France Week

 “May Made Me – An Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France” by Mitchell Abidor, 2018

Revolutionaries study revolutions.  May-June 1968 in France was a peculiar kind of revolt, not a revolution, but a moment when all of progressive French society was up in ‘arms’ in a mass way.  It happened in a somewhat modern capitalist society not so long ago.  There are some similarities to what happened in other countries at the time, like Italy, Greece, Germany, Mexico, Czechoslovakia and even the U.S. What can we learn?

This book interviews a raft of participants – anarchist leaders, students and activists, Trotskyist cadres and supporters, Maoist ideologues, hippie students, high school and neighborhood activists, proletarians of various political persuasions, General Confederation of Trade Union (CGT) and Communist Party of France (PCF) members, syndicalist peasants, radical white-collar workers and ex-PCF filmmakers.  Situationism, Althusser, self-management, film, French philosophers and every kind of politics are discussed. The interviewees stretch across France, in many towns besides Paris – Nanterre, Lyons, Nantes, Saint-Nazaire, Marseille, Rouen, Villefranche.    

The issues that motivated the movement began with opposition to the American war in Vietnam and the French occupation of Algeria. The French Resistance, the Spanish Civil War and the 1936 Popular Front hover in the background of family experience. While De Gaulle wanted to fire on demonstrators and had secretly mobilized the army, the more intelligent police used less lethal methods on purpose.  Two demonstrators died, but not quite by design.  This gave the movement almost no martyrs.  The movement spread to include almost every demand except building dual power or taking state power.  For instance, the unguarded practical power centers or government Ministries were not occupied. There is a reason for this. 

The MERRY MONTH of MAY

The personal narratives highlight the main events.  They start with an attack on a bank in Nanterre over Vietnam.  Nanterre is a northwest suburban town near Paris.  A student occupation followed at Nanterre University over those arrested, starting March 22, 1968.  The police occupied the Sorbonne May 3 in the Parisian Latin Quarter after the Sorbonne joined Nanterre.  The subsequent occupation of the Odeon Theatre by radicals was next, along with attacks by the police against demonstrators on May 6.  Farmers marched on May 8^th in Nantes.  Then the Night of the Barricades occurred in Paris, May 10, involving pitched battles with police.  After this, the CGT union federation finally called a general strike on May 11, which led to a mass student-worker demonstration on May 13 in Paris.  Strikes and factory occupations began on May 14 and by May 19^th 122 factories were occupied and 2 million were on strike, which eventually went up to 9-12 million across the country.  The city of Nantes was taken over by the working class for a week.  Mutual aid was instituted everywhere. Another half-million workers marched in Paris on May 29^th. 

After a ‘bread and butter’ deal called the Grenelle Agreements between De Gaulle and the CGT which gained benefits, conditions and higher wages for labor, the strikes ended after June 5.  Ones that held out were crushed by police operations.  De Gaulle called elections and gained an even bigger majority from the frightened middle class, farmers and bourgeoisie. Street demonstrations were banned, some left-wing groups outlawed and some leftists jailed.   

The PCF lost authority after 1968.  Their social-patriotic position on Algeria; their hesitancy to take radical steps against the Vietnam War; their denunciation of the students and forcible limitation of the uprising to economics; their expulsions of anyone who disagreed; all led many young people, – including Alain Krivine who eventually became a Trotskyist leader – to abandon the PCF. According to one of the interviewees, only in 2018 were some CPers finally admitting they’d made a mistake.

The LABOR ‘PROBLEM’

The ‘unity’ between students and workers was only apparent.  As was pointed out, the 30 years of somewhat better living standards for workers after WWII had made French workers passive.  Only some factories and younger workers, like in the Renault plants in Flins and Billancourt opposed the June financial deal made by the CGT leadership. The PCF formed the main roadblock to a revolutionary approach to the situation, though the PCF had proved this many times before.  They had become a mass reformist, social-democratic party, but still used bureaucratic / Stalinist tactics and rhetoric to control the movement.  Today they are a shred of their former selves, still in the unions, but unable to mount real electoral campaigns or speak credibly of socialism.  

The farmers – which this book calls ‘peasants’ – provided concrete help in Nantes suppling milk and chickens to striking workers at cost.  The CGT leadership in Nantes had nothing to do with them, but younger workers and students welcomed them. However this is somewhat of an exception due to the leadership of a tenant farmer from Brittany.  A similar thing happened in the 1985-’86 Austin, MN meatpacker’s strike in southern Minnesota, when a Trotskyist grocery owner supplied food to the strikers there. 

Renault Billancourt Factory Strike

CGT metal workers in Saint-Nazaire in the shipyard and aircraft factory voted to occupy their plants.  They secured their tools and machines, organized food delivery from local farmers and fishermen at cost, developed security inside and outside the plant and slept in the factory offices, as the actual work spaces were unsuitable. They also controlled the gasoline supply in the city by taking over the pumps to provide food to residents, as there was a gas shortage due to the strikes.  But they opposed any political demands.

After the general strike, the gains for workers was a national minimum wage, recognition of unions inside the plants and wage increases in many workplaces.  Each plant also had individual demands. Some anarchists had brought up ‘wrecking machinery and tools’ but the whole Marxist Left stood against that idea. A Trotskyist CGT member was a leader of the occupation of the aircraft factory, Sud-Aviation in Saint-Nazaire, so the PCF didn’t control everything.  The head of the CGT was booed at the Renault plant in Billancourt when he called for acceptance of the Grenelle accords.  In a way, the so-called ‘middle class students’ from OUTSIDE the union movement spurred a mass movement which greatly helped the working class.  The ‘ouvrieriste’ CGT/PCF never recognized this alliance, much to their discredit.  The Maoists, led by Louis Althusser of the elite Ecole Normale Superieure, also distained the student and community movement, as they were coming from a similar background as the PCF.

The U.S. AFL-CIO at the time was led by George Meany, a hard-core cold warrior whose labor federation was far weaker and far to the right of the CGT.  They would have never thought of a general strike or factory occupations. They supported the war in Vietnam, the government and the U.S. capitalist system in all its glory.  This trade union pathos is somewhat similar to today.

The French Trotskyist, anarchist and Maoist groups which advocated further steps or revolution were too weak to guide the movement except in smaller ways.  They had few roots in the factories and unions.  Few even thought they could challenge state power or take over, as this was no ‘rehearsal,’ no 1905 or Paris Commune.  It was perhaps more similar to the 1936 Popular Front strikes, though without the PCF in government. Essentially the student side of the rebellion was dominated by an ‘anarchist’ approach to organization, demands and ideas, a method which had both spontaneous authority and effectiveness but a long-run weakness.  Universities were occupied, General Assemblies formed and action committees grew up in neighborhoods and high schools, though only one lasted.  The action committees were an idea of Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s, a prominent anarchist.  Battles with Catholic, traditional and monarchist fascists like the OAS also occurred. 

A CULTURAL REVOLT

Gaullist figures like Culture Minister Andre Malraux were pilloried.  Louis Aragon, former surrealist and PCF honcho, was booed at the Sorbonne.  The ‘establishment’ got pied, but not overtaken.  A French feminist and gay rights movement grew out of 1968 - which was not initially present.  Most speak of the events causing a modernization of archaic French rigidity and paternalistic capitalism, resulting in more free speech, looser forms of dress, communal living, relaxed sexual attitudes, youth rights – essentially a cultural ‘progression’ out of archaic Catholic Gaullism.  At the same time the French working-class gained in security, pay and power across the board … for a time.  The example of a complete and massive general strike and factory occupations show such an event is possible.

Many speak of how strangers – everyone – actually talked to each other for a change, for a month or two at the height of events, then went back to isolation and silence.  Community had returned, if for only a moment, out of the alienation of capitalist society.  This is a fascinating materialist account and parallels other books that show how a certain historical event or period ‘made’ people into left-wing radicals. That process has not ended.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “The French Communist Party versus the Students,” “The Age of Uprising – the Legend of Michel Kholhass,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “Citizen Tom Paine,” “Two Days, One Night” “Thieves of the Wood,” “The Coming Insurrection,” “The Left and Islamic Literalism,” “The Committed,” “Thomas Piketty,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “The Merry Month of May,” “Society of the Spectacle” (Dubord); “Something in the Air,” “The Conspiracy,” “Finks,” “The Ghost of Stalin” (Sartre); “A Walk Through Paris” or the words “Paris” or “France.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 29, 2022

The Geography of Revolution

 “A Walk Through Paris – A Radical Exploration” by Eric Hazan, 2016

This is a book of history, architecture, personal memory and politics by a leftist who sees modern Paris through radical eyes.  It is a wonderful and somewhat overly detailed zig-zag path through the city, from the south to the north, crossing the Seine at the Pont Neuf, wandering through arrondissements and quartiers (neighborhoods) to see what there is, but with a knowing eye.

The French Revolution, the 1832 and 1848 revolutions, the 1871 Commune, the 1936 Popular Front strikes, the French resistance to fascism, the May-June 1968 rebellion - all mark Paris as a city of political strife, events marked in the city itself.  It was also a haunt of philosophers, surrealists, authors, poets, inventors, painters, scientists and architects.  Its streets bear the names of famous battles, revolutionaries, artists, politicians and countries.  One street is even named ‘La Rue de Lingerie’ so street naming is across the board.  

The parochialism and newness of the U.S. pale in comparison. 

LEFT BANK

For Hazan, the words of Balzac hover over the city. In the south he crosses the Périphérique ring road from Thorez’ old banlieue and starts in the 13^th Arrondissement, one of the poorest in old Paris.  It was home to the denizens of Les Miserables and also the last barricade of 1848.  It contains a hotel where Walter Benjamin stayed and a room where the prominent anarchist Blanqui was released to live.

After the Luxembourg Gardens, where Colette and Jean Valjean met, and writers and poets like Sartre, Faulkner, Rilke and Verlaine were inspired, is the Rue de l’ Odeon.  This is where Silvia Beach’s “Shakespeare & Company” bookshop was situated which saw the likes of Hemingway, Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Fitzgerald and Pound. Across the street Monnier’s bookshop hosted Gide, Valery, Benjamin and others. The originals are both gone, though a new “Shakespeare & Co.” exists still on the Seine near the Ile de la Cite.  The nearby Odeon Theater served as a base for the student rebels of 1968 after they took it over, stopping a performance by Alvin Ailey’s dance troop hosted by the French culture minister.

This same area on the Rue de l’Odeon was the center of the 1792 French Revolution on the Left Bank.  This is the location of the Cordelier’s Club, which supported Marat and Danton, and housed the proletarian “Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and Citizens.”  The price to get in was a donation, women were allowed to speak and ordinary citizens and sans-culottes filled the hustings, not politicians.  The Cordelier’s first demanded the dismissal of the king, started the insurrection in August 1792 and instituted the de-Christianization program, which closed all Parisian churches.  The Cordeliers were to the left of the Jacobins, the latter group having got their name from a monastery - which perhaps figures.

In the huge left-wing anti-Government rebellion of May-June 1968, the Quartier Latin nearby was the heart of the early rebellion.  It has lost its intellectual and social content and is now a Disneyland for high-end retailers and tourists.  The workers, students, paving stones, cinemas, art and book shops were forced out, diminished or departed, pushed by private and public capitalist forces.   On one of my visits in the early 1970s, the flics still occupied corners with their Black Marias – but that was a long time ago.  No need now.

It was here on the Left Bank, on the Rue des Grands Augustins that Picasso painted his famous Guernica, about the fascist bombing of that Spanish town in the civil war.  Hazan skips visiting the Concergerie on the Ile de la Cite, where Marie Antionette was kept until her beheading, as he crosses the Seine above it on the Pont Neuf.  He also avoids the Place de La Concorde, up the river, where the guillotine did its work, and the memorial to the Martyrs of the Nazi Deportation at the southern end of Ile de la Cite.  As you can see, every radical site in Paris is not in the book, like Pere Lachaise and others.

1848 Barricade Map

RIGHT BANK 

Hazan spends a lot of time on the partial destruction of the neighborhoods and streets of Paris by Haussmann in the late 1800s, and after 1968, by conservative Gaullist presidents and mayors – all aimed at working class districts.  Belleville mostly fell to development, for instance.  As part of this is the destruction of Les Halles, an old, classic market district on the Right Bank, which was partly replaced by the Centre Pompidou, a museum of contemporary art.  The Pompidou used to be open to everyone for free, but is now full of security systems, guards and €30 charges.   Hazan speculates that the exhibits have also declined from its populist heyday due to post-modernist nonsense by Koons and Le Corbusier.

Hazan describes the streets that composed the 3 barricades of the 1832 insurrection in the Marais.  This was depicted by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, and featured in stirring scenes in the play and film of the same title.  The red flag made its first appearance here, though it had been a symbol of martial law previously.  Evidently the ‘peuple’ were now making the law.  While not as significant as 1848, many still died at the barricades at the Alley of St. Merri and Rue Saint Martin, and are remembered in poetry and literature, though the Alley has partly disappeared.  The nearby Rue Saint-Denis was also the site of consistent proletarian and citizen uprisings starting in 1827, in which Blanqui was wounded as a young man, revolts which continued for years in this quarter.

He continues on to the Porte Saint Denis where the first shots of 1848 were fired by National Guard troops, killing two prostitutes on the top of a massive barricade. He mentions that there were 4,000 barricades in Paris at one point. (A map is attached, but this details fewer than that.) He walks into the northern faubourgs (suburbs) that were later incorporated into Paris, where the Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est rail stations are located.  This is also the area of Montmartre and Sacre Coeur. This area retains little of political significance except for the start of the 1870 insurrection by the Commune.

On a side note, in 1972 we ourselves built street barricades in Minneapolis around the University campus.  That happened again in the occupation of the 4th Precinct’s street on the Northside after the police murder of Jamal Clark in 2015.  Small barricades were set up across the city after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 as well.  Barricades evidently never go out of style, even in our boring prairie burg.

Cordelier's Club 1791

The SOCIAL and ARCHITECTURAL TERRAIN of the CITY

Hazan describes the class divisions and gentrification – which he more correctly calls ‘embourgeoisement’ - between neighborhoods and even within them. He changes the name because the ‘gentry’ no longer exist. This happened in the Marais, which used to be a noisy, dirty proletarian warren when he lived there.  He mentions covered commercial arcades, steps, narrow streets, cul-de-sacs, jazz clubs, bookshops and pedestrian zones of the walkable Paris.  He notes the upper-class Proust refrained from the walks that so many others indulged in. Hazan’s walk intentionally avoids the grand boulevards and instead meanders in areas that he still considers working-class.  He notes some recent anti-police brutality and anti-war locations.  As I understand the Yellow Vest protests mostly took place on the grand boulevards after this book was published.

In the northern part of Paris he describes Arab, African, Chinese, Indian, Algerian and Turkish-Kurd commercial and market areas, as well as the subterranean commuter trains to the near-by Arab banlieues and the far African ones. In this area on the Rue Des Islettes and Rue de la Goutte-d’Or Zola set his famous and popular book, “L'Assommoir” (The Drinking Den) about alcoholism and poverty. Hazan’s walk then crosses the northern modernist ‘wall’ of the Peripherique belt roadway, which constricts Paris from expanding ever again.  It ends in the St. Denis PCF banlieue outside Paris proper.

Hazan can describe the architecture of almost every building he crosses, a jumble of Haussmann, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Gothic, Medieval, Norman, Belle Epoque, Neo-Classical, Beaux-Arts, Restoration, Baroque, Renaissance, ’60 ugly, modern and post-modern. As a son of a book publisher, he speaks of the haunts of some of Paris’ writers – Balzac, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Breton, Chateaubriand, Diderot, Mallarme, Nerval, Stendahl – his old gallery.  He is also partial to hospitals, as he worked for years in the medical profession.

If you are interested in the left political side of history, variations of architecture or the encompassing issue of ‘the city,’ this book is for you.

(The author will be in Paris and France in late October and part of November.)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “The Conspiracy” (Nizan); "L'Assommoir" (Zola); "The Committed” (Nguyen); “The Beach Beneath the Street” (Situationism); “Finks,” “Something in the Air,” “Rebel Cities” (Harvey); “Deephan,” “The French Communist Party Versus the Students,” “The Coming Insurrection” (Invisible Committee); “The Ghost of Stalin” (Sartre); “The Merry Month of May,” “Something in the Air – Apres Mai,” “How to Kill a City,” “Extreme Cities,” “Capital City,” “Detroitus.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog, August 26, 2022

Frankenstein is Baaaack!

 “AL Franken at the Acme Comedy Club,” Minneapolis, 8/20/2022

Al Franken gave a PHD seminar on jokes to a small, packed house in Minneapolis’ former warehouse district.  Of course this is Minnesota, where sobriety reigns supreme and jokes sometime go under or over the radar.  Yet the house mostly rocked.  He was preceded by two comics, one who enjoyed looting Target© during the George Floyd uprising and a woman who had rejected Islam as a recovering Muslim, allegedly voting for Trump to keep her fundamentalist Pakistani father out of the U.S.  Her understated delivery and sly punchlines were superb.   

Franken was up next.  His storied career out of St. Jewish Park, an inner suburb of Minneapolis, covered Franken & Davis, who formed at upscale Blake high school.  Then he worked at Brave New Workshop, a long-running sketch comedy club in Minneapolis; a long run at SNL as a writer and cast member; and the U.S. Senate, a place perhaps more idiotic than even a comedy club.

Franken opened with his Jimmy Kimmel line:  “So who’s here from out-of-state to get an abortion?”  He took pokes at Diane Feinstein, Chuck Grassley, some members of the cloak-room Democratic caucus, along with Ted Cruz, revealing how these geniuses of public policy are anything but.  One of his classic jokes was this that passed under the heads of the cloak-room crowd:  “What is the last thing you want to hear after you’ve blown Willie Nelson?”  Pause.  “That wasn’t Willie Nelson.” He told a story of how Cruz – a fellow Harvard Grad - lied to his face.  As he said of Cruz …. “When people think of a cruise that is full of shit, you think of Carnival©, but we in the Senate think of Ted.” After his probing questions as a member of the Judicial Committee, he quoted Diane Feinstein as to how she thought all comedians were stupid.  He recounted an exchange with Grassley that revealed a deep country bumpkin who was missing a few cylinders.  Even Bernie Sanders came in for a poke for having to change his stump speech by removing 'millionaires,' as Bernie is worth more than $1M now.  Though actually he still invokes millionaires, as most of them are the base for the billionaires.  If he becomes a billionaire, his whole speech is ruined.

Franken also reamed the local and national press, which was more concerned with whether he had ever done cocaine at SNL or advocated incest.  He told of his ‘disappointment’ with the Democratic Party leadership, which had told him to resign after a cracked ‘me-too’ fatwa led by Kirsten Gillibrand, loser presidential candidate.  Franken folded on advice of the Democratic Party honchos instead of asking his own constituents if they wanted him to resign.  

As someone who was inspired into politics by the assassination of Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone he failed to defy the Democratic leadership and went meekly into the weeds.  Much evidence points to Wellstone’s plane going down by way of the FBI under orders of Cheney, using an electro-magnetic pulse weapon on the small plane the family was in.  Wellstone had defied the government line and even his Democratic colleagues on many issues, including the Iraq War.  I guess Franken didn’t want to eventually die too under a drone missile launched by Chuck Schumer.

All of this circled around the nature of a joke.  He tells a story of being required as Senator to send a congratulatory letter to a 110 year old lady in Minnesota.  He wrote “May your future be bright” or some such thing. His staff went bonkers. He did 'borsch-belt' Buddy Hackett jokes, and made fun of the Democratic Party consultants who couldn't 'stick' an idea or a joke for the life of them.  He wore a CoVid mask while handling a ventriloquist dummy that coughed and spewed all over the front row.  Of course you couldn’t see his lips move due to the mask because he can’t throw his voice anyway.  

Whatever you think of his servile approach to the Democratic Party, Franken is still an acute observer and funnyman.  At the end Franken advocated everyone door knock and phone bank for Democrats to protect “our democracy.”  It was an unintentional laugh line and brought quiet to the room. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  "American Assassination - The Strange Death of Paul Wellstone," “The End of Free Speech for Seth Rogan, Sony Pictures and America!” “Multi-Millionaire Comedians Who Love the System,” “Get Out” (Peele); “The Chapo Guide to Revolution,” “Bullet Points and Punch Lines” (Camp); “The White Lotus,” “The Jesus Comics,” “Religulous” (Maher); “What Can You Say About Bill Maher?”

The Cultural Marxist

August 22, 2022

War is a Racket II

 Capitalist War Cliches: 

Smart Bombs are Smart

No Civilians Are Hurt

None of our Soldiers Have Been Killed

Many More of Their Soldiers Have Been Killed

Generals are Geniuses

Our Leader is a Genius

All Our Soldiers Are Happy

All Our Civilians Love this War

We’re Going to Win

The Other Side is Going to Lose

The Other Side Tells Only Lies

We Always Tell the Truth

It Won’t Cost Much

This War Has No Impact on Domestic Affairs

The Other Side is: a Dictatorship / Puppet / Moneybags / Fascist / Inhuman / Corrupt / Satanist / Evil / / Infidel / Sub-human / Imperialist / Etc.

Anything we don’t like is a False Flag

That was an Accident

They Made Us Do It.  It was a Provocation.

We Had No Choice

Economics has Nothing to Do with this War

No, it’s Not About the Money

We Don’t Commit War Crimes

We are the Good Guys

The Other Side is Pushing Nuclear Winter.  Not Us.

It’s Their Fault

Domestic Repression is Necessary for the Fight

Prison and Illegality are the Fate of all War Opponents

We are Anti-Imperialists

They are Imperialists

Our Nation, Not Their Nation

In a Capitalist War, One Side is Always Right

Choose us, choose us!

Sound familiar?  Apply as Needed.

Or… revolutionary defeatism, fraternization among warring soldiers and civilians, organize against war, oppose our governments, no voting for ‘war credits,’ international working-class unity across national borders, oppose capitalist war and for permanent peace, up to a social revolution.  If possible, sabotage of the war makers and even turn the guns around on the war-makers, their officers, their thugs.  Make peace.

Prior blog reviews on this subject:  “The Yellow Birds,” “War is a Racket” (Butler); “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx-Engels); “Ken Burns,” “A People’s History of the Vietnam War,” “Hiroshima & Nagasaki,” “Strategy of Deception,” “1917,” “Leaving World War Two Behind” (Swanson); “What Is It Like to Go to War?” and “Matterhorn” (both by Marlantes); “Soldiers in Revolt,” “The Unwomanly Face of War” (Alexievich); “American War,” “We’re Doomed, Now What?” “King of Spies,” “Lieutenant Dangerous,” “Coleen Rowley on Russiagate,” “Tree of Smoke” or the word ‘war.’

The Cultural Marxist

8/20/2022

All You Need Is Love?

 “All About Love – New Visions” by bell hooks, 2000

This book has been a constant best-seller over many years at May Day, so I thought I’d read it.  hooks is a well-known black feminist who took her pen name from her sharp, spunky grandmother.

hooks starts with a definition of love, a definition which is necessary, as having no definition she thinks is a dodge.  She borrows it from Erich Fromm by way of M. Scott Peck:  Love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”  Breaking this quote down she uses more familiar words like "affection, respect, recognition, commitment, trust and care" to describe it.  She believes love is an act, not a feeling.  She does not really separate love into kinds - sexual, romantic, partner, familial, friend, community or class, etc. which seems odd.  But this is a pattern.

You’ll notice the first definition contains a contradiction and also leans towards spiritualism.  hooks denies it is religious, but then mentions it is connected to the soul.  As someone who doesn’t believe in ‘souls’ or understand what the euphemism of ‘spiritual growth’ is, it has a heavy overlay of idealism.  The contradiction in this definition is when ‘one’s own’ spiritual growth conflicts with another’s.  There is also use of the word ‘or’ which might mean one person is using the other.  This is a flawed and confusing definition.

hooks has a whole chapter praising liberal religion, charity, God and the divine as the true opponents of materialism, capitalism and consumerism.  She mentions the roles of New Age religion, meditation and prayer, angels, Thomas Merton and her upbringing in the Baptist Church.  Marxists are still waiting for this mass movement of ‘love’ to break with the pro-capitalist Democrats and Republicans and truly oppose this system.  After all, in the early 1900s, as depicted in “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, Christian socialists were one large strand of the socialist movement.  Where are they now?  Cornel West, Chris Hedges and who?  Dorothy Day, liberation theology and who?  Religion has been eaten by the Right.  Perhaps it is because time has moved on and religion has lost credibility across the board, even among young dark-skinned people.

THERAPY

hooks says she grew up in a dysfunctional family, where care, humiliation and physical punishment were meted out equally.  She actually thinks the overwhelming majority of people grew up like this, though she provides no statistics or facts.  She also generalizes that most men lie, have no feelings and are invested in male supremacy and power.  ‘Lying,’ like love, is not broken down into ‘white’ lies and worse ones.  She claims she always tells the truth, which reminds me of a certain film.  She does believe that people have a right to privacy … another contradiction, as privacy sometimes involves ‘lies of omission.’

hooks goal is ‘true love’ – which seems to be a kind of mystical perfectionism unrooted in material reality.  But then she says she doesn’t believe in this perfectionism.  Kollontai in 1918 pointed out the rarity of ‘true love’ and ‘soul mates,’ and this seems at this point more of the reality.  After all, love, like everything else, is marked by its historical period.  Love as an overarching method might work in an evolved communist society, but before?

POLITICS

hooks wants ‘love’ to be a political slogan, but in the present context it’s really a moralistic one. So she advocates ‘communalism' i.e. community and small towns.  Yet the slogan of love is also the goal of every preacher, every Hillary Clinton, every Subaru© ad and a line of freeway gas stations, Love’s©. She writes of the detrimental affect greed, consumerism and commodities wreak on society, but never ties this to the market system.  Love to hooks becomes an individual moral choice like not watching television or refusing to buy certain products.  To me it becomes a form of virtue signaling, as those ‘Love Over Hate’ lawn signs attest.  Has anyone realized that perhaps ‘hate’ – class hatred - has a role in overcoming the market and war system, racism, sexism, capitalism, global warming and the rich?

This book seems to be a work of therapy by a woman damaged in childhood who had two long, unsatisfying relationships and was on her own and celibate for many years.  Perhaps writing this book was a way of dealing with trauma.  Especially for women and in opposition to the ‘patriarchy,’ she looks at self-love, affirmations, positivity, self-assertiveness, giving, community, kindness and finding a job you love.  For hooks, true love involves much work too, so that is another job to pursue.  She thinks joining an organization or a political movement is not the road to take.  Kindness is more her style.

The book is a compendium of quotes and self-help commentary.  Personally, except for the comment about love being ‘an act’ I was overwhelmed with pages and pages of love rhetoric.  I’m actually disappointed at how weak it is – this from an accomplished woman who was a professor at Yale, Oberlin, USC, San Francisco State, City College and finally Berea College in Kentucky and who wrote 30 books. I don’t really like trashing love, given its benefits – but when it functions as an all-encompassing solution to everything, it reveals its limits.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 16, 2022

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Love or the Alternative,” “Love and Information,” “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai,” “Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs,” “Jude the Obscure” (Hardy); “What is To Be Done?” (Chernychevsky); “Hard Like Water.”

Learning From Mistakes?

 “The End of the Beginning – Lessons of the Soviet Collapse” by Carlos Martinez, 2019

This book is one of a series that attempts to explain the internal contradictions that led to the collapse of the USSR and its allies / satellites.   It’s written from a familiar Brezhnevite / Zyuganov point of view, attempting to explain how the Soviet political economy failed.  

It starts with a long list of achievements of the people of the USSR which should be familiar to most socialists – getting rid of the capitalist and landlord classes, social equality, industrialization, defeating fascism, achievements in science and technology, a comprehensive welfare state, aiding national liberation movements.  This was under years of extreme external pressure.  There is no theoretical background to any of these gains by the author, just a list. 

PROBLEMS in PARADISE

Then Martinez tries to detail the problems, which he says started to show up in the late 1950s – slowing productivity, inability to use technical advances like computers and the flaws of prior methods of central planning as society and production became more complex. The USSR reached peak productivity in the mid-1970s, then began to decline.  Easy oil, coal and gas production declined on the European side of the Urals, so production had to be moved farther east, which cost more.  Quality was secondary to ‘meeting the numbers’ of the plan, especially on consumer goods.  A secondary black-market economy developed because of consumer shortages, engendering a sort of lumpen petit-bourgeoisie.  Martinez also cites “poor labor discipline” as workers saw less and less value to their labor.   

These are all supposedly ‘technical’ economic issues but they relate to political ones - the falling support of the population.  Or as others he quotes call 'the masses.' Martinez tries to explain this lack with a section on foreign problems – Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the break with China, the CIA’s backing of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, the collapse of the associated workers' states in east and central Europe.  He has a special focus on Khrushchev’s denunciation of the euphemistic Stalin ‘personality cult,’ which he thinks was a mistake even though it was real. An earlier “necessary repression” is mentioned, but as to ‘who’ was repressed is left vague.  He mentions the Soviet fear of extending revolutions across the world so as not to anger the West.  The phrase ‘workers democracy’ is never used.  Martinez finally tiptoes up to the existence of a bureaucratic “state-party elite” which would gain from final ‘enterprise autonomy’ and capitalist restoration.  

Martinez covers the endless military, economic and nuclear aggressiveness of the U.S. and its allies against the USSR.  While the latter wanted peace, the former wanted counter-revolution.  So 30% of Soviet GDP went to military spending, which did not benefit the population.  Although as history notes, the greatest danger was from within.

Russian poverty in 2015 at 20 million / 21 million in 2021

GORBACHEV

Martinez shows how Gorbachev’s pursuit of perestroika and glasnost was carried out in a way that undermined the state-owned economy, leading to a counter-revolution led by Yeltsin and 15 years of incredible economic darkness due to capitalist ‘shock therapy.’  This was accomplished in spite of a referendum where voters chose to continue the USSR by more than 2-1 - though the Baltic Republics did not allow a vote. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was accomplished by the leaders of only 3 of the 15 Republics – Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia - initiated by Yeltsin. The prelude to this was Gorbachev allies attacking Marxism and socialism; they got rid of national planning, increased market relations, allowed runaway private enterprise and made a 50% reduction in state spending.  This created chaos and shortages, even of soap.  A first-ever recession occurred under Gorbachev.  After his removal the economy had a 40% decline in GDP under Yeltsin, in what has been called 'the worst depression in world history.'  The U.S. and its allies were intent on dismantling the Soviet economy and they succeeded in handing it over to a new bunch of crony capitalists.

In the process Martinez defends a ‘one party state’ not a workers democracy – even though he blames a large section of the bureaucracy for supporting capitalist restoration.  Go figure.  Now former apparatchik Putin rides this capitalist beast, made up of equal parts crony capitalism, repression and Great Russian chauvinism.  Putin was a member of the ‘state-party elite’ intent on privatization.  Martinez doesn’t mention him as Yeltsin's more competent successor, probably for political reasons.

The author is a British member of “The Friends of Socialist China.” Of interest is his unintentional comparison of the USSR to China.  The latter made a cross-class block with the U.S. and its allies in 1971, and achieved technology transfers by renting its working class out to the capitalists after 1978 when actual Maoism was abandoned.  He celebrates the CCP for not dissing Mao, even though the new leadership opposed many of Mao's ideas and methods like the GPCR. On the other hand the USSR  did not make a ‘deal’ beyond détente, nor could it, as it was the main target of the international capitalists.  Also unlike the USSR, China did not have a global role in financially supporting national liberation and ‘socialist’ movements and governments across the world, but kept itself in national isolation - running publishing houses and friendship associations but little else.  To this day the CCP is still in an alliance with a huge sector of Chinese domestic and “Western” foreign capital, running a version of authoritarian social-democracy -  something Martinez seems to favor.  

Martinez ends by suggesting that the USSR should have followed what China and Vietnam did in liberalizing the economy, but doing it slowly, with care.  As part of this he advocates increasing material incentives, but oddly, doesn't explicitly say that.  He is still flummoxed why a majority of the Soviet bureaucracy chose capitalist restoration... but perhaps they too wanted more 'material incentives.'  This was actually predicted long ago.  Now China itself faces a new cold war and a break in that 51-year long alliance with world capital that started in 1971.  

This is a familiar book which retro-actively explains the past but has no real clues as to the future.  It is a partial history of what happened and an incomplete understanding of what went wrong.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Secondhand Time – the Last of the Soviets” (Alexievich); “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” (Cohen); “The Contradictions of Real Socialism – the Conductor and the Conducted,” “Unlearning Marx – Why the Soviet Failure Was a Triumph for Marx,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “Blackshirts and Reds” (Parenti); “Fear” (Rybakov); “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” “Reinventing Collapse” (Orlov); “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Russia and the Long Transition From Capitalism to Socialism” (Amin); “The Red Atlantis,” “From Solidarity to Sellout – The Transition to Capitalism in Poland.”   

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 13, 2022

Forced Child Bearing Has a Material Cause

 “Without Apology – The Abortion Struggle Now,” by Jenny Brown, 2019

Not quite ‘now.’  This book was written before the repeal of Roe v Wade, but it anticipates that eventuality.  It is a leftist take on fighting for abortion against the failed methods of Planned Parenthood, NARAL, MS Magazine and the Democratic Party’s bourgeois feminists, who have coddled partial anti-abortion types like Cuellar, Carter, Biden and Kaine.  It puts it in the economic and political context of women’s liberation – something that Brown says “the lean-in feminists of the 1%” don’t do. 

Abortion is not just a ‘cultural issue,’ it is a material, economic and class issue.  So-called leftists who consider it a diversion or ‘identity’ politics are fools.  Brown considers abortion, which is a form of contraception, part of the fight for contraception and sex education.  But it also is an aspect of the need for universal health care, subsidized or free day care, paid parental leave, higher women’s wages and shorter hours at work – all working-class matters and something the U.S. has no laws on.  Or as a Marxist might say, key to 'social reproduction.'

SLOGANS

To Brown, the key to fight for abortion is not the ‘choice’ attitude but the ‘emancipation of women’ attitude. Brown calls for ‘reproductive justice’ as an appropriate slogan.  She castigates the weak legality of hanging abortion on ‘privacy’ or the dodge of ‘choice.’  The Republican Party has decided on forced child bearing.  The Democrats allowed abortion to be whittled away for 49 years, and still consider means-testing by a hundred restrictions reasonable.  The Dems thought lawyers, experts, consultants and centrism would win against the whittling away of abortion rights. Brown knows only the revival of a strong women’s movement will do the trick.  And at this point it will have to be one that understands capitalism.

Brown lists some of the anti-abortion restrictions prior to the repeal of Roe v Wade – lack of Medicaid coverage due to Carter’s Hyde Amendment; waiting periods and required ultrasounds; parental consent; few clinics; anti-abortion tracts read by doctors; fake pregnancy centers; abortion pills limited by the FDA and price; gag rules; tightening time limits; attacks on morning-after pills and IUDs; requirements that a doctor perform the abortion; that a hospital must be on call; harassment and physical threats against patients, doctors and clinics.  4 doctors have been killed by anti-abortion fascists, more injured and several clinics bombed or burnt.

BIRTH RATE

The key, according to Brown, is that a declining birth rate is not desired by the capitalist class.  This was evident after birth rates started to drop in the 1970s. The capitalist economy needs more workers, soldiers and consumers to consistently grow GDP.  So-called leftists who ignore the multiple evidence for this have left materialism behind.  The nationalist dodge about abortion ‘genocide’ or ‘limiting the black population’ is also part of this.  Black women have been in the forefront of pro-abortion struggle, as the working class, including its poorest strata, is most impacted by forced child bearing. 

The U.S. has decided on a punitive and CHEAP method to get more children, forcing childbirth while providing little help to families.  Free reproductive and child care labor by women and families is their goal.  As Marx pointed out long ago, child bearing and nurturing are part of the essential social reproduction of the working class, and this burden falls mostly on women although men are acutely aware of this issue too.  On the other hand, most social-democratic capitalist states try to encourage population growth by treating women, children and families with a carrot instead of a stick. Across the border in Canada, abortion is free at any stage, then families are supported in various ways. Canada attempts to replace any population deficit by immigration.  However in the U.S. anti-immigrant hysteria is normal. We have the stick instead.  

Brown recounts how a left-wing mass movement and a women’s underground brought Roe v Wade into being, not politicians or the Supreme Court.  She shows how Ireland voted out the Catholic laws against abortion in 2018 by a 2-1 margin due to a mass movement – similar to what just happened in Kansas. She highlights the various tactics of civil disobedience, lawsuits, electoral campaigns, personal contact and practical mutual aid that work.  She has detailed descriptions on what an abortion is and how to perform an abortion, like vacuum aspiration and pill distribution.  She highlights the fight against shaming, promotes telling personal abortion stories and focuses on the hidden but widespread reality of abortion across the world, with 30% in the U.S. having an abortion, the majority working-class.  As part of her history, she points out that abortion was even legal in the U.S. until 1873.  There's some 'originalism'!

WOMEN’S EQUALITY AND EMANCIPATION

Brown is weak on understanding that men also don’t want to be saddled with unwanted children as husbands, boyfriends or one-night stands.  This was key in the Irish vote.  Brown also does not mention white nationalist or evangelical Christian ‘replacement theory’ that wants more ‘white’ babies.  Both of these versions of the American Taliban oppose abortion due to their idea that women are just baby-machines to bolster the lighter skinned among us.  The ‘coat-hanger’ on the cover even she criticizes, as it makes out that coat-hangers are a way to perform an abortion.  It is not.  She does not discuss deeply how limiting or ending abortion also has a damaging effect on women for miscarriages and women’s health.  That is now becoming quite evident.

At first Brown soft-peddles the ‘material’ side of this question, reprising the 1970s ‘sisterhood’ angle and the 1969 Redstockings radical feminist group.  At the end she also cites the USSR, the former workers’ states, Vietnam and China in their attempt to make women equal to men across the board, including child issues.  She notes that as the Chinese economy gets more capitalist, the 1-child policy became a 2-child policy and it’s now up to 3 as their birth rate drops.  The same thing happened in Poland after 1989, which presently outlaws abortion except for rape and incest due to the influence of the Catholic Church.  This demographic pattern happened in some other former workers’ states like Hungary. The workers’ states were not based on endless and sometimes pointless economic growth at all costs, so their attitude towards abortion – except Romania – was not so driven by material factors.’

On the other hand, dropping birth rates in somewhat homogenous countries like Japan, south Korea, Russia, Netherlands and Denmark are worrying capitalists.  This demographic decline is worldwide, except for countries like Nigeria and Pakistan, due to what she calls ‘urbanization.’ 

This is an excellent abortion primer, or perhaps all you need. 

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “State Department Feminism,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,” “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Really, Rape, Still?” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”  “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” “Stitched Up,” “Shopping World,” “Mistaken Identity,” “The Unwomanly Face of War,” “Reflections on the Olympics 2012,” “Women in Soviet Art,” 'Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai."  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 9, 2022