Re-Fashioned Failure

 “Fashionopolis – the Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes” by Dana Thomas, 2019

This book includes a short history of the clothing industry, from its beginnings in 1771 in Manchester, England – ‘Cottonpolis’ as it was called then – to its spread to New York’s lower East Side and Garment District; and from there across the world, mostly to Asia. The ‘ready to wear’ industry was enabled first by slavery, machinery and colonialism, then by cheap labor, Quick-Response manufacturing, NAFTA, the WTO, the World Bank and China. Liz Claiborne and Zara were ‘trend setters.’ It results in landfills full of clothes, excessive water use, dye pollution, carbon production, lost jobs and grinding labor exploitation, mostly of women. What’s not to like?

This is a very familiar capitalist story. I’m going to look at this book to see if Thomas has any specific solution that is out of the ordinary, other than the now commercially appropriated plea for ‘sustainability.’ Unless we stop treating clothing as a commodity, and greatly reduce our production and consumption of clothing, that solution alone is bogus. Her supposed focus is on ‘fast fashion’ too, so she might have an answer.

SWEATSHOPS

As a journalist, Thomas visits Bangladesh to look at conditions after the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement, which took off after the horrific 2013 Rana Plaza collapse which killed 1,134 and injured 2,500. Now she says some Bangladeshi factories are pristine, while others are still dangerous sweatshops. She says little about unions, which are opposed by the Bangladeshi government. Then she details sweatshops in Los Angeles employing Latino women, which is now the textile capital of the U.S.

DENIM

Jeans are made of cotton. It is estimated that at least half of everyone on the planet is wearing jeans at any moment. I doubt that, but it suggests how ubiquitous they are. I’m wearing a worn pair now. Thomas tells the story of Levi Strauss and another about organic cotton that grows green, brown and blue to avoid toxic dyes. She also interviews people growing indigo as a natural dye for denim, which has been adopted by Patagonia, but still 99% of clothing uses analine dyes, which are synthetic and cancer-causing. She has a long section on Southern small business owners in Florence, AL and Nashville, TN who create small-batch mail-order clothing and socks, mostly using organic cotton – one vertically grown in their own cotton fields. Many of the garments are expensive, as the words ‘bespoke,’ ‘boutique,’ 'selvedge,' 'made to order' and ‘artisanal’ suggest.

Thomas quotes an entrepreneur happy to move from LA to Nashville because the wages are so cheap in the open-shop South. Clearly Thomas is a pro-capitalist who finds cheap wages endearing if they come with a ‘local,’ ‘slow fashion’ and maybe an ‘organic’ label. Words like ‘union’ and ‘co-operative’ never cross her word processor in this context. She has written for Vogue, NY Times Style section, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Conde Nast and others – so of course.

RIGHT-SHORING

Thomas' next stories are about 'right-shoring' – a patriotic hipster word for returning manufacturing to the U.S. and England. This doesn't necessarily involve organic or raw materials – as one English person says it will resemble the 'imperial model' of textile production. Now above 10% of U.S. clothing is made in the U.S., up from 3%. The Chinese are partly behind this increase, as they have restarted plants in the Carolinas helped by revenue bonds, tax credits and infrastructure grants – all typical corporate welfare. She neutrally profiles one U.S. entreprenuer that believes the 'buy less, use less' strategy is “not scalable” and “not a realistic approach to climate change.” This one wants to be the new Zara. Her firm does attempt to use solar power and much less water in production, so Thomas includes her.

WTF?

FINISHING

Another new concept behind making denim softer or actually 'distressed' - called 'finishing' - is something called the 3-step 'Jeanlogia' process – which is highly automated, using far less water and labor. According to Thomas, automation is the route for new production. Stone washing and hand-work softening or creating holes in jeans with sanders and power drills are highly toxic methods to the environment and the workers, as well as wrecking the fabric. However, Thomas does not address why jeans have to be softened at all, thus contradicting her point about making clothes last longer. Most 'softened' jeans quickly rip at the knees. So those wearing jeans for work or practical purposes find 'finishing' to be absurd. Those people running around trying to make a 'fashion statement' with ripped or paper-thin jeans are advertising the fact they don't use jeans for any practical purpose, wasting fabric at the same time.

CONSCIOUS FASHION

Thomas celebrates Stellla McCartney's high-end fashion, which uses wool from a sustainable sheep farm in New Zealand, viscose and rayon from from Swedish and Canadian certified lumber forests, organic cotton grown in Egypt, and oil-based pleather. No fur or leather, which have a highly-destructive and anti-ecological animal sources. She includes almost nothing about McCartney's labor standards. McCartney eliminated ubiquitous and toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from her clothing, recycling plastic ocean waste, stopped using virgin Mongolian cashmere, while using animal-free, bio-fermented leather and silk, along with mushroom leather. Thomas uses the cretinous stereotype “brown-clad, crunchy-granola set” to describe what is now seen as green, “conscious fashion.” It seems the hippies were right again...in spite of the insults. McCartney's firm also uses an “environmental profit and loss” accounting system. The problem of course is that none of us are wearing Stella McCartney.

Thomas mentions various methods of greenwashing and bluewashing by capitalist clothing companies. She highlights firms that recycle cotton T-shirts into new fiber, as part of a 'circular' economy in textiles. She supports long-lasting garments, not junk that deteriorates, including learning the art of sewing to repair and make clothes. One of her entrepreneur's rejected using Spandex, which is oil-based and doesn't break down, and discovered a bio-substitute. Another created a substitute for oil-based polyester. Others are finding ways to break clothing down into their original components, like nylon, or separating polyester and cotton, then recreating them individually instead of sending them to a landfill. Some firms (Patagonia again) run 'repair' operations for older clothing, or buy second-hand from their customers. Others promote 'made to order' or sample pre-orders to reduce overproduction. Even washing clothes less frequently will greatly extend their life.

ROBOTS

For the future-future, Thomas blows hot on home-based clothing 3D printers - a modern sewing machine according to her. This seems odd for someone interested in sustainability, as the ingredients are nearly all polyamide powder, nylon, acrylics and polyurethane rubber. Robots and sewbots (“zero direct labor”) are also coming to garment manufacturing. Yet capital has no plan for those who lose their jobs. Digital sales are now huge, though 'brick and mortar' shopping is still real. Amazon's own line of clothing, Prime Wardrobe, bought a clothing factory for pre-orders to reduce waste.

In the final chapter called “To Buy or Not to Buy” she lays her cards on the table. After her endless celebration of various clothing methods and brands, she mentions – once – to buy less. That is not the line of this book at all. It is a detailed look at new methods in creating more sustainable clothing, a gold-mine of new environmental methods that are being used by small firms and fashion 'start-ups' creating mostly expensive, high quality clothes. But it fails in envisioning a real 'refashioning' of fashion from an anti-capitalist point of view – instead proposing a “kinder, gentler capitalism.” Good luck with that...

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Stiched-Up – the Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion,” “Shopping World,” “Worn – A People's History of Clothing,” “Inconspicuous Consumption,” “Hippie Modernism – the Struggle for Utopia.”

And I got it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 28, 2022

The Village of Leopards

 “How Beautiful We Were” by Imbolo Mbue, 2022

This is the fictional story of an African village standing up to a Western oil company, Pexton, which is poisoning their land, air and water, leading to the deaths of many children.  It reminds one of the actual situation on the Niger Delta, where Royal Dutch Shell, Elf, Chevron and others have ruined the wetlands with constant spills and explosions, oppressing the Ogoni people in the process.  This was also the situation in Ecuador, where Chevron did the same thing in the Amazonian jungle; and in Peru, where Repsol did the extraction destruction.

Mbue herself is from Cameroon, which is just south of Nigeria.  There is an actual French/Anglo oil company in Cameroon, Perenco. China’s Sinopec oil company bought control of a former Shell company, Pecten Cameroon Company, in that same country.  So ‘Pexton’ could be based on several of these outfits.    

The African story is told from the point of view of one child, Thula, other children, Thula’s uncle Bongo, her mother Sahel, her grandmother Yaya, her little brother Juba.  It starts in the 1980s.  It is a very slow-moving and somewhat lyrical village and family story set in a formerly Edenic bush community of thatched huts, small farming, hunting and fishing named Kosawa. Now the children die mysteriously after drinking the water; the farms cannot produce good crops; the air is toxic from flares, leading to coughing and slow death; the river runs green and clotted; the pipelines leak oil. 

A contingent of villagers go to the local capitol, Bézam, to try to get help and never return, including Thula’s father Malabo.  There is a kidnapping motivated by the local ‘crazy’ man Konga, a massacre by soldiers in which 14 are killed, a village chief who benefits from covering for the oil company but then switches sides and 4 villagers hung in a legal trial by ‘His Excellency’s” government. 

Another village group locates a journalist in Bézam who tells their story to a U.S. newspaper in the ‘Great City’ of the U.S.  This stimulates some Americans to form the “Restoration Movement” that gets them a bit of money from Pexton for their misery, while investigating the disappearance of the local men and subsequent jailings. 

The cheery side is that Thula eventually goes to the 'promised-land' in the U.S. to school, helped by the Restoration Movement. Mbue now lives in the U.S., so Thula could be based on the author.  In the story, especially Yaya’s, there are echoes of slavery snatchers, missionaries condemning everyone to hell, forced rubber labor on plantations – all echoes of colonialism.

Cameroon pipeline through jungle.  Familiar?

Thula discovers that the U.S. has its own problems with leaking oil pipelines, poisoned water and air and flooding due to carbon-based climate change.  She understands the problem is bigger than her village.  Even the Pexton laborers are dying or being injured, while other villages have ‘oil’ problems too.  She writes back to Kosawa that they should use sabotage against Pexton, thus countering the failed NGO reform perspective of the Restoration Movement.  She realizes the real problem is the government of ‘His Excellency,’ which allowed this all to happen. The book covers years of patience and impatience, the lies of Pexton and even the Restoration Movement, fruitless meetings, magic, the buying and using of guns, talk of a peaceful revolution, an endless lawsuit, all in the context of extraordinary naiveté by the villagers.

Eventually Thula declares a peaceful ‘Day of Liberation” against the dictatorial ‘His Excellency.’  Evidently there is only one activist village in a whole country, with a simple program of getting rid of the dictator and his corporate cronies, led by one childless woman.  This is more fictional than anything else.  This book is really a liberal story about people who try to do good, not actually a revolutionary novel.  It does show the bind people are in when dealing with a violent state, a useless legal system, a powerful and rich corporation.  Like so many middle-class books its true focus is the village family, though how much interest a reader might have in them is questionable.

Does the ‘revolution’ succeed?  Will Pexton and the government be brought to heel?  Or will the misery for Kosawa and the nation continue?  You can guess.

P.S. - 6/1/22 Guardian covers oil misery in Niger delta:  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2022/jun/01/oil-pollution-spill-nigeria-shell-lawsuit

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these terms:  “Famished Road” (Okri); “Last Train to Zona Verde” (Theroux); “Black Panther,” “The Convert,” “Searching for Sugar Man,” “Monsters of the Market”(McNally); “Female Genital Mutilation,” “Secret History of the American Empire” (Perkins); “Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom,” “The Race for What’s Left” (Klare); “Armed Madhouse” and “Vultures’ Picnic” (both by Palast); “Party’s Over” (Heinberg); “Oil” (Sinclair); “Tar Sands.”

And I bought it at May Day Books fiction section!

The Kultur Kommissar

May 24, 2022

Lawyers, lawyers everywhere ...

 “The Lincoln Lawyer” Meets “Goliath”

Streaming culture is beginning to congeal, as the drop in Netflix customers reflects.  Amazon and Netflix have huge amounts of mediocre entertainment in genres like crime, thriller, comedy, romances, sci-fi/fantasy and ‘dramas.’ This lack of quality is obvious to anyone with a subscription…or at least I hope it is.  The pandemic is also lessening, which is reducing time in front of the screen.  However another aspect is that successful streaming series are being duplicated in different forms – a common movie or TV method.   This may bore viewers, although perhaps I’m being too optimistic here. 

Car culture continues in court.

Take these two better lawyer series:  Goliath’s 4 streaming seasons were first on deck - now the Lincoln Lawyer borrows almost every aspect of Goliath in its first season.   Or at least that is the way it seems… 

To whit:

Both are set in Los Angeles and are about ‘edgy’ dissident lawyers – one who does torts against large corrupt corporations and the other a defense attorney who represents semi-innocent criminals or marginal violators. 

Both lawyers are intuitive and gutsy ‘geniuses’ in their field. 

Both attorneys have either an alcohol or a drug problem.

Both are divorced and have ex-wives they still ‘work’ with in odd ways.  They both have daughters who they are trying to reconcile with. (Problematic teenage daughters is a trope that extends into many crime shows…)

They both drive vintage cars – Goliath a convertible Mustang, the LL lawyer a vintage convertible Lincoln.  (He also has a Navigator© and a Town Car©.)

Both are closely assisted by attractive blondes – a sharp, real estate attorney and a diminutive go-getter who is thinking of going back to law school.  Both have a private investigator.  One is an old, experienced ex-lawyer living in a trailer like Rockford and the other is an ex-bike gang member who susses out the situation on his Harley.  Each lawyer has a conflicted ally in the FBI or police, naturally.  Both lawyers have helpful prostitutes they can call on, naturally.

They both get beat up occasionally and are threatened with death, naturally. Both frequently do their ‘officing’ out of the office – in a bar, in a car. 

Both show judges to be by turns upright citizens or crooked.  The same goes for cops.  The law is ultimately shown as fair, intricate and wonderful in its own way.  This is certainly not the experience of most.  In the end, sociopathic corporate criminals (the Goliaths), and sociopathic billionaires, the criminals - the real ‘bad guys’ - get theirs.    

The only apparent difference is that Billy Bob Thornton – our David – is a light-skinned gringo living in a shabby California-style motel room in Santa Monica while Manuel Garcia-Rulfo – the Lincoln Lawyer - is a light-skinned Latino living in the Hollywood Hills in a modern glass-view mansion.  Garcia-Rulfo is driven around in his Lincolns by a dark-skinned ex-junkie, while Billy Bob does his own Mustang driving.  The Lincoln lawyer lectures her about how he practices law, as befitting a 'legal drama' for the uninformed.  Billy Bob lectures no one. 

And … drum roll… both series were ‘created’ and written by David E. Kelly – who has done many legal TV shows starting with L.A. Law in 1986, and streaming series like Big Little Lies.

Lawyers - yay!

However …

The Lincoln Lawyer was a book first published in 2008 and a film in 2011 starring the doubtful Mathew McConaughey.  Goliath premiered in 2015 as a series.  So the first Lincoln Lawyer book and film might be the template for Goliath.  Only Kelly knows...  The Lincoln Lawyer premiered as a streaming series this year in 2022.  Both borrow from The Big Lebowski, Inherent Vice, Chinatown, LA noir and everything that came before.  The mystique of Los Angeles penetrates both series, much like movies set in New York used to do about that city, until New York exhausted itself and everyone else.  Yes, places are characters and LA is the star of both these shows. 

But now lawyers are the heroes, not PIs.  It seems the professional strata within the middle-class is having its cinematic day over the grubby, street-level PIs, as would be expected in a society enamored with its upper ranks.  The U.S. is also one of the most litigious societies on the globe due to the enormous amounts of money involved, as well as the inability to resolve contradictions any other way.  So the lawyers and their courts play the role of constant referee and judge. Lawyers are over-represented in Congress and politics, so they 'legislate' there too. In the Lincoln Lawyer the duty is to represent and 'win' for the guilty, which is the ostensible heart of the system.  Though as we know the overwhelming majority of proletarian criminal cases are pled-out and do not involve high-priced attorneys.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Goliath,” “Hollywood,” “Hail Cesar,” “A Time to Kill,” “Gray Mountain” and “The Appeal” (all 3 by Grisham); “The Trial Before the Trial” “The Cult of the Constitution,” “Eric Holder,” “Bad Cops, Bad Cops,” “Prison Strike,” “Los Angeles Stories” (Cooder); “The Latino Question,” “Camino Real,” “Three Days in the Jury Pool,” “In Praise of Barbarians” (Davis) "Professional Degrees in Democratic Party Politics," "With Liberty and Justice For Some" (Greenwald); "The Divide" (Taibbi) or the word ‘streaming.’ 

The Cultural Marxist

May 21, 2022

A Post-Technology World?

 “Scorched Earth – Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World” by Jonathan Crary, 2022

This is a train-full of quotes about the non-sustainable environmental nature of the internet matrix.  Then it flips over into familiar rhetoric about exploitative 24/7 time, terminal capitalism, the subverted role of science and the role of WWII in the triumph of U.S. technology and power – among other things.  It is written by a professor from Columbia in New York, who seems to be close to a form of anarcho-socialism.  He's inspired by utopian socialism, the 1960s counter-culture, workers' councils and multiple and various intellectuals.  In a 124 page book, he has 122 quotes, and that does not include the unquoted mentions, from Hannah Arendt to Simone Weil.

Crary has a familiar style – extravagant, ultimast language glorying in its own brilliance, pursuing a wandering argument.  I'm somewhat tired of this style, like every academic wants to be Zizek.  He denounces the internet, urbanism, corporate technology and science from a left point of view – but says almost nothing to explain what comes next.  Is the internet to be destroyed? Are cities to be dismantled?  Is technology and science to be ignored?  The Left is well-aware of the corporate/military misuse of technology and science. This is a tenured professor from New York City and seemingly is anti-technology too.  In his paeans to rurality he probably hasn't smelled manure in a life-time.

Finally on page 83, Crary says:  “...existing technical capabilities could be creatively redeployed by local and regional communities to meet human and environmental needs, rather than exclusively serving the requirements of capital and empire.”

Duh...

His main focus is on opposing techno-modernism and biocide. But there is also the usual psychological and cultural twist. He insists the internet complex is “the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory and social disintegration.”  It is introducing a world of homogenization at “the level of consciousness.”  This is how all propaganda systems work, but in this case ‘the medium really is the message’ because it now penetrates everything, unlike earlier attempts at totalizing systems. 

Of especial interest to Crary is the vast mining push worldwide, especially for 'rare' earths and not so rare ones – copper. This is the source of the title – Scorched Earth. This rush for minerals is now centered on 'green' technology – batteries, server farms, cables, satellites, solar panels and wind turbines, smart homes, electric vehicles, along with the massive electrical and cooling demands created by a 24/7 streaming internet.  None of this will be sustainable and is already leading to more environmental destruction, inter-capitalist competition and war. 

Largest Copper Mine in World in Peru

The 'good' and bloodiest capitalist war in history – WWII – was the moment when the U.S. version of carbon capitalism became ascendant worldwide, along with the development of the early military 'internet.'  This newest iteration – the 4^th Industrial Revolution / digital / green capitalism - ignores the destructive and primary role of the commodity in the capital system.  Like the folks at 350.Org regarding carbon, he wants to leave the minerals in the ground – unlike 350.Org.  However, Crary has no plan for what comes next if this is done.

Crary makes a plea for 'face to face' contact and human interaction, in place of the alienated and individualized methods of the internet. He has a bit about tech billionaires trying to forestall death with cryogenics, drugs and freezing.  But as Marx might say, death proves dialectics. Crary ends the book with an odd chapter on bio-metrics and its 'focus' on the eye and iris, as computers attempt to analyze the eye in order to quantify human behavior and psychology, in a further attempt to read and colonize the human psyche. 

Overall this book is a familiar one, and probably a waste of your time. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Secondhand Time” (Alexievich); “The New Dark Age – Technology and the End of the Future,” “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “Shrinking the Technosphere” (Orlov); “Value Chains,” “Bit Tyrants,” “The New New Thing” (Lewis); “Strategy of Deception” (Virilio); “The Race for What's Left” (Klare); “A People's Green New Deal,” “On Fire:  The Burning Case For a Green New Deal” (Klein); "Planet of the Humans," "Black Panther."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 18, 2022

Post-Crow

 The South – Jim Crow and Its Afterlives” by Adolph L. Reed, Jr., 2022

This is a genial remembrance of a youth spent in Jim Crow New Orleans and the Arkansas Delta and then times living and working in North Carolina after the fall of that legal system in the South.  It includes historical events of the day. Reed wanted to write before the actual memories and subtleties of his ‘boomer’ generation as that South fades into the history books.

Reed contradicts some easy anti-racist clichés in the process. He avoids jargon, theorizing and rhetoric and settles for simple stories. He insists that it is Jim Crow that impacts the ‘modern’ South more than slavery. He doesn’t believe that ‘The New Jim Crow’ is an accurate depiction of the situation for the whole African-American population now. He discusses passing – passant blanc as it was called in New Orleans - and its decreasing relevance, as well as its real non-moralistic, practical significance under Jim Crow. He opposes the idea that ‘races’ are real, biologic categories – a concept tied to eugenics. He approves of the removal of the memorials to the Confederacy and the White Leagues in New Orleans. He knocks the Black Panther Party’s unreal and ultra-left rhetoric, and also to a “doctrinaire sectarian group” organizing soldiers – probably RU/RCP. Reed discounts the triumph of a separate ‘black’ economy in the U.S. proffered by forces like the NOI or other black capitalists.

Reed notes the necessary link of white supremacy with exploitation. He views Jim Crow as an assault on working-class ‘whites,’ but in a different way. Finally, he says that race has become many times a stand-in for class in the South.

Reed grew up in a middle-class family below “the cotton curtain.” As a child he visited segregated cafes to get the wonderful French treat, a beignet or a great po’ boy sandwich. He discusses Jews and Italians in the context of the color line, along with white flight. He notes the disparate treatment middle-class ‘blacks’ are now given in the South, which was true even under Jim Crow. As a professional he is usually treated with respect by modern Southerners, even police, but he notes the signs of that old paternalistic, dominant attitude when it comes to proletarian African-Americans. In his old home town, New Orleans, a well-integrated elite now presides over one of the most unequal cities in the U.S. – again because of the continuation of color caste poverty.

Quotes:

Middle-class black professionals and businessmen “were better able than others to shield themselves from the both the everyday indignities and the atrocities of the Jim Crow world.”

“Continuity and change seem indistinguishably linked…”

“Abstractions like prejudice, bigotry, racism and most recently an eternal White Supremacy … tell us nothing about how the order operated, how its’ official and unofficial protocols organized people’s lives.”

Adolph Reed, Jr.

“News that eggplants, satsumas, Creole tomatoes, crayfish or mirlitons had appeared in markets announcing their season’s arrival was information much too vital to be blocked by the color line.”

Boss … “is a derivative of ‘baas,’ the Dutch term for master.”

Poverty… “was the point of the system, after all.”

Under Jim Crow Lumbee Indians … “Delta Chinese, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Arabs and South Asians commonly strove to distance themselves from identification as black.”

“Racial identity is willful or imposed, or both; it has no foundation outside of social experience.”

“Race has no biologic foundation.”

Huey P. Long’s brother remarked, related to the purity of the ‘white race’ – “it was possible to feed all the truly white people in south Louisiana off one plate of red beans and rice.”

He describes the neo-Confederates defending statues of P.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis in New Orleans as having “professional-wrestling-cum-Red-Dawn cosplay fantasies.”

“Lost Cause ideology and the mythology of the Solid South were cudgels employed to demand political conformity among whites and to stifle dissent from ruling-class agendas, as well as to suppress blacks.”

Regarding being in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood: “…race is a visible shorthand for class.”

“Allegory may be rhetorically powerful, but it is not adequate as analysis or explanation.”

Segregation… “…wasn’t merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power…”

“…the core of the Jim Crow system was a class system rooted in employment and production relations…” “…that victory (of the Civil Rights Movement) left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms, affirmed it.”

My only real beef with this wonderful book is that Reed gives credence to ‘race’ as a non-biologic category by repeatedly using the terms ‘bi-racial,’ ‘multi-racial’ etc. without quotes. He does make fun of the term ‘race relations’ but never comes to the conclusion that more scientifically accurate terms are called for, especially due to his assertion that race is a social construct. The U.S. government, the Census, identity politicians, many professors and every Tom, Dick and Harriet media person use it as a biologic fact referring to different humans.   

In 1950 the U.N. and the overwhelming majority of biologists and anthropologists declared that there was biologically only one race, the human race.  Multiple races are a reflection of early scientific racism in the U.S. pushed by those justifying slavery and Jim Crow.  Some attempted to create a taxonomy of human races, sometimes running into the 100s.  All nonsense. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “Rising Tide – the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927” “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson); “Selma,” “How Bigger Was Born” (Wright); “In Search of the Blues,” “Tremé,” “How to Kill a City,” “Caste – the Origin of our Discontents” (Wilkerson); “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Sycamore Row”(Grisham); “Monroeville, Alabama & To Kill a Mockingjay,” “Slavery by Another Name” (Blackmon).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 14, 2022

Periodical Series: Does Anyone Read Newspapers Anymore?

 “Freedom Socialist – the Voice or Revolutionary Feminism” (April-May 2022) and …

“The Future is Female – but only if we fight” (May-June 2022)

Will the reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) lead to a new radicalization of the women’s movement and the fight against gender exploitation?  Or will it be led back into the arms of the Democratic Party, who promised to protect Roe by calling pro-choice groups to ‘vote for us’ for 50 years?  After all, a good number of Democrats voted for the Supremes who are on the wrong side of this issue.  Biden backed the Hyde Amendment and was himself personally opposed to abortion as a ‘good’ Catholic. 

There are plenty of feminist theoreticians of various stripes – Marxist, bourgeois, middle-class, anti-male – who publish books.  But are there left groups specifically focused on women’s liberation?  We’re not talking NARAL or NOW, both thoroughly run by the Democrats, nor left groups that fight sexism as a normal part of the struggle against capital. 

These two periodicals come from two different perspectives – one, Freedom Socialist (FS), is a Marxist group that focuses on revolutionary feminism.  The other is a lesbian feminist publication The Future is Female (TFIF) that celebrates gun-carrying female national liberation fighters, the Weather Underground and the SLA under the slogan ‘Feminist Revolution.’

TFIF

Let’s start with TFIF.  The color magazine contains lots of color iconography.  I counted 15 images of weapons – AKs, machetes and axes.  Many of the articles are in Spanish.  There is poetry. It is slanted as a cultural magazine.  Its one address is in Astoria, New York, its in its 3^rd year of publication, few authors are listed and it is free.  Then there are the articles.  A useful one on harassment of women on mass transit -–where they call for separate subway cars for women and children, much like India.  Another on how women are the most evicted, which advocates rent strikes and occupations.  Another on sexual harassment within corporations, by Valerie Solanas of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men).  Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968, that great gay artist enemy of the working class...or not. 

Female Kurdish YPG Fighters

Then there are articles celebrating a Weather Underground ‘action’ in the late 1960s by a young lesbian woman; ones on revolutionary lesbianism and on Puerto Rico; a review of the old 1966 film “The Battle of Algiers,” a profile of a young Turkish woman who fought in Kurdistan with the YPG for Rojava, and was eventually killed at 19.  Lastly a poem celebrating a female member of the SLA, an ultra-left organization which existed in 1973-1975.  At least that is the charitable way to put it.  The BPP thought they were run by a cop.

Ideologically in their ‘Five Basic Ideas” they consider both women and youth as ‘classes’ – which makes a hash of a real economic class analysis.  They advocate ‘destruction of the patriarchy’ – not destruction of capitalism.  This is an ultra-leftist group, rooted in nostalgia, though the article on Rojava was at least somewhat current.

FS

Freedom Socialist on the other hand is a typical Marxist publication.  It is a newspaper in its 43^rd year and costs a $1.  It has 9 domestic addresses and 4 international ones, along with an ad for Radical Women magazine, which might be their in-depth ideological arm.  Most articles are written by women, but some by men.  There is no political program listed in the paper, except for “joining the fight to defend working people abroad and at home.”

It has news and analysis articles, with color photos. Its’ lead story is “Ravaging of the Ukraine,” against the Russian invasion and the U.S. imperialist provocations which led to this inter-capitalist war.  Other stories are on book bans, the Supreme Court’s rightist tack, Guantanamo, Florida’s anti-gay legislation, ending abuse of children in Australia, Starbucks union organizing, women’s soccer pay equity, fed-up U.S. workers and privatizing nature.  It has a letters section, guest columnists, a book review and editorials on the gas crisis, Rick Scott and the Ahmaud Arbery copycat shooters in Mississippi.

It also has short biography of James Cannon, key leader of the Trotskyist movement in the U.S. and the old Socialist Workers Party.

The two publications, both ostensibly dedicated to revolutionary feminism, could not be more unlike.   

We carry the SCUM Manifesto in our women's liberation book section.  May Day carries both publications in our periodicals section.            

Prior blog stories on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Feminists and Feminists,” “Fortunes of Feminism” and “The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born” (both by Fraser); “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Revolt. Revolt She Said.  Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel).   

And I got them at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 11, 2022 

Jewish Guerilla Warfare

 “Fugitives of the Forest – The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival During the Second World War” by Allan Levine, 1998

This is a riveting history of Jewish and partisan resistance in Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania and the Ukraine against the atrocities of Nazi rule.  It involves detailed personal stories of rebels in the ghettos and forests, from Vilna (Vilnius) to Minsk to many small cities and villages.  It includes the story of the Bielski brothers and their 'family camp,' who were the center of the movie “Defiance.” While not its purpose, it provides information answering the question of why there was not more resistance, or more effective resistance, to the Holocaust. 

Levine is sympathetic with nearly all the characters in this story – some in the Judenrat, who attempted to deal with the Nazis as a method of survival; some Zionists who wanted to stay in the ghettos with ‘the community’ to engage in a hopeless fight; and those youth and families, as well as Communists and Socialists, who sought to escape the ghettos for the forests, to join Soviet and anti-German partisan units.  In the ghettos all the groups sometimes formed a united front of Jewish fighters. These mostly unprepared individuals and families were facing the most unprecedented killing spree in modern history.  These stories show how each was confronted with gruesome personal and political choices, as families were torn apart, sometimes dying apart.

Levine makes it clear that while some non-Jews were sympathetic and helped Jews to various degrees, or for a price – even peasants - the majority, especially in rural areas and small towns, were either anti-Semitic or cowed by German terror and collaborated with the German occupation.  Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian and Byelorussian police aided the Einsatzgruppen death squads, and sometimes Jewish ghetto police carried out Wehrmacht orders.  As Levine says, "there were no limits no Nazi reprisals" against Jews, partisans and anyone suspected of aiding them.  After the war, there were even pogroms against Jews in Poland.

The majority of Judenräte (Jewish council) leaders dealt with by the occupiers did not believe that Nazis would liquidate all Jews, so counseled caution, opposed resistance and sometimes arrested Jewish rebels.  They sought to maintain the surrounded ghettos by being cooperative.  Many of them came from the middle-class and were backed by older residents, who thought resistance a fantasy. They were aided by the Orthodox Jewish synagogues and rabbis, who preached non-resistance and turning to God.  Yet some Judenrat prepared resistance to German Aktions or liquidations, and in two cases, participated in uprisings that were later crushed.

Stalin and consequently the Soviet army were totally surprised by Operation Barbarossa.  This led to millions of Jews being caught and surrounded immediately.  It was not just 3 million Soviet soldiers imprisoned and German tanks at the gates of Leningrad and Moscow, but countless civilians too. In 1942 the USSR finally established a coherent partisan strategy, which then drew in Jewish fighters from the ghettos. However the Soviets had no policy on the liquidation of the Jews.  Escaped Soviet soldiers that were now in partisan bands were not interested in sheltering Jewish families, and demanded that every recruit bring a weapon.  Militarily taking care of civilian forest family camps was not a goal, and would have been difficult alone.  The Bielskis were one of the few all-Jewish groups that welcomed civilians, although some Soviet partisan units helped too.  Getting a weapon was difficult for male and female Jewish civilians, who had never been armed.  Most forest units eventually became connected to the Soviet Army as otriads.

Jewish Partisan Unit

In the cities and towns, the stronger the influence of local Communists and Socialists – for instance in Minsk – the more Jews escaped and survived.  The more the Judenrat, Orthodox Judaism, older residents or Zionists prevailed, the fewer lived. In Minsk, Levine estimates 10,000 out of 100,000 got out of the ghetto into the forests (puszcza) and swamps before it was liquidated.  Escape, however, could also be deadly.  Few survived the whole war in the forests alone, as local peasants, especially in Poland, engaged in ‘Jew hunts’ of their fellow villagers and turned them over to the SS to be murdered.  They believed the Jews were all Communists, bandits and Christ-killers, and also got petty rewards.  Partisans eventually punished villagers at the center of these actions.

The book contains descriptions of successful partisan actions, leaders and units in the Wehrmacht’s rear.  The unorganized, sometimes anti-Jewish ‘Russian’ (Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian) partisan units slowly came under Soviet military control.  The book describes how the Soviet Army organized and expanded the forest brigades through air-drops and training.  Anti-Semitism still existed among Soviet commanders and partisans, leading to Jews being killed or discriminated against.  The stereotype was that city Jews wouldn’t fight, even when their anti-fascism was evident.   The Soviets didn’t allow all-Jewish partisan units either, but some still existed under nominal Soviet command.  One famous all-Jewish unit was under the umbrella of the Gwardia Ludowa (GL), the Polish CP’s underground army. On the other hand, the nationalist/fascist Polish Armia Krajowa (AK-Home Army) supported by the English attacked Jewish family camps and GL units. At the end of the war, as the Nazi's retreated, attacks by the Polish Home Army and the Ukrainian Banderovtsky increased on Jewish family camps and all partisans.

Zemlianka - dugout hut

In Jewish family camps few survived living in primitive forest zemliankas – dug out, camouflaged log huts.  Levine estimates 10,000 were still alive under the harsh conditions and Nazi killing parties when the Soviet Army liberated these areas. 1,200 were in the Bielski camp alone.  Their condition reminds one of the status of escaped slaves and deserters before and during the U.S. Civil War, who hid in swamps and woods.  Women mostly served as nurses, cooks and tailors, keeping the bands functioning. Dangerous food expropriations (bambioshki) carried out frequently were the main source of nutrition. Torture and death or suicide were the only choices for partisans captured by the fascists, but especially Jews.  The majority of Jewish partisans were working-class youth, artisans or rural peasants, not in the middle-class or upper-middle class.  This figures.

The value of this book is its analysis of guerilla activity in conditions of ethnic oppression – something that is not far-fetched, even today.  Our forests are fewer, but cities remain…Celebrate victory over Fascism Day...

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, with these terms:  “Enemy at the Gates,” “Leaving World War Two Behind” (Swanson); “Panzer Destroyer:  Memoirs of a Red Army Tank Commander,” “Life and Fate” (Grossman); “The Unwomanly Face of War” (Alexievich); “The  Brown Plague” (Guerin); “The Holocaust Industry” (Finkelstein); “Diary of Bergen-Belsen,” “Son of Saul.”

And I borrowed it from comrade Rick!

Red Frog

May 7, 2022

Biological Desertification

 “The Insect Crisis – the Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World” by Oliver Milman, 2022

I consider this is a companion volume to “The Sixth Extinction” and “Dark Side of the Ocean.” (both sold at May Day…)  If your anecdotal experience has noted less bug splatter on your windshield and fewer fireflies, butterflies and bumble bees, well … you are not imagining things.  It has been dubbed ‘Insectageddon.’  It’s the same as the relatively empty woods everywhere.  It came to broad public attention in a 2017 Krefeld study of protected German forests that noted huge declines in bugs.   Another study of the Puerto Rican jungle came to even more dire numbers, along with a third from Australia and a fourth from Rothamsted, England.  They depicted a general 33-40% collapse in many insect species, a rate they claim is faster than any others. 

This is common knowledge for some, so aware individuals now plant wildflowers or native grasses, including milkweed, leave open edging on farm land, go organic, stop using insecticides, don’t mow - all to increase bug habitats.  Yet these individual efforts can’t turn the tide.

Insects function as food supplies for larger species like lizards and birds; as pollinators of the food we eat, especially vegetables, nuts and fruit; as breakers-down of manure, dead animals, rotting wood and plants, nourishing the soil; in combat with other insects - a vital link in a whole ecosystem.  A major study in 2016 pointed out that 75% of food is pollinated by insects.  They provide food for many birds and bats, whose numbers are now declining too.  Yet they are depicted in the mainstream as irritating pests and not as cuddly as apex predators like polar bears.  Milman likens their extinction as “worse than climate change.”  Choosing your poison doesn’t seem to be an effective strategy, but it’s his.

The cause of this coming collapse of the insect world are human and capitalist-linked, much like climate change.  This parallels other species’ declines among amphibians, birds and reptiles - along with the decimation of ocean denizens.  Toxic pesticides, destruction of habitat through farming, logging or building, water and air pollution, animal agriculture and global warming’s effects – drought and flooding - are the main causes, according to Milman.  The first notice of this was in 1936 by Edith Patch, the president of the Entomological Society of America, who decried pesticide use on fruit and vegetable crops.  Eating bugs has yet to become a main contributor, but some are now pushing that too, as, oddly, does Milman.

We’re talking about the valuable roles midges, flies, bumblebees, wasps, dung beetles, blowflies, ants, termites, butterflies, dragonflies, moths, grasshoppers, mayflies, water beetles, aphids, cicadas, crickets, lady bugs, caterpillars, mealworms and more play, as many insects are still unnamed and unknown.  Some, like cockroaches and mosquitos, might increase in number when other species die, as genetic diversity is also being lost.  This decline crosses all three insect 'empires' - aerial, ground-level and water-based.  

Like climate change, the conservative cry of ‘more studies’ contradict the general picture that has already emerged among insect specialists.  The argument Milman and others make is that ‘imperfect knowledge’ is how reality is perceived anyway, and that action has to be taken now.  As Marxists know, there is no such thing as 'perfect knowledge.' 

The book celebrates celebrity insects like honeybees and monarch butterflies, while closely investigating the toxic impact of pesticides, climate change, pollution and political inaction.  Like many scientists, Milman, a journalist, has no grasp of how capitalism or our fake democracy actually function. His lazy 'time scale' is since the start of industrialization, though the real crash was noted since the 1940s and 1950s, when many of the scientists were children. He speculates that food shortages and crashing wildlife populations will prompt tech fixes like drone bugs, a 'fix' entomologists laugh at.  He thinks younger generations will not notice the absence of so many species. He has suggestions against the biological deserts constructed by capital - rewilding, reducing livestock production and indoor farming - but no overall solutions except the general ones.  That is left to others.

A book every person interested in biology and the environment should read, including students.

P.S. - Alternet 5/6/22 story on missing insects:  https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/splatometer-study-flying-insect-populations/

P.P.S. - Guardian 5/6/22 story on missing birds:  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/05/canaries-in-the-coalmine-loss-of-birds-signals-changing-planet

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “The Sixth Extinction” (Kolbert); “Seaspiracy,” “Grocery Activism,” “No Local,” “Planning Green Growth,” “The Avalanche of Plastic…” “Jurassic World,” “The Burning Case for a Green New Deal” and “This Changes Everything” (both by Klein); “Crying Wolf,” “Collapse” (Diamond); “A People’s Green New Deal,” “A Foodies Guide to Capitalism,” “What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?” “When the Killings Done” (Boyle); “Against Doomsday Scenarios” (Foster). 

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog

May 3, 2022