College Library Browsing #13: Red Wavelet Feminism

 “Marxism & Women's Liberation” by Judith Orr, 2015

Orr is the sharp editor of Socialist Worker, the paper of the U.K.'s Socialist Workers Party. This book is an orthodox explanation of proletarian and revolutionary feminism and its differences with other kinds of feminism. The book is grounded in the working-class movement, the materialist foundations of capitalist society and the role of the bourgeois family in the oppression of women.

Orr points out that by 2015 women had made great strides in the central capitalist countries since the feminist movements of the 1960s, yet still suffered under heavy burdens at work and at home. Overseas the situation is worse – extreme poverty, illiteracy, murder, abuse, child marriage, exploitation, inequality, isolation, FGM. She understands the interrelation of class and gender means that damage extends to wealthy and middle-class women too, yet affects proletarian women the most. The Marxist kicker is that women will never be equal and fully liberated until capital is overthrown and a world society formed outside the rule of profit. This is all standard revolutionary Marxism and reads like a primer.

Of most import to Marxists and Orr is that our biological nature determines how humans reproduce, survive and produce the requirements of life. Reproduction, of course, is key and many women bear that initially. She discusses: 1) the role of labor, tools, language and consciousness in the making of human beings; 2) the original primitive communism that relied on group-tribal cooperation and equality; 3) In these hunter-gatherer and subsistence economies, matriarchy was not unusual; 4) the development of pastoralism and slash and burn horticulture, then more developed agriculture, led to the slow development of surpluses and classes; 5) class development led to the subservience of women, as men controlled the surplus while women were centered on reproduction; 6) This extended through tribute, slave, feudal and now capitalist societies. Or as Engels called this process “the world-historical defeat of the female sex.”

FAMILY TIES

The word 'family' comes from the Latin for servant or house slave, or a group of slaves. In Rome it eventually meant everyone – slaves, servants, wives, children - under the control of the 'head of the household.' Orr describes the feudal division of labor within rural peasant families, as women produced clothes, food, household goods and participated in agriculture. With the development of British capitalism, women worked at home doing piece work, or in textile factories on top of their other duties. Today the greatest number of women in history work outside the home, yet the 'trad-wife ideal' of the nuclear family, with women limited to the home, is relatively new. In a way it is a middle-class luxury.

Orr defends the right of women not to work, as some laws were passed in the 1800s that blocked women working due to the incredible strain on a working family of having two jobs. She denies these laws were the source of 'the patriarchy' as some feminists insist. The family as it stands now is useful to capital because of its economic and ideological character. It allows the reproduction and maintenance of the class for free through family labor, mostly women. It is an unpaid 'welfare' system that props up capital's needs. At the same time the home has become a center of individual consumption – the house, children, food, comfort, appliances, entertainment, decoration. It's not a 'sharing economy.'

Ideologically, as Thatcher put it, there is “no such thing as society” - but there are families! The meaning is that each individual family, with no support from the outside, must function alone. They are responsible for everything, society nothing. This induces a sense of isolation and disconnection from greater issues, while failure breeds guilt and prosecution. In reality families can be both helpful and loving or sites of gender and child abuse. Single parents especially are under the greatest financial and social pressure, and these are usually women. Elder care is sometimes located in the home, and its also done by mostly woman. The socialist goal is not about 'abolishing the family' so much has helping women and families connect to the rest of society.

GENDER & HISTORY

Orr has a chapter on gender roles, attacking biological determinism, sociobiology and others who basically claim 'biology is destiny.' Orr however does not ignore the significant biologic differences between men and women – hormones, body structure, the ability to have babies or produce sperm, milk in breasts, etc. She addresses 'discrimination' by some biologic feminists against trans-women at women-only events – though how many of these occur is debatable. Gender under capitalism has two aspects, biological and cultural. These are not identical.  In a socialist future the former would be the only one that remains. Orr challenges the idea that 'female'-led capitalism would be kind and gentle as claimed by some bourgeois feminists. She notes how social gender roles don't just damage women, but men as well – especially through male suicide and health issues.

Orr details the various waves of the feminist movement in the U.S. and the U.K. from the Left – the Suffragettes in the late 1800s and early 1900s and their debates with socialists; the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1950s and 1960s; lesbian feminism; anti-male feminists; and the arrival of bourgeois 'lean in,' corporate feminists. The older Communist organizations and the New Left both failed to deal with feminism in the 1960s, but in the U.K. women strikers brought a clear labor orientation to the movement. As an example, anti-male British feminists claimed that trade union and Leninist men could not be trusted in the 1979 abortion fight. Orr points out that it was in the material interests of union men to be for the right of abortion too. This even showed up in the recent Irish referendum.  As to the socialist organizations, attacking them was part of the weakening of the feminist movement in the early 1980s, with a wing turning to interpersonal issues, identity feminism and anti-maleness. That was the end of the second 'wave' as a movement.

SAD 'WAVE'

Orr shows how many feminists retreated into academia, with arguments taking place absent a mass movement. Cultural feminism became more prominent to the point of endorsing brutal capitalist leaders like Thatcher as examples of 'empowerment.' This eventually devolved into 'post-feminism' and 'state department feminism' which backed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as 'liberating' Muslim women. In response came 'third wave' feminism – intersectional, hip and sexy according to Orr. It was sort of the feminist equivalent of post-modernism, as feminists unmoored from a materialist standpoint could be on opposite sides of the same struggle. A 'hierarchy of oppression' and privilege theory were adopted by some, which she analyzes as incomplete, individualist and failed strategies. All this led to further splitting of the women's movement into smaller and smaller academic bits, as women's oppression was now only a matter of bad ideas, not a capitalist economy. It became pro-capitalist reformism by another name. Eventually you can get to 'trad wife,' Republican mother cults and be-your-own-female-boss MLM schemes as legitimate 'feminist' solutions following that road.

Orr revisits theories of whether 'surplus value' is produced by reproductive labor in the home and the concept of 'wages for housework' promoted by some feminists.  She opposes this as bad theory and not a solution. These views insert the individual capitalist wage relation into the home instead of limiting and socializing the labor.

Orr discusses the widespread occurrences of rape, domestic violence and murder against women and embraces a concept of sexual freedom for women. In early Bolshevik Russia this became the issue of 'free love.' Orr objects to how capital has turned this human desire into a crude, oppressive commodity forms – porn, pole-dancing, strip clubs, plastic surgery, cosmetics, prostitution, child abuse, etc. In more conservative societies female genital mutilation is practiced on young girls – it's answer to stopping the sexual desire of women and promoting the patriarchic desires of men. Almost 98% of women in Somalia are cut for instance, the highest in the world. In the U.S. South and Plains states sex education, contraceptives, GLBT issues, sexual violence, trad families, home-schooling and abortion mirror the attitudes in Somalia. Orr insists that it is key that sexual pleasure is seen as separate from procreation in order to liberate women.

Finally Orr as a socialist says that women's full liberation can only be achieved under a socialist society that gets rid of the class, color & religious caste and gender systems based on profit and private property. Reformism as a method eventually comes up against the needs of the bourgeois economic and political system, which can reverse any gains. This has been seen in the rejection of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. but is evident across the world.  While the modern women's movement has existed since the beginning of the 1900s, most women are still second-class citizens. Orr makes the point that a class approach promises the strongest challenge to capital and sexism. She shows how this worked out in various revolutions across the globe, including in Russia, along with the recent 'square' revolts in the Middle East.

This book could serve as a detailed primer on the issue of sexism from a Marxist perspective, though it is a bit dated. If that is your interest, certainly get a hold of it.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: ““Feminists and Feminists,” “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Mistaken Identity,” “Really? Rape? Still?” “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai," “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” (Ghodsee); “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”  “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “Without Apology,” "Patriarchy of the Wage" (Federici), “FGM.”

May Day Books carries many on feminism from many points of view.

And I got it at the UGA Library!

Red Frog / March 29, 2024

Are You Persuaded?

 “The Persuaders- At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds and Democracy” by Ananad Giridharadas, 2022

This is a liberal attempt in explaining how to persuade people who don't agree with you in order to broaden your coalition. It consists of interviews with activists who worked on the 2017 Women's March after Trump's win; a Left Palestinian organizer; a Black Lives Matter initiator; a duo of DEI 'race trainers,' a “leading consultant on political messaging for the movement left,” an anti-cult worker helping the relatives of delusional Trumpers; a pro-immigrant canvasser in Arizona; a gay rights crusader in California.

Some of these stories might be useful to socialists; to NGO types; to community organizations; to unionists; to political groups, as they show examples of successful persuasion. They may help curb sectarianism on the Left; the over-wokness of various identity practitioners; the false Blue / Red setup and even limit stupid trolling on Facebook and other platforms. There are also emotional issues that you might be able to 'therapize' by talking. Even the a-political method of 'love' gets a workout.

The key, as one woman explains, is to recognize how close people are to your perspective. She calls it the 90% / 75% / 50% / 25% and 0% - the 0% being fascists where no discussion is warranted.

The problem with the book is that the 'goal' is murky and the role of actual conditions is left unremarked. In other words class struggle is ignored. Some people will oppose you no matter what because of their material interests, so its not just a matter of 'persuasion.' You first have to understand their class position and how that might be working their thoughts, in a good way or not. If you are dealing with a landlord in conciliation court, a settlement might be possible, but it is a product not of persuasion, but legal pressure or force. This holds true far outside a small conflict like this - from political differences to occupations, strikes, street conflicts and social revolution. Persuasion can work, but it is not the only thing to take into account, as material reality also exists. Alone it is a form of liberal idealism. Its largest example is 2-Party 'bipartisanship' that sees both sides as having the same ultimate goal. Giridharadas later balks at this form of 'persuasion,' but its proponents trumpet it.

In the process, some of the subjects poke at trans pronouns, 'dead names,' 'safe' spaces, claims to special knowledge, guilt-spreading, cancel culture, 'calling out' and personalist purism like shaming and name-calling - all stupid barriers to working with others. These methods actually isolate the people who practice them and reveal a disinterest in building a powerful mass movement for anything. You've met these people. Yet a good chunk of the book dwells on the evils of having white skin, undermining this insight.

Labor organizers - not in the book

The conflicts in the book are 'intersectional' feminism and Hillary-style middle class feminism; GLBT and Muslim realities and conservative white people; anti-gentrification and anti-racism organizing and liberal approaches to these same issues; guilty white people who don't recognize their privilege; anti-immigrants who've never met an actual immigrant without papers; anti-gay fundamentalists who've never met a real gay person, and so on. Much success is based on personal relations by organizers with those they are trying to reach. A general pattern is that more radical groups are encouraged to work with liberal groups in the name of persuasion, and visa versa, to build a bigger reform front. The question is, who is being persuaded by whom?

In the process one BLM activist, Alicia Garza, redefines the concept of the 'popular front,' seeing it not as a long-standing, cross-class bloc but as a temporary alliance of forces for a reform. She claims Marx said this, which he didn't. That might better be called a coalition. Giridharadas has a chapter on Bernie Sanders' campaigns and a very long one on the 'inside-outside' game – which seems to be the theme here – starring Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. His focus becomes the liberal-left in the Democratic Party as the most prominent example of persuaders. And they've certainly had some effect on Biden, as Biden has adopted bits of Sanders-AOC's program, given centrist, neo-liberal politics have dead-ended. But Biden has also had a conservative effect on Sanders-AOC, as persuasion cuts both ways.

Giradharadas has a key chapter on the wanton police shooting of African-American Jacob Blake in Kenosha, WI, which was followed by the killing of two and wounding of one European-American BLM protesters by the budding fascist Kyle Rittenhouse. He focuses on a local, mostly African-American group, BLAK, which ignored the latter killings and concentrated on the former police shooting of Blake. If there was ever an event that demanded unity between skin colors, this was it, yet Giradharadas has not a word to say about that. This shows how his 'movement building' angle is a bit of a fraud, here boiling down to conservative black nationalism, full of an aging Jesse Jackson, block parties and bouncy castles.

Like all liberals and left-liberals Giradharadas wants to straddle the class line with a foot in both camps. He's appalled by Biden's fear-dripping ad that denounced 'rioting' after the events in Kenosha, but, fuck, Biden is still one of the persuadables. Am I drawing a line that is sectarian? No. Class is actually the main divide in society. It's not going away because someone writes or talks a lot, is kind, engages in 'love,' wants reforms, says the right things, or parses the real differences. In a way this book is a long attempt at persuading the Democratic Party not to always appeal to some sad 'middle' (read 'white working-class) voter or suck up to Republicans, but to have a more leftish position like Sanders. The former strategy is one they've pursued since 1972 and the McGovern disaster 54 years ago. Yet his strategy writes off a good chunk of the working-class once again. Nor are any of his interviewees from organized labor or free-lance labor, which seems significant.

In the end this is a deceptive book that pretends to be your friend, then persuades you otherwise.  Giridharadas is a commentator on MSNBC and a professor at the Carter Journalism Institute. He was a journalist at the NYT, used to pundit for the Aspen Institute, supports the liberal American Prospect and worked for McKinsey & Co. as an analyst, so there's that.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Winner Take All” (Giridharadas); “Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism,” “Death of the Liberal Class” (Hedges); “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,” “Kenosha Trial Was Rigged – Fascistic Murderer Gets Off,” “The Undertow” (Sharlet); “Notes From Minneapolis,” “Defund or Abolish the Police?”

May Day Books, to its credit, even carries volumes by liberals – though not this one.

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / March 26, 2024

Bukka White Warns You...

“Junk Science and the Criminal Justice System” by M. Chris Fabricant, 2022

If your vision of scientific crime-solving is the glamorous CSI lab filled with sexy women wearing lab coats, millions in tech equipment and 'nerds' with access to thousands of databases, that's a TV fantasy. The reality is much more prosaic and flawed, especially in the retrograde death penalty states of the South and plains. Fabricant is a lawyer for the Innocence Project, which has beaten the various pseudo-scientific practices common in the courts with actual DNA science. He looks at the cases that made 'junk' science the standard in law, then how it was undermined by its numerous flaws. He also examines the methods and laws that support the imprisoning of innocents. 

If you can't read 'true crime,' this book is not for you, as it's full of the gory details of various murders. My aunt used to read true crime magazines, and after reading one of hers as a kid, I was repulsed. Now TV & streaming is flooded with this violent stuff. These cases take place in Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Virginia and Georgia, with the usual array of meat-headed prosecutors and cops. Racism and classism is a sub-text of the whole process as you might expect. He calls the flawed methods “poor people science.” In fact, the U.S. mass incarceration state inevitably increases the number of innocent people put behind bars. Overwhelming public defenders to the point where a 'defense' becomes impossible is another byproduct. Or putting in a public defender that does nothing. In fact, if you insist on your innocence, you might get a heavier sentence or preclude parole after conviction.

Several famous cases are mentioned, like Ted Bundy and the Sam Shepard murder case. The key legal decisions and doctrines that opened the door to pseudo-science in the criminal courts, all the way up to the national FBI Lab, are included. On the flip side is a 2009 study by the National Academy of Science (NAS) which undermined 13 forensic methods from the point of view of dispassionate actual scientists, not invested prosecutors and forensic associations. The arrival of sophisticated DNA evidence was also crucial and resulted in the release of 227 prisoners accused of murder over 20 years, though others had already been executed. The U.S.'s legal support of the death penalty makes errors final. Rick Perry, Texas governor, presided over 238 executions, the most of any state. 56 were later found to be erroneous according to Trafficant. It was only in 2012 that the USDOJ started restraining the FBI Lab from using junk 'expert' methods.

Fabricant goes after the dentist 'experts' who made omnipresent 'bite marks' in skin into a livelihood. Bite marks were shown to have a 63% error rate. Or the 'fire experts' who looked at fires and thought they could figure out if it was arson by looking at the scene or trusting a dog. Controlled burns in similar circumstances have shown their guesses to be wrong, as has chemical analysis. Or 'tool marks' that send people to jail for life, as if only one tool could make a certain mark. Then there are hair 'comparisons' that assume every person's hair is exclusive, without using DNA testing, many of which later proved erroneous. The FBI especially favored and testified to this cheap method until their errors were put through an audit after the NAS report. Other forensic issues – shoe prints, 'comparative lead bullet analysis,' polygraphs, tire treads, blood splatter, handwriting, fiber analysis, ballistics – are also questioned.  Even finger-prints are suspect, as no one actually knows how unique they are, especially from partial or smudged prints.

Parchman Farm, MS

One of the keys to  science is 'peer review' done by scientists who have done actual experiments. Failure rates are also key. Rigorously controlled studies have to be conducted. Most of these forensic methods met no such criteria but relied on educated guesses or pure nonsense. After all, how are dentists qualified to understand the role of skin in a bite? Skin is not their forte, nor is it stiff like molding plaster. It's fungible, soft and impermanent. And oddly, why are so many murders supposedly accompanied by bites? The battle over 'bite' marks as reliable evidence Trafficant calls “The Bite Wars” and its a strong thread through this book.

Legal ideas like 'the principle of finality' block later evidence of innocence. In 2006 the Supreme Court assumed that the 'checks' in the legal system meant that the system was working. The Supreme Court said the statistically small number of reversed felony convictions were 'the whole iceberg' and not just the tip. This though DNA evidence is only occasionally relevant in the broad range of felonies they looked at. Civil cases benefited by the Supreme Court's 1993 Daubert case, which limited the reliability of forensics in civil matters … but not criminal. Then there are the careers of elected and appointed prosecutors, judges and police, who routinely exercise 'confirmation bias' to protect their behinds. According to Fabricant, Clinton & Biden gutted death penalty appeals in 1996 in the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act , after which federal court reversals went down 40%. Mentally-deficient people are routinely executed even though the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in Atkins v Virginia.

An example is the hanging DA of Dallas, Texas Henry Wade, whose term lasted nearly 40 years from the '50s to the '90s. His police arm was Will Fritz, who had an unbelievable 98% homicide clear rate. You can imagine how that went, as Fritz was many times able to get confessions from the innocent, a leading cause of wrongful convictions. Inevitably, once out of the interrogation room they refute their confessions, but it's too late. Like other Southern cities, Wade and Fritz would round up every black man with a record in the locality where the murder was committed. Reliable and multiple alibi witnesses are ignored by the prosecutor and gullible juries alike. Wade recommended that no “Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans ...” should be put on juries.

This book is a close-in look at how the criminal courts deal with murder in the U.S., with cases and case law over a period of 50 or so years. If nothing else, it should convince you the 'death sentence' is a racist and anti-working class form of retribution, rehabilitation and deterrence. It shows the value of real science and groups like the Innocence Project, as these are virtual case studies of how they beat junk science. Though that Project has not made much of a dent in the overall incarceration state, nor can it.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Six-Pointed Star,” “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (A. Davis); “The Confession” and “A Time to Kill” (both by Grisham); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “With Liberty and Justice For Some” (Greenwald); “Legal Logic Behind Raids,” “The Divide” (Taibbi).

May Day Books has volumes on prison and legal issues from a Left point of view.

And I got it at the Athens, GA library!  Red Frog / March 23, 2024

College Library Browsing #12: Utopia or Dystopia?

 “Red Planets – Marxism and Science Fiction” edited by M. Bould & C. Miéville, 2009

While a seemingly unlikely duo, Marxism and science fiction (SF) actually have some similarities. Both pay attention to the future and sometimes pay attention in similar ways – specifically world-building versions of 'utopia,' better uses of technology and science and including class or anti-colonial rebellions against exploitative hierarchies. Not all science fiction fantasizes that capitalism will exist into eternity or retreats into medievalism, permanent dystopia or technical fascination. For good reason dystopia is certainly a favorite subject at present, yet some SF dystopias are answered by a rebellion – like Total Recall, The Matrix or The Handmaid's Tale.  “Socialism or barbarism” are both reflected in SF's present output, as they are intrinsically related.

These essays and their subjects, some of which are too abstract or convoluted, cover a range of utopias, rebellions and futurist technology. As the authors note the pure fetishization of 'future' technology is a projection of technology's role under capital. SF literature arose during the rise of capital itself – Jules Verne and H.G. Wells being early positivist examples in the 1800s. Techno-futurism alone is not anti-capitalist or even anti-feudalist, as we can see in Herbert's messianic Dune. Yet there is a reason the genre is called 'science' fiction. That science is sometimes debatable, like the construction of the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, or else completely unscientific, but its intent is to create a believable reality without relying on magic.

The editors stand up for SF in its more sophisticated forms against claims it is not real literature or film. Recent examples: Nineteen Eighty-Four; 2001: a Space Odyssey; A Handmaid's Tale; Gravity's Rainbow; Alphaville; Solaris, etc. The founders of SF are Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells. SF writers like Edward Bellamy, William Morris, H.G. Wells and Jack London were all socialists and this continues with China Mieville, Ursula Le Guin, K.S. Robinson and others. Even Nemo in Twenty-Thousand Leagues was an anti-colonial rebel. Left theorists like Frederic Jameson, Darko Suvin and Raymond Williams treat SF seriously.

The first essay is on 'anamorphic' (distorted or stretched) images found in SF, similar to Surrealism or in the old painting The Ambassadors by Holbein. The essay is an exercise in academic constipation.

Another analyzes 'utopias' designed by writers like Marge Piercy and Samuel Delany, but in this case Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness (TLHOD) and K.S. Robinson's Blue Mars. The author praises Le Guin for her portrayal of non-commodity music on the utopian / anarchist world of Anarres, as it is now a social product unconnected to intellectual property. Yet he faults her lead character for saying that he has discovered 'his' musical art, using a possessive pronoun, as if art is not always social too. I find this objection absurd, as ideas don't change immediately. He goes on to praise her portrayal of a nearly sexless society in TLHOD as showing how a society can break (almost) completely from capitalist animal spirits. Blue Mars' depicts music, drumming and dance as collective events in a utopian but primitive tribal context, and these same musical methods transported to an urban, post-capitalist environment.

Film is now a haven for SF and this essay investigates the relation between 'deflationary' cynical film noir and 'inflationary' optimistic SF. The SF example The Day the Earth Stood Still (TDTESS) satirizes the 1950s Cold War while 2001 shows the link between the clubs of apes and the spaceships of man. By 'inflationary' the author means something that looks optimistically to the future. Both tendencies are present in Marxism – “the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will” is one way its framed - or the cruel present and the radiant possibilities of revolution and the future. TDTESS ends with an 'interplanetary cooperative association' – which is nothing like space in the present capitalist context. The author cites Dark City and especially Metropolis as fusions of noir and SF, which shade over into the ruined cities of Alphaville and Blade Runner. Dark City raises a utopian revolution against a ruling class called The Strangers and succeeds, achieving a society not of a nostalgic past, but of the future.

Another essay follows an obscure, apocalyptic film by Wim Wenders Until the End of the World (UTEOTW), concentrating on the issues of anti-colonialism, the impossible goal of 'going off the grid,' scientists' emotional stupidity and technical SF spectacles that demand nothing from the viewer. It considers 2001 a colonial, tech-fascinated film, and praises UTEOTW as one of the most substantial and progressive SF films in its decade.

There is an essay on 'the singularity' in a novel called Accelerando.- i.e. when human functioning becomes dominated by computerized AI, creating a supposed 'post-human' world of merged human-robot 'replicants.' This concept of a 'post-humanist' singularity divorces thought and action from the biological and sensuous reality of being human. The only real 'post-humanism' would be the complete Frankenstein victory of The Matrix or of Terminator's Skynet, not some super-intelligent, non-eating, non-shitting, non-baby humans. Human intelligence involves at least 9 functions and most computers can only master one. The author says 'post-humanism' is part of a techno-utopia. Is becoming a machine the goal of socialism? No, but a goal for those billionaires looking for some kind of eternal life. As humans know, machines break down and that is why there is a whole category of economics called depreciation. One commentator called the Singularity - “the rapture for nerds” and the author finally calls it “a fantasy of finance capital.” Oddly, the 'singularity' borrows from the Big Bang's imagined 'dimensionless singularity.'

Another essay assails Marx for raising human labor above animal labor, then links the idea to a SF book. Marx and other Marxists have always seen a link between the treatment of animals and that of human 'underpeople.' The author wishes to forge a bloc between socialists, environmentalists and animal-rights campaigners – which is already coming about without ignoring 'the animal labor theory of value' or the role of nature in human life.

Another essay focuses on the role of Lukac's 'Augenblick' – the Leninist moment when will or overdetermination push humans to a decisive intervention in history. This is demonstrated in the SF quartet “Fall Revolution” by Ken MacLeod. K.S. Robinson says MacLeod is “writing revolutionary SF,” seemingly from an anarcho-socialist point of view, advocating some kind of permanent revolution.

Another essay highlights Marxist film criticism during the German Weimar Republic, which erroneously denigrated mass entertainment like Fritz Lang in favor of Prolecult work. He approvingly cites a mass SF film that showed a woman getting into a rocket as some kind of progressive instance. Well it might have been … then. The issue of 'the rocket,' which is such a foundational icon in SF, has changed. It is now an extension of capitalist methods into space. Space X rockets blow up on the launch pads and litter Texas. Billionaires pay for tourist flights. Thousands of pieces of space junk float around the earth and on the moon. Government science programs are privatized while the globe is circled by privately-owned communication and government spy satellites. The real money pot is to mine asteroids and the moon; to colonize anything corporations touch. The only big stellar science projects recently have been the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, the latter undermining the theory of the Big Bang. It's a project, oddly, which yields no profit to anyone but provides valuable data about the universe.

A further essay looks at the role of the city in SF from a Left urbanist point of view, a la David Harvey. Some 1950s pulp SF thought 'skyscrapers' were symbols of a classless techno-utopia, when they are really examples of corporate dominance and high real estate prices. This is caught by SF writers like William Gibson in The Gernsback Continuum. The author claims cyberpunk SF and Marxist geography map the modern city in similar contrarian ways.

It gets more theoretical in several essays. One posits Althusser versus Jameson on the independence of science from ideology (Althusser) or its role purely as an ideology (Jameson). He brings in anarchists like Cohn-Bendit, Freudians like Lacan and concludes that post-capitalist, utopian SF visions have to completely break with capitalist ideology, impossible as that may be. Another is a discussion on the differences and similarities between SF and fantasy. Suvin and Jameson contended that fantasy was backward-looking and regressive, anti-modernist, magical, religious and proto-fascist. Raymond Williams contended that both built worlds that sometimes criticized the present capitalist condition. The author cites Tolkien and, though not available in 2009, Game of Thrones. After all Hobbiton is a utopia, though a retro, old-fashioned rural one based on horse-drawn farming. Likewise the anti-royalist Wildlings and Freefolk in GoT, products of the 'primitive' far north, are heroes led by John Snow. In the real world, the two genres have almost merged, as seen by SF awards in the 2000s for Harry Potter, Pan's Labyrinth and the Peter Jackson Tolkien series.

Mieville claims that both genres of SF and fantasy are distinct yet related, though SF is a more progressive, forward-looking genre. He looks at the scientific 'truthiness' of SF and says much of it is nonsense, though some is based on a rational extension of present science. The key is the author's ability to make the reader believe, not its actual or possible reality. Take the 'thropters' in the Dune film – could they work with those heavy, flapping dragonfly wings? They are a visual delight and two were actually built – with thrusters – and did fly. So they are 'real,' just as the fantastic vehicles in “Mad Max: Fury Road” actually worked. Mieville ends by showing how the worship of a “middle-brow utopian bureaucracy” in much tech SF is ideological, just as is praising a 'lumpen-postmodernist irrationalism.'  'Rationalism' has been debased by its deadly applicability to warfare, surveillance and profiteering, so it no longer works as a palliative according to him. Mieville is a former or present member of the British SWP and ends by praising both 'red planets and 'red dragons.'

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Squid Game,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “People's Future of the United States,” “The Heart Goes Last” and “Handmaid's Tale” (both by Atwood); “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “Good News” (Abbey); “Hunger Games,” “Matrix,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (Dick); “Planet of the Apes” (3 movies); “The Road” (McCarthy); “The Dispossessed” and “Left Hand of Darkness” (Le Guin); “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “The Ministry for the Future” (K.S. Robinson); “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “World War Z,” “American War, “R.U.R. And the Insect Play” (Capek), “Mad Max – Fury Road,” “Dune – the Movie,” "October - the Story of the Russian Revolution" (Mieville).  

May Day has a good left-wing fiction section, with some SF.

Da Kultur Kommissar

March 20, 2024

The Fire Next Time

 Fire Season?

Up in the woods of northern Minnesota the snow is almost gone. The lake ice is soft, the creeks and rivers opening up. It's all early. Take a look at a webcam in Ely, just south of the Boundary Waters canoe area and the Canadian border. Mostly bare grass and soil in the open. Its the same across most of Minnesota. There has been one real snow all winter in Minneapolis. My fellow motorcyclists are out and riding. The rinks are shut, the ice fishing done, the skiers and snow-boarders frustrated, the snowmobilers humiliated, the children without a sled. Perhaps a big, wet snow will still be coming, but don't bet on it. There are several days of light rain / flurries in the forecast for the Cities so there's that.

Fort McMurray, Canada fire - 2016

Instead 'ice rescues' have strained the budgets of northern counties. One ridiculous event saw dozens stranded on a floating ice shelf that detached from the lake shore. Heavy pickups venturing out on lakes have taken an ice dive. Contractors who plow by the event are unpaid, except for the smart ones that demanded money up front. City budgets for sand and plow truck gasoline stand full, while heating bills are lower. Every day in March is predicted to be above freezing, in the 40s and 50s. Minnesota was 2.7F (1.5C) hotter this winter, breaking every record. The Great Lakes are at a 1.2% ice coverage now, with a winter average this year of 5.6%. That's it.

Chris Hedges has an excellent interview on Scheerpost about the tragic fire in Fort McMurray, northern Alberta in May, 2016. Fort McMurray is near the wasteland of the toxic tar sands' 'oil' project, which is a massive bitumen strip mine, the biggest carbon bomb in north America. The woods around town caught on fire due to a long, dry drought and burnt down most of the city. You don't hear much about it now. Every wooded area in north America that has not had heavy snow this year – and there are many in the center and east of North America - will face this same fire problem in the spring, summer and fall. In fact the forecast for 2024 is for a hotter, drier year. Now check the wind speeds and you've got a problem.

So what are your fire preparations if you live or spend time in the woods, even if you are in a town? Or if you are downwind from choking fires? What happens if the roads are blocked by fire, fallen trees, power lines or traffic? If there is a body of water, can you get onto it quickly? Do you have powerful hoses to water down your building? A metal roof? Have you thinned the small trees around your exurban or 'wild-urban interface' structure? Is there gasoline or propane stored in your house, apartment, garage or side building? Is your home a carbon bomb waiting to go off: tar shingles, vinyl siding and windows, floor laminates, a gas stove, furnace and water heater, plastic water pipes, carbon-woven textiles & carpets, or full of plastic products? No?

Texas Panhandle 2024.  Not just the cows burned

What is happening is that fires, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes, storms, ground-water depletion and flooding are causing insurance rates to rise steeply in areas like Florida and California, and this is spreading across the country. The Fort McMurray fire cost $6B in insurance costs, the largest in Canadian history. Much of that was covered by the Canadian taxpayer – the government – as private 'insurance' only went so far. In the U.S. small and medium insurers go bankrupt on a semi-regular basis as disasters overwhelm their capital. Others no longer even offer insurance in some places or raise rates so high people have to move or go unprotected. If your structure is heavily damaged or destroyed, there is no going back in that situation. Well, there is always the land left to put up a tent.

So the dark 'spark' for a social revolution looks more and more like it will be the capitalist carbon industry. Carbon extends beyond oil, gas or coal to house construction, cement making, artificial fertilizer, the plastics and rubber industry, insecticides, many retail products and packaging, road surfaces, meat, fish and dairy, even drugs and cosmetics – just about every sector of the economy. (https://energyneresources.com/blog/list-of-products-made-from-petroleum) Present-day capitalism is mostly based on carbon. The hidden exploitation of surplus value produced by every worker is less obvious, though visibly seen in the growing inequality throughout the world. Environmental disasters are more obvious. The rise of authoritarianism is the outgrowth of this capitalist inequality and it's class structure, much as some just want to blame 'bad' people. You want 'democracy?' Capital is actually incompatible with it.

Green capitalism is inadequate to deal with the dominant, market-driven carbon force. The environmental crisis is the most obvious fact that reveals capital functions only for profit, no matter what impact it has on the community or on nature. At the same time the 'pleasure,' comfort and ease of carbon is a massive weight for stasis, as our social lives will be completely different after the main sources of carbon are slowed and reduced to a minimum. Just look at the many who can't reduce meat consumption because of 'taste.'  The market is keyed to the mass carbon dynamic and it can't change. Nor can its political parties and its '2-Party System,' which in the U.S. are both capitalist - something also true in most of the world. This is the reason no 'COP #' run by governments controlled by capital will ever make a real difference.

A transitional program for eco-socialism is the solution that will actually 'work.' The problem is that many people seek pleasure primarily and will object to their lives being made more difficult in the ways of consumerism. Even though after a transition they will be better off in all the ways that matter most – work, health, housing, family, time, education, environment, social health, peace, creativity, psychology, retirement, crime - some things will become more difficult or unavailable. “Fully-automated luxury communism” is a mirage, though it does hint at something in the future.

Heat Map of the U.S. this Winter

Every product will be evaluated for its environmental, health and social impact, as many buildings, products and foods produced now are junk, while replacements are still aborning. Jobs that are useless will disappear. High-end products for the wealthy – yachts, jets, sports cars, multiple homes, expensive jewelry - will disappear. Wasteful adult 'toys' will disappear or be limited. Society will become more rational and less impulsive, with less fetishes, less violence, less mental illness, less nonsense, less bullshit. Yet this will probably happen only after a long period of environmental disasters, human migration and bloody conflict as defenders of the social order lay waste to any forces that oppose them. In that context consumerist mania will be far weaker and the least of our problems. A 'fire sale' will see to that.

Meanwhile we have to adjust, 'adapt' and deal with the shattering impacts. Enjoy the warm winter if you are not an outdoor enthusiast because the payback is coming. Farmers will be experiencing drought. Fires are in the offing. Smoke will fill the air. Houses will burn and animals will die, as they did in Texas. The world will change and not yet for the better.

P.S. - The Guardian on the recent Texas fire in the cattle-filled Panhandle: Texas Panhandle Fire

P.P.S. - 3/18 Star Tribune on Superior National Forest wildfire risk this year in MN - https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/other/lack-of-snow-intensifies-wildfire-risk-in-superior-national-forest/ar-BB1k2z8D

More:  MinnPost on fire risk in MN, WI, MI, NE - https://www.minnpost.com/other-nonprofit-media/2024/03/from-minnesota-to-nebraska-midwest-states-face-early-wildfire-season/

May Day Books has many volumes on the environmental crisis, from Left and liberal angles.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Collapse" (Diamond); "Native Tongue" (Hiaasen); "Tar Sands," "Climate Emergency," "Planning Green Growth," "The Robbery of Nature" (Foster); "We're Doomed," "Reflections on the Environment and Consumerism," "Vanishing Face of Gaia" (Lovelock); "Anthropocene or Capitalocene?" "A Redder Shade of Green," "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" (Malm); "The Sixth Extinction," "x," "Mad Max - Fury Road."  

The Cultural Marxist

March 17, 2024

Bailout Bonds Men

 “The Lords of Easy Money – How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy” by Christopher Leonard, 2022

This is a conventional but enlightening account of how the Federal Reserve has actually worked since the 1970s. It follows the involvement of a long-serving Federal Reserve governor from Kansas City, Tom Hoenig and chairs Arthur Burns, Paul Volcker, Allan Greenspan, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell, who is still head of the Fed. It basically shows how the issuance of cheap or free money by the Fed created 'asset bubbles' in real estate and farmland, in oil and gas, in the tech and dot.com sectors, in corporate and junk bonds, in mergers, hedge funds and private equity, creating financial crashes since the 1970s as entities searched for high yields. These asset bubbles fueled inequality as cheap money allowed various top financial actors to profit, while closing factories and small businesses, cutting benefits and laying off workers.

The Fed governors and regional bank presidents are appointed, not elected; only 12 vote on a rotating basis in the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC); and they are from the capitalist banking sector, academe or government. It is not a democratic institution. It was created in 1913 because of so many bank and currency failures before that. Private banks own stock in their regional federal reserve banks and Leonard claims it is a 'private-public' partnership, yet the evidence for that is slim.  The Fed is in charge of the 'monetary' side of the capitalist economy; Congress and politicians in charge of the 'fiscal' side. According to Leonard the latter has been in a stalemate since the Tea Party arose in the 1990s and that continues with Trumpism. It is left to the Fed to deal with inflation or unemployment with limited means, while fiscal policy stands relatively stagnant. Leonard ignores the billions poured into the arms industry, tax breaks and financial welfare for corporations and the rich and the protection of Wall Street – all 'fiscal' policies.  He also ignores the falling profitability of many industrial firms. But let's follow his story.

During most of this period money was created by the Fed to pay 24 'primary dealers' through the 'discount window' at zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) or very low interest. These dealers include Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Nomura and Cantor Fitzgerald. In Europe and Japan there was even negative interest. This book looks at 2010's 'quantitative easing' (QE) as an even more egregious version of zero interest money, as it meant buying trillions in bonds by the Fed to prop up the markets and firms. Much of this was secret or not reported on, and in 2008, dwarfed the public Congressional TARP bailout. Of note is how inaccurate Fed predictions go, as Leonard shows the Fed's Ph.D quants getting it wrong and to compensate, speaking in impenetrable “Fedspeak”. At one point they called their policies 'a shot in the dark.'  Hoenig later became assistant secretary of the FDIC in 2012 and advocated breaking up the big banks. He also wanted a return to FDR's Glass-Steagall law to separate commercial from risky capital markets banking. When those policies didn't fly, Hoenig proposed higher capital reserves for each 'too big to fail' bank. After the FDIC Hoenig went on to work at a libertarian think tank at George Mason University, a conservative business school.

No one in the book suggests nationalizing the big banks or the shadow banks - hedge funds, private equity and dark pools - as the real solution to inequality and instability. When a bank is 'too big to fail' it actually means it has become a social entity, a public utility, not a private enterprise. The book notes the high integration of the finance industry, to the point where one failure cascades into others. This shows the social nature of the banking system, which is 'competitive' only to a small degree and is really an oligopoly - and now almost a single entity, a monopoly. This is confirmed when the capitalist state repeatedly rescues, maintains or outright owns major parts of the capitalist banking system, as shown in this book.

Leonard tracks how the Fed, in its role of preventing price inflation, ignored asset inflation and had a tangential record on employment, its other 'responsibility.' It's actual practice pushed money to more risky investments by flooding the big banks with cash. This led to various crises – the Great Inflation of the late 1970s; the vast Volcker interest rate hikes of the early 1980s; the failing bank panic of 1982; the junk bond / S&L crisis of the later 1980s; the tech wreck in the late 1990s; the severe real estate CDO Great Recession of 2008 and years of QE and ZIRP afterwards; a hidden hedge fund meltdown in 2019 over repo basis trades that led to secret billions in bailouts. And lastly the pandemic of March 2020 which affected overly-leveraged and indebted markets across the board and created the quickest bailout in U.S. history. This involved corporate bonds, real estate and commercial real estate loans, commercial paper, collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), stocks, foreign currencies, leveraged loans, repo basis trades and even 'stable' Treasury bonds – just about everything. In 2023 3 of the largest bank failures in history occurred.  This sequence shows the instability, high debt and over-complexity of the capitalist money markets for the last 50 years, but also their insanely privatized profiteering.

A 'dollar' is actually a Federal Reserve Note

In the pandemic case, the Fed had to bring in the U.S. Treasury department led by Goldman alumnus Steve Mnuchin to provide more cash and authority through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) – for a total of $3T in aid, almost a record. As one financier put it, these actions “socialized credit risk.” Congress followed with added trillions in aid through the CARES act and the botched 'Paycheck Protection Plan' for businesses, which mostly went to big corporations and rich individuals, saving the jobs of very few. The Fed's 'populist' “Main Street Lending Program” barely worked either, much like Obama's 2008 homeowner mortgage 'bailout.'  Ultimately the Fed ended up owning $7.4T in rescued assets and had saved mostly the wealthy and the large asset owners. Yeah...

Leonard follows the valuable story of Rexnord, an industrial company in Milwaukee. It was first bought by Powell's Carlyle private equity, then Apollo private equity, who merged and burdened it with debt as a fee-producing cash cow that resulted in the closure of a number of unionized Rexnord factories. Of most importance in this story is how the real source of wealth for the owners and managers was no longer ball bearings, gears, chains and conveyor belts - their real products - or improving quality, productivity, better machinery, technology or worker satisfaction.  The real source were financial machinations, mergers and stock buy-backs. The low profits from production and exploitation led Rexnord to the financial markets, proving one of the contentions of Marxist economics as to the real source of 'financialization' – the falling rate of profit in the productive economy. This pattern is shown in a number of other examples in the book. Cheap Fed money was not being used for hiring or factory improvements or even making loans to small entities but for speculation and monetary maneuvers.

Altogether an exciting narrative about U.S. financial disasters! Leonard ends echoing Marxist Michael Roberts' 'long depression' about a “long crash” after 2008 that is still going on. Most people are unaware of how fragile the financial system is and this book will help illuminate that fact. The conventional, complacent argument is that events are 'circular' and will repeat. There will be no 'qualitative' change, so yesterday's Fed and banking solutions – ZIRP, QE and SPV - will always work going forward, even to the point of a hidden but real state 'socialization.' Has liberal MMT actually been proved by the Fed to always work?! 

 Yet that is not how history actually functions. Ever larger financial debts across the board, increasing monopolization and complexity, higher levels of derivatives, the virtual intertwining of nearly every large financial entity and product, the evisceration of the productive economy, massive privatization and inequality, more zombie corporations, short-term thinking, increasing Federal government involvement, growing moral hazard – what could possibly go wrong? This is not a circular pattern, but a spiral upwards... or down.

P.S. - The collaboration between BlackRock and the Fed, as told by Wall Street on Parade:  https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/03/billionaire-larry-fink-of-blackrock-which-grabbed-fed-bailouts-in-2020-2021-lectures-struggling-seniors-on-making-more-sacrifices/

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Deficit Myth,” “These are the Plunderers” (on private equity - PE); “The Big Short,” “Liar's Poker”(on Salomon Bros); “Flash Boys,” (all 3 by M. Lewis); “The Wolf of Wall Street” (Scorsese); “Den of Thieves” (on Drexel); “Liquidated – An Ethnography of Wall Street” (2 part review); “The Ponzi Factor,” “House of Cards” (on Bear Stearns); “Ponzi Unicorns!” “Antitrust” (Klobuchar); “Debt, Prices & Credit,” “Who is Ron Paul?” “Griftopia” (Taibbi); “Who Gets Bailed Out?” “MMT,” “Mean Girl,” "The Long Depression"(Roberts).  

May Day Books has many Left books on financial topics.

And I got it at the Public Library!

Red Frog / March 14, 2024

In a Garden of Good & Evil

 “A Walk in Savannah”

Savannah, Georgia might be the most beautiful city in the U.S. Its very large downtown historic district is unique in its geometric arrangement of streets and squares along the Savannah River – 22 in all, with one cemetery (not Bonaventure) and one large park, Forsyth. All designed by a leading Methodist, James Oglethorpe. The squares are surrounded by enormous houses in various archaic styles – Greek and Gothic Revival, Federal, Italianate, Georgian and Regency. Massive live oaks hung with Spanish moss dominate nearly every square. All this is based on the port of Savannah, and in the 'old' days that meant slave cotton, slave rice and slaves themselves. This was the seed money for the grand houses, their size, their wide porches, their accouterments, their lifestyle. This is almost invisible now though. When Sherman took the city in 1864 he seized 25,000 bales of cotton as part of his 12/22 'gift' to Lincoln for Christmas. This cotton might have mostly been from a wealthy local, Charles Green. More on him later.

We drank at a choice 'dive' bar, ate at a number of good restaurants which are not hard to find and stayed in an idiotic 'art' inn. We walked 14 squares, zig-zagging our way south from the semi-corporatized riverfront through the parks to Forsyth. The Savannah College of Art and Design – SCAD – dominates the town's culture, which is young and hipster. But other cultures lurk. Yes they do and I'll bet you can guess which one. On my first trip to Savannah maybe 10 years ago I took a Civil War history tour, only to discover the 'tour guide' was a member of the Sons of the Confederacy, supported slavery and thought the Civil War was about 'states rights.' I left that tour but not before asking if we were going to Sherman's headquarters in the city, where Sherman stayed for 6 weeks or so. The answer was no.

This time I wasn't missing Sherman's HQ. It is located just west of Madison Square, facing a church, not the square. It's an incredibly unique house, and that was because it was designed by a New York architect who put in a heated and illuminated roof dome that opened, sliding doors in several clever locations, 3 wall-to-high-ceiling 'bay' windows, two 'romance' bay windows, unique ironwork on the porch and very detailed molding downstairs. It is significant that the house bested nearly every other local structure and was designed by a Yankee. It was owned by a worldly British citizen who favored the South, Charles Green, yet who offered it to Sherman. Green was a wealthy cotton merchant and had his hand in many other slave enterprises – shipping, bricks, railroads, lumber, etc. Why this Confederate would offer the house to Sherman as a guest is questionable, but I'd say he could see which way the wind was blowing. Unlike the Lost Causers, which later included his 'literary' Parisian grandson.

The Green House and its Corner Front-room

Special Field Orders #15

I stood in Sherman's bedroom where a distant relative of his actually prepared for her wedding much later. I stood in the large front room where 20 African American preachers and lay people, along with Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton, hashed out Special Field Orders #15 on January 16, 1865. This is one of the most famous orders in the war against slavery, for it is the source of the goal of '40 acres and a mule.' Sherman, not really a friend of African Americans, wanted the freed people to stop following his armies as they hindered his mobility and he could not supply or protect them. This Order, based on Emancipation, gave 18-40,000 African American freedmen 40 acres to farm in the land between modern Jacksonville, Florida and Hilton Head, South Carolina. Since the Union Army was loaded down with requisitioned horses and mules, some mules also went to these ex-slaves. The area has many islands, and the depth of the strip was between 30 and 50 miles inland, about 400,000 acres, so a huge piece of land. He assigned abolitionist general Saxton to organize the program. One of the first things Copperhead President Andrew Johnson did after Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer was to return most of this land to the white owners, though Saxton and the Freedman's Bureau protected some.

This story was partly told to us in the historic front room by an elderly female 'docent' connected to St. John's Episcopal Church, which owns and uses the house. In that room were no pictures of Sherman, Stanton or the 20 African-Americans, just pictures of Jeff Davis, Jeb Stewart, Lee and Stonewall – the moldy, motley crew. There was a newspaper story on the table detailing the event, that was it. The docent said she was 'just beginning' to read about the Civil War. Good for you! This is like giving a tour of the surrender room in the McLean home in Appomattox, and barely knowing what the fuck happened there. In the room with us were two older Georgians who thought Sherman was going to burn Savannah, because, you know, that's all he did. The male was carrying a beginner book on the Civil War. Upstairs the tour was taken over by a former northerner and present civil war buff. He said that Green's slaves used to pump water up to the second story for baths among all their other tasks, like hauling Green's portmanteau across Europe. He made clear that Green was a Confederate ally and in private pointed out that some tour guides do not mention Sherman, as the Church controls who guides tours. This is actually similar to the museum book store in Monroeville, Alabama that hid copies of Harper Lee's second book, “Go Set a Watchman,” under the counter. That book was very clear on Atticus Finch's actual racism. Monroeville was her hometown and the setting for “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Green-Meldrin House now, with Macon St. blocked off

Now if you've noticed the presence of Yankees in this southern city, read on. At the high-end cocktail bar masquerading as a dive bar, an excellent and creative bar-tender – formerly from New York - presided. On our first visit the talkative lead tile mason was from New York too, while on the other side sat an artist originally from Michigan. The next time there we met a design director for Michael Kors in New York, as he was moving to Savannah. The bar was owned by a former Minnesotan. The design director said one of the benefits of moving was to turn Georgia 'blue.' This is similar to the young dark-skinned folks who are moving back to the South, and proletarian Latinos, Asians and others coming to the South. Visits to Atlanta and Athens, Georgia also testify to the increasing presence of non-Southern-born folks in Southern cities. The massive growth of factory and warehouse facilities across the South is having the effect of proletarianizing southern workers too. At some point this will wise them up to the elite, sometimes southern bosses who've pretended to be their 'friends' for years. African-Americans already know this, but now it's other southern workers' turn.

The bar became one of the headquarters on March 8^th for “Slitherin” - a neighborhood street celebration and parade 'of and for snakes' that took place at night with luminous costuming. In effect artists and locals are sick of the drunken orgy of green beer called St. Patrick's Day downtown, full of dumb-ass leprechauns, four leaf clovers and Forsyth Park green fountain water. They decided to do something about it. St. Patrick hated snakes? Well, then they would celebrate them. Savannah has too many churches, perhaps one on every square. This includes the massive Catholic Cathedral of St. John across Layfayette Square from crazy Catholic Southern Gothic writer Flannery O'Connor's childhood home. Some of the locals seem to be full-sick of the Catholic nonsense that sometimes swallows their town, including St. Patrick. Soooo … Slitherin'!

The ruin of Atlanta's military usefulness, the punishing March to the Sea, the occupation of Savannah's valuable port and the march north to corner Lee were final acts in the defeat of the slavocracy. Thankfully the memorials in the beautiful squares of Savannah relate to the U.S. Revolution or the somewhat less brutal settling of the city by Europeans, not to the Southern Confederacy. In Franklin Square is a memorial to black Haitian soldiers who came to fight the English during the Revolution. Others memorialize Casimir Pulaski, Polish general who died fighting the British at Savannah, and another to Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Green. Another contains the body of Chief Tomo Chi Chi of the Yamacraw, who negotiated with Oglethorpe over Savannah's land and is actually buried under the monument at his request.

While Savannah is famous for Forrest Gump, The Garden of Good & Evil and made-up ghosts, I'd say the real ghost is a dead political idea still hiding under the covers in select parts of the city, trying to 'manifest' at any moment.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Civil War,” “slavery,” “Cranky Yankee,” “Sherman.”

You can find a number of books on southern politics at May Day Books.

The Cranky Yankee

March 11, 2024