History is Never Past

 “Red Valkyries – Feminist Lesson from Five Revolutionary Women” by Kristen Ghodsee, 2022

This is a good book to read for people who are rejecting bourgeois feminism.  While somewhat dated, it shows the emancipatory feminist thrust of socialist women connected to the USSR and Bulgaria.  It covers the stories of the WWII sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the organizer and educator Nadezhda Krupskaya, the Party worker Inessa Armand and the partisan and scientist Elena Lagadinova.  It could be the start of a whole series on socialist women from all over the world of course.

Ghodsee defines the huge differences between bourgeois feminism, which mostly seeks legal equality from the standpoint of upwardly mobile middle and upper class women; and socialist feminism, which advocates legal AND social equality in the form of state support for daycare, paid maternity leave, socialized housework and more.  They see that capital is the ultimate source of women's oppression. 3 of the women were typical feminists first, but saw the limitations.  As a Soviet woman, Pavilchenko observed how U.S. women were trivialized, second class citizens in the 1940s U.S. and Britain.  Lagadinova led the Women’s Commission in the Bulgarian workers’ state, counseling her 'Western' sisters. 

Pavlichenko killed 309 confirmed Nazis in WWII as a sniper, starting with a Moisan-Nagant.  She was skilled as she had been practicing marksmanship since she was a kid.  She was even a ‘counter-sniper’ whose job it was to take out German snipers.  After being injured 4 times and taking sick, she was sent on a trip to the U.S. during the war where she met Eleanor Roosevelt and the U.S. press.  She advocated a 2^nd front, which the U.S. and British ‘Allies’ had delayed for years on purpose. The questions from the U.S. press were mostly idiotic about whether a ‘woman’ could be a soldier and did she wear makeup and nice underwear and what-not.  800K women fought in the Soviet Army as snipers, pilots, parachutists, artillery and other roles that did not require upper-body physical strength.

Like the color issue in the U.S., Roosevelt saw that the U.S. treatment of women did not compare favorably to the Soviets.  Being one of the smarter women in the U.S. ruling class, she prompted a 1963 commission which looked at U.S. laws that discriminated against women.

Kollontai was appointed the first Commissar of Women in 1917.  Prior to that she led the first strike of Petrograd laundresses against Krensky’s regime.  She wrote profusely and also spurred the first Soviet laws advocating women’s liberation.  These allowed easy divorce, abortion, gay rights, maternity leave and were against ‘bastard’ designations, while promoting equal pay and jobs, state creation of orphanages, child care facilities, collective laundries, workplace canteens, and other social efforts to combat domestic drudgery. She also wrote about the development of new sexual and romantic relations if inheritance and women’s oppression were lifted.  She avoided the faction fights and purges of her Old Bolshevik friends in the 1930s by escaping to diplomatic posts overseas.  She saw nearly all her efforts for women’s liberation reversed by Stalin in 1936.  She died in 1952 after a series of strokes.

Krupskaya is the most interesting of all… as she always operated in Lenin’s shadow. Without Krupskaya, Lenin would have not been able to function as well as he did.  She maintained the home and the many relocations, and also translated, took dictation, organized correspondence, paid bills, edited Iskra, did cryptography and minutes, and other aspects of logistics.  While the Bolsheviks were politically for women’s liberation, the ‘old’ ways still persisted in personal contexts. 

Krupskaya, due to her extensive experience teaching workers and peasants, became a seminal advocate of progressive educational principles.  She was an inspiration for Paulo Freire, for instance and supported a ‘labor-arts’ approach.  After the revolution she set up libraries and reading rooms across the USSR and created a school pedagogy that encouraged critical thinking, practical skills and the development of individual understanding and talents.  She also set up kindergartens, the Komosol and the Young Pioneers. Her educational efforts were reversed under Stalin, who reinstituted rote learning, memorization and extensive testing.  She died in 1939 from a heart-attack in the aftermath of the Purge trials of her Old Bolshevik comrades.  

Armand became Lenin’s close confidant and a Bolshevik faction leader, though she grew sick of his arbitrary and demanding nature prior to 1917.  She became a representative of the faction, did translations, did dangerous courier work and extensive traveling.  She edited Rabotnitsa, (Woman Worker) in 1914, which was first issued on International Working Women’s Day.  At one point she was sent to Paris as a representative of the Zimmerwald left, which opposed WWI and supported civil war against the respective capitalist governments. At the same time she had 5 children and this conflict between personal and political continued her whole life.

She was in a close personal relationship with Krupskaya and Lenin at times, and the rumors of a ‘ménage a trois’ or something resembling that still exist.  Ghodsee does not find enough proof for that, though she does explain how traditional marriage and relationships were looked down upon by some revolutionaries.  After the revolution she was a leader of the women’s department of the CP with Kollontai, the Zhenotdel, but died in 1920 partly due to exhaustion.  The Zhenotdel was later eliminated by Stalin.

The 'Amazon' - Lagadinova in 1971

Lagadinova was a Bulgarian partisan in WWII as a girl, brought up in a poor peasant family as a red diaper baby.  After the guerilla triumph in Bulgaria against the fascists and the monarchy, she went on to be highly educated in agro-biology, once developing a seed hybrid of wheat and barley.  She was selected by the Bulgarian president to head the Women’s Commission in 1968, as Bulgarian women were legally equal as of 1946 but still labored in two shifts due to the lack of investment in mothers, daycare, maternity leave and household support.  The problem was a dropping birth rate.  She was ordered to rectify the situation to make it easier to have children.  After 5 years of struggle with her male comrades in 1973 Bulgaria passed and paid for one of the most comprehensive systems to aid women and children in the world according to Ghodsee.  Lagadinova later became an international figure, named ‘special rapporteur’ at the 1980 U.N. conference on women in Nairobi.      

Actual Left Feminism

All these women were socialists who understood the material roots of the oppression of women in the capitalist system itself, unlike middle-class and upper-class feminists who avoid that issue.  A system which demands free reproductive labor and cheap female labor to enable profiteering.  Ghodsee says that “Women’s bodies were as much a means of production as any textile mill or steam engine.”

Ghodsee identifies the USSR with the typical language of ‘actually existing socialism’ – which of course might not be actual socialism at all. She is anti-Stalinist in her perspective, recognizing the anti-female, conservative and bloody role the rigid Soviet bureaucracy played at that time. She does not define polyamory or ‘free love’ in her text, seemingly associating them with something that does not quite rise to that level. At one point she seems to say that ‘free love’ means not wanting to get married.  She notes that 3 of these women came from the middle-class or lower nobility in Russia, but grew apart from their class to pursue a revolution that united men and women. 

Ghodsee concludes with statistics on the huge improvements in the lives of working women in the workers’ states during this period.  She says these 5 women embodied comradeship, humility, auto-didacticism, receptivity, aptitude, tenacity and the ability to create coalitions – skills that a new revolutionary movement will need to succeed.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, using these terms to investigate our 15 year archive:  “Feminism” or “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “State Department Feminism,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” (Ghodsee); “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” (Vogel);“Stitched Up,” “Shopping World,” “Mistaken Identity,” “The Unwomanly Face of War” (Alexievich); “Reflections on the Olympics 2012,” “Women in Soviet Art,” 'Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai," “Without Apology,” ‘What Is To Be Done?” (Chernyshevsky); "Patriarchy of the Wage" (Federici).    

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 27, 2022

An Indian View

 “Post-Modernism Today” by Siraj, 2018

First came the Trotskyists, now the left Maoists, both aiming Marxist shots at the idealist trends of post-modernism and post-structuralism (PM/PS).  You might think these ideas are limited to obscure academic journals.  They are not, as they have flowed into political culture.  Siraj seems to be around the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and makes for the most part an orthodox Marxist attack on these philosophic trends, though he says both the CPI and CPI(Maoist) have made these errors recently.

Why pay attention to theory?  Because ‘theory’ actually promotes practice in the real world. According to Siraj, Foucault and Derrida, the two most prominent theorists of this current, both downplay anything but local, small-bore attempts to change social reality, as any exercise of power is corrupt - even in opposition.  Any ‘overarching theories’ or metanarratives are also rejected by them, as are cause and effect, which denies both Marxism and actual science.  They ignore class and capitalism and dwell on ethnicity - which feeds into pure bourgeois identity politics from the right and left.  Essentially these are conservative, alt-right and anti-revolutionary tacks that parade as ‘critical of the discourses’ of modern capitalism.  While providing some illumination of problems under capitalism, their general thrust is not that.

One of the elements of post-modernism/post-structuralism (Siraj combines them) is a reliance on words and language as the primary markers of reality.  This is not merely philosophic idealism. This issue arises in the real world of politics when words become arbitrary.  Word salad and word games have nothing on this – a method also noticeable in their opaque writing styles. For instance, some activists claim that ‘men’ can have babies or that there are hundreds of genders or that who can give birth doesn’t matter. Others apply the word ‘fascism’ to everything.  Even the word ‘anti-imperialism’ is changing its skin.  In a sense, it makes nonsense of words and material reality, redefining them beyond comprehension, or turning them on their heads. But this partly arises out of a post-modernist approach.  Peace is war!

THE TEXT

Siraj, poor soul, read books on this issue and many of its’ theorists too – Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Lacan.  He tries to tie their ideology to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism.’  In contrast, he stands up for the historically progressive parts of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Descartes, reason, science and human progress.  This is clearly because he has the material background of continuing Vedic and Hindu obscurantism in India, and the accompanying poverty, violence, exploitation and class/caste misery it justifies.  The deep and diffuse uselessness of post-modernism in Indian society is evident in his analysis.

The book is a somewhat brief survey of philosophic trends.  Siraj starts with the textual analysis of Saussure, semiotics, structuralism and how it morphed into PM/PS.  His analysis is somewhat disorganized, repetitive and runs on, but his points are eventually made.  Essentially written ‘signs’ became divorced from what they signify – which means reality becomes language.  As Lacan says “The world of words creates the world of things.”  Or as the Bible says “In the beginning was the Word…” Language is no longer what it refers to, nor what role language plays in social links between humans, or even its relative role in communication.

Hinduvtva - celebrating the 'difference.'

META-NARRATIVES

PM/PS opposes ‘totalizing’ or a holistic approach to reality, and seeks to break down any coherent explanation of reality or economic and social systems into shards and fragments.  This method flows into Siraj’s section on Nietzsche.  Siraj focuses on the concept of relativism and difference that both PM/PS and Nietzsche celebrate.  He says:  “…to worship the ‘difference’ as being intrinsic to societies is to legitimate and provide feudal moral license accepting all the horror-inspiring practices in such semi-feudal and colonial societies of the East.” Relative to this, Foucault endorsed Khomeini and the theocratic mullah government in Iran as a sterling example of an exciting ‘non-Western’ difference.  This view feeds into a traditionalist polemic against ‘foreigners’ and ‘outsiders’ who infect ancient cultures or ethnicities.  Foucault’s endorsement of this kind of ‘revolution’ shows his hypocrisy as to metanarratives.

Nietszche based his philosophy on ‘natural’ biologic differences that flowed into fascism, while PM/PS believes that culture creates all differences and those cultural differences should be upheld against any human similarities or broad material causes.  It is not a stretch to see here the early origins of academic identity theory, or a political program of disunity.  Nietszche believed the Christian myth that Jesus supported equality, and he came to oppose religion for precisely that reason – not its magical properties, its nonsensical explanation of the world, its alliance with various ruling classes – but its weak ‘powerlessness.’

As part of this is the mixed legacy of Edward Said, who Siraj claims denied any benefits to all of the ‘Western episteme’ because of European colonialism, a view PM/PS also endorses.  Siraj, based in India and seeing its’ effects, says of this over-reaching ‘anti-colonialism:’  “The so-called Colonialist discourse is basically weak and partial …”

According to Siraj, PM/PS also abrogates cause and effect, making science impossible.  They oppose “logocentrism” and ‘scientific reductionism’ in this regard.  They dismiss ‘Western science’ as biased, based on their cultural and textual critique, not over whether it approaches reality or is misused by capital. You see reality doesn’t exist, as that would be a metanarrative.  Siraj goes to the point of calling this a form of petit-bourgeois nihilism - rejecting the universality of many scientific discoveries, including people’s science.  He also touches on their romantic primitivism in a discussion of Marx’s ecologic views.

What Siraj is writing is not much different than other critical analyses of post-modernism by Habermas and others, but in more detail and with an Indian perspective. This might not be an introduction but it can be seen as an addition to your library about post-modernist nonsense.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Microverses,” “Marxism versus PostModernism,” “Fashionable Nonsense,” “From the Factory to the Metropolis”(Negri); “Art is Dead,” “Capitalist Realism” (Fisher); “The Marxist Theory of Art,” “Lacan,” “The History of Philosophy,” “La Biennale Arte di Veniza,” “Intersectional Class Struggle.” INDIA: “Walking With the Comrades,’ “Field Notes on Democracy,” The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” “Capitalism – A Ghost Story” (all 4 by Roy); “Arundhati Roy,” “Celebrate Indian Women,” “The God Market,” “Caste – the Origins of Our Discontents,” “Annihilation of Caste” (Ambedkar); “White Tiger,” “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “Value Chains,” “Last Man in Tower” (Adiga); “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” “Life of Pi,” “The Story of My Assassins.”

And I bought it at May Day Books, where everything isn’t about ‘philosophy!’

Red Frog

September 24, 2022

Small Bites

“Microverses – Observations from a Shattered Present” by Dylan Riley, 2022

This book is a series of notes by a Marxist sociologist, tiled in a mosaic of short chapters that run from one paragraph to a couple of pages, covering the period of the pandemic, Trump’s reign to Biden.  It is mostly easy, bite-size thinking with some notes covering the same issue.  They remind one of Zizek except less chaotic.  Riley’s a sociology professor at UC Berkeley and works for New Left Review, so there is a bit of obscure academia included here too. 

Riley debates post-modernism, post-colonial relativism, Bourdieu, ‘racial’ capitalism, anti-political sociology, Judith Butler, Polyani and various anti-Marxist methods, using references to Durkheim, Weber, Gramsci, Lukács, Hayek, Marx and others in his analysis of ‘political capitalism’ – i.e. the heavily state-involved form of capital we now have.  He champions a ‘critical sociology’ interested in ideas.  The two ghosts that hang over these notes are 1, anti-materialist ‘identity’ academia and 2, a social-democracy that limits itself to a philosophy of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness,’ a method he opposes.

Here are some good quotes: 

1.            “Marxism … sociology’s ‘ur-antagonist.’”

2.           “Did Emperor Hirohito suffer politically from the monumentally idiotic attack on Pearl Harbor?”

3.           “The increasing importance of political power as a determinant of the rate of return is one of the basic reasons for the hollowing out of democracy.  Market power and political power tend to fuse.”

4.           Re: “… in the ideology of the capitalist state… it is not the person or the class that rules, but the subject-less order.”

5.           “Trump … unmasked the fiction of the impersonal state.”

6.           “Socialism is already here … it only needs a crisis to reveal it.” (re: government interventions during the pandemic, 2007-2008, etc.)

7.           Riley opposes the ‘stay in your own lane’ privileging of individual experience and identity, as real knowledge is not just personal, anecdotal or through ‘stories,’ but mediated by history, theory, materialism and facts.

8.           The pandemic revealed:  “…the agony of the petit-bourgeoisie.” (Shop-keepers, farmers, etc.)

9.           Centrism…”chloroforms the young DSA left.”

10.       “Mitch McConnell, that … mediocre, white-collar dad…” And:  “When will the crackers produce a Bernie?”

11.       ‘Woke’ politics “is not being fought on the ground of political economy.”

12.        “Social democracy is the actual attempt to violate, and in that way test, the Marxian universal statement” … that “there is no legal transition to socialism.”

13.       Riley understands that ‘anti-theoretical’ people reveal their own theories in denying theory.

14.       Riley wants the Left to “…spend less energy on outrage…” (Note to FB users.)

15.       “The state is an object of struggle among competing political capitalist elites.”

16.       “Why are there so many mediocrities in power with all the incessant chatter about the value of education?”  Remember, Ted Cruz is a graduate of Harvard Law and most prominent politicians are law grads with JDs.

17.       “As if difficult ideas themselves were obstacles to the smooth circulation of commodities...”

18.       Riley understands socialism to be:  “…an absolute flourishing of individuality where people are neither equal to one another, nor unequal to one another; they are instead irreducibly unique…”

19.       Under advanced capitalism “there is no class culture.”

20.       Re academics:  “…a challenge to the ‘canon’ poses the threat of the rapid devaluation of fixed assets.” (i.e. a professor’s intellectual ‘property’ ideas have become outmoded and hence, less valuable.)

21.       Riley points out that the change from direct slavery to share-cropping was not an economically-advanced method of agriculture, and helped keep the south in poverty-stricken, racist backwardness for at least 100 years.

22.       Riley attacks the concept of the ‘culture’ of the misnamed ‘underclass.’ Poverty is riven with the homogenization and goals of bourgeois culture too.

23.       Most people experience capitalism as “a society of small-scale traders.”

24.       Capitalism is far more than ‘unfair’ or ‘unjust’ – “it is a system of social production of historically unprecedented complexity and scope…”

25.       “The preliminary task of a socialist politics is to decrease the cost of acting politically in class ways.”

26.       Socialism could be described as ‘the extended order of human cooperation…”

27.       “…decolonizers never get around to the analysis of ideas.”

28.       To the liberals – “…history is the history of court battles” with movements acting as cheerleaders.  Lawyers become the cadre and ‘general organizers.’ 

29.       “…anti-corruption … becomes an alternative to the politics of redistribution.”  Scandal also plays this role.

30.       “… gender is the product of the division of social labor between productive and reproductive functions.”

31.       “…racism becomes a lay theory that explains uneven development.”

32.       Marx understood human emancipation to require “the elimination of race as a social category.” (Riley still erroneously uses ‘race’ instead of skin color…)

33.       “… the union leader has an interest in the maintenance of capitalism through his interest in maintaining the group called ‘workers’.”

Lukacs - a Riley inspiration

Riley claims that the petit-bourgeoisie is not analyzed in the U.S., which is patently false.  The obsessive “PMC” chatter in Jacobin is evidence of that.  So is the observation of the small owner base of Trumpism, fascist groups and the Republican Party or the professional strata of Democratic Party loyalists by many leftists.  He also seems to think that nationalism still has a future, when all around us there is evidence of the interconnectedness of economies, politics, the environment, war and peoples.  Nationalism, like racism and sexism, is an archaic ideology due to objective changes in the world – which is not to say it is not still useful to national ruling classes.  It seems he also does not grasp the labor exploitation and social labor of many white and pink collar workers.

But given these caveats, a somewhat ‘fun’ book to read.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Zizek,” “Marxism versus PostModernism,” “Fashionable Nonsense,” “From Factory to Metropolis,” “The Ten Assumptions of Science,” “Elite Capture,” “Mistaken Identity,” “Toward Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism,” “Understanding Class,” “Riot, Strike, Riot,” “Giants – The Global Power Elite,” “Rich People Things,” "Georg Lukacs - Record of a Life."  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 20, 2022

Spoilin' Dirty Water

 “City On a Hill” 2019-2022 Streaming Series, Seasons 1-3

There have been a long string of films about Boston – its corruption, its racism, its Catholic Church, its cops.  The Departed, Mystic River, Southie, The Town, Black Mass, What Doesn’t Kill You, Edge of Darkness, Spotlight, Boondock Saints and on and on.  This series tries to do to Boston what The Wire did for Baltimore, but this series is more theatrical and sensational.  I spent the summer of 1975 in Boston during the busing crisis, and saw it’s racism up close and personal. So some of this is not exaggerated, especially the blockheads in Southie. The phrase “City on a Hill” is meant to be a sarcastic reference to U.S. exceptionalism and the 1988 “Shining City on a Hill” quote by Reagan that white-washed the U.S.

Former Bostonians Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (of course...) produced City on a Hill, piggy-backing on this image of Boston.  It’s a ‘star vehicle’ for Kevin Bacon, who gets to play wise-cracking, coke-sniffing, book-quoting, rule-breaking, slime-ball FBI agent Jackie Rohr.  He’s hilarious, the last throw-back to the corrupt “Whitey Bolger” Boston FBI era and probably the best role he’s ever played.

In fact every character in this series is heavily flawed like Rohr, leading you to think that perhaps being fucked-up is the new standard.  Almost no one even approaches some kind of normality.  Being an asshole or stupid seems to be the baseline.

The first season focuses on the Ryans, a ‘working-class’ family of Charleston armored-car robbers who attempt a normal family life while shooting people.  The husband works at a grocery store stocking shelves when he’s not knocking off guards.  The wife is even more vicious, a nasty, drug-dealing beauty who runs a failing hair salon.  The man’s brother is a double-dealing loose cannon who is as erratic as a druggie – which he is. Every Charlestown thug is Catholic and wears a cross, though they are not aware of the irony.  The excuse for everyone is that they need the money.

The second season is about the Campbells, a family in the Roxbury housing projects, led by a ‘saintly’ mother and activist who covers for her deadly, gang-banging older son and his younger brother.  The joke of the mom who never admits her children are bad news is all over this portrayal.  This self-righteous family parades around with prayers, crosses and preachers too as the bodies fall. This tack on community activists will certainly make right-wingers happy. The excuse by the sons is that they want to give "Momma" nice things.  So some kind of poverty is the tie that binds Boston's working-class together.

The third season involves a wealthy, retired ex-FBI scion living in Beacon Hill who drugs and rapes young women, even to the point of overdose.  He’s a smug shit with a skanky, money-hungry wife who tolerates his behavior.   

On the color side of the class divide is a professional dark-skinned husband and wife, who are both upscale lawyers living in ritzy downtown Boston.  The husband, DeCourcy Ward, is built like a buff action hero and never seems to really be the ‘professional’ Assistant DA he is portrayed as.  Everyone in this story insults each other on the job, bosses and underlings included - and he joins in. How a DA’s office could function like this is dubious. He has a love/hate working relationship with Rohr, but they are sometimes able to work together, as Rohr teaches Ward how to work 'off the book.'  Ward's beautiful wife (of course) also never really strikes one as an attorney, especially in her pursuit of a “Big Dig” construction company for injuries suffered by a Latino worker. No facts or cause of action is evident in this vague story. They are both liberal nationalist crusaders for ‘our community’ against police corruption and “the blue code of silence.”  Yet at one point they end up on opposite sides of a criminal case.  This series is set in the early 1990s but riffs off the BLM activism of the last years.

Rohr’s domestic Catholic wife, Jenny, is the saddest of all.  Brow-beaten and two-timed, she’s a timid stay-at-home mom in Quincy who attempts to become herself, actually looking to Catholic Church pastors for direction.  She and Jackie have the typical angry teen-age daughter who, after being gang-raped and into drugs, turns her life around and becomes the only sane one in the family.  Clueless Jennifer understands the world so little that she naively loans money to an IRA woman for weapons … something her husband spares her the knowledge of.  

There is also a cast of corrupt and killer Boston cops, one or two honest ones, a rude FBI boss, a paternalistic political DA, a bi-sexual Catholic priest associated with the IRA, old and abusive working-class mothers, a lost pedophile father, corrupt OSHA inspectors, a seductress, gun-runners, drug dealers, gang bangers, union thugs, FBI informers, police wives and Walpole prison hanging over it all.

Dream On

This series is a picture of a decaying, cynical place full of poverty, corruption and crime.  The actual working-class is somewhat invisible.  Everyone lies, even while on the stand in court.  The Charlestown ‘proletarians’ are lumpenized. There are no African American workers portrayed.  “Activists” are shown to be a crew of hypocrites or ineffectual soft-touches.  Nearly everyone's scared stiff of someone. The ‘good guys’ are flawed or heavily flawed. The use of music is great, especially in Jackie’s car as he roams around the city like a feral animal - so you will catch the Standells and even Boston. Bacon is what hangs this series together and it’s worth watching for him alone.  But this collection of sad cases bodes ill for any social progress at all if you took this as a real representative slice of human Boston… which it is not.  The series also feeds the illusion that ‘the law’ will somehow clean up the city.  It will not.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Boston Marathon,” “Revolution in the Air,” “The Terror Factory,” “April Morning,” “Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Given Day.”  

The Cultural Marxist

September 17, 2022

Periodical Series: Mutual Aid and/or Communal Struggle?

 “Marxism, Bolshevism and Mutual Aid”by Socialist Revolution, 2/2022

This is a pamphlet that addresses a debate on the left, evidently arising out of DSA.  The subject is ‘mutual aid,’ a strategy or tactic advocated by certain libertarian socialists and anarchists.  The main polemic is with Dean Spade and his 2020 book:  “Mutual Aid:  Building Solidarity During This Crisis.” Spade’s book is carried at May Day and is also reviewed below.

Solidarity & Charity

Mutual aid can be seen to arise out of a utopian approach to socialism, which ignores the State, class struggle except in the broadest sense and real dual power.  This pamphlet attempts to address the issue with a general orthodox Marxist take, while having weaknesses in detail.  Orthodox Marxism is unpleasant for people who yearn for some powerful government to back them up, for a role in a powerful capitalist party, for those who want to take sides in a violent capitalist dispute or for a short-cut around the economic and political power of the capitalists. Mutual aid as a strategy fulfills that last role, a shortcut. 

But the pamphlet is not against mutual aid as a temporary tactic, as mutual aid is a normal working-class reaction to disaster, to tribulation, to collapse.  The example of Occupy Sandy in New York is a great example, as it came to the aid of communities long before the city, state or federal government arrived. (See the book “Extreme Cities,” reviewed below, which details this work.)  The Socialist Rifle Association and the “Cajun Navy” have played recent roles in storm disasters too.  In Minneapolis local defense groups operated in various neighborhoods during the uprising around George Floyd.  The Black Panthers and the Brown Berets in the 1960s/70s both saw some success using mutual aid.  The leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, Fannie Lou Hamer, eventually created farm cooperatives to provide low-priced healthy food to African Americans.  The Black Muslims have attempted to create a parallel economy run by the NOI, but they have no pretentions as to revolution.

You will note that little of this created a permanent radical structure, no more than the hippie counter-culture of the 1960s-70s was able to undermine U.S. capitalism.  A few worker-owned co-ops exist, a good number of member cooperatives still exist, but even the example of the 1930s farmer co-ops shows their limited impact, as they have become well integrated into the capital system.  May Day Books itself is a product of that 1960-1970s upheaval.  Prior to this the German Social-Democratic Party, the Austrian Social-Democrats and the British Labour Party had massive projects, buildings, associations, groups and ‘institutions,’ yet none of this led to a social overturn or the ability to crush fascism. The Spanish Mondragon has lasted for years, but it has still been unable to socialize Spanish society.  Instead it is an accepted exception.  All over the world there are examples like this. The pamphlet admits these efforts are part of the power of these movements or Parties, and involve many workers and peasants, but are still insufficient.

What the pamphlet doesn’t do is specify what forms mutual aid might take if administered by an orthodox Marxist organization.  It generally sees its role as the more traditional one of electoral, union, tenant, community, student, theoretical, mass movement and anti-fascist organizing with a revolutionary goal.  Which seems to be a boatload on its own.

Advocates of mutual aid and direct action as tactic or strategy say it builds skills, influences and recruits working-class people, proves socialists ‘in practice’ to be effective, and creates power bases outside the normal functioning of the capitalist economy.  Their mantra is solidarity not charity.  In other words a form of ‘base-building’ for what they might see as socialism – though few mutual aid groups advertise that goal. Spade goes on, unlike Kropotkin who developed the term, to propose that mutual aid will actually lead to socialism.

Occupy Sandy in NYC

The pamphlet asks whether social change comes from this kind of organizing, or whether ‘events’ are the real key to changes in mass consciousness.  It is clear mutual aid and counter-cultural institutions will exist in any revolutionary situation.  But they will not be the tip of the spear, only possible supports.  After all, Lenin came around to the idea that the road to socialization of small holdings in the countryside and city was through cooperatives.  But that was after the taking of political power.

Both Lenin and Marx saw mutual aid like Russian Narodnik ‘literacy’ efforts or English Owenite ‘model societies’ as diversions from revolutionary struggle. Engels devoted a whole book to critiquing actually existing utopian socialists - who he called ‘social reformers’ – in the works of Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen. He wanted to put socialism on a material and revolutionary basis, not a generic humanistic or idealist one.

What Kind of Production Can Prevent or Limit Disasters?

The pamphlet also claims that not pursuing the path of “a technologically advanced society, which requires the complex global supply chains and large-scale industry that capitalism has created” will make life harder for workers, not easier.  Revolution itself will make life harder for a time, as will environmental collapse, as will the continuing degradations of the working classes by capital.  Incidentally, present ‘global supply chains’ are not organized with the needs of the working-classes in various countries in mind.

A consistent weakness of Socialist Revolution and others is their vagueness as to what kind of production will actually be needed under a workers’ state and what kind of production will have to be discarded – if any! This relates to the environmental crisis most of all. Certainly the massive technological adjustment to climate disaster and capitalist functioning will involve an across-the-board look at every form of transport, production, commodities, packaging, infrastructure, agriculture, fishing, urbanism, work and so on - trying to benefit the majority at every step.  Crises, including environmental ones, are built into capitalism.  So the goal is to build 'mutual aid' into society itself.

In preventing disasters, some needed production changes are obvious, some are not.  Reductions should be pointed at 1. capitalist waste, 2. toxic or useless products, 3. commodity fetishism, 4. useless jobs and activities, like advertising, 5. polluting processes, 6. military production, 7. unwise building or infrastructure projects, 8. unsustainable agricultural methods, 9.  unnecessary packaging, 10. multiple iterations of basically the same item and 11. the wealth industry for capitalists and their upper-class allies.  But even those measures might not be enough. All of these points are gathered under the market category of capitalist GDP and ‘growth.’  

For instance, it is obvious now that there is a limit to the minerals for a battery-run world. In a single-house neighborhood, will sharing one push mower on a block make life harder or easier?  Will transitioning to more bicycles or e-scooters be harder or easier?  Will requiring more human labor on farms, as oppose to heavily-machine oriented monocropping, be harder or easier?  Will shorter hours compensate for sometimes harder work?  Will free health care or education and a guaranteed job and housing make life easier, while consumer choices grow fewer?  The reality is there will be trade-offs. 

History and ‘events’ will certainly guide the answers, but there is enough information presently to make preliminary educated guesses.  At bottom I don’t think any of this will make ‘life easier’ in the short term, at least in some ways.  No more than strikes are a roll in the hay, mutual aid easy or environmental destruction a dinner party.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Extreme Cities,” “Mutual Aid – Building Solidarity During a Crisis” (Spade); “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson); “Nomadland,” “May Made Me,” “The Dawn of Everything” (Graeber); “Without Apology,” “Grocery Activism,” “Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens” (Wolff); “The Ministry for the Future,” “Lenin’s Last Struggle” (Lewin); “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety.”    

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 13, 2022

Diamond in the Rough

 “Tess of the d'Ubervilles” by Thomas Hardy, 1891

Jane Austen and her cohort make Thomas Hardy a paragon of modernity, in spite of his language.  Austen's archaic stories, along with the Brontës, wittingly expose the foibles of the 19^th century gentry, touch on feminism, but end up being happy period romances.  They are the fodder for countless BBC Masterpiece and PBS period pieces like Downton Abbey, Sandition and Bridgerton. On the other hand Hardy, while having an advantage as to when he wrote, makes relentless fun of religion, marriage, wealth and royal titles, points heavily at the oppression of women and finds his heroes and heroines among the working-class or peasantry.  Romances turn into their opposite. This book is an excellent example. 

Tess is a poor but comely farm girl in Dorset, England whose lazy and drunken father can't make it to the county fair to sell his bees.  In monetary desperation, she takes on the task.  On the way to the fair in their rickety wagon Tess falls asleep, as it is 4 a.m. in the morning.  As she is sleeping her wretched, palsied horse is killed by a speeding mail cart.  To atone for her guilt at this ruinous accident, she consents to work for a family called d'Uberville – a wealthy family who have stolen the name to escape their past.  Oddly, her father has just been told by a local parson that he is actually a d'Uberville, although come far down in station.  So Tess's position with them as a poultry-minder seems to fit, as they are ostensibly relatives.  Tess fears what may happen if she does work for them however, as there is a wealthy and young 'cad' who lives at the manor – a fake Alec d'Uberville himself.  He is the kind of sweet-talking, mustache-twirling ponce the upper-classes produce on a regular basis.  And there is the rub, the rack and the ruin.

This Bantam© Classic has a glossary of old Dorset dialect and unfamiliar English words used by Hardy, which is a treat, as you'd have to search deeply for each one without it.  The language is thick, old-fashioned and descriptive, in the style of that period.  But it usually comes around to a real punch at the end. There are some wonderful turns of phrase and jokes here, along with nature and sun worship. Hardy set all of his stories in Dorset and Wessex, as he spent most of his life there.  The land, villages, weather and dales – representative of the great Nature – are also characters. The book is packed with references to Shakespeare, the Bible, English poets and ought, reflecting the author's good old-fashioned education.  Because of this some passages are well nigh thrice-readable.  

For his last three books – The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Ubervilles  and Jude the Obscure  - Hardy was pilloried by the conventional powers-that-be and stopped writing fiction.  Running through this book is a sly, anti-conventional Pagan philosophic dagger which they objected to.  Here is one of its' class-conscious lines:  “The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.”  He was too radical for the Victorian capitalist elite of his time. After this Hardy switched to poetry, which might say something about the ethereal lightness of that branch of literature. 

Not always romantic...

The cottagers and work-folk play a role – their fondness for drink as a respite from their labors; their kindness and gossip; their superstitions and ignorance; their servility to their 'betters'; their energy and dancing; their jealousies and over-powering emotions.  At one point he fondly calls them 'philosophers' and “nymphs and swains.”  Here is one humorous observation of a group of girls going to a church class:  “...their rosy faces court-patched with cow-droppings...” (In the English royal court, they 'patched' their faces with colorful make-up.) Descriptions of their work threshing, milking or turnip digging are not ignored.  He likens the depopulation and evictions in rural areas to the work of a great machine. In other words Hardy is more grounded in the real social world than any romantic flights of fancy or religious nonsense.  This makes him a modernist. 

There is always a hero of sorts to rescue a young and handsome woman from iniquity.  Nature and a powerful rurality have no truck with social norms, but for Tess, Dorset's nature is of little help. And so the reappearance of a young man, Angel, a parson's son who has broken with the church and is trying to learn farming.  He learns on the same large dairy farm as the newly-hired milk-maid Tess. Will their relationship prosper through a torturous courtship?  Will this ostensibly open-minded, middle-class young man handle the truth?  Will his Bible-thumping family approve? 

You know the answer.  The young man predictably goes through terrible twists in response to Tess, the ‘scarlet’ woman. Both men haunt her, even after the eviction of her family. It goes Gothic, and ends badly, but also well.

Hardy’s text here is marred by the narration’s emotional ‘thickness’ which goes on for far too many pages. The story is at times slow moving and overly-detailed.  Yet it is really a simple story of rural backwardness, religious intolerance, male chauvinism and class idiocy prevailing over love, conditions which still exist in many places.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Jude the Obscure” and “Far From the Madding Crowd” (both by Hardy); “Peterloo,” “Independent People” (Laxness); “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson); “Marxist Criticism of the Bible,” “Citizen Tom Paine” (Fast); “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “The North Water,” “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty). 

And I bought it at May Day’s used / cutout book selection!

Red Frog

September 10, 2022