Aaargh Me Hearties!

 “Life Under the Jolly Roger – Reflections on Golden Age Piracy” by Gabriel Kuhn, 2020

This is a political and anthropological look at piracy, buccaneering and privateers in the late 1600s and early 1700s in the Caribbean, Atlantic and Indian oceans.  It’s not some rollicking tale of treasure chests, parrots and peg-legs, though real pirates always liked to frolic.  Anarchists and many others have thrilled at the exploits of these pirates, but Kuhn carefully evaluates what their lives were actually like.  The anarchist black flag is possibly based on the black skull and crossbones design of the Jolly Roger and that link continues to this day.  Some direct-action environmental groups like Sea Shepard continue to use it, so Kuhn also discusses the pirate legacy for the present.

Kuhn carefully delineates the various European characters that inhabited the Caribbean, Madagascar and central America during this period; their temporary bases in Tortuga, Nassau and Madagascar; and their actual actions and ideas. 

Definitions:  Privateers were mercenaries hired by various countries to raid enemy ships. Buccaneers and log-cutters were land-based ‘primitives’ who had left the service of any nation, living on islands and coasts.  Pirates were privateers or buccaneers who decided to go it alone in sea robbery.  Pirates raided wealthy merchant ships from Spain, Britain, France and any other country, not really preying on small fry or ordinary people.  This garnered them “Robin Hood” sympathy from many ordinary island-dwellers and coastal dwellers in the U.S.  Oddly, it was the end of the wars fought between European nations that turned some government privateers into independent pirates.

THE PIRATE PLUSES

They were a motley crew of former indentured servants, ex-sailors, criminals, bankrupts, adventurers and the flotsam of various European countries who decided to form a Brotherhood opposed to all nations.  Their ‘salty’ swearing and youth were rampant.  An early pirate iteration was called “The Brethren of the Coast.”  The Jolly Roger itself indicated their independence, rejecting kings and countries and many times rejecting nationalism.  The crews decided things democratically on the ships, as captains and other ‘leaders’ of the boats were decided by vote.  Booty was divided almost equally.  Targets were voted on.  Captains could be removed and crews split up, also by vote.  They dispensed a more equal justice, unlike the European or U.S. courts.  Pirates stood together as required, as this was part of the pirate ‘code’ – articles of agreement which were actually written down on each ship.  Because of the clothing codes forbidding nice fabrics to commoners, pirates dressed as colorfully as they could, in the best clothing they could steal.

In some ways Kuhn compares these small groups to ‘primitive communism,’ as wealth was not accrued or hoarded.  Pirates blew their doubloons in a few days after coming onshore to drink, visit prostitutes, gamble, dance and listen to music, fight and the like. Tortuga and Nassau, the Mosquito Coast, Madagascar and even the U.S. east coast were havens or partial havens for them.  Even captains did not get rich, so those tales of 'treasure chests' are bogus. Except for necessity, no pirate wanted to be told what to do, given their experience with cruel merchant ship captains.  Kuhn praises this ‘anti-authoritarian’ attitude as free individuals.  They abhorred work, except when necessary, and attempted to enjoy their short lives to the maximum.  They lived in conditions far better than the Royal Navy or any crushing job on a commercial merchant ship or whaler of the day.

Sea Shepard on the Watch

Ever the intellectual, Kuhn references Foucault, Guevara and Mao, Guattari and Deleuze, Hobsbawn and Nietzsche in his analysis of pirate ways, including warfare.  Pirates practiced a form of ‘guerilla’ warfare, but on water.  Know the water and land, strike quickly, strike terror, use surprise and light-arms, fight ferociously, then disappear. The difference between this and socialist guerilla war is they never developed a real ‘base’ among the islanders or coastal inhabitants or anyone else, so their resistance was relatively short-lived.  Nor did their failure to 'breed' help their cause, as they avoided women except for sex. 

NEGATIVES

The negatives?  Kuhn punctures the myth that they had equal indigenous or African pirates on board the ships.  This issue is not totally clear, but many were probably servants or slaves, though their lives would have been better on a pirate ship than in a sugar-cane plantation or being killed by Spaniards.  A good number of pirates actually engaged in the slave trade, which was one reason nations were irritated with them - as competitors.  This was one of the rationales for bases in west Africa and Madagascar.  In Madagascar the well-armed pirates were eventually driven out of their colony by the inhabitants. 

Occasionally Mosquito Indians from the Nicaraguan coast were on ships as fisherman, fighters and guides, but there is little indication they were there as permanent pirates.  Nor did the pirates have a view of liberating everyone oppressed by colonialism or uniting with island-based Maroons (ex-slaves) – a myth done up quite nicely in the excellent pirate series “Black Sails.” They were incapable of that kind of vision or organization.  Nor is there record of many women pirates – only two – and they had to pretend to be almost like men.  This was a nearly all-male brotherhood.

The pirates never produced anything, so hints that they are ‘proletarian’ are false.  They lived off the backs of colonial enterprises, taking a piece for themselves.  Lumpen-proletarian might be closer to it.  If this all reminds you of present day ‘gangs’ – motorcycle or otherwise, that would not be amiss.   

THE END

The ‘golden age of piracy’ began in 1690s and ended in the 1720s when the most successful captain, Bartholomew Roberts, was hung along with his large crew.  It is estimated that at its height golden age pirates involved at least 4,000 men.  The nations which had at one time tolerated pirate activities because it hurt their competitors and brought trade items, along with gold and silver, into their communities, turned against it as European (and U.S.) merchant capitalism grew and expanded.  Sea roving rogues like this could no longer be tolerated in a more orderly commercial structure, so national navies flooded seas and oceans to kill, turn or capture the freebooting pirates.

According to Kuhn, their legacy is seen in such things as ‘pirating’ movies, even if stealing “Pirates of the Caribbean” would not be appreciated by the Disney© Corporation.  Pirates occupied temporary spaces, and these are replicated in various short-lived ‘autonomous’ zones, such as George Floyd Square in Minneapolis or other temporary counter-culture places.  In 2009 the “Pirate Party” gained votes and seats in the European Parliament.  Rum runners and ‘bootleggers’ owe their moniker to this old crew. To this day, Sea Shepard, the ocean-going environmental group fighting illegal fishing and whaling, flies their version of the Jolly Roger on their ships.  Then there is always culture - Keith Richards, who styles himself a rock-and-roll pirate or his silly shadow, Johnny Depp. The pirates seem to be living on…    

Kuhn has read every source there is on pirates, though much detail is missing in the histories.   This is an excellent introduction and compendium from a left point of view on these lefty and anarchist fore and aft-runners. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive:  “Black Sails,” “Vultures’ Picnic,” “History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.”  Or other books by Kuhn:  "Playing as If the World Matters" and "Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety." Or the words slavery, gold or colonialism. 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 30, 2021

Apocalypse Now

 “The Tragedy of the Worker – Towards the Proletarocene” by the Salvage Collective, 2021

The key point of this book is to explain how the proletariat – even if it takes power across the globe – will inherit a world dissimilar to what Marx, Lenin, Trotsky or even Mao had to deal with.  A world of ‘abundance’ for all is going to be more difficult because of the wreck capital has made of the environment in the ensuing period.  This decay has not been strictly limited to capitalism of course, though the USSR understood for awhile that nature had to be preserved. That is the tragedy for the workers of the world.  Sort of like when capitalist bosses sell their company to its workers because the company’s market niche is almost dead.  Or when Democrats elect a dark-skinned mayor in a failing, decrepit city, such as happened in Newark, Detroit and elsewhere. 

While deep green ecologists think industrialization dating back to the 1700s is the problem, and hark back to a reactionary world of small farmers or hunters and gatherers, Marxists see that the real problem is ‘the capitolcene’ – whose ‘great acceleration’ took place just after WWII – 1946.  This was the beginning of the car culture, industrial agriculture and other practices, where the need for gasoline became imperative.  This is also the dating of the beginning of the ‘Anthropocene’ by many geologists.  The Salvage Collective (SC) point out that global warming began rocketing up even further after 1991, when neo-liberal imperialism became dominant. These ‘turns’ are not so long ago.

RESPONSES

With somewhat elegant turns of phrase, the SC suggests the proletariat is going to need ‘disaster communism,’ where semi-Promethean methods will be necessary.   They even discuss geo-engineering, but are not specific.  They point out that nature worship and Eco-Theology, absent concern for humans, has emerged in some precincts of disaster fascism and environmentalism, the latter from Deep Greens.  The parallel block between new age ‘naturism’ and Republican libertarianism is also seen in their joint opposition to masks and vaccines.

Green capitalism, as pushed by the Democratic Party, is only extending the disaster, according to the SC.  ‘Adaptation’ is now the mantra of continued profiteering.  The Kyoto and Paris accords, along with the IPCC, made conservative and inaccurate global plans and estimates of global warming.  Market-based carbon trading has been a bust.  The inconsistent, dithering and ‘all of the above’ mentality of the Dems complemented this failure, which was intent on maintaining capitalist normality.  The complete ‘do nothing’ approach of many Republicans and evangelicals is now consciously part of hurrying the world toward the Christian apocalypse and disaster capitalism.  As part of this, a number of governments are salivating over a trade path through the melting Arctic.  Both these parties are, of course, tied to various corporations who profit from unlimited production and extraction, no matter the cost.  The SC calls them all a death cult. Even Extinction Rebellion accepts capital, thinking moral pleas and civil disobedience will force corporations and their politicians to change.

No.

According to the SC, there are also isolated Marxists who still think ‘luxury communism’ and “3 snowmobiles in every pot” (more stuff!)  are reasonable goals.  The latter is an example of ‘productionist’ Marxism, which is unable to see beyond labor as the source of value, opposing Marx’s view.  There are some that think talking about ‘catastrophe’ is a mistake – even though the obvious emergency is bringing many people around to eco-socialism.  The SC’s literature review and advocacy of ‘salvage communism’ or ‘vegan communism’ or ‘life-boat communism’ ends up in a new stage according to them – the Proletarocene.  But it is a very dark scenario:  Given the overwhelming numbers of proletarians on the earth now, they put it this way:  “Capitalism has, 150 years after Marx predicted, finally produced enough diggers to complete the grave, but in doing so it ensured that all that was left to inherit was the graveyard.”

Let’s act before it is a complete graveyard.  Not so much a book with new facts, it promotes one somewhat new outlook, which anyone paying attention to modernity is already dimly aware of.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Luxury Communism,” “Catastrophism,” "Ecological Revolution," "The Monkey Wrench Gang," "Planet of the Humans," "The Robbery of Nature," "A Redder Shade of Green," "Stop Tar Sands Oil," "This Changes Everything," "Green is the New Red." 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 26, 2021

Patriotic Orgy Again

 The American Team and U.S. Olympic Coverage

Watched the opening ceremony. (Peacock/NBC)

When the U.S. team came out they were chanting “USA, USA, USA” like a Trump rally.  15% of the players are not inoculated from CoVid.  Once in the stadium, some took off their masks for selfies and photos.  They were wearing more ugly Ralph Lauren clothing creations.  The most nationalist team of all.  May they lose.

NBC’s lame narrators broke into the parade of nations several times to have useless chats with Megan Rapinoe and other U.S. athletes.  We were treated to photos of the team on the bus, chanting USA again, while other nations entered the stadium.  Then there are the ads ... as other nations walked in.  NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie castigated China and several other U.S. government enemies in their introductions, but not one unkind word about the many dictatorships favored by the U.S.  Viewers will be greeted by coverage of events where U.S. athletes are competing or are expected to place well, but no one else.  In spite of all the hokum about ‘living in peace’ and internationalism, at bottom this is another orgy of nationalism, waste and advertising.  From what I could tell Lennon’s song “Imagine” was censored related to the lines about “no religion, no countries” and “no possessions.”  It’s a commie song, folks.

The Japanese contributions – including a great piano solo by Hiromi, a funny tech bit of turning on all the lights in Tokyo, a drone ‘world’ hovering above the stadium, a performance of pictograms – were at least uplifting.  This in spite of all the public monies wasted on venues and other niceties of the Olympics.  Make Greece the permanent home of the Olympics and remove the advertising, profiteering and product placement, professionalism, hero worship and national flags.  We need a proletarian Olympics once again.

After watching some events (NBC shows mostly swimming, gymnastics, track and maybe basketball...):  When did it become practice for winners to wrap themselves in their national flag?  It is also now the practice that big winners get corporate advertising contracts, which seems now to be the point of winning.

Here is more detail on nationalist and racist coverage by Brit and U.S. media:  https://nomadicthoughts.blogs.sapo.pt/sinophobia-russophobia-and-western-124071?fbclid=IwAR3hmPJPnMA9mSeoZe5-928ENGkkT-h4mmkUBpYyKh1CriDbAN0MeQzjfDQ

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Reflections on the 2012 Olympics,” “Playing as if the World Mattered,” “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety,” “Hey, how ‘bout that NFL?” “Rich People Things,” “Missoula,” “The English Game,” “The Football Factory,” “Concussion,” “One Night in Miami.”  

Red Frog

July 23, 2021

What Did You Expect?

 U.S. Cities With the Lowest Life Expectancy – May 2021

While thinking about the U.S., the bourgeois media describes politics in ‘red state/blue state’ terms, like some simple Dr. Seuss story.  Others have seen beyond this to see it is ‘rural/urban’ terms, with suburbs splitting either way.  Usually the closer-in suburb is more ‘progressive,’ the exurb less.  Another way to see what is happening is regionally – the South and prairie or mountain areas are many times the most right-wing, dominated by hard-right Republicans who are either business owners, ranchers and farmers or evangelicals.  All of these actually combine.  None of this looks at class, but underneath there are class ramifications.  Actual proletarian areas lean left.

A recent You Tube video asked the question “What U.S. cities have the lowest life expectancy?”  The U.S. average life expectancy dropped 1.5 years in 2020.  Prior to Covid, life expectancy was dropping in the U.S. due to ‘deaths of despair’ – suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol deaths. In the world, average female life expectancy is now 75+ years, while average male life expectancy is almost 71.  In the world the U.S. ranks 46^th.  That’s right.  According to the recent drop, the U.S. average is now 78.5 years.  Many of the countries above the U.S. are in the 80s, with Hong Kong at 85.29, the top. Hong Kong is not a real ‘country,’ but number two on the list is Japan, a real country.

DYING EARLY

So what U.S. cities are the worst, and does this say something about regional and rural issues?  This is a somewhat shallow list related to ‘reasons’, as the reasons listed are mostly ‘blame the victim’ types.  But they are still indicators of a certain kind.  Factors like working conditions, unemployment, lack of unions, education and environmental racism are not included as reasons, but they are operative.  Poverty is also mentioned less than it should be.  Notice the prominence of ‘lack of health care.’  The privatized and optional U.S. health care system is indirectly killing millions every year.

#10.  Rocky Mount, North Carolina – 74.6 due to obesity, lack of health care and smoking.

#9.  Alexandria, Louisiana – 74.6 due to obesity, smoking, little exercise and lack of health care.

#8.  Florence, South Carolina – 74.1 due to obesity, smoking and lack of exercise.

#7.  Springfield, Ohio – 73.8 due to obesity, smoking, lack of health care.

#6.  Huntington/Ashland- Kentucky/Ohio – 73.6 due to obesity, smoking, less exercise and lack of health care. 

#5.  Pine Bluff, Arkansas – 73.6 due to crime, obesity, smoking, poverty, less exercise.

#4.  Charleston, West Virginia – 73.3 due to smoking, poverty, obesity, lack of exercise and lack of health care.

#3.  Anniston, Alabama – 73.00 due to crime, poverty, obesity (40%), smoking and lack of health insurance.  This is one obvious example of environmental racism, as Anniston sits on a toxic waste area.

#2.  Gadsen, Alabama – 73.00 due to crime, obesity, smoking, lack of exercise and lack of health insurance.

#1.  Beckley, West Virginia – 72.9 due to obesity (40%), smoking, lack of exercise and lack of health insurance. 

(Source – World According to Briggs - 5/21)

So if you are following the numbers, if 78.5 is now the national average, in Beckley residents will die on average 5.6 years earlier than the national average. That is a large gap.  National averages are not specified by class, but working-class people are dying at much younger ages than the average – something that is behind all these figures.  At one point a number of years ago, only half of African-Americans were reaching retirement (62-65), which tells you something. The gap for men in 2016 was 15 years between the poorest male workers and the wealthy.  It has probably grown by now.

Mississippi State Capitol flag changed 1/21

POVERTY

Regarding ‘official’ poverty levels, here are the 10 poorest states presently, based on same You Tube site.  You’ll notice the connection with life expectancy.  Nationally, Maryland is the wealthiest state, with New Hampshire having the smallest number of poor at 7.19%. 

10.  Georgia – 14.11%

9.   Tennessee – 14.36%

8.   Oklahoma - 15%

7.   Alabama – 16.13% (Anniston, AL, from top list, has an unemployment rate 75% higher than the national average.)

6.   Arkansas – 16.36%

5.   Kentucky – 16.67%

4.   West Virginia – 17.54%

3.   New Mexico – 18.63%

2.   Louisiana – 18.83%

1.   Mississippi – 19.75%

The poverty of Appalachia is still existing - even though one of the 'targets' of the 'War on Poverty' in the 1960s was Appalachia.  Of the 10 lowest-income counties in the U.S, 3 are in Georgia, 2 in South Dakota (probably indigenous reservations) and 1 each in Florida, Kentucky, Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania based on 2019 figures.  Again, the South and rural areas figure prominently.   

If you look at the first locations, they are nearly ALL in the South or close to the South.  Springfield, Ohio is the only outlier.  They are also smaller, rural cities. The second list almost matches them.  There is no ethnic coding, but some of these cities are mostly African-American. So unless you aren’t paying attention to actual metrics, you will notice that the South – mostly dominated by reactionary Republicans backed by some large capitalist corporations – have the worst statistics.  But we can't forget Jim Machin, Democrat of West Virginia or the Democratic governors of Kentucky, New Mexico and Louisiana. It is an inheritance of slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacy and upper-class control.  God seems to have abandoned some parts of these areas.  It is really rabid capitalism doing it’s thing.

Red Frog

July 23, 2021

Doppelgang

Kill the Assassins!

If you follow streaming content or movies, after the endless formulaic detective shows (small town, damaged cop, dead or missing women or girls, etc.) come assassins in numbers.

John Wick Again & Again

Let me count, starting with the granddaddy of them all, Jason Bourne.  Then Killing Eve, The American, Hannah, Pulp Fiction, John Wick, In Bruges, The Mechanic, No Country For Old Men, Nikita, The Accountant, Kill Bill, Jack Reacher, Road to Perdition, Ghost Dog, Gross Pointe Blank, Columbiana, Prizzi’s Honor, Arya in GoT, Fargo’s Malvo, now Gunpowder Milkshake or Black Widow … one website has 152 movies about assassins and hitmen.  I only name the ones I’m familiar with here.  I’m sure there are far more than 152.

There are more movies and series about assassins than blue or white collar workers, farmworkers, the precariat, or anyone in the working-class. Some reject the job.  Jason Bourne threw heavy antagonism towards the CIA and their role in making him an efficient robot killer, but he’s a bit of an outlier.  Black Widow borrowed concepts from Bourne, Hannah and Killing Eve - only now sexy women can be killers too!  The middle-class feminists love this 'advancement.'

What does this say about capitalist culture?  In a recent book that compared East and West Germany (A Socialist Defector) the minute the Second World War was over, cowboy films and crime movies started playing in West Germany and West Berlin.  It was flooded by cheesy Hollywood productions.  In the East they rebuilt the opera and theater scenes, listened to classical music or world music and watched films about WWII.  There was a huge qualitative difference in culture, even if the East German one was also somewhat limited.   Maybe the fact that Nazis still saturated West Germany didn’t help.  Or maybe it was the Marshall Plan, which “Americanized” Europe.

In assassin and hitman films, the killers lead glamourous lives, are paid huge sums, drive nice cars, visit every city on the planet, bathe in champagne, have regular sex, mostly with beautiful women (and for the women, handsome men or other beautiful women) and always have the best guns, tech gear and hideouts.  They are lumpen petit-bourgeois because crime pays really well!  And they are ‘cool.'   Revenge is their credo.  Assassination seems to be the only thing they are good at. Really?  There are always regrets, but even the retired or retiring ones can’t help but pull off one last job.  This is like nearly all the bank-robber movies too.  Many times stoic, super-human, quick as cats, loners but sexy, revenge-minded, bullet-proof, never miss, we end up cheering them on.  Weird, huh?

Now what normal person would admire a hitman or woman?  No one. But in Hollywood and Netflix?  Heroes.          

In the films they are hired by national secret agencies, crime bosses, shadowy international bodies, political sects, corporations – a whole web of invisible and visible crime syndicates, mostly motivated by profit.  These crime organizations are doppelgangers for above-ground capitalism and sometimes they use the same methods.  They reflect the real assassins and hit-men that run amuck in the world, killing journalists, environmental activists, labor leaders, political enemies, peasant activists, socialists – anyone who stands in power’s way.  The recent killing of the president of Haiti was probably carried out by a far-right grouping, using thugs from the repressive right-wing government of Columbia.  Bolivia just had a failed coup and failed assassination plan coming from the Bolivian religious right.  Assassination is one of the main weapons in the arsenal of repressive governments and the Right.  This is because they have no raison d'etre except force. And yet on celluloid or pixels they are cool heroes.     

So I’m waiting for a movie that casts a really cool working-class assassin who guns down rich men, fascists, corporate leaders, military thugs and the like, working for peanuts with old Soviet or Chinese weapons.  But it will be a long wait, as that movie won’t get made.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews:  “The Story of My Assassins,” “The Plot to Kill King,” “All the King’s Men,” “Hannah,” “Redbreast,” “Game of Thrones,” “Fargo,” “The Devil’s Chessboard.”

The Kulture Kommissar

July 22, 2021

The Contradictions of Doing That Thing

 “Hard Like Water,” by Yan Lianke, 2001

This is a satiric novel of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in a backwater town in China, led by a somewhat intense ex-soldier who has returned to ‘make revolution.’   Aijun is a married man with delusions of grandeur, who meets and falls in love with a young married woman, Hongmei.  Their sexual attraction to each other is especially spurred by the hearing of certain revolutionary operas, which is one of the continuing jokes.  Sex and 'the revolution' are intertwined for them.  Aijun is intent on bringing the GPCR to his town, Chenggang, and having a career as a great revolutionary leader.  He had been promised a cadre job in the town by his wife’s father, the Party branch secretary, a former 8^th Route Army PLA soldier.  When that falls through, he becomes intent on replacing the old man, becoming Party head and putting his young allies in positions of power.  In a way, it begins as an obvious battle of the young versus the old.

Aijun thinks in clichés derived from the writings of Mao Zedong, imagining that what he is doing is like the Long March; that the “east wind must prevail over the west,” that “revolution is not a dinner party.”  His first plan is to tear down an old arch entrance to the town, put there by its’ feudal founders.  He is stymied, as the fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers come out and stop the youth from wrecking the ancient arch.  His next plan is to expose his father-in-law, the local Party branch secretary, by finding trivial incidents or comments that incriminate him over his insufficient love for Mao and the Party. 

Aijun takes advantage of the suicide of his own wife in this way, as she damaged a bust of Mao in his house, tore down a Mao poster and soiled one of his Collected Works before hanging herself.  This becomes ‘a counter-revolutionary suicide’ - which incidentally also makes her father look bad.  Don’t laugh.  This and the 17 ‘denunciations’ Aijun has weaseled out of his young followers enables him to ‘overthrow’ her father, the old man.  One of the denunciations is he used a page from Mao’s sacred Quotations to roll a cigarette and gave another to his grandson to use in the toilet. 

After this Aijun becomes head of the local GPCR revolutionary committee; his beautiful, slim, alabaster helper Hongmei becomes #2.  Aijun’s job consists of putting up posters of Mao’s sayings all over town and in every house and tree, which is creepy in itself.  He mandates that all villagers memorize many Quotations, including school children who need not learn anything else.  This becomes a typical idealist exercise, substituting Mao’s sayings for Confucian or Biblical quotes and thus expecting reality to change.  Aijun is also in charge of the farm production brigades, which he has no clue about.  This food and production issue is the most concerning for the poor peasants of rural Chenggang.  Not for Aijun however.  He believes that hunger strengthens ‘the revolution.’

Burning some joss sticks to celebrate ancestors becomes a GPCR crime which Aijun uses to intimidate and then win-over the Cheng family, the most populous in the village, some of whose members had done it.  His long-range plan is to destroy the Chen temple in the center of town, starting with its musty, yellow documents, even though the building is protected as an historical monument.  After being stymied by the mayor, Aijun denounces him anonymously.  He also kills a witness to his affair.  And so it goes in a story of Maoist rhetoric and careerism.

This too-long story is sometimes told in the language of nature, using similes, personification and metaphors that give it an odd and humorous distance from reality. Everything in Aijun’s mind and every event is filtered through some revolutionary aphorism, giving it a grandeur it does not deserve.  In this way the author ridicules the events in town, including the arduous building of a secret underground tunnel by Aijun whose purpose is to facilitate sexual congress with Hongmei.  Ultimately Aijun’s illicit but passionate affair with the married Hongmei creates problems for ‘the revolution,’ even if their love-play also inspires new slogans.  In politics, sex is a stumbling block and the GPCR is no exception.

If you are an orthodox Maoist who believes the GPCR was some kind of perfect struggle against ‘capitalist roaders’ you will not like this book.  If you are an acolyte of the present Chinese CP, you won’t like it either. Lianke’s work is mostly banned in China as you might expect, though this prolific writer still lives in Beijing.  Lianke would have been 8 when the GPCR started and 18 when it ended, so he lived through it as a young person.  Most leftists familiar with Maoism will recognize many of the ideas in the book, which never let up.  If you want some insight into China during this period, including a level of dogmatic and ultra-leftist absurdities and barbarities, you might like it. The book is somewhat overlong but the ideological pokes and jokes keep coming, which helps a reader get through to the very dark end.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive of reviews:  “Maoism & the Chinese Revolution,” “The End of the Revolution,” “China’s New Red Guards,” “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” “The Rise of China,” “Is the East Still Red?” “China – the Bubble That Never Pops,” “China 2020,” “From Commune to Capitalism,” “Jasic Factory Struggle,” “The Fall of Bo Xilai,” “Striking to Survive,” “Class is in Session,” “China on Strike” or the word ‘China.’

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 17, 2021

Religious Obsession in Japan

 “Silence,” film by Martin Scorsese, 2016

This is an odd film about the attempt to turn Japanese farmers and fishermen into Christians by missionaries from Europe, mostly Portugal or Italy, in the 1600s.  It is somewhat relentless, dull and overlong, with beautiful landscapes and some tricky discussions about religion – Christian and Buddhist alike.  It is based on a novel by Shusaku Endo set near Nagasaki.

You too can be crucified

The key characters are 3 Portuguese Catholics – one who has disappeared in Japan, rumored to be an ‘apostate’ priest who denounced Christ.  The other two are his young disciples, who cannot believe this rumor and set out to find him.  They start out in China and are smuggled onto some Japanese islands off Japan’s coast.  There they meet terrified but loyal Christian fishermen, who greet their coming with hosannas.

Thus begins a long – too long – series of gruesome attempts to punish the villagers and find the two young Jesuit priests.  It is reported that 300,000 Christians have already been killed. If government soldiers find them, they are allowed to ‘trample’ on a picture of Christ or spit on a cross and they can leave and live.  If they don’t, they are wrapped in reeds and set on fire; tied to crosses in the surf to drown; hung upside down in a hole with a cut letting blood drip out of their necks; or have their head chopped off.  Yeah, the Japanese feudalists are brutal – but no more brutal than the Crusades, the Catholic / Protestant wars or the Inquisition.

The most interesting character is the Japanese Inquisitor, who is both deadly and kind, intelligent and trying to get the priests and peasants to ‘apostatize.’  He realizes that killing everyone is not the best solution.  His grin is memorable as he discusses religion with one of the young hard-headed Jesuits, who won’t denounce ‘god,’ telling him Japan is a ‘swamp’ in which Christianity will not grow. 

Ultimately that Portuguese missionary meets his mysterious missing priest, who now works for the Japanese, teaching some science topics and reviewing 'suspicious' religious materials.  He has denounced Christianity, though underneath still believes in a way.  The missing priest (Liam Neeson) ultimately convinces the stupid hot-head that renouncing Christianity - which will also save a lot of villagers lives - is the most merciful thing to do, and he finally complies.  He also begins to work for the Japanese.  He secretly still believes of course.  As the original missionary puts it, the Japanese Christians think ‘god’ means the sun and cannot read the Bible, so their grasp of Christianity is limited.

One Japanese peasant renounces his faith several times, saving his life, while his whole family will not and die.  He also turns the priests in, again under pain of death or for money.  His sad story of betrayal, guilt and attempts at forgiveness runs through the whole film.

Scorsese’s obsession with Catholicism led him to make 3 films about it, this being the last, but his focus is solely on moral issues. Scorsese certainly thinks this film promotes religion in a way, especially Christianity.  But to an atheist or agnostic viewer, it only shows how crazed or cruel it is.

Behind this simple story is feudalism and colonialism – subjects only an astute viewer will think about, as Scorsese did not.  The Japanese shoguns clearly did not want an alien ideology among their peasants and fishermen, which might lead the peasants into opposition to the feudal landlords and royal/religious Buddhist hierarchy.  It actually did, in the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637.  Nor did they want to be penetrated by a European colonial power in this way.  The Dutch only wanted to trade, similar to the French in North America.  They did not want to ‘convert,’ and so the Dutch are allowed to visit Japan.  The Japanese understand trade as a maritime nation located on an island.  But this has also isolated them from cultural matters and people.

As an actual leftist in the U.S. and certain other countries, you do not proclaim your politics in many jobs (unless you perhaps have union protection) because you can be easily fired, or in places like Saudi Arabia, killed.  You don’t even announce it to neighbors unless you know them well. In a way, some communists and socialists are ‘in the closet.’  Leftist organizations also have ‘non-public’ work, in which hidden members work in broader ‘front groups’ or unions to recruit secretly.  This is the effect of the continual Hooverism and McCarthyism that still reigns in the U.S., at least since 1917.  So viewing this dull film brings up odd thoughts for some Marxists.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  Use terms like ‘religion,’ ‘colonialism,’ or ‘feudalism’ or “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” “Seaspiracy.”

The Kulture Kommissar

July 13, 2021

Toxic Environment to Think In

 “A Terrible Thing to Waste – Environmental Racism and the Assault on the American Mind,” by Harriet A. Washington, 2019

This is an analysis of environmental racism focusing on what it does to mental and emotional abilities.  Toxic substances like lead, arsenic, heavy metals, untested industrial chemicals, air particulates and carcinogens or the absence of nutritional food and substances like iodide affect mental abilities.  The list of other culprits is long, including vermin, tobacco, alcohol and drugs, hair straigteners and dyes, poverty, red-lining and segregation.  It also includes many pathogens and diseases, including Covid-19, which can all cause cognitive damage.  She does not mention the profit-system of course, which would sure “tie the room together.”

INTELLIGENCE

To assess ‘intelligence’ Washington uses the IQ test.  She has a conflicted relationship with it, but she refers to it constantly. It shows a 15 point gap between dark and light-skinned people.  She takes this number seriously, almost giving credence to the idea that poor or minority people are less intelligent.  This book seeks to explain that gap on the environmental side, as she understands IQ’s limitations.  She seems unaware that there are at least 8-9 types of intelligence, and IQ tests only sample a few. She shows how IQ tests are flawed, as its creator Binet didn’t even think it defined actual intelligence.  In the process she attacks various ‘hereditarians’ who use IQ tests to ‘blame the victim’ – the method of choice by racists.  She goes back to colonial and slavery phrenology, U.S. eugenics of the late 1800s / early 1900s and the racist science of Shockley, Jensen and Watson in the 1970s-1980s, on up to 2014 and a NYT science writer.  She accepts the conventional U.S. government definition of ‘multiple races’ as describing ‘blacks’ and ‘whites,’ then refers to ethnicity or ‘communities of color’ for these same people.  For a middle-class science analyst, she doesn’t seem to have a fixed or accurate approach to either IQ or race.  While ‘socially constructed,’ there is only one human race - embracing the ‘multiple’ verbiage helps the racists. 

Socialists will also notice the complete absence of the term ‘working class,’ as Washington thinks people are either ‘poor’ or ‘middle-class,’ both color-caste coded terms.  This is typical of liberals.  She does identify ‘poor whites’ and ‘underclass whites’ as lower on IQ scores, a result of a very similar poverty to minorities – something also applying to Asians from certain low-income countries like Cambodia, Laos or Indonesia.    

The ISSUES

Environmental damage is many-times the effect of a combination of poverty, class and skin color racism. It is also obvious that climate change will have disparate effects too, though she doesn’t address that.  Washington investigates in detail the physical and mental damage wrought by every single negative factor inflicted on the proletariat in the U.S., especially the African-American and Latino proletariat, starting with lead.  Some of these factors both Dickens and Marx documented years ago, but among workers in Manchester and London.  She starts with Baltimore’s lead-filled neighborhoods and the poor majority-minority town of Flint.  She covers smog leading to asthma, affecting nearly every kid in Harlem.  She investigates the effect of various infections, pathogens and diseases on mental health, from AIDS to Zika.  She locates toxic sites located in minority neighborhoods scattered mostly across the South and on Native American reservations, including the infamous town of Anniston, Alabama, polluted by Monsanto©.  For the cost of doing business and poisoning the residents, Monsanto© paid thousands of individuals legal settlements of $9K an adult and $2K a child for a lifetime of severe health problems, up to and including death.

Afton, North Carolina protest against PCB dump

Washington’s solutions range from getting water filters, avoiding toxic food (much processed baby food has arsenic and lead in it) and containers, eliminating house hazards, enrolling in Head-Start or pre-Kindergarten, breast-feeding, getting out in nature, writing your Congressperson, etc. – all common enough individual steps.  Washington also understands that the issue is really political, beyond the personal.  She seeks a revival of the methods of the civil rights movement to deal with racist toxic issues, citing a local environmental justice struggle against a PCB dump in an African-American neighborhood in Afton, North Carolina.  But what you are left with after reading this book is that we are living in a toxic soup coming at us from all sides – water, air, commodities, soil – with few social controls.  Ignorance is not bliss.

LABOR Is ENVIRONMENTAL

One thing Washington deals with only once are work accidents or conditions, which especially affect blue-collar and service workers. Her focus is on neighborhoods, so misses this. “Environmental racism” is not limited to neighborhoods, but includes work-places.  Vietnamese girls breathing nail fumes; Latino roofers falling; dark-skinned laborers sliced in chicken-processing plants; Mexican farm-workers dying of heat-stroke; Appalachian miners contracting black-lung; Haitian textile workers breathing dust – the list is endless.  The military exposes soldiers to various dangerous substances - we have only to remember Vietnam's Agent Orange and Iraq's burn pits. Due to the racist job-caste system, many of these jobs are reserved for minorities and immigrants, are low-paid and relatively unprotected.  But is also affects light-skinned proletarians.  The ‘mental’ effects of these jobs and accidents is unstudied for the most part.

This book is a detailed study of toxins and their effect on mental and physical health.  The multiplicity of threats requires a more ‘holistic’ approach to preventing harm than Washington suggests.  The feature behind nearly every problem is a political system dedicated to capitalism.  As a middle-class professor, she cannot go there.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive of reviews on words like "toxic," "environmental."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 10, 2021

Lost Gem

 “Summer of Soul,” Documentary by Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Johnson, 2021

Billed as the “Black Woodstock,” having occurred that same summer in 1969, footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival sat in a basement for many years until being rediscovered.  No one initially thought a Harlem event would be a sellable film.  It was a music festival put on by colorful promoter, Tony Lawrence, held in Harlem’s Mt. Morris Park and backed by the City of New York and liberal Republican Mayor Lindsay.  It was attended by tens of thousands of Harlemites dressed in everything from suits, ties, hats and summer dresses to Afros, open leather vests and bell-bottoms, reflecting the changing of the sartorial times. 

Sly - the only one at both

If you are expecting to see sets by various soul, psychedelic, R&B, gospel, Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, Motown, African, blues, folk and jazz greats, you wouldn’t be disappointed.  They are here, but…the segments are not long. The documentary side seems to take precedence.  The music sets last at most 3 songs, sometimes just concentrating on hits, sometimes only samples, sometimes just one song.  There are some outstanding performances here – Sly Stone bringing the hippie funk; Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson belting out gospel together; a 19-year old Gladys Knight keeping it pop, doing Grapevine while the Pips gyrate behind her; a young Stevie Wonder rocking out like a jack-hammer; Nina Simone rakes ‘The Man’ with Backlash Blues while asking the audience to ‘get ready’ for violence and burning; the 5^th Dimension go orange and pop psychedelic on Hair/Let the Sun Shine In. 

The vast variety of music and musicians is overlaid with a very familiar political documentary, as this was the summer after the assassination of MLK.  The darker-skinned part of the city was in the grips of a heroin invasion; the police initially refused to protect the event.  Jesse Jackson, Lindsay, Al Sharpton and the Black Panthers (who provided most of the security) show up.  This is the weakest part of the film for leftists, as except for the Panthers and the Young Lords, these characters have played a clear role in misleading movements.  Here they are stars.  

The funniest bit is that during the festival over 6 weekends the U.S. landed Apollo 11 on the moon.  Or as Gil Scott- Heron put it, Whitey on the Moon, which was also the universal feeling of this audience.  Spending money to go moon-wise was idiotic in the face of U.S. poverty – a sentiment still relevant today as billionaires now rise into the stratosphere on their ‘private’ rockets.  Blowhard middle-class scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson are now on-board with 'star trekking,' which should tell you where his class loyalties lie.  

The Harlem festival is not the first ‘black’ concert film to be made, as the T.A.M.I concert in 1964 featured James Brown, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye and many Motown acts like the Supremes.  Several ‘white’ acts also performed, especially the Rolling Stones, who made the mistake of going on after James Brown.  The Harlem Festival sprinkled the concerts with Puerto Rican, Jewish, ‘white,’ African and Cuban musicians, which reflected its broad diverse intent.  Sly’s band included two women and two ‘white’ guys, which made an impression on the audience.

The most fun is looking at the crowds of young and working people of Harlem experiencing these moments of musical and cultural joy.  To be able to walk to concerts of this stature for free was an unusual experience.  For many young people it was a cultural earthquake that they had to hide from their parents. This documentary joins many others – The Funk Brothers, the Wrecking Crew, 20 Feet From Stardom, Cadillac Records, Searching for Sugarman, Buena Vista Social Club, Long Strange Trip, Woodstock, The Last Waltz, Monterey, etc. – that record the music of the 1960s and 1970s – and should not be missed.

May Day has a great section of books on all kinds of music and music politics – local Minneapolis bands, punk, blues, biographies, music scenes in various cities, folk, rock, jazz et al.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “If It Sounds Good, It Is Good,” “In Search of the Blues,” “Cool Town,” “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” “Life” (Richards); “Janis,” “Kids” (Patti Smith); “Marie and Rosetta,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Echo in the Canyon,” “Treme,” “Long Strange Trip,” “Really the Blues,” “Music is Power,” “Zappa Plays Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years” (Utah Phillips).      

The Cultural Marxist

July 6, 2021 

The War of Southern Aggression

 “The Civil War in the United States,” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1847 to 1871

This is a re-translation of Marx, Engels and others’ short letters and news articles about the U.S. Civil War.  It clearly points out that slavery contributed to the capitalist system – it is not just some ‘pre-capitalist’ form of exploitation.  Marx was writing Das Capital during this period and he depicted modern slavery as an open form of exploitation, contrasting it with wage slavery, which was a hidden form of exploitation.  Engels noted how slave cotton fueled the capitalist textile mills of Manchester, England, not just the slave ships built in the ports of the northern U.S.  The many German revolutionaries that escaped to the U.S. after the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe played a large part in fighting slavery and white supremacy in Chicago, St. Louis and Texas.  They were in contact with Marx and Engels, providing on-the-ground information.  From maps Engels identified Chattanooga and Atlanta as key rail-heads that would cripple and divide the Confederacy if taken – not Richmond, which was mostly just a seat of government.

This edition reprints 112 separate articles, letters and news stories about the war, by a translator who was fired in 1951 for doing the translation. (U.S. version of freedom…)  It encompasses news stories from the Greely’s New York Tribune, the Vienna Die Presse, many letters back and forth, as well as articles by U.S. friends and co-thinkers W.E.B. Dubois, Joseph Weydemeyer and the International Working Men’s Association.

THE SLAVE REVOLUTION

Of most interest is W.E.B. Dubois’ clear point, also made by Marx, that the Civil War was a revolutionary war of emancipation by the freedmen themselves.  It was not just an abstract war by capitalists against a more primitive form of accumulation, as is pictured by some.  In 1861 Marx said that a ‘slave revolution’ would guarantee a Union victory. This book also points out the differences between radical abolitionism / ‘red’ Republicanism and the ‘free soilers’ among Republicans.  The latter did not want to compete with slaves for labor and wanted land without competition from large slave-holders, but they had no particular opposition to white supremacy.  Many Republicans (and Lincoln) initially saw the Civil War as merely a Constitutional matter related to the illegitimacy of succession until later, when the war itself and dark-skinned ex-slaves tipped the balance.

What strikes one is the level of detail Marx and Engels dealt with on a regular basis.  Marx makes fun of the hypocritical ‘anti-slavery’ British lords who earlier threw thousands of Gaelic people off their land.  The elites in England and France supported the Confederacy because the war and Lincoln’s election initially was ostensibly ‘not about slavery’ (cotton, cough, cough …) but about tariffs.  But the lower classes did not support the Confederacy, and stayed solid on that point. This is what prevented the European ruling classes from helping the Confederacy.

In 1861 Marx goes into great detail over the fact that many southerners in nearly all states did not want secession, naming South Carolina as the only state where a majority were in favor.  Yet many present and prominent U.S. historians of the Civil War – Catton, McPherson and especially the dreadful southern historian Shelby Foote and his acolyte, Ken Burns – ignore this issue for the most part. It seems to be crucial as an arrow pointed at the heart of neo-Confederate ‘Lost Cause’ nationalist and regionalist lies.

ECONOMICS, THEN AND NOW

Marx saw that the Republican Party’s plan to limit slavery’s spread outside of the 15 slave states would ultimately end slavery, which needed to expand to economically survive.  This was also the attitude of the slavocracy, which was angling for pushing U.S. slavery into Cuba, Mexico and Central America.  He interpreted the war as an aggressive one by the Confederacy to turn ¾ of the U.S. into slave states. It was not a ‘war of northern aggression’ but one of southern aggression.  So when the national government was of no use anymore to the slave power in 1861 with the victory of Lincoln’s Republicans, as they intended to limit slavery’s spread in border, western and northern U.S. territories, the Confederacy seceded and declared war at Fort Sumter.

This is similar to the present oil and gas industry, centered in the neo-Confederate oil-power government of Texas.  They threaten secession when they are dealing with a national government which mentions a need to end the ‘carbon economy.’ (even though the Democrats have a very real ‘all of the above’ strategy…)  Or how 300,000 slave holders controlled the U.S. government until 1861, and now a handful of capitalist billionaires control the U.S. government and both Parties presently. Cotton and oil, slavery and wage slavery, inequality and inequality, an unCivil War and a class war, both still haunt the U.S.

In these pieces Marx eviscerates the dreadful British press on a regular basis.  He pays great attention to the “Trent” Affair, when U.S. ships stopped a British vessel, finding two Confederates on board, Mason and Slidell (the latter still a town in Louisiana), who were trying to get Britain and France into the war against the U.S.  The British government used the episode to gin up hatred against the U.S., but they failed.  Marx shows how McClellan’s reluctance to engage the Confederate army was political – to the point where he harbored military traitors that were later arrested.  Engels understands that the West is the key to victory and analyzes battles, including those clearing Kentucky and Tennessee of Confederates in 1862.   They comment on the dreadful state of 'poor whites' in the south, were had almost no property, just shabby farms, due to not being part of the large landlord / slave-owner strata.  On display is Engel's pessimism and Marx's optimism; their hopes for a period of labor upsurge and formation of an independent labor party after the war; their mistaken belief in Andrew Johnson; their hope for freedman suffrage and continued U.S. military occupation of the ex-slave states, which did not come to pass after 1877.

This is a great historical book by Marx and Engels for U.S. leftists, as it relates to familiar issues and places in detail.  Every Civil War ‘buff’ should read it.  Marx saw the concurrent war against slavery in the U.S. and the battle against serfdom in Russia as part of an upsurge against capital, emboldening the working classes.  The 1^st International was formed in 1864 in the middle of the U.S. Civil War, which gives an indication of the world-wide importance of these two struggles. It was followed by the first example of workers' rule in 1871, the Paris Commune.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left with these terms, to investigate our 14 year archive:  "Why the South Lost the Civil War," "Lincoln," "Struggle & Progress," "The Neo-Confederate States," "Blockaders, Refugees and Contrabands," "The Bloody Shirt," "Guerillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front," "The Free State of Jones," "Andersonville Prison," "James-Younger Gang," "Southern Cultural Nationalism," "The Civil War in Florida," "A Blaze of Glory," "The State of Jones," "White Trash," "Drivin' Dixie Down" or use the words “Civil War,” "John Brown" or “slavery."

And I bought it at May Day Books, which carries many Marxist books by various authors.

Red Frog

July 2, 2021