A Pauper's Broth ...

 “Marxism versus PostModernism,” by D. Morley / H. Alizadegh, In Defense of Marxism, #34

Many left groups have stopped or paused or extended publishing paper newspapers and journals.  At May Day Books we’ve seen Socialist Action, the Communist Party, Spartacist, International Socialist Organization and Freedom Road Socialist Organization cease or pause publication recently.  There might be others. In prior times the Socialist Labor Party newspaper and one put out by the Revolutionary Communist Party, as well as others, ceased.  These are not good times for paper revolutionary or left-wing papers and journals, which are expensive and hard to sell, with a good replacement – the internet.  Though each organization maintains a presence on the internet, it is a different kind of presence.  Organizations who have no hard-copies cannot go to demonstrations and promote their complete views, which becomes another kind of drawback.

Which Staircase Will You Take?

One paper publication that has not stopped is put out by the International Marxist Tendency, with the theoretical quarterly IDoM.  This issue has a good introductory article on the fallacies of post-modernism, which is the dominant view in much of ‘left-wing’ academe.  While many activists might think being overly-concerned with theory is an abdication of class struggle, it is really class struggle in another arena.  Marxists like Lenin spent time refuting forms of idealism in “Materialism and Empiro-Criticism,” his “Philosophical Notebooks” and a study of Hegel’s “Science of Logic” - as did Marx, Engels and others. This is partly why we run a bookstore!

At any rate Morley/Alizadegh confront the theoretical work of a gamut of post-modernists – Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Butler, Derrida, Irigaray - from a Marxist point of view. These names should be familiar to anyone who reads academic ‘critical thought’ and even this Blog.  This is not to say that none of these people have ever come up with a good insight.  But in essence the Marxist critique of post-modernism is that it is a modern form of idealism, ideologically propping up the present capitalist system by making out that reality does not exist, ‘all views are equal’ and that there is no ‘metanarrative’ about anything.  In a way it is a form of incomprehensible solipsistic nihilism.  Sorry for that mouthful but it’s appropriate.  Engels called something like this “a pauper’s broth of eclecticism.”

The authors focus on the purposely obscure and conflicted language used by post-modernists; their exclusive focus on words; their attitude against science, which ties in with their opposition to Marxism; their elevation of individual subjectivity; their hostility to any form of progress; their disbelief that any form of truth is available; their opposition to looking at the world through a materialist method, especially economics. 

This article is an excellent, brief look at these thinkers, using their own words to reveal what they are really about.  In a way the irrationalism of anti-mask, anti-vaccine libertarianism we see now is an excretion of post-modernism.  Science means nothing - reason, logic, material reality, economics – all nonsense.  Science and reality are just propositions!  Even baseless conspiracy theories like QAnon fit into this narrative. In Texas a law recently passed mandates that 'all' opposing views must be taught, including those that dispute the Holocaust and probably slavery, a flat earth, evolution, blah, blah, blah.  I.E. there is no actual truth anywhere, just opinions.  At this point, our heroic libertarians even seem to think stopping at traffic lights and other traffic laws are optional!  This can be extended to many, many topics, where the ‘emotional reality’ of something trumps the actual one.  I.E. magical thinking, high-brow and ‘low-brow,’ are the products of post-modernism.  They even have a concoction called 'post-post modernism.'  Don't get me started...     

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Fashionable Nonsense,” “From the Factory to the Metropolis,” “Capitalist Realism,” “Art is Dead,” “The Marxist Theory of Art,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” “Watchmen,” “Spiritual Snake Oil,” “Reason in Revolt,” “Astrology – Fraud or Superstition” or the phrase “Big Bang.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 29, 2021

"No Masters, No Flakes"

 “Mutual Aid – Building Solidarity During This Crisis,” by Dean Spade, 2020

This blessedly short book describes the politics, methods and goals of providing mutual aid.  Mutual aid is not charity and is not non-profit work either.  Spade makes the differences very clear.  It is claimed to be a form of ‘community building’ that orients towards a post-capitalist future, building concrete ties among people so as to form a base for a new, socialized society of some sort.  At the same time it provides concrete benefits to the working class – in disasters, in conflict, in normal capitalist times.  This book serves as a practical primer, though later it veers into individual therapy territory.  The author is a law professor who has worked providing mutual aid around prisons, borders, poverty and war.

According to Spade, mutual aid involves various individual struggles:  anti-police, immigration enforcement, welfare authorities, landlords – almost anything you can name.  It is related to survival; to mobilization; to collectivity.  Occupy Sandy, the mass-based work in New York dealing with the effects of that deadly super storm, is one example.  Another is the work of the Black Panther Party, like their breakfast programs of the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Spade also mentions No More Death’s work along the border, mutual aid work in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Irene and labor strike support efforts.  He doesn't deal with examples like the "Cajun Navy" which helps rescue people after flooding, and is not a non-profit or charity, and yet has no future goal of a socially-based society.  Mutual aid is also what many people do naturally, as part of the human species.      

Mutual aid according to Spade differs from charity work in that it involves the recipients and non-professionals, being as broad as possible.  It is a collective effort avoiding saviors, not for the psychological satisfaction of the donors.  It is aimed not to create band-aids or compliments to government work in managing ‘poor’ people, but to create long-lived organizations that point to a social solution.  It is not for tax-write-offs, nor funded by the wealthy, but from grass-roots sources.  It is democratic, not secretive.  It is not limited to ‘the deserving.’  Nor is it like the massive non-profit sector with paid staffs, degrees, grants, foundations and police / government tie-ins, which effectively function as a soft-power arm of the ruling class.

Spade maintains that while capital always takes advantage of a disaster, as seen after Katrina, the left can too.  Which is where he sees mutual aid coming in.  The pandemic is the latest example.  He suggests that mutual aid work might also prompt the government to create real programs, such as the present free breakfasts in schools, which the Panther’s first developed.

Spade supports localism; consensus decision-making, and creates lists of do’s and don’ts for organizations and individuals in mutual aid groups. The latter relate to problems that arise on a regular basis in mutual aid groups – new hierarchies; paternalism; co-optation; vague decision-making; over-promising; ultra-security and secrecy.  After all, the government and the Right “love the idea of volunteerism replacing the social-safety net,” so the goal of real mutual aid is to go beyond the present system.

Spade charts good group cultures and bad ones.  He has a long section praising consensus decision-making, though in my experience you might call it totalitarian liberalism.  He has sections on how to run meetings so as not to drive people away and lists good and bad qualities of leadership.  He discusses the all-important money issue, the issues of paid staffs, the causes of burnout and then has a long section on individual psychological problems that arise in groups.  This I can only interpret as the fact that mutual-aid groups attract young people with little experience in group settings like unions, large organizations or revolutionary parties, and who emotionally personalize everything as a result. 

At any rate, a somewhat useful book if you are in or plan to get involved in a left mutual aid organization. 

P.S. - As has been noted before, the 'first responders' in almost any accident or disaster are actually fellow citizens.  This was true about the collapse of the 35W Bridge in Minneapolis a number of years ago.  Latest example is the derailment of the Empire Builder train in Montana.  Locals rushed to the scene before police, fire-fighters, medics or the NTSB. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews:  “Extreme Cities,” “The Shock Doctrine,” “Nomadland,” “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers Again,” “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” “How to Kill a City,” “Anarchism and Its Aspirations,” “The Wealth Hoarders,” “Winners Take All.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 26, 2021

Vote Yes and Yes

 MINNEAPOLIS VOTES …

Minneapolis, MN, USA will be voting on two key issues in the November election.  A Question 2 is about replacing the police department with a Department of Public Safety, which will have police within it – though the odd language makes this optional, which is not the intent.  Question 3 is to approve some form of rent Control.  See the pics for fliers I got about each issue – one for the new Department, one against rent control.  As you can see left-liberal forces have lined up for the new Department, while the main Democratic Party and Republican Party forces back the present situation.

Given the role of Minneapolis and St. Paul in the rebellion around the police killing of George Floyd, the Public Safety amendment, no matter its weaknesses, will be an indicator of where the population in the city is going.  In fact both ballot questions are political thermometers.

PUBLIC SAFETY

Both these votes amend the City Charter.  The language on the Public Safety question, Question Two, was hotly debated by the City Council, who came up with it after several versions were proposed one after another.  The Council is all Democrats and one Green. All versions were opposed by the centrist Mayor Frey, then the question itself was involved in a lawsuit brought by Democratic centrist / rightist Don Samuels, a former alderperson.  A lower court upheld his suit which would have stopped even a vote, then the Minnesota Supreme Court denied their conclusion, saying the City Council language was in the purview of the City Council.  (Seems logical!) The ferocious fight over the language is a tip-off that some of the powers-that-be were upset… even though this amendment will not do many of the things anti-racist activists want.  The present Minneapolis City Charter oddly mandates a minimum number of police, the only city in the state to do this. If this change is adopted, that will be removed.  It also removes the Mayor from complete control over the police and Public Safety, putting this power in the hands of the Council.  No wonder Frey is pissed!

The attack on the amendment is mostly lying about how it ‘gets rid of police’ or it will enable crime.  Poverty is going up, so crime is going up, along with increased gang activity.  This is what the Right is using to panic the voters.  Logically, if police stopped handling issues like homelessness, public urination, ordinary traffic stops and citations, mental health crises, some domestics and even low-level property crimes, they would have much more time to deal with violent crimes, rape, dangerous situations, assaults and real property crimes like armed robbery, car-jackings and the like.

RENT CONTROL

The issue of rent control was first brought up by Ginger Jentzen of Socialist Alternative (SAlt), who ran in one northeast ward for City Council and won the first round of ranked choice voting, but not the second.  SAlt and others have angered the real estate and construction industries in the city, which have normally had almost free reign over property prices, rents and building. Voting Yes on Question 3 is framed as 'rent stabilization' by its Democratic supporters, which seems to be some kind of euphemism.  That is the source of the hysterical flier posted here, which claims that the Question 3 will also affect homeowner house prices too.    Always humorous to see capitalists resent that some kind of elected body might have an impact on their profits! 

ThinkTwiceMinneapolis, who put out this "No" flier, is probably a combination of landlords and property developers.  These groups are having a field day in the city with extremely high rents while building upscale apartment buildings downtown, along with tear-downs to make way for enormous houses in modest neighborhoods.  Minneapolis is one of the least affordable cities in the country for rents right now. The previously adopted Minneapolis Comprehensive 2040 plan allows developers to build apartment buildings anywhere in the city, as long as they promise a few apartments might be ‘affordable’ – a word that is very fungible and has already been fought by developers.  This question paves the way for solid rent control laws according to left-wing housing activists.

What is clear is that hysteria, bullshit and lies are central to both ‘no’ campaigns.   If the “Yeses” win it will be a signal that the capitalists and their enforcers are seen as needing limits on their behavior by the populace.  The ultimate goal should be housing for everyone on public land, which is what rent control could point towards.  Real rent control would limit the power of the rentier class and help working-class people. The ultimate goal for ‘policing’ is a people’s police based on the power of democratic proletarian assemblies – something not yet in the cards.  But the organized defense of neighborhoods by citizens during the 2019 Floyd rebellion points the way forward.  This change in the Charter could reign in the present police, and orient them towards what they should be doing, not what they should not be doing.

However, the real problem is the class system and poverty endemic to an unequal racist and capitalist system, which we find ourselves in.  Poverty and color caste are key here, and they are part of the class system. Until that ends, street crime will continue while the criminals and thieves in the boardrooms and their allies get off scot-free.

Vote #1 No, #2 Yes and #3 Yes!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive:  "Minneapolis 2040 Housing Plan," "Capital City," "Detroit," "It Was Only a Matter of Time," "Ferguson Facts" or the words "gentrification" or "police."

Red Frog

September 23, 2021

38C Wet Bulb Temperature

 “The Ministry For the Future,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020

This is a ‘fun’ book if you enjoy reading about the coming environmental apocalypse.  It’s got everything in the style of ‘speculative fiction’ – narratives of technocrats, geo-engineering scientists and environmental ‘terrorists’ working on the issue.  It’s got explanatory chapters about different issues – the Gini co-efficient, Antarctic glaciers, PTSD, ideology, the Jevon’s Paradox and wet bulb death. It’s got talking photons, code, the market, carbon dioxide and a sun. It’s got anonymous migrants and scientists and a weird romance.  It’s got a seminal horrifying event – the mass death in India due to a killer heat wave that baked or cooked 20 million humans.    

The real impression is that the narrative is not so speculative, even though it’s supposedly set in the 2030s and 2040s.  For Robinson, not much progressed from today to the 2030s – the world still has the same economy, political structure and social nature.  The capitalist system has motored on with nice words and no real switch regarding climate change.  The biggest advance is the activism of India, which threw out the right-wing nationalist BJP after the deadly heat wave, and has become a leader in environmental mitigation, especially in democratic Kerala and the communist organic farmers of Sikkim.  India ignores international law and does a geo-engineering attempt at dulling sunlight – which works for awhile.  China is mentioned, but basically ignored until its central bank is needed.

The FUTURE COMETH

The key character is an Irish technocrat at the Ministry for the Future in Zurich, Switzerland, Mary Murphy.  The MftF is an organization created by the Paris Agreement to try to save the planet.  She and the Ministry are trying to ‘fix’ this overwhelming problem, partly by giving legal rights to the humans and environment of the future.  Mary is battered by a kidnapping, surprised by a black ops’ group in her own Ministry and ignored by the bankers of the world.  She does not see the proletariat as a reasonable source of power or a solution.  Revolution is not in the cards to her, except maybe through the violent and partial acts of the Children of Kali or the African Union.  She is a pacifist, as she’s seen how violence went in Ireland.

And yet, LA is flooded by monsoon rains.  Planes get blown out of the sky by drone swarms, then cargo ships sink by torpedo, as the Children of Kali attack.  Environmental destroyers die in their beds.  The Davos men are kidnapped for a time. Shrimp slaves rebel.  Water is pumped from under glaciers.  A world-wide environmental digital currency is proposed, Keynes’ dream. Migrants are lodged in camps, and some are normalized.  Taps run dry.  A purely public internet is created and maybe a world shadow government. More Parisian yellow-vests follow the examples of the Paris Commune and May-June 1968.  Cooperatives like Mondragon pop up while Wall Street melts down.  Dirigible airships are being built and photo-voltaic sails appear on smaller cargo ships.  Secret Swiss bank accounts get compromised.  38 degree heat waves in the Southern U.S. and 200,000 die.  The world economy melts down in 2048 and a massive unrest happens.  Rewilding of half the earth.  Will capital survive?

Los Angeles Flooded - only safety is on the overpasses

FINANCE Saves the DAY?

The crucial event for the Ministry of the Future is getting the world’s central bankers to agree to ‘go long on the environment’ and back a digital currency that would be created to sequester or limit carbon with a guaranteed bottom price, backed by 100-year bonds issued by the central bankers.  The idea is to buy out the fossil fuel companies first of all.  The Chinese back the proposal; then they all do.  But the neo-liberal plan fails at first, with the Ministry and Murphy now in the cross-hairs of either new environmental guerrillas or petro-states.

Reading the book is a compendium of environmental conundrums and proposed solutions that we know all too well.  The point of reading it is to see what solution Robinson comes up with – if there is one or many.  The book verbally leans to ‘post-capitalism’ in its slant, praising Vandana Shiva, regenerative agriculture, the “euthanasia of the rentier class,” internationalism and the violent nationalization of mines worked by slaves, turning them into worker cooperatives. Someone even advocates 'democratic communism.' But really a world-wide social-democratic solution is its axis.  It gives credence to geo-engineering, market solutions, MMT, pure tech fixes, central bankers and doom.  It seems the bankers will save us!

 In a way, this is one long semi-left-wing, semi-fictive think piece, but it reads quickly for the most part, even though its almost 600 pages.  I will not tell you the ending, so buy the book!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Catastrophism,” "Ecological Revolution," "The Monkey Wrench Gang," "Planet of the Humans," "The Robbery of Nature," "A Redder Shade of Green," "Stop Tar Sands Oil," "Green is the New Red” "This Changes Everything – Capitalism Versus the Climate"(Klein), “The Sixth Extinction,” "Seaspiracy" or the word ‘environmentalism.’

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 18, 2021           

Back to Black

 “The Melancholia of the Working-Class – A Manifesto for the Working Class” by Cynthia Cruz, 2021

This is not a ‘redneck’ manifesto or drunkard’s lament or a swear-fest indicting the boogee bastards. It is a somewhat sad meditation by Cruz about her own life growing up working-class, while being surrounded at all times by upper-class and middle class rebuke who saw her as ‘white trash.’ She had a proletarian Mexican father who eventually sold cars; a Euro-American mother, a straightened childhood and rough youth.  She eventually entered academe and the arts after finding out about college and discovering why she was so different and so unhappy.

Cruz points out that neo-liberalism erases the working-class.  It rose ascendant under Reagan/Thatcher and Clinton/Blair. Even as it describes Latinos or ‘African Americans’ or indigenous Americans or whatever ethnic or national grouping you can name – they never associate these same person’s with the working class.  And nearly all of them are.  She was told a number of times – by professors, by light-skinned managers – that the working-class doesn’t exist, much to her surprise and consternation. 

‘People of color’ have no class, just ethnicity, in the ruling classes’ political fairy-tale.  In a way, these color castes are really stand-ins for that ghost, that hidden Leviathan, that invisible beast, that powerful but powerless majority.  Cruz herself is an example who only sometimes ‘passed’.  This book is in a way a work of felt sociology by her, describing the “living death” of being working class.  Then it morphs into a work of working-class culture analysis. 

WORKING-CLASS in CULTURE

Referencing social class, Cruz looks at various artifacts – mostly films and music groups – to explore the working-class in culture.  Among other films, she looks in detail at the film “Wanda” by director Barbara Loden, about a broken working class woman; and “Souvenir” by Joanna Hogg, about a doomed cross-class romance.  She closely dissects the music of her early British political punk faves The Jam and Style Council, as well as Joy Division, Sparklehorse and early Cat Power.  Or the book Savage Messiah, which tracks the gentrification and destruction of working-class London.  She shows how these artists and writers represented the darkness of the working-class, left-behind history and how middle-class critics mishandled them. 

Amy Winehouse Shoots for the Past

Cruz covers the great working-class singer Amy Winehouse, who never left her roots. By turns powerful and shapely, then drunk and disheveled, Winehouse embodied the two turns of labor, dying eventually from alcohol poisoning, which the author thinks was caused by her eating disorder.  Bulimia also afflicted Cruz, which is how she sees proletarian female bodies sometimes handling stress.  She claims anorexia is the leading cause of death among those with mental illnesses.           

She quotes various intellectuals –Freud, Boudrieu, Lacan, Zizek, Marx, Benjamin, Fisher – in the process.  All of this shows Cruz’s suspension between 2 worlds – the one she ran away from in Santa Cruz of being a Woolworth’s waitress, receptionist or maid, drinking to excess on the weekends and having lots of babies – and writing 6 books of ‘perfect’ poetry among the precious confines of middle class aesthetes. The book reflects this ‘in-betweenness’ in an abstruse and obscure way, which is why working class people reading it might be put off.  In-betweenness naturally creates a ‘split personality’ for working class artists, who combat melancholia and depression in various ways. This book becomes a compendium of proletarian directors, musicians and writers who reflect this life, but nothing like a manifesto.   

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive with these terms:  “Chavs – the Demonization of the Working Class,” “The Sinking Middle Class,” “Class Lives,” “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “The Worker Elite,” “The Precariat,” “Understanding Class,” “No Longer Newsworthy,” “The Football Factory,” “White Trash,” Hillbilly Elegy,” “Factory Days.” 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 12, 2021

Social Reproduction

 “Patriarchy of the Wage,” by Silvia Federici, 2021

These are left-feminist or anarcho-Marxist essays over a period of 30 years analyzing, supporting and criticizing Marxist views, based on the importance of women and social reproduction in the overall schema of capital.  While praising Marx for raising the issue of the reproduction of labor power, Federici maintains in these essays that he ignored women’s issues, color issues, environmental issues and praised capitalism, industry and technology.  She takes a swipe at Lenin for praising aspects of capitalism too.

Federici seems to understand that Marxism is a method, not a dogma.  Historical materialism is her method too.  Marx was writing at a certain time in history and this impacted his view of aspects of capitalism.  “Theorists” have screamed at Marx for not anticipating global warming.  They have said he didn’t anticipate fascism.  Or write about the overwhelming level of financialization that capital has reached, though he did describe its beginnings.  As capital develops and changes, later Marxists have described, expanded and incorporated each of these into the analysis – just as Federici did on the issue of unpaid house work carried out mostly by women, which Marx did not theorize. 

FEDERICI’s CRITICISMs of MARX

Federici does know that in Britain, France and other European countries there was no ‘home’ life for the working class in the middle 1800s, which spent nearly all of its time - men, women and children - at work, thus endangering ANY kind of home reproduction.  The European labor movement made limiting this work one of its main goals.  This might explain Marx’s absence on this issue.  On mechanization, it is hard to believe that Federici does not understand the crushing toil of peasants and workers that machines can lessen, something no less true today.  I doubt she has forgotten that Lenin was one of those who overthrew capital in Russia.  He was not a stagist Bernstein waiting for the capitalist stage to eventually prepare us for socialism.    

Federici opposes the goal of communism, where technology is used to ease toil, not to create useless commodities or destroy nature.  She supports ‘the commons’ instead, praising subsistence farming, urban gardens, free software (while condemning computers), subsistence women farmers, the Incan and Aztec empires and the Zapatistas, in the process rejecting what seems like all mechanization.  She knows that care-work cannot be mechanized, which is certainly true. Her position in these essays is somewhat like a deep Green, against all industrialization.  She is evidently unfamiliar with the extensive work done by Johan Bellamy Foster on Marx’s understanding of the metabolic links between humans and nature.  Marx’s view of communism was to live in harmony with nature in the use of machines and technology, not to be Promethean.

FEDERICI’s POINTS

“Waged work” leads to surplus value, while unpaid social reproduction prepares for this exploitation, and becomes another type of oppression.  Federici wants to completely ‘center’ unpaid home-work – mostly carried out by women - as key to capitalism instead.  This ignores the key role of the commodity under capital. Social reproduction goes on under every economic system. She alleges that Marx thought ‘primitive accumulation’ ended long ago.  Yet modern Marxists continue to discuss present ‘primitive accumulation’ without quibbling with Marx.  Modern slavery is also well-known to leftists. Nor did Marx maintain that only large agriculture was the road to socialism.

Federici seems to oppose or under-estimate socialization of family tasks, which is already taking place under capital.  In fully capitalist societies, eating out or getting takeout food; hiring cleaners, plumbers, electricians, construction workers, lawn services and car mechanics; using day care centers, health clinics and nursing homes, even ordering groceries or items from the internet requiring truck drivers - all ‘outsource’ this work from the home, but on a capitalist basis.  Of course, the more money someone has, the more they outsource.  The middle-class and the rich are the biggest 'outsourcers.'  Renters already have some of these services – or should have - as part of a rental contract. At some point, socialism could almost completely socialize maintenance, cooking, cleaning, aged, child and sick care and make it available for everyone on a collective basis, not just those with more money, or just relying on unpaid women care-givers.  There are many ways to do this.

Working women then and now - the past is prologue.

The KEY SECTION

The book contains a concise section on Marx’s limitations regarding care-work and women’s role in social reproduction.  This is where the title “Patriarchy of the Wage” comes from, as Federici maintains that a male-dominated proletarian family was constructed by capital in the late 1800s and many women were relegated to wageless work in the home.  Federici seems to have missed the fact that that family has also been superseded by another ‘new’ model of the proletarian family in core capitalist countries, where women have returned to the workforce while working a second shift at home.  (Which explains why the term ‘second shift’ is not used in this book.)  Women have also become wage workers in China, Latin America and India in increasing numbers. The majority of women now work outside the home in the core countries, so Federici’s main point has been superseded in the areas where capital is most developed.  The 'wage' is now evenly spread. Marx predicted capital would turn women into wage workers too and he has been right twice.  55.4% of the workforce is female in the U.S. in 2019.  In a way, Federici is living in the past.

On a personal note, from my experience working-class men in advanced capitalist societies also play a role in the home, though perhaps not as great as women when it comes to ‘traditional’ tasks.  However, tasks like lawn care, snow removal, house, bicycle and auto maintenance, computer work, doing taxes and tracking finances are among the things that many times get delegated to men.  Younger men have taken up cooking, baby care and laundry. The definition of ‘housework’ needs to be expanded from its somewhat original feminist definition in the 1950s.

Humanity may go back to a small-holder agrarian life in the death holocaust that is to come if the working-classes do not take power.  Even a micro-level farming or hunting life will be a stretch.  But wishing for it is as anti-proletarian as you can get, including hostile to modern women.  Federici is an anarcho-communist who trumpets the second coming of utopian socialism – without a transitional state, through local counter-culturalism, absent all modern technology – but I expect she might moderate her stance when the reality hits.

In these essays she fails in trying to create a ‘new reconstructed’ leftism.  Her vague criticisms of a present abstract “Left” ignores the many variations of Marxist thought, though she is correct in looking at some of their failures.  She seems to think that Marxism starts and ends with factory workers, even in the present, while ignoring many Marxist analyses of service, farm, precariat, unemployed, lumpen, care-workers and white collar workers.

Federici and her cohort in the 1970s made great theoretical breakthroughs on the oppression of women, especially in home-life. These essays reference that.  Her proposal of a ‘wage for housework’ starts to deal with this issue, as she knows.  The cutting edge of class struggle for Federici began in the home, with the retrograde husband, and it still seems to reside there.  In her materialist and historical analysis of women’s free care-work, she recognizes her debt to Marx, but then discharges that debt and takes on her own.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate the 14 year archive:  “20^th Century Luxury Communism,”  “Feminists and Feminists,” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Fortunes of Feminism,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” “The Testaments,” “The Old is Dying,” "Women From the North Country" or the word “Marxism.”  

And I bought it in May Day’s excellent Feminist Section!

Red Frog

September 7, 2021

Onward Christian Soldiers

 “The Great Evil – Christianity, the Bible and the Native American Genocide,” by Chris Mato Nunpa, 2020

Nunpa, a local author, spent time in “Indian” schools in the 1940s and 1950s, having religion shoved down his throat.  He learned it well, to the point where he saw all the bloody, vicious and colonial implications of the Bible and the missionaries who mobbed his reservation in western Minnesota.  Intent on obliterating native religion, which is actually far more progressive than Christianity, they trained their charge well, to the point where he rejected it all.

Every ‘movement’ needs an ideology.  Colonialism, Manifest Destiny, Euro-American supremacy and private property needed justifications.  They found it in Catholic logic and Protestant moralism, Bible quotes and a cruel God, Papal Bulls and preachers’ sermons, backed by guns and genocide. This was their approach to the indigenous over the world, in U.S., Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, the edges of Europe and Africa.  The cultural side in North America involved “Indian” schools where children were separated from their parents, their hair cut, their clothes changed, used in child labor, their former religion and language suppressed and as we know now, some buried behind schools by Catholic nuns.

In 2016 the U.N. charged the Catholic Church with enabling this indigenous holocaust.  No word from the Vatican yet, which is still a respected and integral part of capitalism, even though it is presided over by the hippie Pope.  In this book, Nunpa gathers innumerable quotes from the Bible’s books, mostly from the Old Testament, about slaughtering or converting multiple ‘heathen’ tribes, the non-Israelites, the non-believers in God and Christ.  He shows how this was extended into an ideological motivation behind Sand Creek, Wounded Knee and the deaths of 16 million native peoples (“heathens!”) in the U.S., leaving about a quarter of a million left in 1900.  Of course the benefit to ranchers, farmers, railroad barons and mining concerns was more concrete than that delivered to missionaries and churches, but the latter also gained in materiel ways.  Nunpa does not focus on the material benefits of genocide to the ‘winners,’ but this issue is essential for Marxists.

CHURCH and STATE

Nunpa identifies the Catholic edicts of the 1400s and 1500s as instrumental in setting the ‘legal’ stage for colonization, slavery, conversion and extermination – the Romanus Pontifex of 1455; Inter Caetera of 1493; the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas; the Requirimento of 1513 and Sublimus Dei of 1537.  The U.S. Supreme Court used some of these edicts in legal decisions; one made native Americans ‘wards’ of the U.S. government.

Nunpa’s point here is the intimate connection between religion and extermination; church and state.  He chronicles Columbus’s destruction of perhaps 8 million indigenous people in the Caribbean over 21 years – Caribs, Arawak, etc. - under the illusion he was one of the ‘chosen people’ in the ‘promised land,’ a ‘new Israelite’ dealing with new Hittites. He discusses the killing of a Roanacs leader in North Carolina who refused to convert, even with the entreaties of a St. Francis of Assisi monk.  Or the 1637 murder and burning of 900 Pequot natives in their village in Connecticut, celebrated by Protestant leaders as a fire sacrifice to God. Mysterious plagues killing the indigenous were celebrated as an instrument of the Lord, something that also 'smote' the heathens of the Bible.

Idyllic picture of Sand Creek Massacre

KILL EVERTHING THAT MOVES

Andrew Jackson massacring 800 Muskogee; Sheridan saying the only ‘good’ Indian was one that was dead; Chivington, of Sand Creek infamy, comparing native Americans to lice and nits.  The mass hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato in 1863 after they rebelled against starvation. Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the Humbolt County, California massacre, the Trail of Tears, the Bad Axe Massacre in Illinois, Texas indigenous scalp bounties and on and on.  Even the cuddly Frank L. Baum, writer of the Wizard of Oz, recommended extermination.   

All of this is a familiar story.  Nunpa looks at the ‘4^th’ level of genocide too, which is to ‘impose an ideology’ on the conquered.  Indian ceremonies were deemed ‘offensive.’  Boarding schools were built.  Native religious and cultural symbols were burnt by Protestant leaders.  He concentrates on the barbaric treatment of the Dakota people in and around Minnesota by the government and church, as he is Dakota.  Scalp bounties, a concentration camp, hangings, starvation, a forced march, ethnic cleansing by forced removal – all in Minnesota, another ‘land of milk and honey.’  Nunpa shows how many acts were inspired by Christian ideology, giving a Biblical base to Manifest Destiny, ‘killing everything that moves’ of those who stand in the way of the ‘chosen people.’

This book will deepen your understanding of the religious connections to ethnic warfare and extermination, which is still going on across the world – not just through Christianity, but every religion.  Theocracy and fundamentalist religion pose a bulwark for reactionary ruling elites, which they use to increase their power, profits and wealth.               

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14-year archive: “Deadwood,” “Lewis and Clark,” “Indigenous People’s History,” “Loaded,” (both by Dunbar-Ortiz); “Indian Country Noir,” “There There,” “The Heart of Everything There Is,” “Empire of the Summer Moon.”

And I bought it from May Day’s excellent indigenous section!

Red Frog

September 3,2021