Invasion of the Replicants

 “Doppelganger – A Trip into the Mirror World,” by Naomi Klein, 2023

A doppelganger is a double, usually not quite the same as the original. And there is the rub. The book concerns Klein and her ostensible doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, who from being a feminist is now a fact-free conspiracy-monger with Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and the like. Klein uses this image and the 'mirror world' to describe the movement of former liberals, Bernie types and actual leftists to the right, mostly under the influence of the CoVid epidemic. She calls their approach 'diagonalism,' a term I'm sure won't catch on. This has happened in history before when the Brownshirts in Germany and the Blackshirts in Italy were national 'socialists,' but were actually front-men for the capitalist class.

Klein does not engage in a deep class analysis of this trend, but it is most firmly rooted in petit-bourgeois businessmen – or those who aspire to that position. And many small businesses did take it on the chin during CoVid. In one chapter she notes the great number of gym managers, yoga teachers and new age 'healers' who protested CoVid lockdowns, as it shut their body businesses for awhile. Their businesses were not alone. She also makes clear that at the same time the quack medicine, natural food and supplement types were competing with Big Pharma for cash and credibility.

The book is personal, wanders a bit, and sometimes comes off as a cultural look at society, with lots of film and literary references. Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde are some of her reference points in this area as she scans the notion of 'the double.' Her goal is to replace the 'socialism of fools' with the socialism of facts. So what are the main points Klein dwells on, other than Wolf, who she says “is a person who couldn't tell the difference between temporary public health measures and a coup d'etat.” Camile Paglia agreed, calling Wolf “a Seventeen Magazine level of thinker.”  Gore Vidal said “Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences." This was the trajectory of Naomi Wolf.

As a young student Klein was actually inspired by Wolf to become a writer, based on the latter's book The Beauty Myth. Klein's first book was No Logo, which became a famous attack on consumer capitalism. Yet Wolf sided with the Supreme Court's 'states rights' logic overturning of “Roe v. Wade,” and instead celebrates 'mom' culture and the reproductive function. She even bought a .22 rifle to repel home invaders! Early on Klein noticed the lack of facts and the instant, extreme opinions that Wolf had. This has not changed, with Wolf and many others on the far-right lazily throwing around terms like 'genocide,' 'slavery,' 'Nazis,' 'dictatorship,' 'apartheid,' 'the Holocaust,' 'Jim Crow' and the like, referring to trivial, fun-house mirror versions of those very real things. In other words, 'words' have become meaningless to them, really for the purpose of subterfuge. Meaning itself has an overblown mangled double.

Klein points out that there are very real conspiracies, but the ones ginned up by far-rightists and fascists are designed as diversions from criticizing the capitalists and their profit system. Hunches, suppositions, lies and guesses replace facts. 'Q-Anon, 'the deep state,' transgender panics, a Chinese invasion, 9-11 Truthers, the Protocols of Zion, vaccines, Satan – you name it. After years of scanning right-wing sites, Klein has regurgitated many of their sad theories and the book is chock full of them. Yet in the mix are very real problems – government surveillance, Pharma profiteering, media manipulation, unhealthy food – that the right takes advantage of and liberals and leading Democrats ignore.

Most people are unaware of the practice of real reporting, so to them everything is just an opinion. Shared standards, double & triple sourcing, real sources, actual interviews, verifying documents, peer-review, being real about uncertainties, fact checking, possible review by experts, lawyers and editors – all are part of real journalism. The point is to get as close to the truth as possible, but of course the media does not always do that. Yet lame conspiracy theories, government handouts and 'fake news' verbiage never do.

She compares a 400 truck Canadian convoy opposed to the deaths of indigenous children at Catholic boarding schools with a later owner-operator truck convoy that shut down Ottawa about CoVid, partly led by an open Nazi. Similar tactic, yet two different motivations. You could even say that the inept January 6 selfie riot was a sad copy of the mass BLM demonstrations after George Floyd's murder. One was a twisted mirror of the other. Even Klein's own concept of 'The Shock Doctrine' was used by the right to explain how CoVid had engendered a 'dictatorship.' Bannon finds arenas the Democrats are ignoring and starts pushing them... and there are many.

Klein notes the confluence of parts of the wellness industry and New Age thinking with the Libertarian hard-right in response to CoVid. It wasn't just Republicans, Christian nationalists and fundies. Of the top 10 misinformation sources about CoVid: 3 were chiropractors, 1 an osteopath, 1 a supplement entrepreneur, a couple who sold essential oils, the antisemitic editor of the Health Nut News and the superfood guru behind GreenMedInfo who accuses Bill Gates of wanting to depopulate the earth. "Holistic psychiatrists' and celebrity Oprah doctors joined that crowd.  In Klein's words, “a who's who of woo.” The angle of these people is that 'public' health is so yesterday, the only thing that matters is your own private health, your own body. Buy our products and to hell with public stuff! This blending of fascism and New Age thinking also happened in the 1930s.

Klein relates this to the whole issue of the perfect body, purity and 'natural' foodyism, which connects to other body issues, like 'Asberger syndrome,” eugenics and Nazi race 'science.' There sterilization and murder of the unfit, those with bad genes and the untermensch was appropriate. Hans Asperger, an Austrian psychologist who became a Nazi, recommended that only a few 'high-performing' autistic children be kept alive, while the rest were sent to be killed. Some U.S. wellness types maintained that the unhealthy should die if they get CoVid instead of 'bothering' the rest of the population. I.E. a 'cull.' Working class people over 65 and darker skin colors died first, with unvaccinated Republicans dying later, so this strategy initially had a racist edge too. Many 'essential workers,' especially Latino or African like those in meat-packing plants, were infected. But 'the healthy' would survive!. Klein says this smacks of 'ecofascism,' though a better phrase might be social Darwinism.

Runaway individualism and self-centered hedonism stand out as huge cultural motivations for moving to the right, as it is the ethic of advanced capital. “You are the CEO of your own company: Me, Inc.” Refusing to wear a mask, get a shot, distance or isolate indicates you do not actually care about anyone outside yourself, allowing the epidemic to spread. Individualism also promotes the idea that profits should always predominate over health. People like Bannon do not recognize society exists – only the 'guvmint' – so anything done by the government is a plot. This is Libertarianism at its finest, a useful word that Klein oddly only uses once. The libertarians especially reserve their ire for the 'CCP' – Chinese collectivists (and Democratic ones) lurking behind all evil, including lab leaks.  Marxists of whatever type are the uber-enemy. For libertarians, if a government can successfully deal with a pandemic, that has to be torpedoed. They are 'sovereign citizens' accountable to nothing outside themselves or their family.

Much of this is also tainted by anti-Semitism according to Klein. As she puts it: “...the post-Holocaust lull in open Jew-hatred is coming to a close.” Jews become the personification of big capital and also the personification of those who are attempting to overthrow capital – communists.  It's logically ludicrous but if you are white, 'middle class' and an enemy of both labor and big capital, it makes emotional sense – this even AFTER you take billionaires money, celebrate them or vote for one. This is the role of fascism – to be a subaltern to preserving the profit system - and big capital knows it. In this context she talks about the many bombings of Gaza and killing of Palestinians by the Zionist 'muscular Jew' who actually manufactures anti Semitism through his actions.

The crusade of right-wing 'warrior moms' to save the children mirror real attempts to improve the lot of children through quality daycare, national pregnancy leave, women's health care services including abortion, hospital birthing centers, certification of doulas and midwives, rights to breastfeed and funds / meals for poor children. But instead it dealt with how 'masks' would actually suffocate children and vaccines would turn them into zombies. Democrats 'sucking the blood of children' is part of the hare-brained attitude.  They claimed the children 'can't breathe' while ignoring the very real pleas of black men being suffocated by cops.  It was crackpot momism. Now there is even an organization to represent them - the 'Moms for Liberty.'

Klein is most inspired by the 15 years of 'Red Vienna,” where Austro-Marxist left social-democrats dominated the city, providing quality health care, housing, education, exercise, jobs and culture for years. That experiment was destroyed by the Austrian fascists in 1934, yet Vienna is still one of the most livable cities on the planet. Wolf's liberal feminism was always glass-ceiling, lean-in pro-capitalist feminism. This is really the major schism that Klein sees. As she puts it: “...no one ever taught you about how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs ...” That approach is the biggest fun-house mirror of all.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Libertarianism,” “I Am Not Your Negro”(Baldwin); Parasite,” “Us,” “Weird Conservative Feminism,” 'fascism,' “Capitalist Realism” (Fisher); 'red-brown,' “After the Fact,” “Modern Rhinoceroses,” “Antifascism, Sports and Sobriety.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog 

October 27, 2023

Industrial Deserts

 "Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth?” by Paul Josephson, 2010

Review, Part 2

In the latter part of the book Josephson addresses nuclear programs imported from the USSR into East Central Europe as large examples of what he calls ‘gigantomania.' The Soviet nuclear program began near Arkhangelsk in the north and instead of the Bikini Atoll, used the huge Novaia Zemlia islands as the test sites. They are located far northwest of St. Petersburg between the Barents and Kara arctic seas. This program he terms 'nuclear hubris' for its wide-ranging confidence in nuclear power as some kind of cure-all.  He investigates North Korea’s adoption of Soviet methods, then their ‘refinement’ in the autarkic ‘juche’ ideology - Korean for “self-reliance”. North Korea had to be rebuilt after the Korean War, as its infrastructure and cities were literally leveled by U.S. bombers. Then projects expanded to extraordinary and flawed levels. To give an idea of the autarkic slant, in 1992 the Korean Workers Party removed ‘Marxism-Leninism’ from their Constitution and replaced it with Juche.

Josephson looks into the massive ecological damage of various building, energy and agricultural projects in the USSR, a familiar issue. This especially occurred in the southern Urals, creating what he terms ‘industrial deserts.’ He has an extraordinary section on worker safety – and its absence - and one on the gains and losses of feminism in the USSR due to the failures of consumer commodity production and the reality of the second shift.

Josepheson’s main focus – repetition actually – is the post-capitalist preference for massive industrial projects, the bigger the better. The repetition I think is because each chapter is supposed to stand on its own, or was originally published that way. He repeatedly notes the early use of forced and convict labor or terrible working conditions, as much work was done using massed labor with hand tools. Hundreds of thousands died building the Belomor Baltic-White Sea Canal for instance, while gulag and ex-peasant labor built Siberian roads, mines, factories and towns. Skilled workers and good equipment were in short supply everywhere.  Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Co. mitigated some of the brutal methods after Stalin, yet large industrial projects with human, environmental and social damage continued. The first real inklings of environmental policy related to development were issued under Khrushchev. But rules are made to be broken and were ignored or not prosecuted. He contends the issues finally became more public under Gorbachev. He blames what a Marxist would call a ‘lack of workers’ democracy’ and holistic science for the heedless top-down state-led methods of development.

Those methods put priority on making unrealistic production goals - not labor safety, environmental concerns or public benefits. In one key chapter he points out that a lack of light-industry 'commodities' hit women – whose domain was the home – especially hard. While the USSR was on paper and in some ways light years ahead of capital on women's issues, simple things like contraceptives, menstrual pads or a lack of labor saving devices like home vacuums, decent washers or refrigerators made women's 2^nd shift life especially difficult. Polluted city water, a key to domestic life, didn't help. He focuses on Alexandra Kollontai in this regard, but the early feminist plans of the Bolsheviks were partly reversed in 1936 under Stalin's “Great Break” when, among other things, abortion was recriminalized, 'bastardy' revived and divorce made more difficult. The Bolshevik women's organization was disbanded in the 1932, as the 'women's question' had been solved according to the Nomeklatura. No one asked the women workers of course.

Hard Hats

Josephson has an extraordinary detailed chapter on health and safety at work, especially in the northern tundra regions – fishing, forestry, mining, road and rail building, factories, foundries, canals, dams, water diversions. Safety gear was almost absent – no eye or ear protection, no hard hats, no masks, no prohibition of alcohol, not even decent gloves, boots or clothing. Workers, sailors and lumberjacks were to make do. Food, housing and medical care were an afterthought.  He contends alcohol was one of the main drivers of absenteeism, accidents, fines and high turnover, as workers would drown their sorrows in vodka. The reason for drink was obvious. He describes a plague of accidents in the nuclear, shipping, rail and auto/truck industries due to lack of education, poor workmanship, shoddy building materials (watered-down concrete and poorly-made steel), drunkenness and absurd top-down production requirements that forced groups to take damaging and deadly risks. Productivity and production were divorced in the bureaucratic planner's thinking, except in the concept of speed-up. Even driving became hazardous, as car accidents and dead pedestrians were common. Any laws that existed were not enforced in the name of production and a macho culture of 'unsafety.'

The indigenous reindeer, hunting and fishing peoples – the Nenets, Chukchi, Komi, Guldi and Saami - were removed or forced to become laborers in these areas.

Sverdlovsk after 1979 Anthrax leak

Deserts?

According to him, in the Ural mountains, “a vast, toxic rust belt of chemical, metallurgical and nuclear factories and extractive industries spewed smoke, acid and poison into the air, water and land over decades.” 100K hectares of vegetation became denuded. The worst was Cheliabinsk province, where according to him 500K hectares had become an 'industrial desert' by the mid-1980s. This was 'the forge' of the Soviet Union and it is one of the reasons why the Soviets defeated the Nazi armies in the '40s. In these industrial zones the Soviets did not provide adequate housing, education, medical care, entertainment or food. This even though the USSR set up the first forest preserve in the world in 1920. In the 1980s attempts were made to reclaim these brownlands in the Urals around Sverdlovsk, trying to mitigate the damage to water, soil and forests. In the collective farms they used 3-5 times the pesticides and herbicides that a farm in the U.S. would do, due to soil problems. Putin disbanded the Russian environmental protection agency in 2000, so the situation retains a certain similarity.

On the tundra and Siberian zones, toxic nuclear waste was buried under lakes and soil. One, Lake Karachai, held 24 times the radioactive material released at Chernobyl.

As to solutions, Josephson finally says a ‘publicly-controlled nuclear program’ is his aim. He thinks whistle blowers, environmental groups, health & safety laws, lawsuits and an open muck-raking press are the solution – all partly found in the advanced capitalist countries. He does not go beyond that, so his solutions are pretty vanilla considering the dire production, environmental and health issues we face even with those patches to capitalist production. He does not mention independent unions as antidotes to workplace health problems. They were banned in the USSR and other transitional, post-capitalist bureaucratic workers' states.  He does not note that Trotsky's Left Opposition supported independent unions in workers' states. Union's enforce workplace safety standards in capitalist countries … or should. It is clear he's kind of a left-liberal supporter of the New Deal.

All together a good purgative for those 100% cheerleaders of the Soviet Union or its knock-offs, as the book reveals the contradictory character of the USSR, North Korea and the East Central former states. It is also a counter-active to the somewhat rosy Soviet environmentalism of Monthly Review . Josephson even waded through many previously unread volumes of information on Soviet industry in the USSR as part of the research for this book.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: "Red Gas," “Kollontai," "environmentalism," "technology" or “New Dark Age – Technology and the End of the Future,” “Scorched Earth – Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World,” “Fully-Automated Luxury Communism,” “Shrinking the Technosphere” (Orlov); “Bit Tyrants – the Political Economy of Silicon Valley,” “The New, New Thing – A Silicon Valley Story” (M. Lewis); “The Circle and the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Technology,” “Democracy, Planning, Big Data," "Art of the Soviets."

And I bought it at the excellent cut-out section at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 23, 2023

The Technological Bugaboo

 “Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? – Technological Utopianism Under Socialism, 1917-1989, by Paul Josephson, 2010

Part I Review: 

The title is bookish click-bait, though eventually the answer is ‘yes’ - Trotsky would.  Josephson claims that all socialists in power – Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Dimitrov, Rakosi, Ulbricht, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Kim Il Sung - were ‘technological utopians,’ while Marx and Engels were ‘technological determinists.’  China, Cuba and Vietnam are missing from the book. He equates these post-capitalist workers’ states with the same tech practices as under capital, and claims they thought there was such a thing as ‘socialist technology.’  This relates to the issue of whether technology is value-neutral.  It is a useful book in its detailed focus on workers’ state technological development, a mostly unknown and unexplored area.  

However there is nothing in Marx that alleges technology primarily determines history, as class struggle is the real motor inside modes of production.  Nor is his ‘key’ quote from Lenin sufficient.  From a poster it reads “Communism - is Soviet Power, plus Electrification of the Country.”  What he misses is the primary role of ‘soviet power.’ Electrification is clearly secondary in this quote – a ‘plus.’ In a country of oil lamps, horse power, humans behind plows and hand labor, electricity is actually not ‘utopian.’ It can be a benefit to workers and peasants, though how it is done is another matter.  As the workers’ state degraded, there were socialists who did become ‘bureaucratic utopians.’  But that is a political question, not a technological one.  Dialectical interplay between and within different forces seems to be beyond him.

Josephson thinks the 1917 revolution was a ‘coup’ and continues to call the Soviet CP ‘Bolshevik’ long after it had fundamentally changed. He complains about Soviet praise for various tools and machines, without acknowledging that these are both extensions of human labor – labor which has sustained humanity since the beginning.  The question is ‘what’ tools are being praised.  While he doesn’t claim to be hostile to post-capitalist societies or state-led development, recognizing their many successes, the book doesn’t read that way.  That said, let’s see what Josephson has to contribute other than allegations against productionist or ‘totalitarian’ Marxism.

Early On

Josephson has studied post-capitalist use of technology deeply.  His first point is the imitation and borrowing of specifically American production methods – Taylorism and Fordism.  Lenin and Trotsky famously elevated Taylorist study, which they considered a corrective to chaotic work methods and absenteeism by former muzhiks.  This was in the context of civil war, poverty and backwardness. But it ultimately led to militarized work, speed-up and the Stakhanovite movement.  Early on many U.S. engineers were brought into the USSR to modernize the industrial plant.  A Soviet auto factory was built to imitate River Rouge in Detroit and steel plants were modeled after those in Gary, Indiana. An immense number of tractors were imported into the Soviet Union from U.S. companies like Case, International Harvester, Deere and Allis Chalmers until a domestic industry was developed.  Many peasants did not know how to operate or take care of machinery even after being trained, so tractors were left to break or rust. 

Much of the early technical and electrical plans were to link workers with peasants in exchange for food.  This is the symchka, part of the ‘scissors,’ a unifying material link between city and countryside.  The peasantry was not a solid ally in the USSR so it made sense to provide concrete incentives.  Josephson says scientists and engineers were heavily involved and organized in the production field at first, far more than in the U.S. or Germany.  The Bolsheviks embraced science and modern technologies – rail, printing presses, telegraph and telephone, film, photography and beyond.  They were not the false stereotype of the Luddite.   Later under Stalin engineers and scientists were suspect as upper-class ‘wreckers,’ and show trials were held for them in the early 1930s. 

Steam Punk Rendering of a Hero City

Main Points

One of Josephson’s main points is the continual Soviet focus on ‘heavy industry’ to the detriment of light industry and worker, environmental or consumer-facing issues. Mining, metallurgy, machine tools, concrete, artificial fertilizer and oil predominated these economies.  An example is the terrible phone service in the USSR that lingered into the 1960s and 1970s.  Cramped housing, low level health care, inadequate transport and a limited supply of everyday items and food are more examples.  Khrushchev began to deal with lack of housing through large and medium building projects, but only in the 1960s.   

Another is his faulting of the Communists, using Trotsky as an example, for having a ‘promethean’ view on nature. He uses one quote from “Literature and Revolution,” which poetically described how socialism would move literal mountains.  I myself have tried to find references to working with or protecting nature from Trotsky, and could not, unlike Marx, Lenin and others.  Some present Trotskyists also carry this baggage.  Nevertheless the historical record shows that Soviet efforts around dams, canals, trees, soil, rivers, water, cotton and oil were as damaging to nature as capitalist ones. 

Josephson describes many projects, starting with the first hydroelectric dam north of Leningrad, along with the first aluminum plant, both presided over by Kirov.  Stalin became even more enamored of massive projects after the destruction of all opposition in the 1930s – canals, hydro-dams, the Moscow subway, giant factories, skyscrapers, whole cities devoted to one industry - while looking down on muzhiks who refused to ‘modernize.’ This was one of the ostensible motivations for forced collectivization, to crush peasant ‘backwardness.’  After Stalin died during the ‘thaw,’ monumental buildings were denounced as pretentious, inefficient, ugly and wasteful.   

Central & Eastern Europe Snapshots

One of the problems in the book is a certain dearth of detail.  What are the rates of lung cancer, industrial accidents, life spans, hours worked, environmental damage, safety gear, size and quality of living quarters, poverty rates, homelessness and other metrics for the workers of the USSR and central/eastern Europe related to technology?  Clearly the goals of cleanliness, safety, comfort and ease were not always being met.  He switches to ‘aesthetics’ and obsesses about a uniform ‘grayness’ in the ‘eastern bloc.’ He claims if you were set down blindfolded in ANY capital of Eastern or Central Europe, you’d see it.  Yet many of these cities had hundreds of years of architecture prior to 1946 and were not destroyed.  Nor were they bulldozed for ‘brutalist’ styles and poorly-made concrete blocks.  Many Soviet industrial methods were imported into the new workers’ states after WWII, including new cities (‘hero’ cities) dedicated to certain industries, or nuclear plants.  There was also a needed recovery from capitalist WWIIs’ infrastructure.  Roads, bridges, buildings and power stations had to be reconstructed quickly.  Even he recognizes the achievement.

In East Central Europe the post-capitalist states adopted: 1., standardized production goals and standards, not the millions of twists in a market-economy.  (Just try to analyze the multiplicity of complex faucet cartridges in the U.S. to stop a simple leak in a faucet!) 2., an aversion to producing luxuries or many variations of basics, in pursuit of equality.  3., mass production for economies of scale and wide, inexpensive production.  4., Large factories, mines, ports and plants built to efficiently concentrate workers in one place, avoiding the repetition of many work sites.  Josephson makes little of Soviet bureaucrats’ autarkic methods in Europe, even through COMECON.  Each country was advised to duplicate what the others were doing instead of creating a ‘common’ cross-border economy, swapping production and products.  This was a deeply inefficient nationalist ‘deviation’ so to speak. 

Sztalinvaros in 1956

Josepheson describes the construction of a new industrial “Stalin City” (Sztalinvaros) on the banks of the Danube in Hungary.  In 1956 the happy workers there and in every other industrial Hungarian town came out against the bureaucratic government and for workers’ control and workers’ democracy.  Socialization from above had failed.  But is this really only about housing, goods and working conditions?  He addresses the rebuilding of Warsaw, Poland in a gigantic style, which was 85% destroyed.  A present look at the city shows modest modernist and older facades, not giganticism.  Were they all torn down since 1989? The construction of the huge Nova Huta Steelworks and a new city is done in a predominately rural area near Krakow and soon becomes over-crowded, with few human amenities. He travels to Bulgaria and mentions that many specially created post-war Bulgarian industrial cities like Dimitrovgrad became toxic waste dumps.  The implementation of Bulgarian mega-farms of 10K acres actually was less productive than smaller acreages and soil treatment, though he says little about soil fertility.  In East Germany/GDR another steel/ iron/ cement city, Stalinstadt, was built with Soviet aide.  50% of German production had been destroyed during the war. They employed the clichéd ‘socialist in content, national in form’ standards, designing everything around the factories.  The city became a huge site of air pollution with a familiar lack of shops and housing.  In 1953 conditions led to another worker-led uprising in the GDR.  Nevertheless, Josephson points to the high level of technology achieved in other areas of the GDR like chemicals, physics and rocketry, but as usual he does not elaborate. 

The Bourgeois Cadres Decide Everything

Josephson  hides his opinion on nuclear power, oil and gas drilling, the car culture, building methods and materials, the best city planning, meat and clothing production, factory design, ‘green’ tech, artificial fertilizer, water/air use and the like – except that he sees Soviet methods employed in the ‘West’ too.  So it is unclear if he’s an eco-socialist, a Social-Democrat, just a needling anti-Communist or an ordinary academic who hides his politics.  I.E. the real question is, what technology should be used and how should it be done?

The value of the book for communists and socialists is it leads to paying real attention to the issue of technology, its benefits and its collateral damage, or its complete uselessness and toxicity.  Technology is not always neutral.  As to the title’s wireless Bluetooth question - certainly I use it and so do many other comrades.  But do we really need it?  I easily lived for many years without Bluetooth© as did everyone above the age of 25.  It was introduced in 1998.  It’s a frill. 

(End of Part 1 Review)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “New Dark Age – Technology and the End of the Future,” “Scorched Earth – Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World,” “Fully-Automated Luxury Communism,” “Shrinking the Technosphere” (Orlov); “Bit Tyrants – the Political Economy of Silicon Valley,” “The New, New Thing – A Silicon Valley Story” (M. Lewis); “The Circle and the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Technology,” “Democracy, Planning, Big Data," "Art of the Soviets."

And I bought it at May Day Books' excellent cut-out section!

Red Frog

October 16, 2023

Anti-Fascist Series #12: Funhouse Mirrors

 Strange Bedfellows

Brownshirts.  Strasserism.  3^rd Position.  National Bolshevism.  Red-Brown.  Maga-Communism.  Maga-Democrats.  Anarcho-Capitalism. National Anarchism.  Autonomous Nationalism. Social-Fascist” rhetoric.  Neo-Marcyism.  Odd ‘anti-imperialists.’ “Left-Right” unity.   The Trumpen-Left. Republican politicians.  Libertarianism.  Conspiracy theoryism.  The ‘socialism of fools.’  The 'anti-imperialism of fools.' National Socialism.  Fascism. 

What do these all these somewhat esoteric ideas have in common, starting with the Brownshirts?   They all mix left and right perspectives in the interests of deception, the right and the capitalist class.  Every lie has to contain some truth. 

You might have heard or seen so-called allies imitate some of these ideas.  These are examples of morbid symptoms occurring now in the U.S. and on the ‘Left.’  Naomi Klein’s recent book “Doppelganger” about her name-resemblance to another person, Naomi Wolf, examines this issue.  The latter Naomi has transitioned from being a feminist liberal-leftist of some sort to being an ally of Steve Bannon and Alex Jones.  Just like certain ‘anti-war’ types are thinking of voting Republican or for Libertarians like RFK Jr. - including former socialists, liberals, pacifists and Bernie Sanders’ supporters.  Or friends who have turned to MAGA Trumpism wholesale.   

These morbid symptoms are spread by YouTube post-left podcasters and ‘geopolitical’ analysts who ignore class, socialism, proletarian issues, internationalism and revolution - all those ‘hard’ topics.  ‘Doppelganger’ is a soft-left attempt by Klein to deal with this phenomena.  The symptoms are these:  Republicans claiming to represent the working class, as the Democrats’ failure is obvious. Republicans claiming to be anti-war, as the Democrats’ war-mongering is obvious. Wellness gurus denouncing all of ‘western’ medicine, including vaccines and even masks. (Mask use is common in Asia for road and street dust … but most wellness fans have never been there.)  Quack medical solutions. Violent, bloodthirsty rhetoric.  Single issue anti-war types blocking with pro-war types.  Conspiracy theories as the way to understand reality, with suppositions and one slim fact to back them up.  All ‘mainstream’ news is ‘fake news.’  People who buy the ‘filtered’ propaganda from each government.  Deep Green ‘blood and land’ longings.  Blocking or cheering on anti-feminist, ethnic nationalist, fundamentalist, authoritarian and reactionary capitalist forces and regimes. The discovery of very strange bedfellows.  And on and on.     

Lets see if 'comrades' pull back from their rightist positions.  “Doppelganger” is at May Day and a Blog review is forthcoming.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “The Black Hundred,” “Against the Fascist Creep,” “The Brown Plague,” “Marxism versus Libertarianism,” “Who Is Ron Paul?” “Crack-Up Capitalism,” “RFK Jr. The Libertarian,” “It Can’t Happen Here” (Lewis), “Caligula on the Potomac,” “Modern Rhinoceroses,” "The Destruction of Reason” (Lukacs) or the words ‘Anti-fascist Series’ or "Naomi Klein.'

Red Frog

October 12, 2023

You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover!

 “How to Read a History Book – The Hidden History of History” by Marshall T. Poe, 2018

This is a somewhat witty and clear story about how academic history books are written.  Poe clearly means it for other academics but also a small public audience, as he avoids jargon.  Liberal Arts academics will find it full of jolts of recognition and some absurdity. Others will find their suspicions confirmed.  The title is somewhat deceptive, as it is not a critique so much as an amusing take on the foibles of the mainstream history ‘profession.’  You want to be a ‘professional’ historian?  You won’t after this.

Poe creates a case study of an imaginary student, Elizabeth Ranke, who is white, upper middle-class and really wants to be a history professor.  Her ‘field of study’ is 1960s radical feminism at a made-up university in Priestly, Westcoastia, which holds a number of primary sources.  She wastes time studying a French philosopher named ‘Darridont,’ who is probably Derrida.  There is even a school slovenly called ‘Oxturd.’  She much later lands a second-tier history job in Ameless, Iowana, a small town full of tractors and drunken football fans.  This gives you an idea of the many ‘thin disguises’ in the book. 

Poe is a full prof at Amherst, UMass but he did attend college in both Iowa and at Berkeley.  He’s published on ‘early, modern’ Russian history too – whatever that is.  He predictably opposes Marxism as ‘dogmatic’ and calls post-1917 Russia ‘Utopistan’ and “The Workers Paradise.”  He was born in Huntsville, Alabama, which might be indicative, then went to high-school in Wichita.  His net worth is $1-5M, so he's solidly in the upper-middle class.  Poe repeatedly mentions that many Universities have gender and skin color requirements for hires, but he never mentions why.  Presently history faculties are mostly gender-balanced according to him.

Meta-Narrative No!

Poe describes nearly all U.S. academic historians as specialists, uninterested in over-arching themes, ‘the big picture’ or ‘meta-narratives,’ as the post-modernists like to say. Socialists have an over-arching narrative, so they are outside this method of history too. The specialists are also contrasted to the academically distained ‘popular’ historians who write for the general public. They use the research of the academics to create their own narratives.  Only a few of these popular historians make any money, so it might be safer to be an academic - or so you might think.  Elizabeth’s journey in writing a history book is really to address other professional feminist historians about one moment in history, in one location, mostly about one group.  Nothing ‘cosmic’ about this, as Poe would say.  What was that about forests and trees?

Poe points out that professional study of history is a relatively new phenomenon.  He introduces the reader to how ‘the German method’ of studying history developed, then came to the U.S. after 1914.  In Germany this involved the creation of graduate seminars, research libraries, the first modern history graduate program, the first professional organization and the first history journal.  Instead of the practice of a few rich ‘gentleman’ historians dabbling in the past, professional ‘history’ now had its own rules and regulations, institutions, governing bodies, standards and practices.

Poe describes in exhausting detail Elizabeth’s long progress through her Ph.D, her struggle with writing a 435 page academic tome, then her attempt to get hired in academe in order to fulfill her life-long career dream.  He doesn’t mention the fact that ‘tenure’ is now a disappearing goal for many academics, or if she accrued debt.  Her lawyer mother had told her that law school was always a backup - but Elizabeth refused to take that path.

Poe makes fun of the 1960s Women's Liberation Mvmt.

Neutrality?

For a Lefty, the healthy vegetable of the book is Poe’s chapter on what history books hide. Elizabeth eventually starts to think about what might have been ‘unsaid’ in her book about 1960s radical academic feminism at ‘Priestly.’  The German model asks the historian to be neutral and impartial but of course as Poe notes, no historian is.  Elizabeth herself was a feminist, her mother was even more radical – and the topic itself is not neutral or apolitical.  Just as the historical docudramas of producers like Ken Burns are loaded with a pre-conceived conservative and neo-liberal worldview, so Elizabeth might suffer from the same thing on the flip side.  Oh, the horror!

She remembers a particular right-wing student – ‘Russ Doubtless’ - she used to argue with as a freshman, and how his religion would have led him to look at different primary sources and take a different Christian conservative tack about this same topic at the same university.  Poe of course doesn’t actually have any evidence of conservative Christian ‘feminism’ at Priestly, so his point is a straw woman.  Nor does he have any proof that what happened was a ‘tragedy’ for women unless you claim that equality itself is tragic – which you’d have to do.  Consider the source, as they say.  But the point stands – the story of history is not purely objective or apolitical, nor can it ever be fully known.  Yet not all opposing histories are equal and there’s the rub.  Facts still exist.

This should not be ground-breaking information, especially to a tenure-track feminist like Elizabeth, her cat, her glasses of wine, her second-tier school or to you, dear reader.  Poe’s description of the Priestly feminists then descends into Tom Wolfe satire, because, hey, even this book has an agenda.  There are bathroom jokes!  Elizabeth finally decides her book was full of jargon, muddled thinking and abstractions, while ignoring certain unpleasant facts.  Poe concludes that there are a lot of lousy academic history books - products of the academic system, vanity, careerism and social blindness.  He contends that none are intended to make it into the internet, film, documentaries or podcasts where most people now consume history, another problem. 

Poe concludes that history books, or even a solid understanding of history, don’t change history, unlike what Santayana said about repetition.  They just clarify facts with which to confront the fake-history fabulists. There is no “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice."  He says this is because “people are people” and will always do “war, poverty, oppression” … “over and over, forever.”  What was that about boots stamping on faces forever?  As Mark Fisher might say, Poe's position is so much capitalist realism, but then Poe has been a popular success in his field, so who am I to argue?  The book ends with a maudlin death scene for Elizabeth as she ponders what grounds truth in history.  She concludes it is Utilitarian happiness and ‘love’ that provide its truth. This contradicts his ‘people are (shitty) people’ logic but then muddled thinking is not exclusive to Elizabeth.  In fact his thinking smacks of Christian original sin, a premier example of muddle-headedness and perhaps one the author takes to heart.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Why People Don’t Buy Books,” “The Melancholia of the Working Class,” “Capitalism on Campus,” “The University in Chains” (Giroux); “Furious Feminisms,” “The Debt Trap,” “Professional Degrees in Recent Democratic Party Politics,” “Meridian” (Walker); “Can History Predict the Future?” “Doublespeak,” “Keywords – the New Language of Capitalism,” “Uncomfortable Television,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism and Southern Liberals,” “Democracy in Chains.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist, October 9, 2023

The Anaconda Plan

 “Democracy in Chains - the Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America,” by Nancy MacLean, 2017

This is a look into the origins of U.S. libertarianism.  It arose when MacLean, a reporter, got access to the unguarded and disorganized papers of one of the invisible founders of libertarianism, James McGill Buchanan, on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  Her investigation showed that libertarianism's origins lie in a defense of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow, legally summed up as 'states rights.'  Demands that were raised in the 1850s are similar to now, especially from the South, the Republican Party, the Koch Network and the libertarian tech bros of Silicon Valley.  It's not to say that neoliberal ideas are absent from the Democrats – they are not – but the libertarians are the ideological 'fountainhead.'  Her main point is that the plan is not to use fascism and overt violence, but to gradually take over various institutions and return the U.S. to some primitive, late 1800s robber-baron version of itself – prior to the New Deal, the Warren Court, Keynes and the Johnson/Nixon reforms.  I've called this 'the Anaconda Plan.'  It is succeeding. 

Buchanan, through his contacts with billionaires and ideologues like Hayek, the Mont Perlin Society and the Chicago School, developed a right-wing 'political economy' that directly opposed anything provided by the federal government, counties or cities, in favor of state government.  This means promoting 'right to work' laws, privatizing education, restricting voting and getting rid of federal govt. programs like unemployment, social security, welfare, Medicare and taxes, among others.  Buchanan's inspiration and forerunner was South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, the vicious slaver, planter, Confederate, segregationist, governor and senator.  MacLean reminds us that the Confederacy was based on a state's right to allow any form of property, including slaves.  That is why neo-Confederates call it 'the War Between the States.'  Buchanan's first Virginia proposal to privatize all Virginia schools was submitted during the fight against desegregation after the 1954 Supreme Court “Brown v. Bd. Of Education” ruling.  One rural county in Virginia closed all public schools for years rather than capitulate to the federal government.  As you can see, his program is not about 'individual choice.'  The overturning of 'Roe v. Wade' was also done on the basis of 'states rights.'

No Democracy

Buchanan's libertarian political economics department at the U. of Virginia initiated by the university's Chancellor in 1956 was partly funded by the private Volcker Fund.  As is now familiar, conservative billionaires and millionaires provide cash for these ideological efforts, even in state schools. The State of Virginia during the 1950s was the 'polite' form of segregation, mostly eschewing the lynching and KKK terror of the deep South in favor of rich white segregationists controlling nearly every aspect of law, business and state government under the leadership of senator Harry Byrd.  Buchanan's 'intellectual' tactics fit right in. His attitude to labor: castigating union leaders, the unemployed, retirees and those on welfare or any government program as 'parasites.'

MacLean notes that not all federal government is under the libertarian axe, just everything that does not 'steal' from or 'oppress' the rich like taxes, or socialize what could be private.  In 1964 Goldwater was their mouthpiece and his ideas were so unpopular he lost in a landslide.  As Ayn Rand and the John Birchers said in defense of Goldwater, the essential issue was 'capitalism versus socialism.'  This is still the main line of thought almost 60 years later.

Libertarians realize their program will never be popular, so they aim at decimating any form of bourgeois democracy in favor of capital and the market. Libertarians understand that majorities tend to tax and regulate, if not outright socialize wealthy or corporate private property.  The majority of workers support programs that support them, or at least they should.  So getting rid of democracy is the long game, as authoritarianism is preferred for capital's 'excellent' functioning.  Buchanan put it this way in his book The Limits of Liberty:  “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe.”  One of his co-thinkers suggested:  “Restriction of the franchise to property owners, educated classes, employed persons or some such group.”  There’s some originalism for you!  

Private capital wants to directly control the courts, educational institutions, workplaces, media, land, elections and the government without organized opposition.  Their plan is to turn bourgeois democracy into an authoritarian variant.  Bars on felons, gerrymandering, cutting polling places, ID laws, maintaining the Senate, Electoral College and life-time Supreme Court appointments are at the top of their present list. Claiming an election is erroneous without evidence is typical. But these are just starters. Some also lean to martial law, theocracy or a new ‘Caesar.’ Buchanan's goal was anarcho-capitalism, no matter how it is done.  This guy got a Nobel in 1986 for this deceptively named 'public choice theory.'  That theory was for "a limited franchise and elite control.'

University Conflicts

Buchanan resigned from the U. of Virginia in 1967 and went to UCLA.  He had finally been ousted from Virginia due to his intolerance of any view but his own in his 'Virginia School,' the private money of the Volker Fund, along with his promotion of an academically untalented ally. As one academic noted the school's theories never had empirical verification, but that isn't what Buchanan was after.  It was more about constructing a wish-list counter-narrative to federal programs. Buchanan's experience at UCLA in 1968 made him want to turn universities into something akin to a corporation.  He quickly left UCLA to return to Virginia Tech in his beloved South, as he was really a rich farmer's kid from central Tennessee.  He got kicked out of there 10 years later for the same reasons and ended up at George Mason U in northern Virginia.  MacLean goes into detail on the Charles Koch's domination of the economics and law departments there, as corporate cash, led by Koch, flooded into GMU. Koch's money and minions turned it into a political organizing center, not an academic center, which forced even Buchanan to retire.

His university program?  Get rid of tenure, make students customers, raise tuition to stop so many working-class youth from going to college, get rid of liberal arts, privatize and use physical repression when necessary. They are well on their way to these goals.  Other successes: the military and prisons are now partly privatized; Medicare and retirement savings are partly privatized; some govt. welfare services and some national land are; subcontracting of government work, the military and parts of the space program are; some schooling is already privatized through charter schools and 'homeschooling.' I'll bet you can think of more.  Capital is cannibalizing the public sector, not just demanding corporate welfare and low taxes.  This is actually a reflection of its weakness as a profit center.  They also want to disband the postal service, privatize fire departments and roads, close public libraries, privatize federal parks and get rid of any regulation or law that impedes business.  Sound familiar? 

Well, you didn’t think this would all stay at the level of theory did you?  Buchanan was actually the chief architect, not Friedman, of Chilean policies after the 1973 Pinochet dictatorship through a Virginia School acolyte José Piñera, the labor minister.  In Chile retirement was privatized, national unions disbanded, the minimum wage deplored, the Constitution rewritten.  The ‘Constitution of Liberty’ was adopted in 1980 after a bogus election in which opponents had no access to the press, as it was controlled by Pinochet.  This constitution made 'legal' changes almost impossible, on purpose.  Buchanan never mentioned his role in this version of ‘public choice economics’ because he had to hide it.  

The book mentions all the familiar names linked to far-right libertarianism – Buckley, Friedman, Hayek, Koch, Meese, the Cato Institute, the John Birch Society, Stockman, ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, but also many unfamiliar ones.  MacLean claims that this whole movement's goals were through 'stealth' but for anyone who wants to look, they are pretty open.  Koch has been a known factor for years.  MacLean mentions that some ideologues admired Lenin's political skill in creating an organization of professional revolutionaries – cadre – to overthrow the capitalist state. Buchanan's allies at the time – and people like Steve Bannon now - fancy themselves counter-revolutionary cadre battling Democrats and Republican ‘statists,’ who are supposedly the useful idiots of socialism.

MacLean confuses the words revolution and counter-revolution in the text, since she's a left-liberal.  She makes no connection between libertarians and Christian nationalists / Dominionists, fascists or even some anarchists and post-lefty podcasters.  The seizure of the Supreme Court to redefine - or refine - the U.S. Constitution is touched on. What MacLean ignores is that the majority of capital actually needs the federal government, otherwise they would be financially underwater and the subject of mass revolution.  Another thing she ignores is debt.  Libertarians consider federal 'debt' to be anathema in their pursuit of a 'balanced budget,' but no proletarian 'kitchen table' budget is actually without it.  Debt is ubiquitous in personal, government and corporate functioning in a capitalist matrix.  They are not against debt or interest per se, but only govt. debt that helps the majority. Libertarianism is in essence a reactionary fantasy, a vision of Utopian conservatism, but it is also a heavy capitalist ideological weapon in the class war.  That is why Left policy should be no blocks with libertarians on any issue.   

Notes:  A “Unite the Right” rally was held to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee at the U of Virginia in that self-same Charlottesville.  Many were beaten and one anti-racist killed.  Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis was recently renamed Bde Maka Ska (Biday Mahkaska) due to Calhoun's racist legacy.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Marxism versus Libertarianism,” “Rich People Things,” “Who is Ron Paul?” “Crack-Up Capitalism,” “RFK Jr. The Libertarian.”

Red Frog / October 5, 2023

Take Your Pick

 “Socialism or Barbarism – From the 'American' Century to the Crossroads,” by Istvân Mészáros, 2001

The book is a bit dated but the angle still holds. It is prior to the 2^nd Iraq war and the 2007-2012 long recession, for instance. Mészáros makes some key points that resonate with orthodox Marxists but have wider applicability. It borrows the famous 1915 quote from Rosa Luxemburg as to the choice that will have to be made by all social forces in the ever-nearer future, but especially the proletariat. The present dangers of financial ruin, war, fascism, authoritarianism, nuclear annihilation, corporate control and environmental chaos threaten an even greater barbarism than she could imagine. She wrote this line in prison during WWI, held there for her anti-war work.

Mészáros makes these significant points: 

1. Capital's 'globalization' contains a fatal contradiction, in that their states are not global. This contradiction contains the recipe for capitalist war. There will never be a 'world government'  under capitalism in spite of the U.N. and EU experiments.

2. The prior is one of 16 internal and external contradictions in capital's functioning.

3. The “downward equalization of the differential rate of exploitation” across the world means that 'western' workers are now under the same pressures as those in the 'global south.'

4. The USSR and its associated states, along with present China, etc., were/are 'post-capitalist' but not socialist.

5. “The capital system could not survive for a week without the massive backing it constantly receives from the state.”

6. He thinks the state is increasingly having trouble rescuing capital. Can you say growing debt – corporate, governmental, private?

7. The U.S., after it replaced Britain, is no longer capable of being the imperialist colossus. Yet multi-polarity will not solve the basic problem either.

8. World-spanning oligopolies now dominate world capital, sometimes under the rubric of 'human rights' and 'multi-party democracy,' other times under authoritarianism, but always under the hallmarks of business. 'Plurality' means a plurality of capitals.

9. He takes apart the inadequate slogan of 'Think globally, act locally.'

10. Imperialism's and capitalism's military and economic forces are linked, even though the dollar many times does its work alone.

11. Authoritarian political methods stem from capital's 'top-down' methods.

12. The Soviet Union as a post-capitalist state still did not get rid of the effects of capital.

13. China is the ultimate present target. A party-state is an odd duck in the 'free market.'

14. The split between labor's industrial role and its political arm have to be united in any real class struggle. It has meant a weak 'defensive' role only.

15. “Western” labor is no longer just looking for higher wages. Demands for shorter working hours and attempts to stop closures show post-war Keynesianism has failed and labor is taking that into account.

16. Socialism means control by the associated producers, not by a Party, bureaucracy or a leader. The workers' state actually should wither away.

17. Keynesianism will not return in a substantive way.

18. The approach to capitalist war is to “turn their weapons against their own ruling classes, as the socialists invited them to do.”  Note to those 'socialists' who back Russia in Ukraine.

19. Reformism is more and more lost in its pursuit of immediate aims unconnected to strategic objectives.

20. We do not have centuries, only a few decades. (A poke at Samir Amin and other Maoists who claim we do.)

Mészáros is interviewed by an Iranian Left journal at the end.  He contends that capitalist crisis is related to a global view of capital, which combines the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, overproduction and the reproduction of what he calls 'total social capital.' This latter formulation seems unique. It is an attempt to link labor profiteering with all the other 'organic' methods that capital uses to control society. He rejects the concept of 'state capitalism' as to the USSR and China, but thinks that the 'capital system' intrudes into a post-capitalist, transitional society until it is rooted out in a permanent manner. Continuing political control of surplus labor in China is an example.

Capital is a hugely wasteful system, and this is reflected in its environmental effects like pollution and useless and toxic products. Millions in the world live in a hybrid of capitalism and other methods, an example of 'combined and uneven development' though he doesn't use that phrase. He compares, like Marx, the functioning of a capitalist enterprise to the military, where foremen are sergeants, CEOs are generals and includes every layer in between. But the great majority are privates and corporals! This should put paid to the idea that socialism is a 'barracks-like' institution where everyone takes orders, sleeps in a bunkhouse and owns what is in a trunk. This conception actually reflects a bourgeois military.

Many aspects of capital are parasitic, like administration, insurance and the financial sector. Marxism always needs to be renewed and developed, as capital has successfully 'postponed' its grave problems, putting them off to the future. But the future is not endless. Mészáros puts his main emphasis on who controls production and makes the decisions as to the division of the surplus, not just on surplus value. His conception of revolution is of a mass 'social revolution' involving the overwhelming majority of people, which Marx took from Babeuf's 'society of equals' during the French Revolution. Just 'overthrowing the state' is insufficient and only preparatory to a transition to socialism. Revolutionaries cannot substitute for the class in his mind.

This small volume's points could be an introduction to his work in the books listed below. There are others I did not cover, some of which did not come true. It is dedicated to Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy of Monthly Review.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The Necessity of Social Control,” “The Structural Crisis of Capital,” “Beyond Leviathan,” (All 3 by Meszaros) or the words 'capitalism,' 'imperialism,' 'post-capitalist,' etc.

Red Frog

October 2, 2023