived in the GDR), film and books, along with the classics of German and European culture.  Thomas Mann would visit on a regular basis.  In addition, GDR citizens were in contact with cultural and political developments and left struggles in places like South Africa, Nicaragua, Chile, Vietnam and Cuba.  They knew more about Angela Davis than U.S. citizens, while U.S. citizens were fed a diet of Wall stories.  

The Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961, as the GDR was losing skilled workers to west Berlin due to higher pay and more commodities.  The Marshall Plan and West Germany had made west Berlin a show-piece, pouring millions into reconstruction, shopping and entertainment to lure easterners (a.k.a. Ossies in German).  The controlled Eastmark became a weak currency compared to the Westmark which was used as a weapon, much as the dollar now dominates world currencies.  West Germany maintained sanctions against the East for its whole existence.  Grossman thinks the Wall was necessary as a protective economic measure. 

As to the Stasi, most people didn’t take the Stasi too seriously – jokes about them were frequent.  His 3 personal acquaintances that were in the Stasi were decent anti-fascists who wanted the GDR to succeed – the kind of person you might find in the FBI / NSA, but fighting for capitalism.

The issue of commodities was one of the toughest.  The GDR had to maintain a small army against the massive West German one.  They used poor quality ‘lignite’ coal for power, as they could not get cheaper and cleaner alternatives. The successful housing program was extensive but expensive.  The GDR sold many of their high-quality tools, food and products as exports for desperately- needed hard currency.  Grossman mentions periodic shortages over the whole period, but does not seem too bothered by them.  While Berlin’s housing was shabby on the outside, or decent housing was not seen by tourists as it was farther out, Grossman points out that the inside of the apartments were comfortable, if perhaps with outdated appliances.

Travel was also a problem, as East Germans could not go to countries outside central and eastern Europe without a special visa.  Budapest, Hungary was a favorite destination, but many wanted to go to west Berlin outside the annual reunion days, as families were still separated.  Grossman himself traveled to the USSR a number of times – Leningrad, Moscow, Sochi and farther east.

COUNTER-REVOLUTION

After the wall was declared ‘open’ by the SED, elections were held which were won by the Christian Democrats (CD - Angela Merkel being a low-level official.)  Only the SED opposed it, as the Social Democrats blocked with the CD.  This opened the way for the liquidation of the GDR in 1990.  Housing gentrification began to occur.  Prices for transport and basics quickly rose.   Many libraries in east Germany were closed.  Nude beaches were limited or eliminated.  In spite of the excellent transport system in Berlin and Germany, getting a car became a priority.  Porn, prostitution, cheap movies and potboiler books replaced the somewhat high-brow and narrow cultural approach of the GDR.  

Mass unemployment, homelessness and crime rose.  Scams became pervasive.  Debt became the method of control, with public Eastern banks bought by the likes of Deutsche Bank.  Now suddenly eastern public enterprises were also in debt and forced into sales.  The West German Trenhand commission closed or sold 8,000 state-owned enterprises, 10,000 acres of public land, laying off millions, liquidating competition for West German companies or enriching them by selling firms for a pittance.  This disastrous policy was followed in many east and central European workers' states subject to counter-revolution, the intent being to enrich western European and U.S. corporations.  Thousands of science researchers, teachers, journalists and other white collars also lost their jobs, including Grossman, who ended up translating Rawhide for his last few years.  Members of the SED (2 million members) were interrogated, then fired.  And the fascists once again emerged, taking advantage of the destruction of the eastern German economy.  This continues to this day.  Historically any memory of the GDR was erased by the western government, even the wonderful "Palace of the People" in east Berlin.  

After the barbaric liquidation of the GDR, Grossman was happy to see the increase in foreign foods, as East Germany had been somewhat isolated.  He was also finally allowed to travel back to the U.S. after 47 years, without being jailed for desertion.

Of special note was the role of the eastern Lutheran church, whose hypocritical leaders protested constantly against the workers' state, and helped organize against it.  After the overthrow they became hard right 'good Germans' who once protested for 'peace' and now endorsed every military war by the German state or the 'West.'  

Grossman is a CP loyalist, one of whose biggest problems is not understanding workers' democracy.  His approach to elections is either a one party state or bourgeois democracy.  He doesn't understand that in workers' democracy, working-class parties would be legal.  Nor does he understand the role of workers' councils, as they are absent when a 'Party' controls all decisions.  Yet the first German revolution in 1918-1919 was based on moving power to the councils.  

Socialists of whatever stripe should read about the lived experiences of the former workers’ states, as they provide valuable information for ‘the path forward.’  He points out that competing with West Germany was difficult if you have no imperialist concerns in far-flung countries, as did West Germany, which exploited other regions of the world and still does.  This book has a wealth of detail no review can encompass.  While somewhat short-sighed and theoretically muddled, the book is a good place to start.   

The last part of the book is a very familiar left critique of U.S. politics / history, McCarthyism and the like.  It also includes a somewhat humorous comparison of the weaknesses of various U.S. 'quality of life' standards versus the higher ones in the GDR.  In response to a U.S. question about why GDR factories had so many employees, he explains that technology was not as developed and the GDR had a commitment to everyone having a job.  Another group of 'useless' factory employees he described is actually quite interesting.  I will quote fully:  

"Every medium-sized factory had one or two SED organizers, a union secretary or two, someone to work with apprentices and one for promoting women.  Others, chose by the union, helped employees find housing, organized vacation offers and perhaps staffed the union's vacation hotels.  The kitchen staff usually had a dietician in charge. The clinic, aside from treating accidents, ran checkups on occupation illnesses and arranged stays at spas.  Factories had kindergartens, libraries and bookshops with technical books but also novels, even poetry; in some, an 'artotheque' lent out reproductions to decorate office walls and breakfast rooms.  Every big plant had a House of Culture with music and dance groups, writing, art and hobby clubs from film-making to auto mechanics. All had sports programs, the bigger the plant the more it offered: Soccer, handball, track and field, even gymnastics and fencing if in demand.  And all free of charge."   

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive: “Line of Separation,” “From Solidarity to Sellout,” “Secondhand Time”(Alexievich) “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” (Cohen); “The Contradictions of Real Socialism,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “Blackshirts and Reds” (Parenti); “Yugoslavia” (Chomsky); "Soviet Woman," "How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 26, 2021

The Walls Have Ears

 “Saudi Arabia Uncovered,” documentary by James Jones, 2016

This is a British ITV/Frontline documentary using undercover footage and interviews with Saudi dissidents to expose the reactionary nature of this theocratic kingdom.  A hard ally of the U.S. and the U.K. since the 1940s, the secretive kingdom has been embraced by Democrats and Republicans, by oil executives and the arms industry and by Islamic fundamentalists around the world.

Public Beheading with Sword

Article 1 of the Saudi constitution reads:  “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a sovereign Arab Islamic state with Islam as its religion; God's Book and the Sunnah of His Prophet, God's prayers and peace be upon him, are its constitution …”  Article 5 says it is a monarchy.  Article 6 reads:  “Citizens are to pay allegiance to the King in accordance with the holy Koran and the tradition of the Prophet, in submission and obedience...”  Article 7 says it “derives its power from the Holy Koran and the Prophet’s tradition.”  Article 8 says it is based on “Islamic Shariah.”

Yeah, it’s the 14th Century!  The documentary shows instances of how a version of Islam (Sunni Wahhabist Salafism) is used to prop up the ruling elite, partly using religious police who “promote virtue, prevent vice.” They confront women who wear some make-up, destroy alcohol and attack those who play music publicly.  Jailing, public whippings and beheadings are common.  There is a public square in Ridyah called ‘Chop Chop Square’ with grates to allow blood to flow under the stones.  In 2016 a mass execution of 47 ‘terrorists’ was carried out.  The effect of all this is to terrorize the population.

Tourists are not allowed into Saudi; filming is not allowed; women are brutalized on a daily basis; protests are illegal; public music is illegal and there are slums in the kingdom.  One quarter of Saudi citizens live in poverty.  The Shiite minority mostly in the east are treated as third-class citizens, living in squalid conditions, but so are the millions of imported workers – which the documentary does not cover. Nor does it cover other labor issues, but unions of any kind are banned. Atheism is punished by death.  Many women are shown begging on street corners, as only 1 in 5 women have a job and if their husband dies or leaves, they are left destitute.  Laws requiring women to have a male escort or permission to do many things are still on the books in spite of noises about ‘liberalization.’

The documentary shows a rebellion during the Arab ‘Spring’ and a subsequent rebellion after the killing of a leading Shiite cleric.  Children are taught in the ‘schools’ that Jews, Christians and Shiites are infidels and should be put to death. The documentary focuses on 3 in-country dissidents – a blogger, a teen-aged Shiite and a women advocating women’s rights and driving.  The blogger has been jailed for 10 years for running a blog called “Liberal Saudi” and ‘insulting Islam’; the young Shiite was executed for ‘sedition and treason’ for complaining and taking pictures at a police station; the woman was detained, then prohibited from driving or running in elections.  In the process they treat any dissident as a ‘terrorist.’

Daesh Executions

REAL TERRORISM

The Saudis have spent at least $70 billion in spreading their version of Salafist thought, which is at the ideological root of groups like Al-Qaeda and Daesh (ISIS).  Everyone is already familiar with the Saudi role in 9/11 and the creation of Al-Qaeda.  Of most interest in this documentary was the exposure of a ‘charity,’ the “Saudi High Commission for Bosnia and Herzegovina.”  It was officially connected to the Saudi government, with Bin Salman, the present ruler of Saudi, as its head.  It had connections to political Islamists and spent money aiding Islamic terrorism, even in Bosnia.  The Saudi High Commission hoped Bosnia would be their ‘beachhead’ in Europe.

Yemen is barely mentioned, another atrocity carried out by the Saudis with U.S. help.  The EU finally condemned arms sales to Saudi Arabia, but the British still sell arms, as do the U.S. The Brits also ‘train’ the brutal Saudi police.  There are harrowing scenes of the jails in Saudi Arabia, which are crowded, full of drugs and run by the most thuggish inmates.  The Brits are supposed to also train the Saudis how to run a jail.  Good luck.

In a sense, Saudi is a high-tech medieval society, where the most backward principles of royalty, wealth and religion still dominate.  It is the Islamic version of oil-rich Texas.  And yet it is a close ally of imperialism, which only goes to show – capital will use any social practice to prop up its international system.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Slave States – the Practice of Kafala in the Gulf Arab Region,”Female Genital Mutiliation” “Land Grabbing,” “What is the War on Terror and How to Fight It,” “The Management of Savagery” (Blumenthal); “God is Not Great” (Hitchens); “The Death of the Nation” (Prashad).

The Cultural Marxist

June 22, 2021    

Back to Vietnam

 “The Latitude of a Mercy,” poetry by Stefan Lovasik, 2021

Lovasik was a Special Forces sniper in the American war in Vietnam.  He now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.  These 53 short poems mostly center on that war.  They might serve as therapy; as remembrance; as honoring; as nightmares.

This is not the gauzy ‘moon in June’ kind of poetry.  This is more like the ‘blood moon’ or more exactly, “blood lotus blossoming.”  Veterans try to forget but most can’t and Lovasik is one.  He empties and anesthetizes his memory by aestheticizing that war.

The collection varies from locations in Vietnam – the northwest corner of south Vietnam up by Khe Sanh, Lang Vei, LZ Brown and LZ Blue, Phnom Ke and Ca Lu; to locations in the ‘world’ – St. Paul, Narragansett, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Prague.  

Poetry is really about language communicating impressions.  He has some good phrases.

“..the smell of open wounds and damp rice.”

“…boys squeezing the triggers…”

“…our memories are exit wounds.”

“…grief-jeweled aoi dai.”

“Diamonds of expectations…”

“…black star trees bend,”

An 'aoi dai' is the sheath-like formal dress Vietnamese women wear, sometimes even on a bicycle or scooter.  One of the most straight poems is an angry recreation of D.H. Lawrence’s take on Jesus sexually ‘rising’ again.  Another is the memories of an “Old Soldier.”  The task is trying to explain to wives … or assholes who want you ‘to forget.’  He includes 4 poetic letters home. The jungle reigns, as does blood. In one poem they "light up a VC village" full of children and women.  Some of the poems are not about Vietnam but about the rest of the world.

These are not political poems – they are more of the ‘war is hell’ variety.  Many of these poems were too abstract for me – too full of language, not images. But perhaps your poetry skills are better than mine. 

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Welcome to Brooklyn Criminal Court” (Butters) or the word “Vietnam” to read many reviews of books on that war.  We carry a small collection of poetry  books, starting with the classic Howl by Allen Ginsburg.  We carry many books on the American war in Vietnam and the military.

And I got it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

June 19, 2021

More Than Police Brutality

 “The Man Who Lived Underground” by Richard Wright, 1941/2021

He’s brown-skinned, 27, only 135 pounds and 5’7” tall.  He’s not a big guy.  He’s returning from mowing the lawn and other odd jobs at a light-skinned woman’s house, heading home to his pregnant wife.  He’s polite, goes to church, soft-spoken and somewhat clueless.  He’s a man who is forced to escape underground.

He is the focus of Richard Wright’s recently discovered novel, written in 1941.  The publisher at Harper & Brothers rejected it then because of the scenes of police cruelty and brutality in which it opens and closes. These scenes are hard to read.  In the 1940s, even as today, the police were sacrosanct.  3 very large white police officers accost and then handcuff him for a rape and murder that occurred near where they pick him up.  They have to ‘solve’ the crime and he’s the innocent ‘black’ patsy.  They and the local DA get him to sign a document he can’t even read after a long session of brutal torture, sleeplessness and lies.  It is a confession. 

After a somewhat unexplainable bit of kindness by one cop, he realizes his predicament and escapes down a manhole, into the sewer, into the dark.  He could be in any city, probably New York or Chicago or … Now if this escape into the sewer might remind you of Jean ValJean in Les Miserables, or the Jewish rebels of Lvov and Warsaw in WW2, part of which is reflected in the film Kanal, or Dostoevsky’s ‘underground man,’ or the homeless sleeping in tunnels in present-day New York or Bucharest or the inhabitants of Roman catacombs or the Hunger Games or Divergent films – you would not be far off.  Even the recent film Parasite forces a working man to go ‘underground.’

In the process this man, Daniel, loses his servile religion, sees the narcotic effect of entertainment and abandons his wife and new baby.  Instead of immediately going back above-ground, he becomes an exile.  Like a mole, he chisels through the city’s underground into brick basement after basement, from church to movie theater, from mortician to butcher to mortgage company – observing as a stranger.  He becomes like the ‘borrowers’ in that children’s story, taking things from the world above, but this time as trophies and relics.  He turns dollars and diamonds into their original fetish state. He taps an electric power line and begins to make a hidden underground home for himself.  In the process, he loses his head and rises back into the world with an odd vision of universal guilt.

This is a hallucinatory story, perhaps a horror one.  It is as modern as today.

The underground man

MEMORIES of MY GRANDMOTHER

This essay accompanies the story.  Like How Bigger Was Born, a reflection on Native Son, Wright reflects on how he wrote The Man Who Lived Underground, which he calls his most unitary and whole story. He describes his grandmother’s Seventh Day Adventist religion and how it finally drove him out of her house at 15.  She had no understanding of other people’s feelings or social life outside of her rigid Christianity.  No books or music except the Bible or religious songs were allowed in Granny’s house. No radios.  She was a person living in a sort of ‘underground’ too.  So she had an impact on this story, especially on the ‘useless’ and unconnected artifacts that Daniel finds and drags back to his underground cavern.  Wright discusses how his grandmother’s religious notions collected unrelated things in her mind, with no pattern or links, as she viewed the world from the 'other-worldly' position of the Old Testament.  In this essay Wright also touches on invisibility, his childhood memories, Gertrude Stein, surrealism, jazz and blues, dream theory and ultimately, back to his character-based fiction.  On crime, he says:  "A crime may be likened to a sharp rent in the social cloth that reveals the texture of all the strands..." He concludes that the book is really 'jazz prose.'  

In discussing the absence of literature about African-American religious feelings in this essay, Wright had evidently not read Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, which was published in 1953.  But I can't really tell because this essay is undated. 

Mayday Books is located in a basement.

**  Wright’s story about his involvement and subsequent disillusionment with the Communist Party, “American Hunger,” was also rejected for publication early on and only published in 1977, many years later.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left to search the 14 year archive:  “How Bigger Was Born” (Wright); “Go Tell It On The Mountain” (Baldwin); “Red Hook Summer,” “BlacKKKlansman” and “Da 5 Bloods” (all by S Lee); “Meridian” (Walker); “The Good Lord Bird,” “One Night in Miami,” “Souls of Black Folk” (Du Bois); “Black Panther,” “Things of Dry Hours,” “Go Set a Watchman” (H Lee), “Get Out.” 

And I got it at the library!

The Kulture Kommissar

June 15, 2021

Ethiopia Again

 “Ethiopia in Theory – Revolution and Knowledge Production," 1964-2016, by Elleni Centime Zeleke, 2019 

(Part 2)

This is a social-science literature review of the Ethiopian Revolution and aftermath, which started in 1974 with the overthrow of Haile Selassie, royal power and feudal relations in the countryside.  The author does not push a point of view as to the best ideas, groups and actions that powered the revolution.  Her main concern is actually ‘where did the ideas come from’ – i.e. ‘knowledge production.’  I find this a scant rationale for a book on that revolution, which keeps it in the academic sociology ghetto, though it is evident she leans to the left.  At the end she endorses a Marxist slant on African development.  She calls for a class analysis, seeing the economic rationales behind claims to ‘democracy.’  The book is a useful, if academic, history of ideas up to 2018, about a revolution and country few know about.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia today

Elleni reviews the topics covered in the Ethiopian student journal “Challenge” starting in the 1960s put out by the ‘educated youth.’  They looked at issues like the intentional under-development of Ethiopia and how imperial forces buttressed feudal relations. They pointed out that Selassie's feudalism enabled capital penetration.  Much was made of Stalin’s definition of a nation, Maoist ‘new democracy,’ as well as advocacy of guerilla war.  After ‘new democracy’ it was theorized that there would be a “subsequent socialist revolution.”  Some advocated kebelles, i.e. local peasant committees, which were later formed by the Derg and still exist today.  Elleni says that many ideological claims were ‘empty formulas,’ as little was empirically known about how peasants went about their lives.  Agricultural production actually dropped after 1975, leading to famine and civil wars.  

The LAND QUESTION 

Elleni notices a distinct continuity of people and issues since the 1960s in Ethiopia, starting with the old demands of ‘land to the tiller’ and ‘national self-determination.’  10 regions were designated based on ethnographic factors in 1995 as reflective of the latter.   This continuity was shown in the 2005 election, where World Bank neo-liberals openly challenged the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF) ‘revolutionary democratic’ policies on these two issues.  The EPRDF later over-hauled land property relations in Addis Ababa and other cities in line with neo-liberal privatization.  The EPRDF legalized a land lease market in cities over 2,000 population, thus contradicting the country’s 1975 Constitution, which said land could not be sold or privatized.   (Even wage labor on farms had been abolished in 1975.) This resulted in small farmers and poorer urbanites losing their land and households.  In 2011 small-holder agriculture involved 80% of the Ethiopian population of 85 million. There were only 175K light-industry workers at that time. 

The EPRDF also made overtures to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two conservative capitalist theocracies.  There were indications that both Ethiopian Air and Ethiopian Telecom were on the sales block to pay government debts due to international loans. This was all in the context of a move to ‘liberalization,’ concurrent with the increased influence of an Oromo party in the EPRDF in the 2018 election.  The EPRDF was also tied to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front at this time.  The TPLF started a rebellion in 2020 against the EPRDF leadership that has now devolved into a bloody civil war in Tigray involving Ethiopian and Eritrean troops.

Elleni discusses the false dichotomy in most western-oriented ‘social sciences’ of ‘liberalization versus authoritarianism’ – where authoritarianism is defined as state-led development.  She calls it a ‘false telos.’ None of them deal with the issue of retaining or creating social goods against the influence of global capital, but only unleashing the market.   

AFRICAN THEORIES

Elleni’s last section is highly theoretical, considering various interpretations of African and non-Western development, attempting to avoid a ‘Euro-centric’ model. She defends the ‘critical theory’ of Euro-Marxists Herkeimer and Adorno against various neo-liberals.  She challenges some of the conclusions of “African philosophy” and the ethnography of cold war social science that focused on ‘the primitive mind.’  She contends with the cultural relativism of Digesh Chakrabarty, who posits that there are parallel concurrent histories, 1 and 2, the second still existing outside capital; and the Marxist Jarius Banaji, who understands that capital will use all forms of pre-capitalist economics – trade, slavery, subsistence farming, debt, tribalism, theocracy – to accumulate profits.  In other words, primitive capitalist accumulation continues up to now.  These disparate economic systems are so interrelated to the point that Banaji even claims Indian petty commodity peasants are now also proletarians. 

Ethiopian cows threshing

Enlightenment ‘reason’ is seen as part of the logic of capital, where ‘rational’ economic actors always act in their own individual interest.  Chakrabarty alleges that capital considers pre-capitalist modes as “the delusions of a madman.”  Elleni attempts to blend Chakrabarty and Banaji by critiquing Lukac’s almost impenetrable essay, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” showing how it posits ‘trans-historical labor’ – something Marx never did. Labor is actually historically specific. The impact of Lukac's essay was to model all developments of world capital on how labor and capital developed and exist in Europe, which Elleni knows is untrue.  Ethiopia under Selassie and the Derg show this.

Lastly she argues with Neil Davidson about his contention of the impossibility of overcoming capital in a condition of scarcity – as was attempted in Ethiopia and other places.  Elleni points out that ‘scarcity’ is also historically determined.  What was once acceptable as a standard of living might one day become too limited and visa versa; what was once acceptable suddenly becomes waste, over-production and ruin.

Thanks to Solomon for loaning me the book!  We also carry a shorter history of the Ethiopian revolution covering 5 years, which is not so academic.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to search the 14 year archive of reviews:  “History and Class Consciousness,” (Lukacs) “The Law of World-Wide Value” (Amin); “Amiable With Big Teeth,”(McKay) “Land Grabbing,” “Slave States,” “Female Genital Mutilation,” “Comrade Harry McAllister,” “Dirty Wars” (Scahill).   

And we sell it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 12, 2021

Politics in Action

 “The French Communist Party versus the Students,“ by Richard Johnson, 1972.  (Out of print)

This is a detailed study of the relationship between the French Communist Party (PCF) and the other political forces involved in the May-June 1968 rebellion in France.  While seemingly dated, it actually reveals quite a bit about present spontaneous rebellions and riots, as well as the present flaws of neo-Stalinism. Johnson attempts an even-handed account of the rationale behind the CP’s opposition to the student movement, as well as the logic of the student revolutionaries, especially anarchist and Luxemburgist Daniel Cohn-Bendit.  It also involves the rightist positions of the Italian CP under Togliatti, ‘workers self-management’ coming from Tito, independent existential Marxists like John Paul Sartre, Trotskyists like Alain Krivine, Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank and Pierre Lambert and Maoists under the intellectual leadership of Louis Althusser. 

Johnson starts by explaining the early links between Sartre’s existentialism, his turn to Marxism and his role as a ‘fellow traveler’ of the PCF until 1956.  He covers the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin on organization, which directly related to events in France.  He shows that Althusser’s role in the PCF was limited to theory.  Althusser actually did a 'self-criticism' of his class background and flawed ideas, much to the delight of the PCF leadership. Sometimes Johnson conflates Stalinism with Leninism in his detailed analysis of the PCF’s ‘democratic-centralist’ structure.   Johnson at times calls it ‘Leninist Stalinism,’ then “Stalinist distortions of Leninism.”   Its structure could serve as a template for the structure of many CPs.  He does understand that conditions in France ’68 were different from those in Russia. 

Johnson’s politics are not clear, though he is sympathetic to the left.  He opposes the bureaucratic and reformist logic of the PCF, showing how the Party’s pre-1968 politics and structure had already set the stage for 1968.  The PCF advocated a popular front with the Radical Liberal and Socialist parties, adopted the ‘peaceful road to socialism,’ heartily endorsed Soviet tanks in Hungary, banned factions in 1965 and disappeared from opposition to the colonial French occupation of Algeria.  The tricolor French flag and “La Marseillaise” were features of their rallies during May-June.  The party itself was a formidable machine run by dogmatic workerism, ideological binaries and dichotomies, firmly entrenched in the electoral road to socialism, with its greatest allegiance to ‘socialism in one country’ – that country being the USSR, not France. 

THE ‘INTELLECTUALS’

Thus a massive, spontaneous student-initiated rebellion against the police that grew exponentially put them back on their heels in opposition to the ‘petit-bourgeois’ students. The rebellion spread to young workers in the factories, even those under CP / CGT control, resulting in splits under the PCF leadership of Marchais.  Ultimately it led to the French general strike of 10 million workers, the students providing the ‘spark’ that started a ‘prairie fire,’ to use a Maoist phrase. 

Johnson’s focus is on the contradictory nature of part of Marxist practice itself, which combines theory, propaganda and agitation, joining high-end Ph.D and public intellectuals with factory proletarians with high-school educations in an organization.  Johnson at various times calls the former ‘bourgeois,’ then ‘petit-bourgeois,’ then ‘middle-class’ – conflating all students with this strata, as the PCF also did. The PCF preferred their Party ‘theorist’ intellectuals not theorize or analyze new conditions, thus blocking a part of Marxism. Instead they relied on a dogmatic and rote understanding of social reality.  This was a form of workerism by the apparatchiks, which Johnson goes into at length.

As part of this Johnson does a useful sociological analysis of college students in France.  In 1968 the majority of college students – but not all – were from professional, managerial or some kind of business roots.  Yet only 60% passed the exams and graduated.  This might bear out part of the PCF’s distain for students, except for one other thing.  As one of their isolated and more creative theorists Garaudy pointed out, French capitalism in 1968 was moving to a heavier reliance on white-collar workers and higher technical skills, where many students would end up.  So a hostility to students reflected a misunderstanding of the trajectory of capital.  The development of monopoly and technical capital also negatively impacted the PCF’s attempt to continue their traditional attempt at winning small business men and small farmers.  Their blanket hostility to students meant that they were cutting their ties to white collar allies of the future.

SPONTANEITY

The other thing the PCF objected to was spontaneity.  If they did not control or originate a situation, they wanted to have nothing to do with it.  This reflected the heavy bureaucratic nature of the Party, which at this point preferred planned rallies where their leadership spoke to its seated supporters - instead of building barricades against the flics, occupying plants and schools, holding bosses hostage or wild-cat strikes –all which happened during May-June.  Johnson claims the Bolsheviks also functioned in this manner.  He seems to forget that the women’s demonstrations for food in February 1917 were unplanned by the Bolsheviks, who didn’t even participate.  Yet they took full advantage of the situation, as the women’s day demonstrations precipitated the Russian revolution.

As part of this Johnson interviews students in the riots, who had a large number of rationales to come out of their 'individualism' and join a collective struggle.

Cohn-Bendit on the other hand distained all organization and advocated exemplary actions by a militant minority that would inspire others.  Sartre somewhat agreed, saying that these experiences would create leftists, as they did in volume, but he also advocated ‘going to the workers.’ Some Trotskyists endorsed the student movement’s development of hundreds of ‘committees of action’ and the parallel development of factory committees, which they saw as the beginnings of dual power and ‘soviets.’ They also participated in the street fights. Other Trotskyists advocated ‘going to the workers’ like Sartre.  The Maoist organizations focused on education the most, learning the ‘classics’ of “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought” and Althusser.  They ignored the student movement as did the PCF, with some stupidly advocating “going to the French peasants” and even adopting rural guerilla struggle.  Farmers gave De Gaulle a huge majority in the June elections.

10 Million Workers on Strike

THE GENERAL INTELLECT

Johnson’s focus on the question of ‘intellectuals’ is somewhat dated.  In the U.S. the majority of young people now go to certificate programs, 2 or 4 year colleges or trade schools.  The internet and auto-didacticism allow anyone to educate themselves readily on a variety of subjects.  An isolated strata of ‘intellectuals’ is hard to locate anymore. Marx’s concept of the ‘general intellect’ is relevant here, as the huge barrier between paid academic Ph.D ‘intellectuals’ and the rest is lessening by spades.  Specialist Ph.D’s are no longer the unchallenged authorities on everything, especially as most are now very close to the power structure.  This was true in France even in 1968. Johnson looks at the rigid school system in France, showing how it too replicated the bureaucratic structure of both French society and the PCF.  This is one of the reasons why the students started the rebellion, which originated with a rumored incident of deadly police brutality on the Left Bank in Paris.   Police brutality again sparks confrontation.

The PCF had to oppose the students’ ‘adventurism’ in order to keep their organizational position from this threat on their left.  They attempted to guide the rebellion into advancing working-class wages and conditions, but not as a more general attack on French capital, social conditions or widening its base. They kept to economist trade-union demands, and many of these were won, vastly improving the lives the working class. They then advocated an electoral popular front, which lost heavily in the election.  Their ‘revolutionary’ credentials (once again) were shattered because of this behavior.  Today the PCF has a small fraction of representation in the French National Assembly and Parliament, garnering around 3% of the vote.  It is strong in some proletarian municipalities and is an accepted part of the French political landscape.  In a way it has become a more left version of the Socialist International it split from.  The events of May-June 1968 confirmed this.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Thieves of the Wood,” “The Coming Insurrection,” “The Left and Islamic Literalism,” “The Committed,” “Thomas Piketty,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “The Age of Uprising,” “The Merry Month of May,” “Society of the Spectacle,” “Something in the Air,” “The Conspiracy,” “Finks,” “The Ghost of Stalin.”

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent bargain cutout / used book section!

Parts of the book are available as a free .PDF online, though stopping at page 155 out of 188.

Red Frog / June 8, 2021

Lobby This!

 “Miss Sloane,” movie directed by John Madden, 2016

This film is one of those cheesy Washington D.C. exposés featuring the red lips and reddish hair of Jessica Chastain as Sloane.  She’s a hard-charging, unsleeping lobbyist for a right-wing firm on Avenue K, Cole Kravitz.  She is trying to pitch an Indonesian palm oil bill to Congress by sending a key Congressional voter on a junket to that fair country.  As she claims, she is always one step ahead of her opponents.  And she is!

What the film exposes – and what we know already – is that Congress people don’t vote their ‘conscience.’  Of course, whether they have a conscience is another matter. They vote the political expedient, especially if it comes to continuing their tenure and not offending those with deep pockets.  The ‘pockets’ in this case belong to the thinly-disguised NRA, which wants to get women on board with guns.  Sloane suddenly drops her role in the deforestation palm oil play at Cole Kravitz and switches to a ‘boutique’ (read small, liberal and powerless) firm fighting for a gun regulation bill.  This puts her against her former bosses at Cole Kravitz, who are backing the lucrative NRA contract to kill the gun control bill.

The delight of this film is Sloane’s quick insults and plain descriptions of reality in D.C.  My favorite come-back was “Don’t be so cynical…” which Sloane interprets as a defense of naiveté.  You almost can’t be too cynical when it comes to D.C.  In one TV interview she calls the Constitution the equivalent of consulting a horoscope.  Sloane herself lives on uppers, hires a male prostitute for sex, manipulates everyone, lies, consorts with tech hackers and will stop at nothing to ‘win’ – which is why she took on the difficult gun control cause.  The main arsenal in her weapon is the tears of women who were victims themselves or lost family or friends to rampant gun violence.  Suicide (of mostly men) is the leading result of gun deaths, but next are the murders of women by their husbands, boyfriends or partners - far more than mass shootings or crime deaths.  

2^nd Amendement

What the film does not get straight is the actual meaning of the 2^nd Amendment, and how it has been changed by the Supreme Court and the NRA.  What the Supreme Court did to the 2^nd Amendment ranks right up there with Citizen’s United or overruling the Voting Rights Act.  Essentially only the last part of a 3 part Amendment has become law.  No mention of a ‘well-regulated militia’ anymore, no mention of ‘the security of a free state’ anymore.  No mention of the background of slave patrols or fighting native Americans.  No mention of it substituting for a standing army.  As she might have put it, the ‘founders’ didn’t mean what the 2008 Supreme Court decision “D.C. v. Heller” meant. Sloane misses all this in a TV debate with one of the sleeze-meisters at Cole Kravitz, instead relying on tears and a personal story of violence to win women over to the gun control fight. 

Italian femicide poster

But Sloane has a sneaky plan.  At one point an unpredictable act of violence puts the gun control campaign on the defensive and Sloane misses the chance to float a very reasonable conspiracy theory about collusion between savior and shooter – something a scheming lobbyist wouldn’t hesitate to do.  She herself becomes the colorful target of a Congressional investigation and it is here that she turns the tables, though she still pays.  Falling on her own sword is essential to winning.  It is barely mentioned, but after her skillful plotting, the gun control bill passes – another bit of high fiction.

A Hollywood probe of D.C. which of course does not go deep enough, exposing a senator and a powerful ‘outside interest.’  But as Sloane says, “it’s the system,” a bourgeois system of lobbyists, money and false ‘representatives,’ which Hollywood is an essential part of.  Yet it is becoming harder and harder to hide its reality with bromides about ‘democracy,’ the 'balance of powers,' “the two-party system” and the Constitution.  Actually the faction fight between two wings of the ruling class is reflected in this film.  7th grade civics no longer suffices.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment” (Hartmann) “Loaded” (Dunbar-Ortiz),"Cult of the Constitution," "Trapped and Detective Series in General" or for other movie/film reviews the word ‘film’ or ‘movie.’

The Cultural Marxist

June 5, 2021