Periodical Series: 'Liberty' Bound

 “Marxism versus Libertarianism - Capitalism’s Free Market Fanatics,” by Adam Booth, “In Defense of Marxism,” #36, January 2022

If ‘neo-liberalism’ has a sort of ideology, it is borrowed from the writings of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian School, who made it their life’s work to attack Marxism and socialism.  Libertarianism provides a shabby ‘line’ for the Republican Party and also many Democrats, first in economics and later applied to the cultural field.

If you wonder why capitalist government help is decried as the ‘slippery slope to socialism’ it comes from Libertarianism.  Any planning, even for environmental catastrophe, is attacked for the same reason. The fanatic red-baiting that results from this is common, especially from Republicans.  A mild form of Keynesianism is its capitalist rival, mostly coming from Democrats.  

When trillions of dollars were pumped into the economy by the U.S. government during the 2008 crash and the Pandemic crash, as long as the lion’s share of that money went to capitalists, no one made a peep.  The military budget is similarly immune from charges of ‘socialism.’  A true libertarian method would have resulted in a full economic collapse and the large capitalists know this.  ‘Creative destruction’ on that scale was not appreciated. These events revealed what class is in power - again - the top international capitalists.

Booth takes apart the various pathetic arguments by libertarians, so this article is a view into the real battles being waged in front of us.  Key libertarian texts are The Road to Serfdom, Collectivist Economic Planning and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis.

     1.   Libertarian dogma maintains that if every individual pursues his own rational ends, the whole society will benefit.  In reality, this kind of ‘individual rationality’ has led to widespread social irrationalism.

     2.   The first libertarian thesis was the ‘efficient market hypothesis’ which takes us back to Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ and ‘Say’s Law.’  The latter oddly posits that ‘supply creates demand,’ and that if you provide any product, it will have customers.  As a result, the economy will run perfectly.

     3.   Libertarianism, while basing itself on some of Smith and David Ricardo’s ideas, opposed the labor theory of value, which Smith and Ricardo supported.

     4.   Fin de siècle Vienna under the Austro-Hungarian empire became the base for reactionary ideas to oppose the socialist movements of the time.  Wittenstein, Klimt and Freud rubbed shoulders with reactionaries like Ernst Mach (a target of Lenin’s), Karl Popper, Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, Friedrich Weiser, Carl Menger, ‘logical positivism’ and later, the Austrian School.

     5.   To oppose the ‘labor theory of value’ - which had roots going back to Aristotle – along with Marx's refinements embodied in ‘socially necessary labor time’ and ‘labor power’, the libertarians proposed Marginal Utility Theory (MUT) along with people like W.S. Jevons.  It was based on producers having isolated consumer exchanges on what Booth calls a desert island, not a real society… “a scaled-up version of a barter economy.”  Money, businesses and the market (i.e. complexity) play no role in their tiny abstract scenarios. 

     6.   For Marx, the source of real value is labor time and power, (along with nature, which is ignored by Booth), while supply and demand play subsidiary roles.  MUT only looks at prices.  For MUT, the consumer is the real source of value.  Consequently, value becomes a subjective category, an opinion, not an objective fact.  Consumer-based theories like this hide the role of production, surplus value and profits, as well as real human needs. 

     7.   Marx understood ‘use value’ to be embodied in a commodity or it would never have ‘exchange value’ and be sold.  A $5,000 motorcycle that cannot be sold is worthless under capitalism, even though it has use value and embodies labor and raw materials. The same goes for food. Libertarian “utility” for a consumer is subjective and qualitative, not objective and materially-grounded.  Must I have the latest iPhone? Or super-yacht?  Toilet golf?

     8.   Mises, in his theory of ‘praxeology,’ believed that economic laws were ‘timeless’ – not tied to historical development of societies.  This reveals the idealism inherent in libertarianism.  Other libertarian theorists use abstract and isolated examples of exchange as ‘proof’ of their theories.  As Booth points out, they seek to hide how capital functions, not to discover how it actually works.

     9.   To oppose socialism, the libertarians started the ‘socialist calculation debate’ – insisting that society was too complex to plan.  They oppose all forms of planning. What this actually reveals is that capitalism was too complex for them to understand.

     10.               Unfortunately for them, huge multi-national capitalist corporations like Wal-Mart, Amazon, GM, etc. are planned down to the ‘T.’ Even small businesses plan.  When Sears introduced internal competition within the firm, it led to bankruptcy.  It is only the outside general economy that is chaotic, irrational and unplanned.  This is a natural consequence of capital.     

Reviewed Below

     11.               Some libertarians use Trotsky’s taken-out-of-context remarks about the Soviet economy and bureaucratic methods to bolster their case.  Marx understood that under the workers’ state / dictatorship of the proletariat, markets, prices and supply/demand would not magically disappear overnight.  Trotsky wanted to introduce workers’ control of planning, not top-down bureaucratic methods, to slowly eliminate that market.

     12.               Libertarians oppose any state intervention in the economy.  Idiocy unparalleled.

     13.               Libertarians believe that monopoly or oligopoly is not a result of normal capitalist functioning (as history has shown) but based on government policy decisions. Again, against all experience.  As Engels said “Freedom of competition changes into its very opposite …”  Monopoly or oligopoly.

     14.               Libertarians have no theory of capitalist crises that happen on a regular basis.  They blame it on too generous credit by governments, not the underlying functioning of capital and falling profits.

     15.               Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, gave up trying to make an economic case for ‘free markets’ and instead made a moral, political case for ‘freedom,’ ‘choice’ and ‘individuality.’  He said that any government planning or involvement inevitably leads to ‘totalitarianism.’ (There’s that useful word ‘totalitarianism’ again…)  This is one of the ideological sources of the culture war.

     16.               Engel’s pointed out that actual freedom is based on an “insight into necessity,” not utopian nonsense about being above material reality, nature, human needs or social reality.  I.E. there should be no freedom to starve, be unemployed, homeless, sick, uneducated, paid poorly, have no free time, be over-policed, in solitary, living in toxic conditions or among the war-dead.  As they joke goes, we are free to live under a bridge.

     17.               Keynsianism is distinct from libertarianism in that it seeks to partially restrain rentier capitalism and laissez-faire.  But they both share the same goal – they are two bourgeois factions whose main interest is maintaining capitalism, profiteering and the dominance of the billionaires.  The ruling class factions mix their methods as they see fit, through the mediation of the bourgeois parties, but the goal is the same.  As Pelosi and Warren said clearly, ‘we’re all capitalists here.’

Booth, probably following the line of his organization, the IMT, says that a workers’ state with the goal of socialism and communism will ‘increase production.’  Given the material and environmental limits the world has reached, this old position needs to be refined.  Abstract statements based on something written 150 years ago will not suffice.  Other than that, Booth does a good overview of libertarianism, which is a strong animating ideology in parts of the U.S. ruling class and middle-class, and increasingly in Europe.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive using these terms:  “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart,” “Rich People Things,” “Who is Ron Paul?” “The Making of the English Working Class,” “Marx and Human Nature,” “Mean Girl – Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed,” “Libertarian Atheism versus Liberal Religionism,” “To Serve God and Wal-Mart,” “The Cult of the Constitution,” “Anarchism and Its Aspirations,” "AntiTrust."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

March 30, 2022

Disappearing Socialist Sisu

 “The Nordic Theory of Everything – In Search of a Better Life,” by Anu Partenen, 2016

Finland was just declared the ‘happiest country on earth’ for the 5^th time.  So this review is appropriate.  I’m part Finn – my mother’s first name was Ainu, and her family settled on the Minnesota Iron Range along with many other Finns.  I’ve been to Helsinki and enjoyed it.  The author, Anu Partenen, moved to the U.S. from Helsinki to work as a journalist at a prominent business publication in New York.  She came from a middle-class family, as her mother owns a dental business and her father is something equivalent.  Before she came, she naively understood the U.S. in glowing, entrepreneurial terms through films and TV shows like “Sex and the City and commentators like Thomas Friedman. Her take on the differences between the socially backward U.S. and the ‘human’ nature of Finland is colored by this middle-class perspective.

I’ll start with her key ‘theory’ – the “Nordic Theory of Love.” She borrowed this from a Swedish academic Lars Trägårdh.  To introduce it, Partenen heralds how tiny Finland fought communism and Russia – once in 1919 and again in WWII for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ - as if no U.S. readers know Finnish history and will buy this rhetorical pixie dust.  She ignores the fact that the Bolsheviks gave Finland its national independence in 1917. She skips over the fact that that there was a civil war between capital and labor or that the White terror after 1919’s Finish civil war led to the execution of between 8,400 and 14,600 working-class Finns.  Many other proletarians lost their jobs, homes or where otherwise brutalized. 

Or that Finland’s government allied with the Nazi regime in WWII.  Ooops!  Or that Finland and the rest of the Nordic countries – Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, etc. – had huge Social Democratic, Socialist and Communist currents that later created those ‘lovely’ social-democracies through class struggle.  Those parties and unions still play a role. Responding to typical anti-communism, she denigrates the word socialism and never mentions social-democracy, unions or capitalism.  Even Helsinki’s ruling Green Party is disappeared. This is why she needs to paper over history with a theory of ‘love.’ 

The Nordic ‘theory of love’ says that the best way to enhance individualism, family, happiness, creativity and life is to remove the dependence of citizens on corporations, and instead insure that every human basic is pretty-much guaranteed. The emphasis on ‘individualism’ is to rebut rightist concerns, but also highlight how un-free people actually are who have to worry about human necessities day in and day out. This is not far different from Marx’s point that the goal under socialism/communism is to reach the ‘realm of freedom’ from the realm of impoverished material necessity, which can then lead to the flowering of all individuals.  Certainly under Nordic social-democratic capitalism this has temporarily happened in the social realm - though labor exploitation, classes and capital’s dominance in the workplace remains inside the country.  What is going on ‘outside’ is another matter.

Nevertheless the ‘Nordic system’ would be a huge improvement for the U.S.  Partenen calls the U.S. “living in the past,” “pre-modern,” “backward,” “antiquated,” “old-fashioned,” “out of date,” “anachronistic” and “archaic” time and time again.  

The reason social-democratic tenets will not work in the U.S. or world-wide I’ve gone into on prior reviews, so I’ll skip it this time.  But it revolves around the concepts of imperialism and environmentalism.

The Good Stuff

Partenen describes the large pluses of Nordic social-democracy … errr, ‘love’ … compared to the backward U.S.  She rhapsodies over the wonderful treatment of individuals within families, unlike the U.S., which in one line she calls ‘barbaric’ for their treatment of families. Free to very cheap prices for pregnancy and pre-natal medical care; universal support for early baby and childhood development; generous parental leave for both parents; inexpensive, widespread and quality day care; jobs protected after births for long periods – all show a concern for individuals, family and children far above the ‘you’re on your own, dipshit’ attitude of U.S. social policy. All these Nordic / Finnish practices are universal, not means tested.  This is key in lessening scapegoating, classism and hostility.  As she puts it, “Americans” don’t even know how poorly they have it.

Then we have gender equality, where the Nordic states always rate in the top 10, while the U.S. comes in the middle to late 20s.  The only difference is more ‘super mom’ CEO’s in the U.S., but re female averages, no contest.  Paid paternal leave – even ‘daddy only’ leave - is offered in Finland and if you don’t take it, you lose it.  So most fathers in Finland are heavily involved in their children’s lives from birth, doing it on their own for at least 3 months while their wife works.  Partenen cites California as attempting longer maternal leave, along with some paternal, but their budding parameters are nowhere near Finland.

Then there is education.   The egregious primary and secondary U.S. system is dumbed down, ill-paid and defunded, while it’s ‘theory of education’ has stalled for years around memorization and rote tests.  Inequality is rife, poverty and class play almost determinate roles in outcomes, and the ‘fixes’ make it worse.  U.S. colleges, trade schools and other post-high school programs are extremely expensive.  The U.S. ranks in the 20s and 30s on world-wide education rankings, with science at #38!  This figures in such a religion-saturated society. 

On the other hand Finland has been in the top 6 for math, science and reading for years… without standardized testing and little homework.  It is studied across the world. It has almost no private schools, no charter schools, no class-stratified school systems, as nearly all schools in every town and neighborhood perform about the same.  The goal is not some phony vision of market-based ‘excellence’ – the goal that transformed the old Finnish school system, according to Partenen, was … equity.  Unequal societies have the lowest educational achievements, so this concept of equity goes beyond the schools in Nordic social-democracies.

Add to that a conception of childhood as ‘a time to play,’ not to be drilled in some skill as a 2 years old, and you get a sense of the difference.  Partenen calls it “free range” child-rearing. Teaching in Finland is a respected job where every teacher is required to have an MA, unlike the shabby qualifications in the U.S. or the non-qualifications for “Teach For America.”  There are no sports teams in local schools, just lots of physical education.  The schools are funded by universal national and local sources, not property taxes, as the latter reflect unequal cities, suburbs and towns in the U.S.  Results from skills tests in technology, reading and math on university students show the mediocre U.S. to rate behind the Nordics, in spite of the small effect of the pampered and elite Ivy League. 

Social Democratic Party of Finland

Then there is health care. The criminal nature of the U.S. system of market-based, profit-based health care has been belabored for years, so I won’t go into it too much.  She has a long chapter on the differences.  The U.S. has a chaotic mixture of 4 different types of health care, with businesses and for-profit medical firms totally in charge of your health for most of your life!  Partenen is astonished at the high deductibles, co-pays, monthly payments and absolutely cock-eyed variety of variable quality health insurance in the U.S.  In Finland it is simple, cheap or free and universal.  This leads to a much healthier population, which seems to be the real point. In 2011, she cites 91,000 more U.S. citizens dying of treatable conditions compared to the best of 15 other industrialized nations, France.  The U.S. ranked last on health and cost metrics in this study and does on others.

Next is what Partenen calls ‘the well-being state,” as she'd never heard of the term 'welfare state.'  She was taxed at around 30% for her white-collar income.  For this she got free or cheap health care, could get monthly child payments, free quality daycare, quality primary and secondary education; free university and grad school, along with generous sick pay, 5-week paid vacations and well-funded parental and disability leaves.  She concurs it is a bargain. She thinks the state in Finland is actually far more modest and low-key than in the U.S., unlike rightist clichés.  Property taxes in Finland are nowhere as high as in the U.S.  Finn tax forms are very simple.  And on and on.  This fits with her theme that individuals are stronger when basics are universal. 

Partenen believes in meritocracy as a good liberal, so she has a chapter on ‘opportunity’ – which is higher in Finland and the Nordics than in the U.S.  As has been obvious for years, class permeability has become much more difficult in the U.S., while poverty has sky-rocketed.  The mentally ill, drug addicted and homeless don’t roam Finnish cities.  According to Partenen, there are shelters, public housing and institutions in Finland that take care of these issues.  She met rich New Yorkers and trust fund babies and ‘artists’ in that burg, and realized that New York reminded her of a “19^th century banana republic” due to its extreme class disparities.  However she avoids the term class, as she has been appropriately trained by liberal U.S. culture. She does not discuss gentrification in the U.S. or housing in Finland, nor anything about agriculture, food or the environment.

Partenen goes on to cite a long list of Nordic firms that have become world players in technology, cars, software, furniture, toys, wood production and design to show it’s not a slouch in the capitalism or innovation department.  She ends with the cultural equivalent of how Finland tells everyone that ‘they are not special’ – an unheard of sentiment in the egoist, narcissist and me-driven U.S.

CONCLUSION  

This book was praised by the NYT, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, Oprah Magazine, NY Post, Seattle Times, Robert Reich and Foreign Affairs.  It is mostly an argument to convince Republican and Democratic Party rightists, centrists and even liberals that ‘love’ is the answer - though she has no real solutions to U.S. problems except parroting liberal Democratic Party talking points and policy tweaks.  This is because she really doesn’t understand how the Nordics got the way they did, or even what forces are trying to unravel them as we speak. It certainly wasn’t through a surfeit of ‘love!’  

The Times praises her for puncturing the myth that the Nordics are ‘socialist.’   And yet this book had absolutely no impact on the leadership of the Democratic Party or the profile of social-democracy in the U.S. media.  Perhaps it is that while trying to suck up to “American” verities, she made them a laughing-stock.  A valuable book for those who are unfamiliar with how a modern social-democracy works, written in a chatty, personal, journalistic style, but which purposely ignores the real class-struggle roots of present Finnish or Nordic societies. 

P.S. - Now that Finland is considering to be part of NATO (Don't do it, Finland!), it reveals that Finland is not isolated from war or international issues.  This will impact their domestic situation.    

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive with these terms:  “Viking Economics – How the Scandinavians Got it Right,” “Puntilla and His Hired Man” (Brecht); “Lenin in Helsinki, Finland,” “Redbreast,” “Bordertown,” “Red Star” (Bogdanov), ”Who Killed Olaf Palme?” “Why the U.S. Will Never Be a Social Democracy,” “Sami Blood,” “Trapped” or the words ‘social democracy’ or ‘social democrat.’  

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog

March 22, 2022

Historians Agree!

 American Myth

One of the first American myths is that of the Revolution, starting in 1775 and finishing with the Constitution of 1787.  It was followed by a long line of Amendments which ‘fixed’ the originalist Constitution.  And evidently, it still needs ‘fixing’ 235 years later.  Can we say antiquarian?

The Ethiopian Brigade of the British Army in North America

The Revolution was fought for freedom from the British monarchy and colonial state by a new strata of local mercantile and plantation owners.  Very clear and somewhat progressive event.  However, a few panels in the new Smithsonian African-American Museum of History (the Bird’s Nest!) in Washington D.C. put a dark spin on that story.  The 1619 Project does the same.  The panels depict enslaved people flocking to the British lines to gain their freedom.  They also depict Crispus Attacks dying to oppose the Brits, and some dark-skinned folks joining patriot forces, even though their General Washington was a slave-owner.

INSURRECTION WITHIN THE INSURRECTION

Washington was a harsh plantation owner, officer and large land speculator who after the Revolution removed native Americans from ‘his’ tracts of land over the Appalachians.  This is all well known. He initially refused to free slaves to allow them to fight on the side of the Continental Army, though urged by a man close to him.  In November 1775 Washington decreed that “neither negroes, nor boys, nor old men” could enlist in the Continental Army.  Indentured servants could supposedly join in exchange for severance of their contracts.  Not sure if this actually happened. No one mentioned women - and native Americans didn’t exist in the polity.

The 1619 Project, a patriotic and somewhat class-blind history of slavery and colorism in the U.S., pointed out that “the Earl of Dunmore warned the colonists that if they took up arms there, he would ‘declare Freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.’”  Hundreds of African-American slaves immediately fled to the British troops, and later fought against colonial troops at Hampton and Kemp’s Landing.  Dunmore then issued a proclamation asking enslaved people to join a British “Ethiopian Regiment” if they fled from patriot-owned plantations, freeing them from bondage.  Dunmore was a slaver himself, though Britain had never formally legalized slavery.  This was a smart war tactic … somewhat similar to the original Emancipation Proclamation so many years later. Dunmore however returned slaves to Loyalist planters, just not disloyal ones.

A 1772 decision by a British court to free a slave, James Somerset, who had made it to the United Kingdom, enraged Virginians. A rumor that the British Parliament was considering setting all slaves free in the colonies was relayed to slaver James Madison.  All this moved elite and plantation Virginia towards the side of the armed revolution.  Jefferson considered Dunmore’s ‘stoking of insurrection’ unpardonable.  Historians consider these events pivotal for southern plantation ‘revolutionaries’ like Jefferson, Washington and Madison.  This gave them a somewhat separate motivation from the likes of Tom Paine, John and Sam Adams, Ben Franklin and Nathanael Greene.  As seems obvious there was already a nascent Confederacy in the U.S.

The NUMBERS

So how many dark-skinned bondsmen, freedmen and fugitives really fought on both sides of this war? It seems that more would have been allied with the British.  According to the History.com and the book Liberty’s Exiles, around 20,000 lined up with the British. One of Washington’s and one of Patrick Henry’s slaves escaped to British lines.  The Ethiopian Regiment had “Liberty to the Slave” embroidered on their uniform’s sashes.  The Regiment was mostly used for labor, trades, food and medical roles in the British Army, but also combat. 

As the war progressed, another black regiment, the ‘Black Pioneers’ was formed by the British.  They participated in battles, including the siege of Charleston.  In June 1779 British General Henry Clinton issued the Phillipsburg Proclamation, which promised freedom to the enslaved as Black Loyalists.  Though if the Brits caught a slave person fighting for the Continentals, they would return him to slavery.  After the British defeat in the Revolutionary War, some 5,000 of these allies were allowed by the British to go to London, Canada, Sierra Leone, Florida and the Caribbean as freedmen.  Great Britain outlawed slavery in 1807, long before the U.S., though their various capitalists still profited from it. 

Liberty’s Exiles estimates that around 5,000 fought for the Revolution, though the parameters of that service are not clear.  In Georgia, another website claims 5,000 slaves escaped, were manumitted or freed during the war – a 3^rd of the total in that state, though not stating what side they joined.  Another website, American Battlefield Trust, based on several written histories, claims 100,000 came behind British lines – about a quarter of all slaves.  Wikipedia says 20,000 and 9,000 respectively were in the armies in various capacities.  Higher numbers for the Continentals might be taken with a grain of salt, especially from Wiki.

In New Jersey, a former slave, Colonel Tye, led an uprising of the Black Brigade that used guerrilla warfare in Monmouth County against the patriots.  The Continentals eventually recognized what was going on and recruited the First Rhode Island Regiment in 1778, probably made up of freedmen.  According to eyewitnesses and ABT, 1/5^th of the soldiers on the side of the U.S. siege of Yorktown were African-American, though their status is not clear, nor any promises their service may have elicited.  New England regiments promised freedom to the enslaved for service. Some southern patriots allowed their slaves to fight with promises of freedom, but Wikipedia points out that many times they lied.

As to native Americans, the Wyandot / Huron joined the war on the British side, but many native communities remained neutral, while others like the Cherokee and Iroquois Confederacy split.  The British had reserved the land west of the Appalachians for native Americans in 1763 and this angered the colonists, which became a grievance mentioned in the Declaration of Independence – and soon rectified by fellows like Washington!

Slavery continued in the U.S. 74 years after the 1781 siege of Yorktown. This bit of history shows that in the U.S. it is not just Bacon’s Rebellion, the Stono Rebellion, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey or John Brown that we should remember, but the first truly mass war against slavery by its victims – non-ironically in opposition to the American Revolution, started for that vague and notorious notion of ‘freedom.’

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, using these words:  “Citizen Tom Paine” (Fast); “The Civil War in the United States”(Marx & Engels); “12 Years a Slave,” “Lincoln” (Spielberg); “Struggle & Progress” (Jacobin); “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment” (Hartmann); “Loaded” (Dunbar-Ortiz); “White Trash,” “The Good Lord Bird,” “The Souls of Black Folk” & “John Brown” (both by Dubois) or “slavery.”  

The Cultural Marxist

March 19, 2022

Chris Hedge's Crush

 “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism”by Sheldon Wolin, 2008/2010

Wolin is the main squeeze of Chris Hedges, so I thought I’d read his most famous book.  The term ‘inverted totalitarianism’ seems both academic and convoluted, while claiming a spot in the vague ‘democratic’ center – as if democracy had no economic system, as if fascism and bureaucratic socialism were the same.  In reality Wolin was a Rooseveltian, or a secret mild-Social Democrat perhaps in the tradition of Norman Thomas.  He was an outrider at Princeton’s political science department, where his criticism of U.S. ‘democracy’ was considered heretical.

In essence, what the term ‘inverted totalitarianism’ means is that the formal democracy of the U.S. is turning into a totalitarian state step by step.  Every sector of society – the media, the elite education system, voting, the Two-Party structure, the legal hierarchy, the military and police forces, the scientific establishment, religious institutions, the capitalist corporate and war economy, even the culture – all are converging into a single, unitary neo-liberal/neo-conservative repressive front.  Wolin wrote this book during the Iraq War and the George Bush II administration, publishing it in 2008-2010.

Wolin considered this issue ‘a specter’ that has not yet arrived.  I don’t think any Leftist studying U.S. history actually thinks this is new, but it certainly applies now.  In the past I’ve called it ‘the Anaconda,’ as this conservative tilt is still happening as we speak.  Look at the wall-to-wall pro-war coverage on Ukraine by the whole bourgeois structure! According to Wolin, the watershed was 9/11, but there were certainly many earlier watersheds.  He notes McCarthyism and the stolen Bush/Gore election.

The term ‘inverted’ – which means ‘reversed’ or ‘upside down’ or ‘reversed relationship’ - doesn’t actually fit.  After all, what is ‘reversed totalitarianism?’  Why not call it ‘democratic totalitarianism’? Wolin also frequently uses the airy phrase ‘power imaginary‘, which along with the phrases ‘misrepresentative democracy,’ ‘fugitive democracy’ and a singular ‘Superpower” seems to be this book’s contributions to academic verbiage.  His favorites are authors like Max Weber, de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, who all look at society from a purely ideological view, adrift from material and class forces.  He is essentially an ideologue of humanist capitalism who can’t understand why it is drifting into a more open dictatorship.

Marxists do understand.

This book is really based on 9/11, the Patriot Act and the Iraq War – a war that Hedges himself lost his job at the NYT over.  For a thin layer of left-liberals, this war was a breaking point.  Wolin believes that the myths of democracy and Constitutionalism will work to cover the normalization of a stealth totalitarian system.  The word ‘democracy’ at this point provides a rhetorical function only.

Wolin recognizes that electoral democracy led to fascism in Italy and Germany.  He believes that real democratic practice is possible under capital, whereas leftists believe that capital precludes actual democracy.  Yet he understands the Constitution to be an anti-democratic document of elite ‘managed democracy.’ He understands the market power behind this totalitarianism, but denies that Nazism was an arm of German capital.  Wolin knows that in the U.S. the ‘free market’ is superior to freedom and democracy - but doesn’t extrapolate that idea.  He calls fascism ‘revolutionary,’ not counter-revolutionary, giving it popular credentials.  There is no other version of Marxism for Wolin but Stalinism.  He effortlessly combines Bolshevism (his word) with Nazism – a practice common across the political spectrum in the U.S.

So nothing new to read here actually. 

The Truth Behind the Words

Wolin knows that under ‘inverted totalitarianism’ citizens are only valued for their manipulated opinions on surveys, without having any real power or organization.  They are passive subjects responsible only for cheerleading, and that is the way the rulers like it. He calls it managed democracy. Global domination and empire extend Manifest Destiny and the Constitution on a ‘humanitarian’ basis, though Wolin seems to have no clue as to why the state and corporations might want global control.  As such, he does not predict the new cold war with China and Russia.

Wolin writes as if the 2-Party oligopoly rarely fights. As we have seen, the cultural faction fight for votes between two sections and the two parties of the capitalist class has been obvious for years.  Nor does he predict the growth of the populist right and left in his schema – or the rise of U.S. fascist groups and their influence in the Republican Party – that ‘old’ totalitarianism.  His description of the fake opposition Democrats is stunted.  He once used the words ‘working class’ that I saw – he prefers the archaic ‘citizen.’ He thinks the joint development of a version of democracy and capitalism was an historical accident. He does note the archaic religiousness permeating the right and neo-conservatism which buttresses the American myth.

In a way this book is a snapshot of a short period of time in which his theory is fleshed out.  Good theory is supposed to apply over a very long period of time, which is why the bogus Fukuyama “end of history” scenario collapsed quickly. This theory does have its roots in the U.S. Constitution, the ‘Founders,’ the ‘Originalist’ battle that made sure a popular majority would never cohere under that Constitution, along with the conquest of most of North America. But it seems most focused on the near present, which knee-caps its power.

Wolin suggests that a ‘fugitive demos’ can save us from this process, which he identifies in the activities of, of all things, NGOs.(!)  At this point Hedges himself is to Wolin’s left, being some kind of a Liberal-Left Christian socialist. Wolin knew in his bones that it is better to be an outlier than an outcast at Princeton, which is why he ignored Marxism and even Social-Democracy.  He kept within the parameters of the left centrist mindset, writing in a somewhat august and academic way about politics and history.  This book is best at exposing the hollow mantra of U.S. ‘democracy’ for all to see. Of special fun might be his long take-down of CNN hack Fareed Zakaria.  But why, since the targets are so many?

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Death of the Liberal Class,” “Empire of Illusion,” (both by Hedges); “The People’s Party Convention,” “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (Zizek); “Lenin’s Las Struggle,” “The Populists Guide to 2020,” "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded" or the words “anti-fascist series” or “Zizek.” 

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog

March 15, 2022

Worn Out

 “Worn – A People’s History of Clothing” by Sofi Thanhauser, 2022

This is an environmental, labor and historical materialist analysis of the development of the clothing industry.  It is based on 5 main segments – Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics and Wool.  Given clothing is a human essential, this book provides a great background to understand what has happened to clothing in the colonialist and capitalist age, and why it should not go on. 

I’m only going to look at the chapters on cotton and synthetics. 

COTTON

The story of cotton is somewhat familiar.  It was the foundation of the ‘industrial revolution’ in England, spurred by slave-grown cotton from the U.S. and later, the peasant-grown cotton of lower caste India.  The English actually destroyed the Indian artisanal handicraft clothing industry during the U.S. Civil War after slave-cotton was no longer available in bulk.  So the British East India Company forced rural peasants to grow cotton for export instead of food for themselves.  E.P. Thompson noted that the textile factory system, first started in 1771, destroyed the textile artisans in England earlier.  All in the interests of a full blast commodity economy.

Thanhauser weaves a story of the vast cotton ranches in the Texas panhandle near Lubbock, desperate modern Indian farmers committing suicide in small villages in Tamil Nadu and the cotton lands and industry of forced Uyghur workers in Xinjiang, which has become China’s cotton hub.

TEXAS

Cotton uses 20,000 liters of water to make a single pair of jeans.  Worldwide it uses 24% of insecticide and 20% of nitrogen fertilizer, while decimating the land as a monocrop. The U.S. is the #1 exporter of cotton in the world. Modern cotton growing uses bio-engineered pesticide-laden seeds.  The Texas and Kansas wheat and cotton ranches suck huge amounts of water out of the Ogallala aquifer, which in Kansas is down 60%. Liquid nitrogen doses the drip tubes. Cotton is sprayed with toxic paraquat to make it mature faster and sprayed with Bayer / Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide to kill bugs.  Latino field workers get cancer, while the EPA gives Monsanto© a pass.  The life expectancy of Latino farmworkers is 49.  The U.S. subsidized cotton growers with $1.1B in 2017.

Buddy Holly’s club, the Cotton Club in Lubbock, is closed.  It figures. Lubbock itself is a ghost town according to Thanhauser.

TAMIL NADU

The colonial English push for cotton in India led to deforestation, the enclosure of common lands and private ownership over cooperative farming. India also became a cloth importer when it had been a cloth producer!  A famine in the 1870s partly due to export production led to 19 million Indians dying – never mentioned in the context of capitalism of course.  Present cotton farmers are forced to buy patented Bt cotton seeds, fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides. 90% of India’s cotton acreage is now controlled by Monsanto© seeds.  In 2004, 600 farmers in Andhra Pradesh committed suicide due to corporate-induced poverty, some, ironically, by drinking the chemical defoliant paraquat.

Low-paid, non-union women now work in the Indian knitwear & textile industries, supplying Walmart, Target, Sears and H&M.  Toxic dyes are dumped in rivers – red, yellow, blue and black, for crops, humans and animals to pick up.  Cotton exports like this export water too – just like export flower farming in Columbia does when you buy that cheap bunch in a grocery chain store.

XINJIANG 

China has turned Xinjiang into a ‘special economic zone,’ especially to produce cotton clothing in large factories and farms.  Cotton farming has desertified southern Xinjiang, drying up its rivers.  This is similar to what happened to the Aral Sea in the USSR / now Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan, which disappeared after intensive water-hungry cotton farming was initiated. 20% of world cotton came from Xinjiang in 2019.   According to reports, much of this labor is forced or required, though the factories and farms are called ‘vocational training centers.’

Some U.S. companies using cotton and clothing from this area are Badger, Adidas, H&M and The Gap.  In 1992 under Clinton, executives for The Limited, Kmart, The Gap & Spiegel testified to keep cheap Chinese cotton flowing – and it was done.  Given all this, do you think bought-and-paid-for textile departments in southern U.S. universities are studying hemp textiles, which, unlike cotton, use far less water, fertilizer, machines and herbicides?  No they are not… 

SYNTHETICS

RAYON

The first ‘synthetic’ clothing was made from rayon – essentially wood pulp and chemicals – but it got worse from there. Oil became the base of new fabrics – along with bright aniline dyes that stained rivers red, yellow and orange.  Rayon could be mixed with natural fibers like cotton to make blends.  As a ‘new’ industry, its workers were non-union, paid less and worked longer hours, nearly all in the U.S. South.  Cellulose also can make cellophane and acetate, but they all use carbon disulfide, a neuro-toxin.  Rayon workers, who were mostly women and girls, fainted, got Parkinson’s, nerve damage, personality changes, hallucinations and loss of libido.  They noted an increase in 'mental illness' around rayon mills.

Due to later studies, OSHA reduced the carbon disulfide standard to 20 ppm, a compromise but still too high, and still the standard in the U.S.  Officially in the EU and China it is 2 ppm, but in the global south it is still 20 ppm.   

The largest textile strike occurred in Gastonia, North Carolina, which was met by National Guardsmen, company thugs and right-wing militias, who eventually killed one of the leaders of the strike, Ella Mae Wiggins.  No memorial remains in Gastonia at the mill that was the center of the strike. Another 1934 strike in Greenville, South Carolina and the little town of Honea Path led to the murder of 7 strikers and wounding of dozens by the mill owner, who ordered his goons to use a machine gun.  The owner was also the town mayor and judge, typical in small towns.  No one talks about this strike either, nor was anyone prosecuted.  Union organizers in the South were then and still are treated like ‘carpetbaggers.’ Thanhauser details the proletarian feminism of other textile strikers and seems to be somewhat of a Leftist, though she does not openly condemn capitalism or embrace eco-Socialism.     

NYLON

Nylon was developed by DuPont and was made entirely with petroleum products.  It was soon followed by acrylic, polyester, spandex, Dacron, Orlon and fluorocarbon, along with hundreds of sub-varieties.  Bright aniline dyes were also developed out of coal tars, which involve chromium, lead, cadmium, sulfur, mercury, arsenic and formaldehyde, among other chemicals.  And then there is the recent development of omnipresent oil-based micro-fibers…  As is clear, any reduction in oil usage would require our petro-fabric clothing and carbon-based dyeing industries to be de-carbonized too. This will mean a huge change just in our dress. 

Nigerian Export Processing Zones

EPZs

Thanhauser describes how the U.S. domestic clothing and textile industries were consciously destroyed in order to ‘fight communism’ by sending these jobs to countries under threat like Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia.  It was basically on orders from the State Department, but the manufacturers soon went along when it allowed them to leave unions behind and find cheaper labor.  This was the political origin of ‘off-shoring’ and tax-free, duty-free raw materials and cheap labor ‘export processing zones’ which supply the U.S. with fast fashion and clothing.  Brands like H&M, Macy’s, JCPenny, Kmart, Sears, The Limited, The Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Esprit, Adidas, Carhartt, Under Armour, PINK, Nike and L.L.Bean all use these EPZs.  In fact, probably every brand you can name does.

These EPZs were then promoted by the U.S. government in central America and the Caribbean (like Jamaica) during the 1980s - also it seems in the ‘fight against communism.’  Honduras, along with El Salvador and Guatemala, became a huge export hub and Thanhauser considers Honduras a case study.  Starvation wages, forced overtime, physical violence, mass firings, anti-unionism, child labor, death threats occur around these EPZs.  These might remind us of the old U.S. south, but now it’s the global south.  The wretched celebrity Kathie Lee Gifford even got caught using these EPZs, which are like secretive armed camps, guarded with razor wire.  As might be expected, corporate good conduct plans have changed little.   Choloma, Honduras is an EPZ example Thanhauser looks at, a gated enclave that functions as an extractive geography.     

Honduras had a coup in 2009 supported by Obama and Clinton, as the new liberal government threatened the local textile oligarchs.  The coup government presided over drug dealing, rapes, assassinations, murders and kidnappings, while gutting the welfare state. No wonder so many Hondurans tried to emigrate to the U.S.  Blowback! You want to stop desperate immigration?  Stop supporting climate change, capitalist extraction and vicious governments – but that is not the U.S. plan.  After the Dhaka Ran fire disaster in 2013 in Bangladesh where 117 died, 17 large U.S. firms still refused to sign an Accord on Fire and Building Safety.  Yet the U.S. government does not see their role as anything but enabling these criminal firms, usually with corporate trade agreements.

Hanhauser ends this chapter by talking about fast fashion outfits like Zara, Forever 21 and H&M, who stock new fashions in stores twice a week. An industry of young internet ‘influencers’ has grown up displaying these ‘hauls’ on You Tube, Tik Tok and Instagram, pushing this disposable junk as part of the slickest sales effort in history.    

The book is a lively, somewhat familiar tour of the world’s garment industry, its environmental, health, labor and financial effects.  It would be a great introduction for some, as it covers most of the bases. 

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Stitched Up – the Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion,” “Shopping World,” “Inconspicuous Consumption – the Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have,” “NAFTA 2,” “USMCA Fraud,” “The Marijuana Manifesto,” “The People’s Green New Deal,” “The Avalanche of Plastic.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

March 12, 2022