Actually Save the Children!

 “Cults and Cultists”

A morbid, bizarre and stressed society produces cults in the hundreds. One of the strengths of You Tube, podcasts, some films and documentaries is their ability to expose these swarmy things to daylight.  These sad, grifter, Elmer Gantry organizations are based in the U.S., but there are many others all over the world.  Most borrow from some religion, then turn the volume up to 11.

Not around after the revolution...

Whether it is Hasidic Jews in New York or the most brutal and weird of all, Scientology; Hindu versions like the Rajneeshees and Bikram Yoga; multi-level marketing organizations like Amway, Herbalife or LulaRoe, which function as commercial money cults; the apocalyptic Jehovah’s Witnesses; Christian cults like the Children of God, The Family and the Remnant Church; Nuevo-Buddhist sex cults like NXIVM and even the fundamentalist child-abusers in the Mormon FLDS – there is no end to it.

They all share a somewhat different organizational style than so-called mainstream religions, though the thought patterns of faith, magical thinking and being disconnected from reality are similar. You may leave the Catholic or Baptist faith, but you are probably not shunned or sued because of it.  Though leaving mainstream Mormonism or Islam can be dicey, as they straddle the continuum in some places. Of course, if you are around fundamentalist Islamic or Hindu groups outside the U.S. like Daesh, Al Qaeda, the Taliban or the RSS, having another religion or no religion at all can get you killed.

I’ve watched a whole host of these documentaries, de-programming podcasts, streaming series and the like.  These U.S. cults all share a number of characteristics.  Terrible attitudes towards children and women; a central ‘guru’ figure; isolation from the world; complete shunning; financial exploitation, ultra-high internal controls.  Now why would a leftist be interested in the issue, other than exploring the pathological versions of idealist thinking and terrible organization that capital produces?  I’ll get to that.

Save us!

The Cults

First off is Scientology.  It is centered in a personality cult around one dead man, L. Ron Hubbard. It imprisons its own members for so-called offenses, ‘shuns’ anyone who leaves - even family members - and spies on dissidents.  They milk members for massive amounts of money to build hollow temples to their ideas.  They sue those who go public and use the legal system to intimidate the IRS, the FBI and any newspaper willing to expose their functioning.  Children of Scientologists are brainwashed from birth.  Their ideology is ultimately really bad science-fiction - written, logically, by a science fiction writer. Lying, like every other cult, is allowed in order to protect the leaders or organization - sort of like the CIA.  Almost no one from Scientology ever goes to prison, no matter how many crimes, negligent homicides, data theft or tax evasions they commit.  Only 11 at this count.

Or NXIVM? It was run by a single guru, Keith Raniere.  He was surrounded by mostly upper-middle class women and Hollywood stars, some of whom are initiated into a ‘branding’ society dedicated to his sexual pleasure, enabled by a lead woman.  They hold expensive business training seminars which were really part of a MLM pyramid scheme. These were attended by many famous business executives.  They isolate their members from family, take all their earnings or accounts and have the members live in a dormitory.  Members, like other groups, are manipulated by emotional grooming and toxic positivity. Their ideology is some version of ‘evolutionary Buddhism,’ claiming they are indulging in 'rational inquiry.'.  This guru went to prison after trying to escape to Mexico, but still runs the group from inside.  This bunch reminds me of Jeffrey Epstein and his procurer Ghislaine Maxwell.

The FLDS collects every bit of money members earn, puts them to work in their Utah, Arizona and Texas establishments and doles out young girls to aging leaders and other men as part of their polygamy beliefs.  If they leave FLDS, they are shunned by family and friends and isolated from the whole group.  Members are barred from exposure to the rest of the world. The grorup even sent away young men who were interfering with the allocation of wives.   Mormonism is like a weird Americanized Christianity, partially based on the teaching that the prophets in the Bible had multiple wives.  Warren Jeffs, the head of this cult, was eventually sent to prison where he still controls affairs.

The cuddly, white-haired guru of the Rajneeshees is from India, Bhagwan Rajneesh.  He had 17 Rolls Royce motor cars and intended to create and build a communal ‘heaven on earth’ in Oregon, on a very large compound and ranch.  His main administrator was a woman also from India.  She enforced discipline, manipulating voting rolls, made threats and brought out guns against those who opposed the group.  They milked Hollywood stars and upper-class people for vast amounts of money and built their holy town with free labor. One of the draws of the ‘town’ was sexual freedom. The Hindu guru had to flee back to India when some of these actions came out.

Gwen Shamblin Presiding

The Remnant Church was started by a big-haired fake blonde from Memphis, Gwen Shamblin.  She believed in Bible literalism and controlled the church’s membership down to the ‘T,’ ran God’s own weight-loss program (yes!) and became a multi-millionairess. Towards the end, Shamblin encouraged members to give up their worldly wealth to ‘God’ (which was the Remnant Church) – something she was not doing. Then problems erupted.  These included the death of a child who was mistreated according to church doctrine; women who left opposed her doctrine that the husband is king; the Church interfered with an experienced doctor’s medical advice; and finally lies about her inheritance.  ‘God’ finally did have his say, as a plane she and her minions used to go to a Trump rally crashed and they all died.

Or the Jehovah’s Witnesses?  Those nice people selling their sad literature from a rack on the street or knocking on your door?  They are an apocalypse cult that isolates their children from other children and perpetuates child abuse by condemning everyone to a hell or death for every little ‘sin.’ All in continual preparation for the Book of Daniel's Revelation prediction that 144,000 of the elect are going to ascend into Heaven, and the rest will be part of the lucky few left alive on earth after the genocidal slaughter of Armageddon. They have a closet full of rules on dress, sexuality, food and holidays.  Mostly – don’t!  Totally dominated by a Governing Body of ‘elders’ - tired old white men who ignore child sexual abuse.  Reserve your seat now!

The Christian Children of God or The Family?  Children are isolated from the rest of the world, taught that nearly everything is a sin, that the man is the leader, that if they leave, they will be permanently shunned by everyone, even their own parents and siblings. They are barely educated in incompetent 'homeschools.' If they get abused by a leader it is some kind of ‘gods will.’  Sometimes they live in isolated compounds, which compounds the picture.

The Hasidim (Satmar sect) also practice shunning, isolation, male chauvinism, collection of assets, labor assignments, forced marriage, weird clothing and sexual repression.  Girls especially try to run from this group, which is controlled by a group of elderly rabbis.  And don’t get me started on the Christian Scientists, who sometimes kill their own children by refusing them medical aid, because God will ‘naturally’ heal their troubles.  Another group of organized child abusers and wellness nuts. What the hell is wrong with all these people?!

Pedophile priests?

So?  

No doubt a few of these issues are common to other non-political organizations, especially sexual abuse of women or children as we’ve seen in the U.S. military, the Southern Baptists, the Boy Scouts and the ‘grand-daddy’ of them all, the Catholic Church.  It all fits in with capitalist backwardness and the decaying culture we live in. Male chauvinism and toxic masculinity is part of the gender structure of U.S. society. The prosperity gospel fits in with the meritocratic myth of the ‘select’ getting rich.  Being ungrounded in understanding economics, science and material reality is convenient to the ruling class and these groups are a result.

Magical thinking befuddles workers and makes them useless to pro-labor social movements – but not to the fundie churches, Trumpists, the Republican Party and fascistic organizations, which have aspects of cults, but not the full meaning. QAnon has heavy participation by evangelicals - supposedly interested in 'saving the children.'  The patriarchal ‘family’ and the treatment of children is one of the links to cults.

Some of this behavior also happens in leftist organizations.  There have been occurrences of financial theft or soaking members for excessive cash. A few groups have had occasions of sexual abuse and exploitation by leaders upon members. There have been threats if someone leaves the group, while a few organizations have powerful sugar-daddies.  There are also the hidden and un-elected status of exalted leaders, a standard in organizations that do not allow voting at any level, usually Stalinists of some kind.  Some groups never read anything outside the group’s publications or their assigned reading, much like religious cults. There is even one ultra-Maoist Party, the RCP, that encourages an unthinking approach to their leader maximus, intentionally creating a cult around him. The idea that ‘Marxist-Leninist’ organizations are like a military unit is part of this.  Take orders and shut up!  But they are overall far from the functioning of an actual cult.

But if you see any of this happening, you will know … ‘you’re in some kind of a cult!’

Sources:  “The Weigh Down: The Millionaire Preacher With a Weight-Loss Cult;” “Wild Wild Country,” “Scientology and the Aftermath,” “Escaping the NXIVM Cult;” “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator;” “Escaping Jehovah’s Witnesses,” “Mormon Polygamy: Leaving the Cult;” “Unorthodox,” “The Family,” “The Children of God,” “On Becoming a God in Central Florida,” "LuLaRich."

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews:  “The Cult of the Constitution,” “Covideo Nation,” “After the Fact?”  “Marxist Criticism of the Bible,” “White Knight,” “One Night in Miami,” “Rise of the Nones,” “Religulous,” “The Jesus Comics,” “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Spiritual Snake Oil” or the word “Christianity.”  

The Cultural Marxist

January 29, 2022

Class Classic, Part 1 - The Reign of Paine

“The Making of the English Working Class”by E.P. Thompson, 1963 Part 1 Sketch: (pgs. 1 to 205)

This long, classic book by E.P. Thompson is 939 pages, with a 1968 postscript. I’m going to review the book in bits.  The book is so long and most leftists, including myself, have never had the time to read such a tome.  It holds lessons for today, so this is not just some excavation of musty information.  There are many parallels to present society.  Thompson was a member of the British CP until he left after the USSR ordered the invasion of Hungary, along with Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin.

Thompson’s main point is that workers create themselves as a self-conscious class - it is not just the automatic activity and influence of history, society or economics.  His book covers both the creation of the working class in England and its rise to class consciousness - two distinct processes.  This book is how it happened in Britain, from the early beginnings of ‘reformism’ in the 1700s, which began a struggle against the landed gentry, the monarchy, the state church and the police state.  This is how a class ‘in itself’ slowly became a class ‘for itself.’ 

Thompson employs a vast amount of original research, a wealth of personal names, a credenza of cities, a mass of organizations, a large quantity of quotes, a plethora of literary references, to write this history.  He names the leaders of the various factions, especially the most leftward and consistent – Hardy, Thelwall, Binns, Spence or writers like Blake and Shelley.

But perhaps we now need a supplement – “The Unmaking of the British Working Class”? 

In the 1700s conservative institutions like the Methodist Church trained working-class people in reading, speaking, organization, planning, raising funds, travel, publication, communication and rules. This was very unlike the official Anglican Church of England. The Methodists provided a training ground for future groups, though the Methodist’s official theology and leadership was loyalist and reactionary.  In the later 1700s artisanal and proletarian inspiration came from Tom Paine’s omnipresent and cheap publication “The Rights of Man.”  Paine at the time was living in England. Later it was the Jacobins and the example of the French Revolution. Associations in England formed bonds with the French revolutionaries and defended France.  Later some even hoped that French revolutionary troops would invade England and overthrow its ruling class!

Apocalyptic and millenarian thinking was also common in this period, accompanying the high social turmoil.  The “Book of Revelation” from the Bible was especially quoted.  Thompson also mentions cultural forces – the tavern, the church, social and town life. Many radicals met in taverns, as they were free.  These were even christened ‘tavern societies.’  While the more proper reformers had staid and organized meetings, the more proletarian ones drank, ate and had loud, combative discussions.

Reverence for the English ‘Constitution” of 1688 kept many English radicals from going beyond it.  While allowing a certain amount of freedom to the ‘free-born Englishman” it propped up the state church, property rights, the monarchy and the land-owning aristocracy, as well as opposing universal suffrage. Paine was the first to undermine this Constitution, saying Constitutions were moldy parchments based on the dead hand of the past.  This should sound familiar to present day left radicals in the U.S., who face liberals and mild reformists who cherish every bit of our own moldy and anti-democratic parchment … adopted in 1788, 244 years ago.   

Food and price riots were frequent, organized by the poverty-stricken ‘lower orders of society.’  But the Right also organized attacks of thugs against reformers – organized by the church, businessmen and fearful Tories.  ‘Mobs’ and riots occurred on a frequent basis in England towards the end of the century, especially as the economy tanked due to the newly-declared war against France. The Rightists figured that a huge percentage of the population were criminals, calling them thieves, traitors and terrorists, and applied those names to the radicals too.

Paine denounced appeals to the British Parliament as pernicious and a waste of time.  What about the U.S.’s own modern Congress?  Liberals and even some ‘radicals’ never cease in expecting Congress to deliver significant reforms.  Paine made the demand for a people’s Convention of citizens, not continuing appeals to the sclerotic British Parliament.  He was essentially calling for a rudimentary dual power.  Except for actual socialists and communists you won’t hear anyone calling for something like that today.  Our own 'gentlemen' reformers do not know how to go beyond a terminal and corrupt bourgeois democracy.

Thompson points out that agitation in Britain among the poor artisans and workers between 1792-1796 was near insurrectionary… not a mere reflection of the French Revolution, but caused by British conditions.  Paine’s agitation and propaganda had combined political suffrage and economic demands, which did the deed, as laborers for the first time saw their economic issues and solutions highlighted. His writings were sold cheaply everywhere.

A patriotic war fever against France accompanied war preparations.  Paine was banned, burnt in effigy and attacked from the royalist Right and conservative ‘reformers’ still aligned with the 1688 Constitution.  He fled the country to France.  Prominent radicals were jailed or attacked by royalist mobs, yet there was much opposition to the war and impressment.  Later, thousands of sailors revolted and blocked the Thames in 1797 with their ships.  There was an armed Irish revolt in 1799 against Whitehall, so the national question was at all times present, though Thompson doesn’t frame it as such.  Many plebeian Irish were part of the subversive organizations in England.

The above-ground groups had minutes, meetings, membership lists, dues, communications and publications. They were a mixture of artisans, laborers, small shopkeepers and a few professionals – who had the beginnings of class understanding.  A proposal for a national Convention joining all reformers, including Scots and Irish, was the last straw for the ‘Church and King” set, for the ruling class politicians Pitt and Burke. Prosecutions, jailings and executions followed, which broke the back of the legal reform societies. Though it did not amount to a ‘White’ terror, as the British jury system prevented every prominent and not so prominent activist from being jailed or killed, but Thompson still styles it a ‘counter-revolution.’ During this period there were also underground insurrectionary groups like the “United Englishmen.”

Thompson dates this period as the beginning of the formation of the British working class in both fact and theory, being proletarianized while being imbued with a class understanding.  Landlords, the aristocracy, merchants and capitalists in their majority had all united against the plebeian masses in repressing their nation-wide organizing.  This was unlike what happened in France. The beginnings of class and socialist ideas began to percolate – about nationalization of the land to oppose the landowners; ‘class versus class’ views; economic, not just ‘rights’ demands; and notions about relieving the special burdens imposed on working-class women.   

In the 1800s, after the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815 at Waterloo, nearly all ‘mobs’ were from the left, reflecting the ‘turn’.

End of Part 1 – Stay Tuned!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Citizen Tom Paine” (Fast); “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “Chavs – the Demonization of the Working Class,” “Class Against Class – the Miner’s Strike” (Matgamna); “Left Confusion on Brexit,” “The City” (Norfield); “Pride,” “Mr. Turner” (Leigh); “Coming Up For Air”(Orwell); “Monsters of the Market” (McNally); “1916 Rebellion Walking Tour,” “A Full Life: James Connolly,” “The Immortal Irishman,” “The Football Factory” (King); "The North Water." 

And I got it at the UGA Library!

Red Frog

January 25, 2022

College Library Browsing #5

 “Marx” by Terry Eagleton, 1997

One High-Marxist Brit here.  Eagleton is a multiple professor and especial political expert in literary theory and fussy Roman Catholicism.   Eagleton grew up working class, in an Irish Republican family and later was a member of several British Trotskyist groups.  This book was bound in an intense black hardcover, lodged in the forgotten stacks of a University Library.  His most famous book is “Literary Theory:  An Introduction,” where he approaches literary formalism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-modernism from a political and Marxist point of view.  What does he have to say to a ‘Jimmy Higgins’ in this book, which is the British version of saying a regular Leftist activist?   Well...

Eagleton at Rest

Eagleton’s book is probably known as a monograph in England.  In this small volume he goes over some of Marx’s greatest hits, highlighting some famous quotes, incessant dialectic pairings and the wonderful grounded language that Marx, the ‘economist,’ sometimes used to describe just about everything.  At one odd point Eagleton claims that it was Engels that came up with dialectical materialism, but then admits perhaps Marx was on board too.   Perhaps! 

Eagleton explains Marx’s takes on philosophy, anthropology, history and politics.  Here is a sample salient point from each. 

1. He discusses the idea that Marx’s anti-philosophy was still a philosophy of sorts.  It was an ‘anti-philosophy’ because if theoretical problems are actually rooted in social contradictions, they cannot be solved except by addressing those real contradictions in the real world.  Just as combatting religious, metaphysical or magical ideas is not done purely through logic, reason and facts, as liberals or pure atheists would have us believe.  Society has to change for ideas to adjust.  Under communism according to Marx the main contradictions of life would actually disappear and this would ‘self-abolish’ radical political theory too.  Ultimately ‘philosophy’ is grounded in history, not inside our heads.  

2. Marx saw humans as social animals, with change being the essence of humanity's life.  Marx understood both individualism and social being – ‘species-being’ – were absolutely linked, not diametrically opposed.  Mental and manual labor, city and country, animal and human, body and mind, head and heart – are also false dualisms.  Eagleton quotes from Marx’s early works, which some may find ‘romantic’ but others absolutely true as pictures of alienation: 

“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become the treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume – your capital”

Money is “…the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples…”

3. Marx did not discover the notion of social class, he focused on how class was related to a ‘mode of production’ of human life and necessities.  Tribal life, slave agricultural  societies, tribute societies, feudalism, capitalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat … and socialism lurking in the wings.  The last stage of socialism is where class disappears. Producing the basic human needs of life is what makes up the bedrock of history, not great men or women, not war, not various superficial identities, inventions, ideas, not even gods.  Eagleton discusses whether Marx felt socialism was inevitable.  He concludes no. Socialism can come about as capital socializes labor, develops technology and centralizes economies world-wide – which it has already done.   Marx describes this period thusly, when the ruling class and capitalist property become archaic:  

“Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.  The death knell of capitalist private property sounds.  The expropriators are expropriated.”  (Communist Manifesto). 

4.   Marx is a practical political thinker, even though he sometimes seems too abstract.  He concluded that the proletariat was the ‘last class’ because they had the power to abolish classes.  Social inequality is eliminated in socialism, but not between individuals, who remain of differing skills, energy levels and intelligences.  Under communism, abundance and time will finally render inequality moot, and individualism will flower under the strength of mutual bonds, economic sufficiency and democracy. Marx did not spend much time looking into this future, as he knew the actual class struggle determines how the future looks.                                                      

More is contained in the book than just what is in these notes, of course.  No review can incorporate everything, which is why you should come down and buy some books during this cold winter.  May Day has many books on ‘theory’ by various authors.  We have anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, council communist, environmentalist, guerillaist, humanist, left communist, Leninist, liberal, left liberal, Maoist, Marxist, Schactmanite, Social Democratic, Stalinist and Trotskyist writers and theorists.   Did I miss anybody?

And I got it at the UGA Library! 

Red Frog

January 22, 2022

Ship of Tools

 “The North Water” Limited Series, directed by Andrew Haigh, 2021

This is a tale of early capitalist England in the 1850s.  Still a time of primitive accumulation, when murder, fraud and secrecy could lead to a great initial fortune. When colonial occupation and whaling were worth many pounds of sterling.  When the Irish were suspect and class a heavy thing.

Filmed in Norway, far north of the whaling town of Svalbard, it is about an ill-fated whaling ship out of Hull, England traveling to the Arctic for seal pelts and whale oil in 1859.  The ship is called ‘The Volunteer’ but the men aboard are only ‘volunteers’ in the lying sense, as they are desperate, ill-used and ill-paid.  Ice flows, pack ice, barren rock outcrops, vast stretches of frozen, snowy land, crevasses, glaciers, a giant whale, helpless seals, the totemic polar bear and Inuit hunters populate this North.  Blisteringly cold winds, shabby tents, hunger and possible frostbite haunt the crew. 

The whaling ship’s captain has been secretly ordered to sail as far north as possible and scuttle the ship between ice flows for the insurance money.  The first mate is an accomplice but no one else knows – neither the ship’s doctor Sumner, who was cashiered out of the military by a double-dealing superior officer; nor the brutal harpoonist Drax, who leads the hunts.  They find out soon enough. 

The show might remind watchers of Shackleton’s trip to the Antarctic or bits of the Revenant; Call of the Wild, Titanic or Billy Budd, but it’s really a case study in capitalism, writ small on a cramped, wooden sailing ship.  Drax is an unrestrained sociopathic killer and Sumner the Laudanum-addicted ‘intellectual’ he eventually hunts.  The captain works with both Drax and his first mate to cover up a rape and murder.  A stolen diamond ring from India plays the role of greed and an incentive to murder.  They join a ship of proletarian men, all to be possibly sacrificed to the god of profit by a silver-tongued, silver-haired gent in a frock coat living in a large row house in Hull.  Of course! 

A northern fijord in Norway

The rich and the bosses are dealt hard times in films lately.  If these movie portrayals are any indication, their number is coming up soon.  After all, the CIA and the U.S. military don’t control all the movies made in the world.

The brutality contrasts with the quiet and somewhat happy hunting life of the local Inuit, who help the Europeans, then are punished for that.  A Christian reverend has found himself a ‘cause’ – to ‘civilize’ the Inuit.  He has built a wooden hut in the middle of nowhere to do so. These money-grubbing English, with their industrial scale whaling and seal-clubbing, their punitive religion, their violence, seem to be the least civilized – except in technology. 

There is a great scene of a pagan May Day in Hull; a not so great pub fight in a Shetland port, a polar bear playing the role of a protector.  A bloody seal hunt and the butchering of a whale is so real it makes you wonder if they really did kill those animals in the process of filming. I understand it was CGI.  Haigh framed the seal hunt as part of history, but commercial seal hunting is still carried out en mass in places like Canada.  Sumner, the addicted ‘intellectual,’ is constantly reminded of his questionable status as an Irishman.  The film was actually made only 22 miles from the North Pole due to global warming, as they had to continue northwards to find a suitable frozen environment. This is a howling trip to the North that you will not forget.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box in upper left to investigate our 15 year archive:  “The North is not the Mid-West!” “Northland,” “Life Under the Jolly Roger,” “Seaspiracy,” “All is Lost,” “Kolyma Tales,” “Polar Star.”

The Cultural Marxist

January 18, 2022

Into the Archive Again

 “The Plot to Kill King – The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.” by William Pepper, 2018

Forget fake murder mysteries.  Forgot fake drama.  Forget unsourced conspiracies, conjectures and magical thinking.  This is the real stuff. This is evidence.  This is the definitive description of the victory of the security state in the 1960s.  The murder solved, after almost 50 years of legal trials, depositions, affidavits, testimony and just plain common sense.  The FBI, the military, the Dixie Mafia, the power structure of Memphis, the corporate media, even SCLC informants – all involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

After all, who had motive, who had opportunity, who had the means, who had the power to kill a leader of the black community that was fast becoming a national and international anti-war leader and a fighter for the rights of labor – in short an anti-capitalist?   And then to stage an extensive and long running cover-up?  Some sad petty criminal?  A ‘fall guy”?  Another patsy? A guy who was at a gas station when the fatal shot was fired?  A man who declared his innocence for 30 years? Think about it.  J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, was the person who most hated MLK.  Hoover and the government considered MLK a 'communist.'  And 'the only good communist is a dead one,' as the quaint phrase went.  The trail of FBI break-ins, surveillance, media plants, disinformation and plots against King, tracked by even the corporate media, are only the tip of this iceberg.  If you had a real police investigation, Hoover would be suspect Numero Uno.  But alas, few want to go there. Below water in the coldest part of the iceberg is a scoped rifle in the hands of a racist, macho Memphis police officer, crouched in the bushes across from the Lorraine Motel.  With backup from military intelligence, the mayor and police chief of Memphis, the New Orleans mob, the chief doctor at the hospital, FBI handlers and FBI-influenced media and authors which to this day retail the flimsy ‘official’ story.

Here is the truth.  Searing as it is and instructive as it is to anyone who challenges the U.S. power structure.  Learn and be forewarned.  As Pepper says, “…with respect to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., no act, no matter how heinous, by any public official is unthinkable.” 

THE OFFICIAL STORY

Pepper initially believed the official story about James Earl Ray being the assassin.  However, after interviewing him years later in prison, he changed his mind.  The man was quiet, believable and not a bigot.  This book is the story of trying to prove the innocence of Ray, and since the state had no interest in doing that, Pepper had to instead prove who really did it.  In the process, familiar break-ins, bribes, stolen information, murders, planted and distorted news stories, legal maneuvers, frightened or planted witnesses, bought judges, intimidation and years-long FBI efforts to silence Pepper followed.  As people told him time and time again, ‘You don’t know who you are dealing with here.”

Throughout the book, I tracked 112 facts that contradict the official version of the assassination, which was based on the scanty evidence of one very drunk ‘eyewitness,’ a bag containing the wrong gun and some personal effects, and a poor and obstructed ‘shooter location.’  Ray initially ‘confessed’ under heavy intimidation, then quickly reversed his plea, and that was all the state needed to have him die in jail years later, although he was supposed to be eliminated quickly.  The ‘fall guy’ strategy worked to a T, using only 4 falsities.

Pepper’s investigation included a civil trial years later in which Lloyd Jowers, the City of Memphis and the Federal Government were declared responsible for the murder by a jury. Only one person from the local press covered the trial, almost completing a news blackout.  After the trial, it was attacked as a ‘fraud’ by FBI–influenced journalists who had not attended. At this trial, the King family worked to clear Ray’s name, as they too had come to believe that MLK was killed by the government with the help of the mob.

THE PRINCIPALS

Pepper, in a prior 1995 book “Orders to Kill,” named the assassin as Earl Clark, a sharpshooter and lieutenant in the Memphis Police Department (MPD.)  After getting further evidence, in this book Pepper names Frank Strausser, another MPD marksman, as the actual shooter, with Earl Clark kneeling by his side.  Lloyd Jowers, mob-connected owner of nearby Jim’s Grill, handled the rifle and payoff as part of the killing. The Mayor of Memphis, Henry Loeb; MPD chief and former FBI agent Frank Hollomon and Frank Liberto, local Dixie Mafia boss, all organized the hit locally.  Chief deputy to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover Chuck Tolson was their liaison with the FBI.  The FBI procured the weapon in Oregon, and oversaw Ray’s handler, a New Orleans mafia gunrunner named Raul Coelho.  The FBI broke Ray out of prison prior to the assassination as part of the set-up.  They then tried to kill Ray in prison after he was convicted, including setting up another prison break so they could hunt him down. This was only stopped at the last minute by the intervention of the Governor of the state.

Military intelligence groups – including Special Forces Alpha 184 - were involved, triangulating King from high rooftops around the Lorraine.  A military Psy Ops team photographed the killing from across the street on the roof of a fire station and their photos caught the real assassin. One of the many witnesses who saw Earl Clark jump down from the bushes after the shot and get into a nearby MPD car was killed that same evening by a local mob enforcer, Chess Butler.  Even the head surgeon at the hospital which had been pre-chosen to transport King, St. Josephs Hospital, a Dr. Breen Bland, was connected to the plotters and made sure King did not survive the emergency room.   The plot went according to plan.

The saddest and most controversial aspects of this plot are that there is some evidence that 3 people in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) group accompanying King to Memphis were also helping the FBI.  One of them, Reverend Kyles, was the one that knocked on King’s door right before 6:00 PM, then moved far down the balcony away from King’s room.  Another was … Jesse Jackson, who according to testimony, arranged to have King’s room changed from a secure location on the first floor interior of the motel up to a room on the exposed balcony. This is an odd move, but not conclusive. The man kneeling over King right after the kill shot was connected to the government, checking to see if he was dead.  Jackson was on the right-wing of the SCLC and might have opposed King’s widening opposition to the Vietnam war, labor support and a pledge to bring thousands of poor people to Washington D.C. – something which terrified the ruling elite.

The First Book

DEJA VU

Anyone reading this book will remark that the whole cast of characters and modus operandi seems similar to the hits on John Kennedy in Dallas and Robert Kennedy in LA.  A southern city, the FBI, the mob, local police, the withdrawal of protection, a patsy, operating room manipulation, a shoddy cover-up, many bad facts, dead witnesses, a suppliant media, intimidation all around.  Interestingly, this book indicates that Hoover started a deathly ‘Prayer List’ that included both Kennedys and later King.  This was after the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, as the Kennedys had turned against McCarthy, Hoover’s ally.  Witnesses in this book even saw mobster Jack Ruby and gunrunner Raul Coelho together in New Orleans.  Another close witness quotes LBJ as saying that he would never be humiliated again 'by that bastard,' a few days before JFK was killed.   Pepper did not want to go there, which makes sense for this case. 

Another dark secret is that the racist Mayor Loeb wanted to lure MLK to Memphis and to do that, he pushed the sanitation workers into a strike by ignoring their demands.  The crushing of two black sanitation workers in a garbage truck while they hid from the rain was also intentional, so as to create even more of a crisis. 

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

This is a description of how it actually happened.  The most direct shot to the balcony of the Lorraine was not from a cramped high rooming house bathroom with tree branches in front (as the official story goes), but from bushes right across the street, on top of a wall higher than the Lorraine balcony.  A number of witnesses confirmed the shot and activity came from there. The shooter, Strausser, a beefy bigot and thumper, practiced shooting at the MPD range all morning.  He parked at the nearby fire station, then went around into the empty lot. All normal police protection had been withdrawn from King.   With Strausser were Clark and Jowers - the latter got muddy pants from kneeling in the bushes.  A backup shooter was in the rooming house, along with the military teams on the other buildings.  James Earl Ray himself had driven to a garage to get a tire on his white Mustang fixed and knew nothing of what was going on.  Witnesses say the bundle with the decoy gun was dropped in the doorway of Canipe Amusement company next to Jim’s Grill right before 6 PM, by either Raul or one of the local mafia fixers by the name of Adkins. 

Just after 6 PM, Strausser shot King in the mouth with one shot.  Jowers immediately ran into his café, Jim’s Grill, and was seen by a witness as he brought the death weapon in and broke it down.  Clark jumped down from the bushes, ran up the street and got in an MPD car, and was seen by many.  Strausser left size 13 footprints in the muddy earth, and probably got away through the back lot.  The next day the police ordered the bushes cut down and trees trimmed, contravening any crime scene methods and making the supposed ‘shot’ from the rooming house unobstructed.  The police traced the rooming house registration and the bundle to Ray.  All other evidence has been ignored, destroyed or downplayed by Congress, law enforcement and the criminal courts.  The plot went off – the only hitches being Ray, Pepper and the truth. A ‘pay log’ for the plot, with Raul’s name on it, was later found, but the government could not admit Raul even existed.  It is actually amazing how sloppy and open the whole thing was, but they figured they were immune.  Pepper ultimately produced 70 witnesses that contradicted this government ‘open secret.'

This book is required reading on MLK Day or any other.  The gauzy “I Have A Dream” media representation of King trotted out once each year hides a far more radical reality, a “Christ-like” leader who was becoming a threat to the whole U.S. system - and was crucified by that same system. 

Other reviews on this topic, below:  “”Orders to Kill,” “They Killed Our President,” “The Strange Death of Paul Wellstone,” “Finks,” “The Devils Chessboard,” “American Made” and “Kill the Messenger.”  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

First published November 2, 2018

Now January 17, 2022, MLK Day

Pograms or Programs?

 “The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution” Leon Trotsky, 1938

One of the greatest problems of socialist activity is to link the day to day demands, reform demands or minimum programs that exist in any struggle to a longer game.  The ultimate goal is to increase the strength of the proletariat and weaken the capitalists to the point where a social revolution will not be some distant goal, but an immediate possibility.  Demands that play a role as a transmission belt, so to speak.

Some rely on passive waiting for a catastrophe – a war, an economic depression, environmental collapse, fascism – that might make a social revolution inevitable.  Certainly these things are in the cards. Others spend their time chasing every cause that arises, without a perspective.  As we know, the collapse of capital is not inevitable, even in its direst hour.  This is why the conscious use of a transitional program, revolutionary demands or ‘revolutionary reforms,’ as others have said, is useful.  They take longer strides towards the real solution.  The strategy of a ‘mass line’ attempts to do this, but it doesn’t have a transitional component that I am aware of.

I’m going to take a look at the original 1938 work that became known as the Transitional Program (TP) to see if it is still relevant, if it needs to be adjusted, if it would work in the U.S. context.  The TP document was adopted in1938 at the founding of the 4^th International, titled “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the 4^th International.”  As we know, capital did not die, though it was significantly weakened in this period.  The 4^th International, and the currents that came from it, now exist as weak reflections of its former self.  Assassinations, the downturns in the labor movement in core capitalist countries, the prevalence of social-democratic or Stalinist solutions at the time, the ostensible victories against colonialism and the collapse of the USSR all played a role.  These components have affected the whole Left, not just the FI.  But presently there exists a somewhat new world context for the Marxist Left … 

SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC DEMANDS?

In the U.S, reform socialist Bernie Sanders and the social-democratic DSA, along with others, have come up with their own versions of ‘somewhat’ transitional demands in the U.S. You might consider the best known “Medicare For All” as some kind of a ‘transitional’ demand in the U.S.; just as are “The Green New Deal” (GND), “Free College,” “Jobs for All” and “Keep the Oil/Gas/Coal In the Ground.”  Two of them limit privatization and benefit the working class economically – in the medical industry and in education. One, the GND, creates competition for a key U.S. industry, while attempting to provide new jobs for those workers unemployed by its diminution.  Jobs for all creates economic security for every proletarian.  The last impacts every carbon industry in the U.S. and world – auto, oil, gas, plastics, fertilizer, transport, agriculture, cement - and indirectly ‘might’ encourage ‘degrowth’ and a break in the commodity economy.  No doubt gaining any of them would be a large advance in the present shitty U.S. context.  I’m not going to mention socialized day care, debt relief, shorter hours - 32 hours work for 40 hours pay, reining in the Pentagon or other issues.

Given the liberal pablum and aging clichés spewed by the Democratic Party leadership or the propaganda media, these demands seem radical, even though most people support them.  For the working class they are not radical at all, as normal self-interest would lead you to agree with them.  So what are their limitations, or better yet, how might they be used by a wing of capital?  Are they transitional, utopian, limited or perhaps somewhat capitalistic?

Medicare for All would catch up the U.S. to the Nordics, Europe and a number of other countries, while weakening the capitalist medical industry.  The Green New Deal is actually the perspective of a majority wing of the international capitalist class, which is orienting towards an explosion in ‘green’ technology to revitalize capitalist industry, much as railroads, the steam engine, the automobile or the computer once did.  Of course, minus the part about providing unemployed workers jobs or reining in carbon corporations.  Free college or cheaper college would also bring the U.S. up to the level of a number of other capitalist countries. Jobs for all does strike at the heart of the capitalist economy, as it needs a reserve army of cheap labor – illegal, desperate or unskilled – to maintain profits and pressure on the employed.  It also blunts privatization, as the government would do the hiring.  Keeping the coal/oil/gas in the ground is somewhat similar to the GND, except more radical, as it pushes the time envelope for adaptation and prevention of catastrophic global climate change.  Yet without putting the carbon companies under public and workers control, the only avenues to achieve this are consumer behavior, civil disobedience, legal challenges, tax and corporate welfare changes and market ‘competition’ … all of which are slow, incremental and narrow. 

The other issue is that as world police-man, the U.S. cannot afford social-democracy.  The U.S. is based on imperial violence and war industries.  Becoming ‘social-democratic’ would almost definately require it to relinquish its dominant global role in the world capitalist system as arms producer, enforcer and economic controller. 

TRANSITIONAL DEMANDS

In a way, these demands would bring the U.S. closer to the level of social-capitalist development in the Nordics, Europe, Canada and certain other countries.  The actual reality is that any gains in these countries are always being undermined by capitalist forces in each one.  Look at the U.K. which is slowly privatizing the NHS, just as Medicare here in the U.S. is being privatized through Advantage© plans and ‘direct contracting.’ In France, it is pensions that are being cut.  Name your country, it is going on across the world.  I.E. every single ‘advance’ is liable to be reversed – quickly or slowly – as long as capital remains in control of society. Nor do these demands address some issues like imperialist war, exploitation and debt.  This is why the real ‘long game’ is social revolution.  

So what does the 'old' and mysterious original Transitional Program say?  Here is my list from the text:

    1.   Sliding scale of wages and hours.

    2.   Seek leadership in the trade unions; create labor organizations when unions are inadequate; break with the conservative trade-union apparatus when it betrays.

    3.   Factory committees.    

    4.   Open the books.

    5.   Workers control of industry.

    6.   Public works to end unemployment.

    7.   Expropriation and nationalization of certain industrial sectors.

    8.   Expropriation and nationalization of banks.

    9.   Create a public national bank.

    10.               Union defense guards; a workers’ militia.

    11.               Sit-down strikes.

    12.               Alliance of workers and farmers.

    13.               Nationalization of land; collectivization of agriculture.

    14.               Struggle against imperialism and war.

    15.               Workers and farmers government.

    16.               Soviet democracy, growing out of factory committees and other forms of dual power.

·  For capitalist ‘developing’ countries, the TP also advocates agrarian revolution and national independence.

·        For fascist-run countries, the TP advocates, of course, democratic demands but also a united front against fascism, not a popular front with liberal capitalists.  All this is very difficult in a fascist state. 

·        For the deformed or degenerated workers’ states (the USSR at the time), the TP advocates a political revolution against the bureaucracy; legalization of pro-Soviet parties; a real planned economy; opposition to secret diplomacy; workers’ control of enterprises; right to strike; a united front with the bureaucratic layer against capitalist counter-revolution; Soviet democracy.

·        For general political/theoretical struggle, the TP advocates: against liberalism, pacifism, social democracy, sectarianism, Stalinism, anarchism.  The TP advocates turning to women workers and youth under its banner.

 It is a somewhat complete program, but a bit dated.  Let’s briefly look at the 16 points:

#1 - A sliding scale of wages and hours is based on a rise in unemployment and a rise in prices, so the ‘slide’ would compensate by wages going up and hours going down with the same pay, which would provide jobs for the unemployed. (Similar to the demands of 32 for 40.)

#2 – Union points.  Seem logical and has happened already in various forms.

#3 - Factory committees (and warehouse, office, mill, retail, transport) are seen as an incipient form of dual power and a training ground to run a planned economy and businesses.  Quite advanced for the U.S. at this moment, especially given the weakness of the left in industry.  Best to call them ‘workplace’ committees.  

#4 – Open the books could be a demand by any union in negotiations with a corporation or company.  It would also apply to government bailouts.

#5 – Workers’ control is a demand somewhat similar to cooperatives, workers’ ownership or actual ‘control’ by a factory or office or warehouse or mill or mine or retail store committee of their working conditions.  The union-based Labor Party had a demand close to this, regarding ‘democracy on the job,’ but this goes farther.

#6 – Public works was partly done in the U.S. during the depression.  Still applicable.

#7- #8 – Nationalization and workers control would actually stop criminal corporations and banks in their tracks.  Still relevant, but a big move in the U.S. context presently, though it is becoming more common to advocate.  In practice it happened during the 2008-2009 crisis for the banking and auto industries, but they didn’t call it that, nor was there any ‘workers’ control’.

#9 – A public bank has become a common demand, especially through the Post Office.

#10 – Union defense guards existed in the 1930s.  With the rise, again, of fascist militias and union-breaking in the present U.S., a workers’ militia is not out of the question at all.  We’ve seen small community and political examples of it, though not yet connected to unions.

#11 – Sit down strikes are uncommon, but still an excellent tactic to prevent scabbing.  It promotes the understanding that the workers 'own' the workplace.

#12 – An alliance of workers and farmers sounds good in some countries.  In the U.S. many farmers are now multi-millionaires, vote Republican, have huge debts to banks and owe their business to some Ag conglomerate contract, but still protect wealth.  So perhaps an ‘alliance of workers and small farmers’ might be more appropriate.

#13 – Nationalization of land would end rising land prices and be an aid to new and small farmers, cooperatives and communes. Nationalization might also help with city gentrification, as cities are basically run by landlords and real estate developers.  There is no primary demand related to housing in the TP, only in the text.  On collectivization, studies and experience have shown that small scale farming can be very productive, preferably under cooperative and agro-ecological methods.  So ‘collectivization’ might be reserved for the many large farms where farmworkers now greatly outnumber owners.

#14 – Being against imperialism and war is up to date.  Some things never change.

#15 – ‘Workers and farmers government’ as an immediate transitional demand would best operate when dual power has arisen already, so it’s a bit for the long end now.  ‘Farmers’ might be replaced by ‘small farmers’ or some other middle-class entity, like small shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, contract workers or professionals.  This TP demand is a non-sectarian way to bring other sectors of the population over to social revolution.

#16 – ‘Soviet’ is a Russian word, so in the U.S. we’d use assemblies or councils as the form of dual power, growing out of workplace and neighborhood committees, leading to a workers government based on assemblies / councils in workplaces and neighborhoods. 

There is nothing about climate change in the original TP; housing is in the text but not as a larger demand except in the context of land; culture is not an issue, nor is the media or the internet; surveillance is not discussed; nor are the public police or secret police; nor migration except in the context of internationalism; nor the larger issues of racism/ sexism, etc. except as related in the text. 

A modernized TP seems to be necessary, as capital has become more complex, older and more vicious than it was even in 1938.    

The Pathfinder edition of the TP / ”Death Agony of Capitalism of Capitalism…” has introductory articles by Joseph Hansen and George Novack of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party; discussions with Trotsky; a program for Black Liberation; a strategy for revolutionary youth, pre-conference documents - all related to the original TP.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive: “The Socialist Challenge,” “Levers of Power,” “The Struggle for Power,” “Lenin’s Last Struggle,” “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?” (Zizek); “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” (Cohen); “Viking Economics,” “Why the U.S. Will Never Be a Social Democracy,” or the words ‘transitional’ or ‘program.’

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

January 15, 2022  (Middle of the Winter!)