BeTwixt and BeTwain

 “The Jester and the Sages – Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud & Marx” by F. Robinson, G. Brahm Jr., C Carlstroem, 2011

This is a 'fun' book that discusses how Twain's ideas and those of these European intellectuals agree – or don't. The section on Nietzsche dwells on their shared atheism and 'libertarian' ideas, though not their politics; the bit about Freud explains how they were both interested in dreams and unconscious emotions in humans and literary characters. Of most interest is the confluence – or difference – regarding Marx. Twain is one of the great classic writers of U.S. letters - a traveler, humorist and raconteur; inventor, newspaper man and novelist. Now he would probably be hated for his leftist positions opposing religion, colorism and imperialism. Let's see how Marx and he get along.

The main difference is that Marx had no truck with getting rich or those who already were. Twain did. It was said of Twain that he was “a theoretical socialist and a practical aristocrat.” He relished his giant, unique house in Hartford; his wild-eyed speculation and schemes to make money; his cock-eyed attempt at inventing a printing press; his publishing of Grant's memoirs; his social associations with the wealthy. His book The Gilded Age reflects his obsession with money. The author concludes that there was always an edge of class guilt with Twain due to this. But he didn't let it stop him from insulting the monied.

CONFLUENCES

Marx and Twain did agree on a number of issues, even though Twain never read Marx except perhaps a few journalistic articles in the New York papers. Twain damned capitalism, but didn't want to see it removed. They both opposed slavery, though Twain spent a smidgen of time with a rag-tag Confederate unit in Missouri before he “lit out for the territories.” Yeah, he deserted. Both were 'grounded' – Marx a materialist; Twain a writer of the American vernacular of ordinary folks. A commodity was a mysterious thing to Marx; Twain found slavery to be mysterious too – mysterious in the sense of crazy. On the other hand, Marx had a systemic understanding of problems; Twain a personalist one. Marx was direct; Twain sometimes ambiguous. Yet as a writer Twain embodied in his stories many aspects of the social thought of Marx. Marx understood the value of fiction in this regard, but there is no record he read Twain that I know of.

Their personal family histories were somewhat similar – both from modest beginnings, both having lawyer fathers who died prematurely. They shared a certain youthful anger at idiocy and social cruelty, especially shown in Twain's books A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Prince and the Pauper. Twain made his views on class clear in a Connecticut Yankee: “...a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slave-owners by another name.”  

In 1886, Twain addressed the Hartford Monday Evening Club:  “Who are the oppressors? “They are the few,” he replied, “the king, the capitalist and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who the oppressed? The many: The nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that MAKE the bread that the soft-handed and the idle eat. Why is it right that there is not a fairer division of the spoil(s) all around? Because laws and Constitutions have ordered otherwise.” Marx and Twain both agreed on internationalism; the role of the state; the oppression of the worker, the responsibility of the capitalist. Marx thought revolution was the answer; Twain wanted a fairer share of the spoils, and thought it possible.

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophically, Marx understood that ideas – consciousness - comes from social being, not the other way around. Twain thought the same, but in a more vernacular way: “You tell me whar a man gits his corn-pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is” he wrote in 1901. On religion, they saw similarly. Marx said “Man makes religion; religion does not make man.” Twain dismissed religion as “pure and puerile insanities, the silly creation of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks – in a word, they are a dream.” Yet both understood that religion provided comfort for the most put upon– an opium, a false drug for sufferers in a cruel world. But they also knew that religion was a comfort to the comfortable and the ruling elite. Both writers opposed social delusions and the pretense of individual freedom. Both envisioned a world prior to class and labor exploitation – for Marx, primitive communism; for Twain, an Edenic and primitive world of children and nature outside the constrictions of 'polite' society.

On colonialism, they took similar tacks. Marx denounced the British rape of India and Ireland and the exploitation of Latin America and Africa. Twain criticized the U.S. colonial war in the Philippines as part of his membership in the Anti-Imperialist League. His travel book Following the Equator makes his awareness of the negative effects of colonialism clear. Christianity and 'civilization' combined to murder the people of South Africa, Australia and the Pacific islands. In his essay To the Person Sitting in Darkness Twain opposed the U.S. annexation of the Philippines and the European control of China. His essays late in his life in the early 1900s against lynching, war and God were not published, as he had fallen out of fashion.

Both opposed labor exploitation. In Roughing It Twain points out that mining labor is done by a large group, but the profits accrue to the few who get hold of the most land, sell the shovels and buy the raw gold. Even the white-washing fence scene in Tom Sawyer typifies this ... a hostility to Aunt Polly's forced labor. The raft in Huckleberry Finn is a tiny world of free and slave, one with money, one without, a reflection of the Missouri class structure, but attempting to break free.  (By the way, the plan was to go down the Mississippi, then turn up the Ohio to go upriver.  Why not go across the river to Illinois or up the Mississippi?  Ah, fiction...)

EVIL?

Marx and Twain part ways on the source of exploitation – Twain blamed determinate and greedy 'human nature' and Marx blamed class society. Twain damned humanity, believing it was permanently evil and stupid. Marx's understanding led him to think that the working population would eventually overcome. Twain watched southern Reconstruction get destroyed by violent racist forces, which didn't help his optimism. This is why Huck Finn knows he will 'go to hell' for helping free Jim. According to the author Pudd'nhead Wilson, Huckleberry and Connecticut Yankee Hank Morgan all shy away from the personal cost of these serious fights. Yet Twain's cynicism and belief in 'original sin' never stopped him from pushing against oppression.

Twain might be considered a left-populist libertarian. If you are a fan of Twain, this little book contains more excellent points on his thoughts, life and writing. Worth checking out.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “American Vandal – Mark Twain Abroad,” “A Traveler's Tale,” “The Good Lord Bird” or “Marx,” “slavery,” “Christianity” or “imperialism.” (Those latter will give you many, many hits.)

And I got it at May Days Used / Cutout Section!

The Cultural Marxist

February 27, 2023

On the Borderlands of Gringolandia

 “Central America's Forgotten History – Revolution, Violence and the Roots of Migration,” by Aviva Chomsky, 2022

Central America was a deep concern of the anti-imperialist left in the late 1970s and 1980s. It is not forgotten. Not the victory of the 1979 popular-front FSLN in Nicaragua when it overthrew Somoza. Not the following Iran-Contra scandal. Not the violent dictatorships and death squads sponsored by a series of U.S. governments to oppose revolutionary movements – in Guatemala, in El Salvador, in Nicaragua; nor the bloody U.S. invasion of Panama. Not the torture training at the 'School of the Americas' in Georgia. Or the support for the 2009 military coup in Honduras by Obama and Clinton. If this history is unfamiliar to you, then this book will be valuable. It is written by Noam Chomsky's oldest daughter, who is a specialist in Central and Latin American history. I'm only looking at the chapter on migration.

THE MIGRATION STORY

One consequence that is not forgotten because it is still going on is migration. The result of these anti-peasant, anti-working class dictatorships was a fundamental disruption of the labor communities in these countries. Land was stolen; terror was instituted against indigenous farming towns; in the cities poverty was enforced, unions destroyed and leaders killed. Rape, massacres and murder were normalized. Drug gangs protected by rightist governments consolidated control, as did local landlords and international corporations. In the 1980s-1990s it forced many peasants and workers to flee to other parts of their own country; to other Central American countries; to the United States, and some all the way to Canada.

Chomsky explains that the original immigrants and refugees who escaped these blood-baths and who made it to the U.S. sent back money – remittances - which sustained their poverty-stricken families back home. Many times it was just the father or sons who left. The lure of this 'money' economy over subsistence farming or slavish factory work was powerful. Some of it descended into bragging about wealth by those who worked in the U.S. This eventually helped lead to 'chain migration' – even just children – as Central Americans tried to patch their families back together over the years. This accounts for the many unaccompanied minors making the trek to the supposedly golden land of El Norte, something that is still going on.

Chomsky details how solutions like micro-credit programs (favored by H. Clinton) actually led to people losing their land as land prices contracted. Behind this is the fact that the migration economies are run on debt, as people pay or borrow huge sums to leave. This creates further misery down the line for whole families – repossessions, overwork, deeper poverty, even violence, when payment is difficult or impossible.

Before and after the 'reformist peace' governments in Central America that were set up in the 1990s, peasant land was abandoned by migrants. This could be due to climate-change drought, to poverty and debt or seizure by wealthy landlords, drug gangs or for a large corporate or government project. Migration resulted in a fundamental dissolution of some peasant communities and the proletarianization of these migrants at the bottom of society as they moved to cities. Given this history, Central American migration to the U.S., which has presently overtaken Mexican migration, is a clear version of class war blow-back.

Death squad having a laugh

THE FACTS

In her section on migration Chomsky details the complicated patchwork of laws and border controls, waves of deportations, entities, programs, disaster relief, U.S. administrations and numbers that affected Central American migrants on the U.S. border. Like others, she contradicts Obama's statement that the U.S. welcomes immigrants. A broad point she makes is that as Mexican immigration went down after 2010, and Central American immigration began to rise in the 1990s, border militarization and obstacles grew. It did not matter whether it was Democrats or Republicans, as both had a somewhat consistent attitude. That is until Trump's even worse policy initiated a 'border war' with it's 'remain in Mexico' policy, bigger and abusive internment camps, family separations, the nullification of asylum, the 'wall' and increased desert deaths … policies which mostly have not gone away.

Chomsky discusses the numbers that fled from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. 3 million Central Americans were displaced by these wars and migrated in the 1980s. By 2017 there were 3.5 million living in the U.S. alone. The 1965 immigration law gave Mexico a quota, which made many Mexicans illegal. A 1986 law allowed a path to legalization if you arrived before 1982. Neither of these laws helped Central Americans, as they arrived later and had smaller quotas. Asylum was granted in tiny percentages. Refugees were put in detention camps and some deported back to death. Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was created in 1990 due to violence and disasters in Central America, which helped. In 2014 a law on CA minors allowed a tiny group of young immigrants to be legalized. Even adoption became a political issue, as CA children were being kidnapped or sold into adoptions, mostly to North American gringos. As a commentator said: “It's the neo-liberal phase of imperialism. First we take their land, then we take their resources, then we take their workers and then we take their children.”

The establishment of ICE in 2003 vastly increased militarization, with 4K agents expanded to 21,444 in 2011, now around 20,000. Rhetoric about 'criminals' increased under Obama and especially Trump, with many deported for minor or very old infractions. One of the sad consequences was that migrants in U.S. communities like Providence, Rhode Island were living alongside commanders of death squads or bloody former government officials, who hid, lied or were protected to get into the U.S.

Immigrant Detention Camp

SOLUTIONS?

Chomsky has no solutions to the migration issue. She hopes her facts will help. She does not discuss the actual differences between economic migration and asylum. She does not propose a broad immigrant work program to fill the immense gaps in the U.S. workforce. She does not propose a Central American or Latin American customs and monetary union, a la the EU. She does not suggest a new U.S. foreign policy for Central America or aide targeted only to peasants and workers. She does not address the legalization of drugs. She does not suggest the socialization of U.S. corporations in the isthmus. She does not move towards internationalism and a new policy around national borders. She does not advocate support for socialist movements in Central and Latin America. After all, the key is to improve Central America for the majority of people so they are not forced to move.

Most importantly, she does not point out that rapacious and warlike capitalism deeply damaged parts of Central America to this day. Few would have migrated if not for these primitive capitalist dictatorships and civil / class wars. Who would want to leave their home, their family, their roots unless pushed by terrible circumstances beyond their control? It is class-war blowback, just as Mexican migration is blowback for corporate Mexican governments and NAFTA.  Climate change might have come for Central America finally, but that also has the same cause. To paraphrase a famous quote by Marx - academics can only show us facts; political organizations have to change them.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year “Pearls Before Swine” archive, using these terms: “American Made,” “Manufacturing Consent” (Chomsky); “Not a Nation of Immigrants” (Dunbar-Ortiz); “American Exception,” “Kill the Messenger,” “Secret History of the American Empire” (Perkins): “Washington Bullets” (Prashad); “Worn,” “Revolutionary Rehearsals,” “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti), “Bad Mexicans,” “All the Pretty Horses”(McCarthy), “November” or “El Salvador,” “Nicaragua,” “Guatemala.”

And I got it at May Day Books used books section!

Red Frog

February 23, 2023

Anti-Fascist Series #11: The Terrain of Theory

 “The Destruction of Reason” by Georg Lukács, 1962

Given the present needs of capitalism and fascism for irrationalism, individualism, idealism and post-modernism, this book is relevant. It is a bit dated in that it covers older philosophers like Schelling, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers and Spengler. It also looks at the American pragmatist William James and the sociologist Max Weber, two more 'heroes.'  Lukács goal is to describe the roots of modern fascism, and indirectly, capitalist apologetics. He claims this is not a Marxist history of reactionary bourgeois philosophy but it certainly seems like the beginnings of one!

Lukács tracks how the founding of irrationalism had counter-revolutionary origins. It was a reaction to the French Revolution of 1789, the 1848 revolutions, the 1870 Paris Commune and continued against the 1917 Russian Revolution. It grew along with the development of capitalist imperialism, which led it to social-Darwinism, racist theories, eugenics and the Nazi and Black Shirt movements. Lukács brings materialism - philosophic, historical and dialectical - to bear on these reactionary thinkers, especially the Germans, some of whom were the inspiration for National Socialist ideology. For a radical philosophy student the book contains excellent rebuttals – that is if universities teach actual philosophy anymore instead of math.

I'm going to look at just a few chapters, as this is an 850+ page book – his introduction, his discussion of Nietzsche who is having a moment, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, both 'pessimists,' along with bits on James and Weber. This is a great book for those who are interested in revolutionary philosophy and I recommend reading the whole thing if you have the time.

INTRODUCTION

In his intro, Lukács clearly says that while Nazi 'philosophy' was crude and looked-down upon, it is a mark of the degeneration of capital that it's philosophical thinking slowly degrades. It is replaced by myths, aristocratic hierarchies, mysticism, anti-scientific, anti-rational ideologies and pragmatism. He considers the praise of thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger by the bourgeoisie as a substitute for National Socialist thought to be a “strategic retreat” - yet still holding the reactionary essence. All of reactionary thinking is a response to the class struggle according to Lukács. We see current versions of this among post-modernist thinkers and their pedestrian representatives - power-saturated thugs, religious dictators and congenital political hypocrites and liars.

EARLY IRRATIONALISM

Lukács looks at early 'irrationalism' – which, oddly, is a legitimate philosophic category. One of the main propositions of reactionary thinking is that something 'cannot be known,' even to the point of nihilism. Or it retreats into the past, going into religious despair over a world of science without God or myth. It involves, as did Schelling, the upholding of the psychological and the intuitive, of what we might call 'emotional truth' over investigation and science. In reaction to the grounded materialist ideas coming out of the French Revolution, Schelling became the founder of the oxymoron 'objective idealism' and linked up with Romanticism. In his reaction to materialism he, as Marx joked, proclaimed: “I, the union of philosophy and theology.” Atheism became the materialist's ultimate crime. Lukács calls their proclamations “mythico-mystificatory,” which seems to be the point.

Wealthy and Loved the System

Schopenhauer predated Schelling, but Lukács asserts that he was the complete version of bourgeois irrationalism. He gained prominence after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions and higher developments in German and European capitalism. Schopenhauer was well-off, without needing to work - a rarity among intellectuals who usually had to teach or write. His will included money for soldiers injured defending the German state in 1848, which is a measure of his real attitude. Lukács thinks Schopenhauer was the first to completely privatize individualism in the service of bourgeois self-sufficiency. He saw egotism as a cosmic attribute of debased 'man' in general and suggested rising above it by a higher-end aesthetic and intellectual egoism. I.E. like the Nazi that plays Beethoven in his office...

Lukács says Schopenhauer engaged in 'indirect apologetics' for capitalism. The bad side of capital was admitted, but then explained as a natural failing of humanity and human existence. This pessimism was translated into the social sense too, meaning all political activity was absurd, especially after momentous events that supposedly changed nothing. On the question of religion, while he opposed the Church formally, he accepted the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' and became a subjective idealist, as actual reality was supposedly completely unknowable. These ideas are familiar class-based ones and still provide intellectual comfort to the ruling class and capital.

MODERN IRRATIONALISM

Kierkegaard , a Dane, achieved influence between WWI and WWII and was inspired by Schopenhaur. He attempted a 'qualitative dialectic' to divert from the materialist one. He did this by banning 'quantity into quality' as a feature of dialectics and motion as a logical process. In effect, a snow-slide that sometimes becomes an avalanche does not happen. He substituted a religico-moral 'leap' instead. He banned other aspects of dialectics, like the connections between opposites or the presence of internal contradictions. Lukács calls this a 'pseudo-dialectic' that ignored advances in dialectics since the Greeks.

Kierkegaard opposed materialist dialectics because it posited approximate knowledge. His position against approximate knowledge is nihilistic, as it implies that nothing then can really be known about the world because it is partial. His 'dialectic' opposed a human, historical view of social developments because that got rid of God - even though God at this point was a dubious prospect. Kierkegaard split history into God's absolute reality and a limited, human one. He promoted an individual, isolated 'ethical' distance from involvement in history as a result. This 'gap' led him to existential despair, into a solipsistic & ascetic isolationism, in a world of Christianity without Christians. (This Lukács calls 'religious atheism' – a phrase that is more confusing than anything else. )

Lukács thinks his views served "the bourgeois intelligentsia's spiritual needs” in a somewhat similar way to the present 'ethical' and educated but quiescent liberal. Kierkegaard oddly gives it away by letting slip, at one point, “My whole work is a defense of the established order.”

SUPERMAN?

Nietzsche is seen by Lukács as the first clear philosopher of colonialism and imperialism, astride the world like a colossus, intuiting its triumph in the future. He was the apotheosis of irrationalism in the 1800s. In my eyes, he banned God and Christ to put a human dictator in charge. He was cited by the Nazis as a forerunner.

Nietszsche, as a good Prussian, wanted to join the German army to invade France and crush the Paris Commune. He praised Greek slavery, and insisted that slavery should be part of any just, aristocratic society. He opposed Christian meekness because he believed in the will-to-power, of Dionysian and rapacious instinct over reason or wimpy kindness. Nietzsche criticized Bismarck from the right, opposing his concessions to democratic parliamentarism. In the 3 phases of his career, Lukács thinks that socialism was his consistent target.

Nietzsche promoted the egoistic spirit of the bourgeois entrepreneur as the central feature of human life, while, as Lukács puts it, capital “was mobilizing all mankind's barbaric instincts in its desperate struggles with its gravediggers, the proletariat...” Nietzsche provided intellectual ammunition for this struggle. He endorsed the criminal type; a return to 'the jungle,' the breeding of a higher Aryan "blonde beast," biologic vitalism and the possible annihilation of humanity. As he said later, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

WEBER & JAMES

A more prosaic and measured version of these pro-capitalist ravings is found in the work of the German sociologist Max Weber. Lukács explains that Weber, writing before WWI, divorced sociology, religion and ethics from economics, holding they had a complete life of their own. Through broad analogies, he sought to refute historical materialism by asserting that religion created economies, not the other way around. Weber appreciated democracy more than most. Yet he wrote an endorsement of enlightened colonialism: “Only a politically mature people is a master race” … Only master races are called upon to intervene in the course of human developments.”  Perhaps reading too much Nietzsche?

Lukács explains that Weber attempted to remove obvious irrationalism from his theories and method, but gave them a subtler platform by limiting what sociology concentrated on and by placing an individual's choices at the center of social life. Given earlier readings of Weber in “Understanding Class” by Erik Olin Wright, Weber thought workers or slaves were not exploited.  He insisted that capitalist managers, not workers, should always fully control production. These apologetics are somewhat more direct.

William James is the propagator of American pragmatism, the idea that all social activity is gauged by whether it is 'practical' or not. Practical to whom, you might ask... Lukács asserts that James theory was aimed at the 'man on the street' who wanted to combine utility and his individual self. Lukács writes that James thought that: “reality, in everyday business life, must be scrupulously observed – on pain of bankruptcy...” As James himself said: “The practical world of business is, for its own part, highly rational to the politician, the soldier, the man ruled by the commercial spirit … but it is irrational to the moral and artistic temperament.” No better explanation of Babbittism need be given, nor its limitation. This philosophy is meant to give the American businessman comfort and truth. It also reveals a shabbiness and shallowness of philosophy, which James praised, as he believed understanding much else was useless.

Lukács focus in this book is how bourgeois and German irrationalist theory led to German fascism. His post-war epilogue is of much lesser value. In the U.S. and other countries where fascist ideas and forces are growing, the battle is not just in the streets or courts, but in the realm of ideas. This book is a weapon in that fight.

P.S. - There is a review of this whole book in Monthly Review. Read it if you have time. MR: Destruction of Reason Review

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year “Pearls Before Swine” archive, using these terms: “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukács); “History of a Life – Georg Lukács,” “religion,” “post-modernism,” “Lukács,” “Nietzsche,” “Weber” or “Understanding Class” (Olin Wright) or "Anti-Fascist Series."

And I got it at a College Library!

Red Frog

February 20, 2023

Riot Time

 "Athena,”a film by Romain Garvas, 2022

This film might have been inspired by the 2005 riots in the Paris banlieues (suburbs). Those started over the deaths of 3 youths who fled police and hid in an electric sub-station in Clichy, only to be electrocuted. 3 weeks of rioting followed – attacks on police cars, arrests, fires set by mostly Arab youth sick of unemployment, poverty and police harassment in their housing estates.

In this film, it starts in the aftermath of the supposed police killing of a 13-year-old Arab boy. In revenge, a well-organized group of youth led by one of the dead boys' brothers engage in a successful assault on a police station. This film is a graphic depiction of the attack on that police station and the subsequent occupation of a concrete housing estate called 'Athena.' It shows different currents within the African, Arab and Algerian towers – angry youth rioters, religious elders urging calm and evacuation, civilian women and children leaving and criminal gang members trying to hide weapons and drugs. The young boy has a brother in the French Army and another who leads a drug gang, so it becomes a conflicted and stereo-typed family story of 4 brothers, with ma mere almost invisible.

The younger brother's plan is to capture a CRS riot cop and trade him for the cop perpetrators of the murder, and if not, kill him. What might be a veteran of the Algerian revolution is called upon to help, and he starts planning to blow up one of the towers. It slowly comes to light that the killing of the young boy was orchestrated by a group of French fascists intent on starting a 'race' war. It is alleged they dressed in police uniforms to accomplish the act. They are the ultimate but hidden bad guys here, as a scene at the end of the film verifies that story.

This is mostly an 'action' flick that attempts to show the chaos of a violent revolt – Molotov's and fire, the prodigious use of roman candles and heavy fireworks to shoot at cops; a rain of stones, concrete, a fridge and TVs; physical attacks, CRS batons, shields and helmets, pepper spray and tear gas (which don't seem to work in this movie...), flash-bang grenades – the whole panoply of riot weapons and responses. For people that have never been in these situations, watching this might prepare them. In a way, the camera work and tracking is stylized cinema-verite and arty, which gives it a feel of being movie-like, not real. Though very real fire was used throughout. How the Athenian rebels got ahold of so many fireworks, prior to this unpredictable death, is not explained.  This might also be stylized.

Politically the rage and emotion are ultimately misdirected. The portrayal makes the youth seem over-the-top and only focused on revenge. The brother soldier changing sides is an example of this. This is due to the lack of previous context – the gut reactions of too many viewers might be 'these guys are nuts!' Apartments in the tower are vandalized and walls busted through. Residents' stuff is destroyed. Several floors are blown up. A number of radicals die while elders and youth are arrested. There is no respected or strong political organization in Athena to take leadership – a common problem. So ad hoc rebellion is the result.

Certainly, police stations in many revolts have been burned, including one in Minneapolis during the 2020 Floyd Revolt. That included the defeat of the police on the street. This film's advantage is showing what violent capital has driven some people to, whether you like the results or not.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year “Pearls Before Swine” archive, using these terms: “Paris” “Riot, Strike, Riot,” “Summer on Fire,” “Hinterland,” “Dressed Up For a Riot,” “Tell the Bosses We're Coming,” "The Coming Insurrection," “The Bomb.”

The Cultural Marxist

February 16, 2023

Not As Advertised

 “Time for Socialism – Dispatches From a World on Fire 2016-2021,” by Thomas Piketty

Piketty rose to fame through his data-driven book on inequality, Capital in the 21^st Century. His focus is on inequality again . As he says: “History shows inequality is essentially ideological and political, not economic or technological.” He comes out for a “new form of socialism, participative and decentralized, federal and democratic, ecological, anti-racist and feminist.” Perhaps one can sense from these phrases that his politics are somewhat vague, social-democratic or Utopian. Lets see how they play out.

In this series of short, bite-sized essay / blog posts, Piketty switches between wonky left social-democratic suggestions on how to improve capitalism and criticisms of bourgeois methods and politics. Piketty repeats his statistics that show inequality has gone down since the early 20^th Century due to the mysterious arrival of the 'welfare' state, which in France went down further after May 1968. Most of his focus is on Europe and secondarily, France, and much of it is on taxes.

Wonky Suggestions: He thinks 50% of the population still has no real wealth, so he proposes giving each person an inheritance of apx. $160K at age 25, paid for by higher taxes on corporations, wealthy individuals and large inheritances. He hints at states increasing their public property ownership to avoid increasing debt, but does not call for a state bank or nationalizations. He has a series of ideas on how to reduce inequality in France, especially in regard to improving the tax code. This means opposing Macron's approach which involves weakening the wealth tax. He advocates more seats for workers on company boards (now mandated at 1 in France) and against new laws that make it cheap to layoff workers. He adopts the position of the Yellow Vests as to cancellation or limiting of the public debt. He opposes the French government's idea that the retirement plan should reproduce inequality. This is reflected in the current mass demonstrations against raising the retirement age.  Many working-class people die before the rich or upper middle-classes, which means their contributions are funding wealthier people's retirements.

In response to Brexit and the growing disenchantment with internal EU inequality, Piketty and other intellectuals came up with a 'Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe.' It is based on 4 taxes on corporations, wealth, the rich and carbon emitting, to be voted on by a “sovereign European Assembly.” This Assembly would incorporate 80% of the serving members of present national states and 20% of those in the present European Parliament. If Germany, France, Italy and Spain adopt it, that is 70% of European production.

Criticisms of Capitalist Economic Methods: Piketty slams the IMF for gauging inequality by looking at income, not wealth and thinking that the 'rate of return' on investment is the rate on sovereign debt i.e. Treasury bill rates, not on the real investments made by the rich or corporations. This hides inequality. He notes that most gender pay equality measures ignore age and the fact that many jobs are not as open to women, producing statistics that also hide gender inequality. He notes that French & German productivity levels are equal to U.S. productivity. This is without the rabid anti-labor bias or use of over-time and lack of time-off in the U.S. Trump continued the standard Reaganite battle to cut corporate and inheritance taxes and succeeded mightily. Piketty has always seen education as the key to reducing inequality, and now the French state is reducing education spending for youth.

Piketty discusses 'money creation' by the ECB, and indirectly addresses the concept of modern monetary theory (MMT). He agrees it might have prevented a more severe depression in 2008-2018, but argues against it as a totalizing monetarist panacea.

Inequality in Europe - one view

Political Issues: Piketty's position on Catalan independence is related to the Spanish tax plan that is not federally-based, but based on region. This leads to separatism. He understands that the EU's unequal north/south divide led to European bankers soaking the Greeks. The unequal east/west divide led to mostly German firms expatriating profits from the former workers' states. He supports 'economic justice' approaches as a way to counter sectarian, nationalist or racist ethnic politics.  He avoids the issue of migrants.

Re other countries, Piketty advocates a coalition of the left against the BJP/RSS government in India. In an essay on China, he sees “the 10% own most / 50% own little” wealth inequality split existing there too. He backs Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax plan for the U.S. and Sanders' attempts at increasing democracy, which is predictable for him. In Russia, the 'flat' tax on ALL incomes is 13%, and there is no tax on inheritance there, nor in China. This allows Russian and Chinese billionaires to pass on their wealth unencumbered. His analysis of Russian balance of payments / trade surpluses suggests massive amounts of cash have been sent out of the country, proof of a kleptocracy. He supports a certain limited variety of internationalism and 'universal values.' Finally, the invasion and riot at the U.S. Capitol put period to European idolizing of the U.S.A.

Piketty notes that “carbon emissions are strongly concentrated among the rich. At the global level, the richest 10% are responsible for almost half the emissions, and the top 1% alone emit more carbon than the poorest half of the planet.” This is why he thinks European 'Greens' who govern with monied centrists will fail. He supports a 'circular economy' through a Green New Deal - which is not really about a circular economy.

As you can see from all these ideas and objections, Piketty has no actual vision of how a socialist society would come about, no transitional ideas, nothing in that realm. His many wealth, inequality and financial charts are certainly of use. To him, the word 'socialism' is in the sense of 'capital with a human face' – if that is still possible! He has many gradualist plans that might help workers, youth and citizens, but that stay firmly within the boundaries of present capital, its states and its laws. In this sense he is a Social-Democrat of the type we have seen before, but perhaps one who is troubled due to the clear erosion of the former degraded Social-Democracy. This has forced him to move a bit to the left by now verbally endorsing 'socialism.'

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year “Pearls Before Swine” archive, using these terms: “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty); “Modern Monetary Theory,” or the words 'France,” “Brexit,”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

February 13, 2023

The Chat Bots Are Coming!

 “R.U.R.” & “The Insect Play”by the Brothers Ĉapek, 1920

R.U.R.

R.U.R. stands for Rossum's Universal Robots. This is a rare tragicomic play on the development of robots to replace workers and soldiers – in fact all of humanity. There are so many themes here that have filtered into modern science fiction that it seems a seminal work. Humans have stopped having babies – cue Children of Men or Handmaid's Tale. The robots are replacing humans and soldiers, killing hundreds of thousands in massacres – cue Terminator, iRobot or The Matrix. A humanist group is attempting to give rights to the robots – cue Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Ex Machina. There is even a touch of 'last man on earth' – cue I Am Legend or Waterworld.

The Robots Rule

There are two speeches that parallel the Marxist view of automation. If machines do more work, humans will be freer to develop all their cultural and social skills, and live without poverty. In this play however, which takes place under capital, the result is mass unemployment and poverty. The shareholders only want dividends and the businessmen only want more robots. The play also reflects Engels' point that humans are a laboring animal. Humans work more than any other animal. Take all work away and humans would be bereft. Sitting on a beach with a Mai Tai is not the be-all and end-all of human life.

The play has an anti-human robot revolution, which might be a metaphor for something else. This is because the engineers made the mistake of giving a hundred of the robots a soul on the advice of a kind-hearted woman. The engineers running RUR hope they can control the revolution because they hold the secret to their construction. Then RUR will also manufacture 'national' robots, not 'universal' ones, that will hate each other, speak different languages and make war, which will help the humans split the robot forces. This shows the writers were against nationalism. There is no hope against the robots, who are efficient at almost everything they do, including killing their creators. Cue Frankenstein, et al. But … they cannot create themselves.

P.S. - I asked the Chat (Ro)Bot AI program ChatGPT to write a review of this play.  It did it in about 20 seconds, 5 paragraphs long, giving an accurate, generic take, but NOT from Wikipedia.  It reminded me that this play first popularized the term "robot."

The Insect Play

Is this a riff off of fellow Czech Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, written earlier in 1915 about a human being turned into a beetle or a cockroach? Not quite. This play features a parade of butterflies, beetles, flies, chrysalises, larva, crickets, parasites, ants, moths and snails. There is a narrator as in Our Town, but this narrator is a drunken tramp sitting in the woods rhyming his words. The butterflies are having romances and poetry. The chrysalis is a mystic moth. The married dung beetles are counting their muddy nest egg, their 'pile,' their savings, their capital, only to have it stolen by another beetle. The flies are a killer father and his sluggish, gluttonous daughter. The crickets are moving into a new house. The ants are making war on other ants for the control of a tiny patch of dirt.  The snails clean up the mess.

The Ants Battle

The insects are really various human types, much like the later Animal Farm. The parasite is a worker bullied by the killer fly. The fly calls him a 'bolshie.' Of most consequence is the exterminating battle between the Ant Realm and the Government of the Yellow Ants. The newspaper ant and the philanthropist ant support the war. Massive amounts of ants die observed by the Tramp, who stomps on the winning dictator ant at the end.

Both these modernist plays were popular and performed in England. The Ĉapek brothers opposed oppressive and fascistic governments and are still celebrated in Prague, as their house has become a museum. It seems they were influenced by revolutionary movements in the early 1900s. One died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, the other in 1938 in Czechoslovakia during the rise of the Nazis.

P.S. - ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence bot, was just asked a question about humans. It said they were 'the worst thing to happen to the planet.' Welcome Skynet!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year “Pearls Before Swine archive” using these terms: “The Cradle Will Rock” (Blitzstein);  “Oil! & the Jungle” (Sinclair); “Love and Information,” “Ideation,” “Things of Dry Hours,” “Appomattox,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marie and Rosetta,” “The Good Person of Setzuan” and “Puntilla and His Hired Man, Matti” (both by Brecht);“The Visit” (Durrenmatt); “The Lower Depths” (Gogol); “A Bright Room Called Day” (Kushner); “Love and Information,” “The Convert,” “The Plough and the Stars,” “Shadow of a Gun Man” and “Juno and the Paycock” (all 3 by O'Casey), “Marie & Rosetta,” “Rock and Roll” (Stoppard) or "The Matrix," "Blade Runner," "Children of Men," "Handmaid's Tale."

And I got it at May Day's cutout / used section!

The Kultur Kommissar

February 9, 2023

Relics

  “Not a Nation of Immigrants – Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy and a History of Erasure and Enclosure” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 2021

Dunbar-Ortiz attacks the phrase 'nation of immigrants' used by Democrats and abandoned by Republicans as a “mid-twentieth century revisionist origin story” that hides a very real settler-colonial origin. The phrase Nation of Immigrants was popularized by Senator John F. Kennedy in 1958 in a book titled just that. Her analysis is not really new on the left. Let's see what she does with it.

The slaughter and seizure of the land of the original 'first immigrants' - native Americans; the annexation of Mexican territory; periodic mass deportations of Mexicans; ten years of La Matanza terror in Texas; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Puerto Rican and Hawaiian colonies; the 1924 Immigration Act which limited immigration to western Europeans; the incarceration of Japanese during WWII; or referring to slaves as 'immigrants' – all show what actually occurred. Even discrimination against the Irish, Italians and Jews goes unsaid, although they were later granted light-skin status. All well known on the left.

Dunbar-Ortiz later adds capitalism to the mix and follows the story up to the present, where John Birch Society politics are now mainstream. She touches on Lin-Manuel Miranda's celebration of the arch-colonialist Alexander Hamilton. Other chapters discuss settler-colonialism; slavery; the continent-wide spread of the empire; the Irish diaspora; Catholic and Jewish immigrants; anti-Asian panics; and lastly the border, which is one of the key places were 'immigration' politics play out, mostly violently directed against Mexicans and those from Central & Latin America. If any of these subjects are new or of interest you, then buy the book!

HAMMING IT UP

New is the chapter on the recent play Hamilton, which was an upper-middle class sensation, even premiering for the Obamas. It represents Hamilton as pro-immigrant and anti-slavery - when he was the exact opposite. To boot, the white faces are done by black faces in the play, a form of disguise. Is this a new form of blackface or 'white-washing?' Hamilton actually married into the wealthy New York Schulyer family, which bought and sold slaves – a business he aided. He also owned slaves himself. He supported the French during the Haitian Revolution. He came from the slave-ridden Caribbean and entered New York society as a prominent Britisher. He advocated deporting all immigrants unless they were merchants or 'of good character.' Part of the reason was his Federalist Party wanted to cut the voting pool for the opposing Jeffersonian Democrats, who were more plebeian and getting migrant votes. Sound familiar?

Hamilton's reviled opponent Aaron Burr was actually to his left. According to Dunbar-Ortiz, Burr embraced immigrants, the rights of women, criminal justice reform, more democracy in the election of senators and press freedom. The play makes Burr out to be an envious jerk. Hamilton, on the other hand, was a fierce advocate of property rights, a “fiscal-military state” and heartily supported the 3/5s rule. He led troops to crush the Whiskey Rebellion in the Appalachian mountains. He plotted plans for war with France, the invasion of Spanish Florida and into the lower Americas. He also advocated conquering Shawnee territory in Kentucky.

The right man died in that duel... Hail Aaron Burr!

THE BORDER

Fun aside, a few facts about the border. According to Dunbar-Ortiz, between 1930 and 1934 some 2 million Mexicans were forcibly deported back to Mexico, with 1.2M being naturalized U.S. citizens or born in the U.S. In 1954's 'Operation Wetback' between 300k-800k migrants were deported, which she considers a show for political consumption, as the key has always been the need for cheap labor. Under Obama 3 million were deported and 2.1 million 'voluntarily' left.

The 'spirit' of settler-colonialism?

THEORY?

The last chapter includes Dunbar-Ortiz' overall conclusion. In it she criticizes 'multi-culturalism' and diversity as kind of updated forms of the 'melting pot' thesis. She contends that aspirations to blend into the 'melting pot' or 'become white' are now weaker. And that immigrants “do not automatically become settlers unless they resist that default.” (The default is 'white.') So being a 'settler' today is in the mind, behavior and skin color. The problem with this somewhat dated, idealist / individualist take on being a settler is that people are moving all over the world right now, mostly because they have to. Many countries are gaining or losing workers, immigrants, refugees, students and asylum seekers of various kinds, fleeing from all manner of misery, much of it created by imperialism. So unless you oppose 'whiteness' you are the enemy. A weird, post-modern ideological slant.

She wants to 'deconstruct' settler-colonialism.  She says: “Diversity and racism are widely accepted but the problem is the general denial or refusal to acknowledge settler-colonialism.” The problem? Settler-colonialism was the template for the expansion of mercantile capital all over the world and the establishment of countries in Latin America, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and later, Israel. Yet if we accept that somewhat archaic understanding of ALL U.S. history, where does that leave us?

There is no hint of a class or anti-capitalist understanding here. Depending on the country or area they are coming from, many immigrants are working-class, especially from Africa, Latin and Central America. Some are not - they are professionals, upper-class students, HBI white-collar techies or here to start small businesses. Her idealist take ignores these class differences, or even how they work within the U.S. color-caste and privatized land systems.

The other unsaid idea that floats behind the concept of 'settler-colonialism' as still the key issue is that all the settlers should leave. This is not a viable politics, especially in a highly-developed and unequal capitalist class society that started more than 500 years ago. The verbiage theoretically avoids the present and any program to overthrow modern capital. On page 281 she explicitly rejects a proletarian social revolution, and by implication any class line. Logic like this is academic liberalism run amok.

Get Your Quill Pen Out...

MANY RELICS 

The U.S. Constitution itself is a relic of this colonial period, promoting an anti-democratic structure based on private property and military expansion. It is like our prehensile tail site or the tiny 'canines' of the human body, reminding us that we have not always been upright ground-dwellers. It is part and parcel of the enduring love for 'the Founders' that animates both Democrats and Republicans – as if time has not passed, ideas have not changed and society has not developed since 1789. U.S. capital still carries with it this prehensile 'tale,' an example of combined and uneven development, of which settler-colonialism is one.

Dunbar-Ortiz has now written 3 books with basically the same view, the other two being “Loaded” on the real meaning of the 2^nd Amendment and “An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States.” (Both reviewed below.) Certainly this book has additional facts, but as to theory, there is no real movement here. Perhaps this is a default for many historians, writers or academics who ride their ideas into the indefinite future and never broaden their views. Chock full of facts, polemics and a broad palette, this book might be right for you - or might be more of the same.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Loaded” and “Indigenous People's History of the United States” (both by Dunbar-Ortiz); “Bad Mexicans,” “The Latino Question,” “The Convert,” “The Open Veins of Latin America” (Galeano); “Land Grabbing,” “Guns, Germs and Steel” (Diamond); “Silence” (Scorsese); “Dream of the Celt” (Lhosa); “Last Train to Zona Verde” (Theroux); “Washington Bullets” (Prashad); “Caste – the Origin of Our Discontents” (Wilkerson).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog, not written by ChatGPT / February 6, 2023

Another Lost Cause

“Monument – the Untold Story of Stone Mountain,” documentary by Kristian Weatherspoon, Producer

If you approach Stone Mountain from its back slope, it is a pleasant, airy, 30 degree hike with a great view. It was a former meeting place of the Creek and Cherokee. Stone Mountain is now a Georgia State Park with a golf course, a train ride, a meeting center, dinosaurs, a sky ride, hiking trails – its basically a weird amusement park around a granite dome. If you approach Stone Mountain from the front however, it has a big 'memorial' lawn and picnic area. Looming over that is a monstrous granite cliff face, with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and 'Stonewall' Jackson chiseled into its surface. It is the largest Confederate monument in the world, 3 acres large, bigger than a football field.

Davis was the slave-owner president of the Confederacy; Lee its failed general and Jackson, one of its best generals, killed by friendly fire. They are all on horseback, riding across some mythical battlefield that might still exist.

THE DOCUMENTARY

I attended the Athens, Georgia premier of a recent documentary on Stone Mountain's 'sculpture' called Monument, with an audience of older, academic, light-skinned folks. It tells the story of the existence of this memorial as an enduring monument to the 'lost cause' and the Confederacy. The mild-mannered documentary was peopled by academics, who called the issue 'complex' and 'complicated.' It isn't. It's pretty fucking obvious. Instead they asked for dialog and discussion, without calling for its removal, though they implied it. Like I said, mild-mannered and typical of Southern liberals. In the documentary one former Georgia governor said that the memorial was objectionable only to black people. Hell, its objectionable to way more than that.

You might think this monstrosity was created right after the Civil War, but you'd be wrong. The first attempt to carve the mountain was started in the 1920s, including an attempt by Gutzon Borglum, the creator of Mount Rushmore. This was during a rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan used it as a meeting place in 1915 to re-invigorate their organization, as it had originally formed right after the Civil War. That year they inaugurated their rebirth by a Bible reading and the burning of a Christian cross at the summit of the mountain. After that the Klan had yearly meetings at Stone Mountain for decades, until 1962. 1915 was also the release of the racist Confederate film Birth of a Nation, which was originally called The Clansman. However, the first attempts at carving the mountain failed by 1928.

Then during the stirrings of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s, another attempt was made. The segregationist Georgia state government bought Stone Mountain in 1952 for $2M and created a private organization to create the bas relief. Georgia enshrined in their legal code a statement that these carvings could never be removed. (O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1, et. Seq). The law states that it was to remember the 'cause' for which these men fought. It wasn't until 1970 that the sculptures were inaugurated, and fully completed in 1972. Today Stone Mountain is a state park overseen by the legislature. Georgia removed the Confederate battle flag from its state flag in 2001 but the Rebs still have this state-endorsed defaced monolith.

As can be seen by the timing, the monument was prompted by a massive wave of KKK terror and Jim Crowism in the South; and then as a response to the African-American civil rights movement. These were both made possible by the violent and political defeat of Reconstruction in the 1870s. In a sense, while the Confederacy lost the open military struggle, it 'won' the peace with guerrilla tactics, leading to 90 years of fascistic 'black codes' and Jim Crow. In fact, it is still trying to win that peace after the setbacks of the 1960s. One older interviewee recalls that he thought the South had won the Civil War, given its treatment in his local school. The carvings are not really about the Civil War, they are about continuing white supremacy, racism and some kind of nationalistic southern sentiment, all to benefit the corporate rulers of the region.

DIFFERING MONUMENTS

In one of the small towns in Minnesota stands a monument to the Union war dead in the town square. That town, Northfield, also celebrates the defeat of the James-Younger gang during a botched bank raid there. They were shot up by former Union soldiers after stealing around $27. They were a bunch of killers who fought with the vicious Quantrill's Raiders in the Civil War, a Confederate unit based in Missouri. Some have called this one of the last battles of that war. The reason is the bank they tried to rob held assets of the former Reconstruction governor of Mississippi, Adelbert Ames, who owned the Ames flour mill in town. It was a revenge robbery. Yet the seemingly neo-Confederate 'Mississippi Encyclopedia' on-line site calls Ames a “carpetbagger.”

On the other hand in Georgia, at a time when Confederate monuments are coming down from New Orleans to Richmond to U.S. military bases, they stand dotted across the state in small town squares, standing guard in front of courthouses. The Georgia Statehouse lawn hosts a statue of General Gordon, a Confederate general who ably fought in the Eastern campaigns, then became a “staunch anti-Reconstruction” politician. Stone Mountain Park in 2021 made a small concession to include verbiage about the mountain's link to slavery and the Klan in its museum. This is how things are done in the South. But still no dynamite.

Link to documentary:  https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/monument/

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The Civil War in the U.S.” (Marx/Engels); “Why the South Lost the Civil War," "Lincoln" (Spielberg / Kushner); "Struggle & Progress," "The Neo-Confederate States," "Blockaders, Refugees and Contrabands," "The Bloody Shirt," "Guerillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front," "The Free State of Jones," "Andersonville Prison," "James-Younger Gang," "Southern Cultural Nationalism," "The Civil War in Florida," "A Blaze of Glory," "The State of Jones," "White Trash," "Drivin' Dixie Down" or use the words “Civil War” or “slavery."

The Cranky Yankee

February 2, 2023