Prescient?

 “Civil War”a film by Alex Garland, 2024

This film gave the impression it would be a sensationalist, cheesy, apolitical version of the real thing. It actually has, in its own way, a broader message. The most obvious apolitical point is that the 'Western Forces” of California and Texas that confront the government in D.C. is a quite unlikely combination in reality, nor would a real civil war necessarily be a 'war between the states' or four regions. We can't even tell why this war started or what it is about.  In the film the U.S. is run by a somewhat familiar, bombastic and authoritarian President of the United States who is on his third term, so there's that.

The central figures are war photographers and war reporters. As the famous and experienced journalist played by Kristen Dunst says, “I always thought my pictures would warn people of the terrible consequences of war.” But evidently not, as the U.S. is now embroiled in one on its own soil. The film starts with pushing and clubbing between cops and demonstrators in Brooklyn, New York, reminding us of present images of anti-war Gaza protests or BLM confrontations. But then someone straps on a suicide back-pack. At this riot Dunst helps a somewhat stupid young woman who wants to be a war photographer too. The kid becomes a central part of the story and at the end we see her as the vile careerist and adrenaline junkie she always was.

This group of journalists decide to visit the front lines in Charlottesville, Virginia, which is not an accident as far as locations go. It was the site of a deadly fascist and Neo-Confederate protest in 2017. Dunst and her obnoxious press reporter companion, who has stupidly brought the girl with them to 'learn the ropes,' plan to go on to Washington D.C. to interview the President. The President has not talked to the press in many months. In the long, circular journey in their white press van they come across military roadblocks, freeways full of blown up and abandoned cars, locals guarding gas stations who take Canadian money (dollars are evidently worthless); tortured people and executed prisoners, ruined military gear next to a Pennys and a refugee encampment in an old stadium run by a humanitarian group. They get intimately involved in a fire-fight and a sniper confrontation, and have only kevlar, helmets, press passes and cameras.

They visit a pretty, small town where the war seems not to be happening and go into a clothing store. The clerk tells them the town has decided to stay neutral. This is similar to the parents of both Dunst and the young woman, who live in Colorado and Missouri respectively. They are also pretending the war is not happening, as 'apolitical' people do, thinking their lives are not affected when they are. Yet the group spies local snipers on the roof of a nearby building.

The most significant event is coming upon a large dugout full of bodies. This latter is the most powerful scene in the film. Three Government soldiers are dumping dead civilians into a pit. They have grabbed the young woman and another correspondent after she made the truly stupid decision to get into a moving car from another moving car. The journalists are clearly looking at a war crime, with more about to happen.

The lead soldier, wearing red sunglasses, asks all of them 'where are you from?' When they don't give the right patriotic answer (not 'Hong Kong') they get a bullet in the head. He kills those who are not 'real Americans' including another Asian. The reporter stupidly mentions they are journalists from Reuters, which is an international press syndicate. It can only 'go South' from there. This deadly nationalism might remind you of the ideology of certain fascist and ultra-right groups in the U.S. I won't say what happens next.

Finally they reach a military encampment of the Western Forces near Charlottesville and find out from embedded journalists that the Government front lines have collapsed and the way to D.C. is open. Now while I've never been a war photographer, this film repeatedly shows them clicking pictures among squads of soldiers in full combat, as if Frank Capra's shot in the Spanish Civil War was being recreated endlessly. Most soldiers would tell these people to get the fuck out of the way – as they truly are in the way. They are like a trip wire. It's perhaps a riff on the selfie culture of modern cell phones and media, where everyone wants to be famous for 15 minutes and also an unlikely plot device. War journalists hang back as much as they can... though, like Gaza, Ukraine or Mexico, they are easily shot.  Nor are they quite the grisly voyeurs this film makes out.  In this apocalyptic situation, cell phones and much tech is not functioning, along with constant power blackouts, so the only fame will be a news photo made by an old-fashioned Leica. A photo that makes a career, just as Dunst made her career at some 'Antifa' massacre long ago.

The climactic scene takes place around the White House in D.C., which is surrounded by high concrete walls. The Front has orders to execute the President. Dunst, who by this time is shell-shocked after seeing the death of one of her elderly journalist friends, is not even taking pictures, while the young woman is frantically snapping away, taking constant risks. Dunst then realizes there is a diversion and starts into the White House, followed by a squad of WF soldiers. What follows is the what might be called 'the young taking over from the old' in the worst way possible. To careerists the old and experienced are expendable evidently.

The film is littered with hints as to actual U.S. politics, but it mostly serves as a warning about the reality of civil warfare.  Certainly the director has no idea what is actually going on.  We are heading into an election where physical threats are common and actual violence is very likely. It is a situation where police are storming onto campuses and where the Christian nationalist Speaker of the House has called for the National Guard to be sent too. Heavily armed right-wing militias and lone nuts populate the country. Gun-crazy Republicans flaunt their weapons while the U.S. wages several wars overseas. Civil war is the wet-dream of the neo-Confederate reactionaries. Retrograde state legislatures, a corrupt Supreme Court, a heavily anti-democratic electoral system, an archaic Constitution, a barely functioning Congress – what part of this is optimistic? The film, like Dunst's war photos, serves as a warning.

Be Prepared!  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx-Engels); “American War,” “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” The Untertow” (Sharlet); “Southern Cultural Nationalism and Southern Liberals,” “Hunger Games,” or the phrase “Civil War” or words “Trump” or 'fascism.'

Kultur Kommissar

April 28, 2024

College Library Browsing #15: Not So New

 “Marx in Motion – A New Materialist Marxism” by Thomas Nail, 2020

This is an academic Marxist attempting some kind of updated development of Marxism. Lots of these innovations falter, so let's see if Nail hits it on the head and finds something further. There is much repetition in the book, much that has already been explained by other Marxists, it's highly abstract and includes a good amount of seemingly random points, so its not an easy book to read by any stretch.  But he does make some good points.

Nail describes 3 long-standing attacks on Marxism by anti-communists – that it is: 1) economically reductionist; 2) historically determinist; 3) Anti-environmental. All three are mostly based on crude ideologies promoted by reformist Soviet Communists so there's some smoke here. Yet many Marxists, including ones he cites, have answered these objections. His innovation is something he calls a 'materio-kinetic dialectics' - the study of motion and process in Marx, based on Marx's early doctoral thesis and notebooks on Epicurus. He thinks this will help Marxism address these attacks and errors. Nail claims Marx did not agree with Engels' dialectics of nature, but only addresses it in one slight paragraph so that is not convincing.

Nail thinks Marx saw various levels of motion as the basic character of matter and also social / economic forms. Under capital movement, change, disruption and speed have vastly increased and spread in society. In his earliest work looking at Lucretius, Epicurus and Democritus, Marx rejected mechanical / determinist materialism; external God-like 'causes'; and matter as discrete particles or atoms. In this he argues against Aristotle and Democritus. He saw matter as an interactive and constant 'flow' of a 'three-fold' movement, not an isolated thing. It is not a metaphysics but it might remind some of quantum mechanics. This unitary perspective was carried over into Marx's later works, reflecting the constant interaction of humans, nature and society in a specific time-based, historical context.

Nail applies this 'kinetic materialism' to the first chapter of Capital, Vol 1. He shows that Marx based his analysis on sensuous experience of the world, not ideas. Marx compares the commodity in Capital to that of an atom – real to a point, but actually part of a long process and movement, and he sets out to explain its actual place. What follows is a normal but overly academic description of Capital, including Nail's constant use of words like kinetic, pedetic, folds, fluxions, swerve and simplex. Marx is actually more graphic and descriptive than Nail. Nail emphasizes that the roots of capitalist value reside in the history of colonialism, slavery, migration, women's reproduction and primitive accumulation and that nature is an essential part of value.

Nail discusses the metabolism of nature; the metabolism of man within nature; and the subsequent social metabolism. He says the terms metabolic 'rift' or 'shift' are descriptions of the tear or alienation in these metabolic relationships, especially those induced by capital. As to the former, he quotes a writer that there is “a tendency for the ecological surplus to fall” as related to the so-called 'free' gifts of nature – minerals, oil, soil quality, water, air, animals, etc. This is an accurate riff off the 'tendency of the falling rate of profit' in Marxism. In Capital Marx discusses what Nail calls “the patriarchy of the wage” as women's discounted labor is appropriated. Birthing babies is likened to birthing use-values – it's the original human (re)production. To do this Nail analyzes Shakespeare's Henry IV's Falstaff and Dame Quickly, which Marx uses to comment on women's 'devalorization.' (Academese for devaluation.) In a way the home is another site of 'primitive accumulation.'

Diamonds are a girl's best friend?

Marx defined value has having 4 types of exchange: simple, expanded, general and lastly money. They are all processes of constant interconnection and response, of matter in motion, revealing their origin – creative labor power and labor time. He includes a chart of these exchanges and goes into a highly abstract discussion about them. He makes one point that “Consciousness and agency are not unique to humans but occur in all sensuous matter.” Certainly, of a sort, and up to a point. For instance recent research on the 'wood-wide web of trees' shows there is scant evidence to support the idea of fungi transmission. Nail discusses how gold became the money-form because it had already been a commodity – it was 'the germ' of money. Nail maintains that this led to the 'fetishization of the commodity' as a process of 'domination.' Evidently that domination is a work of social magic, though money has real empirical power under capital.

Marx mentions the Taiping rebellion, which was dominated by Christian deism but “abolished private property, communalized land, banned foot-binding, declared a classless society and the equality of the sexes and criminalized opium, gambling, tobacco, alcohol and polygamy” according to Nail. Marx equates fetishization with religion as forms of magical thinking, a fog hiding both gods and commodities, and the ultimate fetish of money. Nail discusses Robinson Crusoe, who was pictured by Smith and Ricardo as operating an ahistorical, priced commodity economy on his island, an idea Marx ridiculed – capital in the egg without history. This was their myth ignoring primitive accumulation and colonialism. There is even a slave whom Robinson names Friday but this is supposed to be normal. Marx thought this image was really a cock-eyed reflection of original primitive hunter/gatherer societies.

Lastly Nail turns to the nature of 'kinetic communism' – his concept. Marx looks at feudal, peasant and communist 'forms of motion.' Feudal relationships were dominated by God, the church and a proscribed nature, but it was clear what was owed by the serfs to each. English peasant society was based on subsistence agriculture that produced its own use-values, organized by patriarchy and simple production techniques. The 'communist form of motion' is an association of free people, working with advanced means of production held in common, expending labor power as one labor force. It has no class system, no domination, no state, no commodities, no alienation or rips in metabolism, yet still measures labor time according to Nail and Marx. Nail maintains that idealism, nature worship and folk religion are abandoned under kinetic communism.

Nail addresses the issue of the 'base and superstructure' in Marxist discussions through his 'motion' lens. These are not static parts of a building or ship. “An economy is a form or pattern of motion.” Nail is an expert in German, so his translations show that Marx understood this 'structure' to actually be an interactive and unitary social form, in flux, not of an active base that plays a role as direct causation in a passive superstructure. Once this is understood, then “reductionist, determinist and anthropocentric” crude communism will be overcome according to him.

He hides his most startling claims for last. Nail says that “Marx did not hold a labor theory of value” because theft and appropriation were prior to the exploitation of surplus value. I assume this does not negate the continuing exploitation of labor that has been going on since the development of capital. Nail believes that dialectical materialism was “invented” by Engels and the Soviets. As said previously, he makes this statement without backup. Because someone crams dialectics and materialism into one phrase does not negate the actual processes of dialectics and materialism. It might just be understood as a form of short-hand. His justified focus on women, animals, the earth and the colonized seems to leave out the working-class ... a phrase not found in the book or index at all. Abstract labor is present, workers are not. Nail hopes this book contributes to feminist, ecological and post-colonial Marxism through its focus on Marx's original philosophic work.  He is part of a current that seems to be avoiding the actual labor movement.

His best paragraph illustrates how every single commodity is linked forward and backward to a long chain of events, labor, time, natural sources, social systems and people in an endless web of actions and reactions, kind of a Marxist version of Gaia. I'm not sure this is a 'new' Marxism – it seems to be plowing a deeper furrow in ground already trod.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using this term: “Marx,” "matter in motion."

May Day Books carries many books on Marxism.

I got this at the UGA Library!

Red Frog / April 25, 2024

Labor Culture

 “Working Man,”film by Robert Jury, 2020

It's the standard 'rust belt' town in the north – named 'Orridge' but really Norridge, Illinois – a place that stands in for many other cities decimated by plant closings. Allery is an older, stocky, light-skinned worker who doesn't talk much, eats his lunch alone and works diligently. It's the last day at a plastics factory, (a real closed plant in Norridge, IL) as the owners have an unknown plan in mind and are laying everyone off. Yet they've left parts and raw materials all over the place.

Allery has other plans. The younger folks get their last paychecks at 1:00 P.M. and are paid all day. He continues to work until the old closing time, 4:30 PM. The plant manager hands him his last paycheck. Allery has a long-suffering wife, Iola, he barely talks to. He's obviously depressed, as they lost their older son to suicide. The next day he watches telly and finds nothing on. He seems to have no interests. He goes to the unemployment office and his fellow workers mention its a 2 hour wait for part-time jobs, so he turns around. He takes a walk every night down towards the river and bridges, and you'd swear he's going to jump in.

That's the setup, but what comes next was already hinted at. As a Marxist would say, a factory is not 'private property' but is really owned by the labor of those who spent years there. Like 'common law' marriage or an uncontested boundary line or road, habit and occupation become ownership. The next day Allery is seen trundling down the street towards the plant in his work clothes, his lunchbox and Stanley thermos. His former compadres look at him from their front porches and wonder 'WTF?' He jimmies open an old back door, gets into the plant, starts his machine but there is no power. He instead gets out cleaning supplies and begins to clean the whole place. He takes his break with a powdered donut and for lunch a vile liverwurst sandwich on Wonder Bread. (This is an old-fashioned guy.) The co-workers on the porches watch him walk home and are astonished once more. This goes on for several days until the foreman shows up with the police and tells him to leave.

Plastics factories are toxic places to work, but no one here seemed to wear breathing protection, just a few fans. There seems to be no union. There are no guards at the plant or preparation for something else. Nor does the movie mention that he could apply for unemployment insurance. That is not this story.

Republic Windows and Doors UE Occupation

Finally a newer worker, a tall dark-skinned brother named Walter, talks to Allery about how he has a door key the company forgot. He goes with Allery to the plant, they get in another door and Allery starts cleaning again. Walter calls the power company and gets the electricity turned on. They begin making parts in their plastic stamping / extrusion machines. Eventually other former workers are curious and show up. It starts as an ebony and ivory 'buddy' picture but becomes an occupation of the closed factory. They intend to stay inside the plant for at least a week to produce on suspended orders.  They invite family too. This is probably based on a real factory occupation in Chicago at Republic Windows and Doors in 2008, led mostly be Latino workers.

The plan, which is Walter's, is to fulfill the orders left undone and put pressure on the company to keep the building open and save the remaining jobs. The factory had 500 workers originally, and is now down to around 50. The company hears about the occupation on the news and is afraid to call the police – at first. The wife, Iola, is suspicious of Walter, him having a beard and being non-white, and refuses to join her husband and the neighbors in the plant.

What happens? The best scenes are in the plant, as this is a real work place, not a set. Anyone whose spent time in one will be at home. Unfortunately Walter has a volcanic temper and a drinking problem, even though he's been portrayed as the brains of the bunch. After being threatened with arrest, and with the power shut off again, most of the workers still agree to stick it out, including Alery. However no outside labor movement shows up for them and only one lonely reporter. The screen-writer / director tanks the film from here, basing everything on a major lie told by Walter, who is still correct as it turns out. The film shows the most radical worker to be manipulative and maybe crazy. They win a larger severance and a production bonus and abandon the plant nevertheless.

It ends as a tear-jerker buddy picture, a renewed marriage and a liberated Alery and Iola – ultimately a personal story. This film is a product of the wreckage of industrial production by technology, off-shoring, maquiladoras and sending work to the U.S. South. No one thinks of forming an ESOP / employee ownership to buy the plant, though they probably couldn't given the small number of workers left. Nor is a plan for the factory, its materials or machines, ever clear or mentioned. It just sits there, which is not realistic.  Nevertheless, the basic premise is all too real.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Striking to Survive,” “Factory Days” (Gibbs); “Polar Star” (Cruz); “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Autopsy of an Engine,” “Night Shift,” “China On Strike,” “Jasic Factory Struggle,” “The Unseen” (Belestrini); “Red Baker,” “On the Line.”

Tot Kultur Kommissar

April 22, 2024

The Real Plot

 “Who Killed Kirov – The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery” by Amy Knight, 1999

Forget all those random detective series. Like the assassinations of Olaf Palme, Dag Hammarskjold, Malcolm X, MLK, Paul Wellstone, Huey Long and the Kennedy's, political assassinations actually mean something on a broader scale. The killing of Sergei Kirov in December 1934 is such an event, as it led to the liquidation of the leading elements of the Bolshevik Party. Associates of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and the “Leningrad Center” were first accused of the assassination, after which they lost their position in the Party, and later their heads. It led to the 1930's purge trials, executions and imprisonment of ten's of thousands of top 'Old Bolshevik' cadre, to be replaced by hand-picked supporters of the new Party leadership.

I've been to Kirov's fourth floor apartment museum in the Petrograd District of St. Petersburg tended by some old ladies. It contained his vast collection of books, his hunting gear and guns, his expansive work / dining table and a picture of him, Stalin and Kirov's good friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze on one high wall. Knight used Russian archives that were first made available after 1991. These help reveal who is the most likely candidate for murderer. Knight is no leftist, but she is a reporter and researcher. This is her analysis.

There are several theories on the December 1, 1934 assassination. #1) Disgruntled, unemployed individual, Leonid Nikolaev. #2) A dastardly plot by the Zinovievites, Kamenev and later Bukharin. This was the Party line at the time. #3) An NKVD assassination orchestrated by Stalin. In 1988 the Soviet Union legally rejected the Zinoviev plot thesis though the murder had been in review since 1955. Re #1, even if it was true, it did not justify the subsequent bloodletting and destruction of the actual Bolshevik Party, turning it into a bureaucratic hierarchy.  Later Soviet commissions zig-zagged over Stalin's responsibility depending on who was in power, with one in 1960 saying Stalin was behind the murder. Knight examines the possible logic behind #3.

Caught in a Vice

Kirov was a self-educated intellectual, tireless worker, a popular speaker and personality. He was assigned to police Leningrad by Stalin against the supporters of Nicolai Bukharin, who wanted to continue the NEP. Bukharin opposed Stalin's plans for forced collectivization, grain requisitions, deportations and breaking the 'scissors' with the peasants, as a 'war on the kulaks' was becoming a war on the peasantry. Kirov himself sympathized with Bukharin's position and went 'easy' on his Leningrad comrades in 1929, which put him in disfavor in Moscow. The Leningrad District lagged far behind other areas in collectivization because Kirov refused to use force. He held to this idea through 1934.

However Kirov was also a sometimes Stalinist. He initiated the decimation of the Leningrad Academy of Sciences, which later led to prison sentences and executions – though he might not have expected that. After being assigned to the Politburo he denounced the Bukarinites as 'capitalist restorationists' but still stayed on friendly terms with them. The brutal construction of the Baltic-White Sea Canal with prison labor was also carried out under his watch, though one journalist reported that Kirov was against its use of forced labor. The secret police OPGU was in direct command. In another instance he publicly maintained theft from kolkhozs or cooperative stores should be punished by death, then criticized local police for putting 'half of Russia in jail.' Similarly, while supporting expelling Martem'ium Riutin from the Party in 1932 for his group's Left criticisms of Stalin, in the Politburo he publicly opposed executing him. That, however, was Stalin's proposal. Kirov began to suffer from various physical complaints – heart, fatigue, nerves, etc. due to the conflicted situation in the Party, country and no doubt himself.

So Kirov was someone who 'wobbled' on the issue of brutality. Stalin's method of showing 'comradeship' towards people like Bukharin in 1935 only hid his future plans. This might also have been true of Kirov after he publicly opposed him in the Politburo. Kirov himself heard a tirade by Stalin at a dinner in 1926, where Stalin maintained that what Russia's people wanted was a new 'Tsar,' so he was not clueless about Stalin's goals. Kirov was not the only Party leader who was ambivalent about the 'great leader.'

Many old Bolsheviks wanted Stalin gone, especially at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934. Kirov was their suggested replacement at a private meeting and Stalin found out about it. At the 1934 Seventeenth Congress you will be surprised to learn that actual votes were taken by delegates for members in the Central Committee. Current U.S. 'Marxist-Leninist' groups won't even vote on who will be their coffee mule. However in this case some votes were not counted, negative votes against Stalin disappeared and still Kirov was within one vote of Stalin. At that same Congress Kirov warned about the threat of fascism in Germany and Japan and advocated preparing for invasions. Stalin was mulling a bloc with Hitler, but later endorsed an anti-fascist 'popular' front. So there were many 'rubs' in Stalin's relations with Kirov.

Kirov was actually shot from behind

Questions

In late 1934 Kirov had 9 NKVD bodyguards. On December 1, the day he was killed, all but one guard were downstairs from his third floor office in the Smolny. The last bodyguard, M.D. Borisov, was down the hall when Kirov was supposedly shot by Nikolaev. As Knight notes, facts from official reports and witnesses contrasted and some 'official facts' were inaccurate. There were other people in the hallway and offices, yet the NKVD did not interview witnesses or secure the area. One key person disappeared. Stalin, between the short period of time of hearing of the murder and boarding a train for Leningrad, had time to draft a new penal code procedure. It was: 10 day investigation; charges conveyed to defendant 24 hours before trial; case heard without defendant or his counsel; no clemency appeals allowed; death sentence carried out immediately. So it was a form of summary justice. A convenient ruling. He immediately told witnesses that a 'Zinovievite' was the killer. This murder led to almost 2 million executed or sent to labor camps in the Great Purges.

Leningrad NKVD officers, especially those guarding Kirov, were lightly punished for negligence, including prior times they questioned Nikolaev without searching him - though he had a gun on him. Oddly the 2 bullets and cartridges were not compared to Nicolaev's Nagant revolver. Somehow Nikolaev got past the third floor guard station, which would have required a party card and an employee pass, neither of which he had at the time. Prior to this Kirov had an office right next to the guard desk but his office was moved way down the hall and around a corner. Nor was it known by anyone except the NKVD that Kirov would be in the building that day, which was not a regular work day. Nicolaev was immediately taken by the NKVD after the murder, as he was still alive. He was repeatedly hysterical, then mute, a 5-foot bag of bones dressed in shabby clothing according to witnesses. Yet a possibly fabricated written 'plot' plan was found on him by the NKVD. Not one witness actually saw the death shot, or said they did.

The next day Borisov, held by the NKVD along with the other guards, was told he was going to be interviewed by Stalin and 30 minutes later was returned dead to the NKVD medical unit. The stories vary - some said he was thrown from the van; a doctor said he had two contusions on his skull; another that the driver purposely slammed into a wall; another that it was 'just an accident' even though the guard in the back of the van was not hurt.

The 'Plot' Sickens

From there, people associated with Nikolaev were arrested as part of a terrorist cell called the 'Leningrad Center,' especially if they were Zinovievites or had prior contact with Trotskyists. Nikolaev had been a Party member and had worked in the Peasant's Inspectorate but was thrown out and lost his job. The NKVD used forced confessions with fabrications or torture to patch together a plot. After Stalin's arrival, their plot line changed from 'lone nut' to conspiracy triggerman. An hour after sentencing 14 defendants were shot. Family members were either executed later or sent to labor camps.

Zinoviev prison photo

The dragnet spread to a 'terrorist' “Moscow Center” as Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested and tried in 1935.  At first there was no evidence, but the NKVD got someone to rat, fabricated confessions and suddenly there was a 'case.' The group was accused of “political and moral responsibility for the murder of Kirov.” If this seems laughable, it's not. Stalin considered the group 'White Guards' but only had them jailed for 5-10 years at this point. He then wrote that all left oppositionists had to be put behind bars. The terror had begun.

One Leningrad NKVD officer, Medved, after talking with Stalin, told his brother-in-law that Stalin knew 'Yagoda and Zaporozhets' were behind the killing – both top NKVD officers. The NKVD officers initially 'punished' by prison in Kolyma had it easy – good positions, quarters and were able to bring family - as if their sentencing was for show. Ultimately Knight concludes that what happened in that corridor that day is suspect on many levels – another shooter, the NKVD using Nicolaev and getting him in the corridor, the delay of his guard Borisov, the shabby investigation, missing evidence, dead witnesses. She contends: “The crucial issue is whether Stalin had a reason for ordering the murder of Kirov.” The answer to that question is obvious because of their many political differences – yes.

Already in late December, 1934 books started appearing lionizing Kirov as a secular saint, serving Stalin's purpose in the purges. Ordzhonikidze, Kirov's good friend, was most shattered by the killing and aftermath. Any opposition to Stalin's opinion was now punishable by death or gulag. He could not help friends caught up in the dragnet. One of his best Party friends committed suicide over the oppression. He followed in 1937 after many disagreements with Stalin's method of executing so-called industrial 'wreckers' and shot himself. 

Kirov's wife received condolences from Bukharin. Bukharin followed many others' fates in 1938 by being executed after a fake trial. The rest of the book discusses the reaction of the workers in Leningrad, their disbelief in the official story, and Stalin's war on Leningrad as a nest of subversives, arresting or exiling 90,000 people. Many of Kirov's Leningrad Party allies were demoted, then denounced as enemies. Knight reports that later Bukharin realized Stalin was behind the murder, retailed in conversations in Paris with an exiled friend.  When his name was associated with the 'plotters' and Trotsky as the 'master-string puller,' he knew where things were headed.  Stalinist NKVD Chief Yagoda was also executed along with Bukharin, Rykov and others for being part of a "Zinovievite-Trotskyite" terrorist group.

A true and riveting tale only sketched here. If all these facts remind you of other political assassinations, congratulations. A patsy, bad police work, missing facts, a government's suspicious narrative, a captive press, witness killings, a moved office, corrupt cops, a useful outcome – its all there.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Wellstone, Huey Long, Olaf Palme or “Petrograd District – Monday,” “Radek,” “Fear” (Rybakov); “Beethoven and Shostakovich” (Woods); “Lenin's Last Struggle” (Lewin); “The Struggle for Power” (Vilkova); “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” (Cohen); “Dear Comrades,” “The Ghost of Stalin” (Sartre); “Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth?” “Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? (Zizek); “October” (Mieville).

May Day Books as many volumes on the USSR.

And I got it at the Public Library!

Red Frog / April 19, 2024

Let Them Eat Cake!

 “Price Wars – How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World” by Rupert Russell, 2022

This is Russell's version of chaos theory – that beneath seemingly disconnected events is a pattern. He links the Arab Spring, mass migrations, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, Venezuela and terror groups to the 'butterfly' effect of raw commodity prices. It's both a materialist theory and against post-modern ideas of confusing chaos. Feedback loops amplify small incidents, setting off a bigger, 'criticality' chain reaction, a 'phase' transition, a boiling point, a 'breaking of the camel's back.' In this case, commodity markets created human storms, much as added grains of sand create a landslide. Or in dialectics when quantity turns into quality. Let's see where he goes with this theory.

Arab Spring

In 2008 meteoric food price rises created riots in 48 countries on every continent. In 2010 the same thing happened. In Tunisia in 2010 what people wanted from the revolution against the corrupt Ben Ali government was a stable economy and affordable food, clothing and shelter. Afterwards they got nothing.  The Tunisian revolt spilled over into Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Syria and Kuwait, first about wheat and bread prices. The food price rises triggered all the other issues of dictatorial bourgeois governments in these countries. Price was the most important 'grain of sand.'

Bread and wheat are the main ingredients of diets in the Middle East. Prices are mostly set by commodity exchanges in Chicago, New York and London. If there is no social / state control of prices, then any increase goes straight into the market price. The IMF had fought state price controls in the 1970s, killing or limiting them in exchange for loans. In 2010-2011 regimes with oil wealth survived - except for Libya due to NATO's violent intervention. As he notes, there was no connection between supply and demand at this time as there was plenty of grain. In the 2008 financial crisis a broad range of commodity prices shot up in various countries too, among them wheat, cotton, coffee, oil, nickel and natural gas. Why?

Commodity Exchanges

Russell found out that firms poured money into commodity index funds on futures that pushed up prices across 20 different sectors, no matter their real world price. Other commodity trading tactics - price 'trend following' and price 'contrarians' who short – were supposed to cancel each other out. They don't, leading to price booms and busts or worse. He details the familiar stories of Greenspan's libertarian '90s advocacy of getting rid of Glass-Steagall and instituting the Commodity Futures Modernization Act during the Clinton years – which succeeded. The former exposes the whole banking system to speculation; the latter deregulated derivatives and increased betting on commodity futures and prices. The collapse of Hayek/Friedman's Efficient Market Hypothesis in 2008, which postulated 'perfect information,' also died when the mortgage, CDO and credit default swap markets collapsed. Instability in prices is 'priced in' for all commodities due to they're being dominated by capitalist financial markets.

Daesh, Brexit, Trump, Green Gold

Russell surveys the rubble and ruins of Mosul, Iraq after Daesh (ISIS) was driven out of the city. Daesh was funded by its capture of the small Syrian oil fields and recruited out of the food riots. To Russell, those food price hikes led to this civil war, leading to further 2014 spikes in the oil price - a perfect feedback loop. Traders told him that speculators had piled into the oil market at that moment, though Daesh had no real control of significant oil fields. It was not an issue of 'supply and demand' but of price betting by trend followers. Russell goes into how stories, social games, cult behavior and algorithms drive bubbles and market prices, not rational evaluation of perfect information. DJT - Truth Social stock - is just the worst example.  This nonsense holds the world hostage.

Russell looks at 2016's Brexit vote and notes that the 'Leave' vote was centered in specific working class and middle-class areas where house prices were rising higher than incomes, or where prices were falling. The petro-dollars from speculation over the wars in the Middle-East boomeranged into higher property prices in London and across the country, leaving some areas depressed. Government austerity also contributed. As he puts it, house prices are like a thermometer for economic health in an advanced bourgeois society, even for renters and HOA residents. It is a key part of the bourgeois 'social contract.' A similar situation was noted prior to the 2016 election in the U.S. for house prices in the U.S. Finance capital speculators were buying up homes across the nation, raising prices in some areas and making prices in other areas tank. According to the chart, those with the worst price situations voted Trump. Another kind of land grab was going on across the world, as 'green gold' – agricultural and mineral land and infrastructure - became targets of finance, sovereign wealth funds and the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, also driving up local prices.

Resource Curses

Russell finds himself traveling in the Donetsk 'People's' Republic after 2014. He is driven through the bombed-out ruins of Donetsk City, almost as bad as Mosul. He thinks the 1989 fall of the USSR was due to weak Soviet grain harvests, falling oil/gas prices and heavy loan debts to western banks and the IMF, all of which undermined Gorbachev's state. He suggests that the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Putin was spurred by the discovery of a vast trillion-cubic meter gas reserve in the Black Sea off of Crimea and southern Ukraine – on Ukraine's side of the sea border. He does not mention the existence of valuable wheat and coal land in eastern Ukraine. Among other things this gas field would give Ukraine energy independence from Russian gas. He notes that oil speculation has floated the Russian economy for years. Russell cites charts that show a parallel between rising gas prices and the increasing odds a petro-state will resort to some kind of military action. Boom!

Russell visits Venezuela and depicts the dire poverty he sees as oil prices crashed in 2014 – the other side of the resource curse. He acknowledges that the 2017 sanctions embargo on Venezuela by the U.S., which sequestered millions in government' funds and everything else, was a final nail in its cross of poverty. Venezuela never escaped a major reliance on oil even though Chavez had wanted to end it. He claims that much of the early oil money went to shoring up support among the middle-classes, not the workers and peasants, but there are figures that show the opposite. 400,000 deaths, mass poverty and 5 million people migrating is the result of this oil price drop and sanctions.

Kibera, Nairobi

Climate Shocks

Russell visits a tribe in Kenya defending their shrinking cattle-land from another tribe with AK-47s. He visits Nairobi which contains the biggest shanty-town in Africa, Kibera, full of climate migrants where a small price rise in corn flour creates huge problems. He shows a graph that tracks conflict to periods of too much water (flooding) or too little (drought). Russell rejects a neo-Malthusian approach, as a lack of food, housing or clothing is not the problem – in fact there are massive amounts available. The real issue is the market 'price' problem and the 'wage' price problem, the latter which he mentions only tangentially. He does not understand that labor power is 'priced' and a commodity too.  Nor does he look at how commodity markets run small U.S. farmers out of business.

Russell interviews a major institute that forecasts harvests of many different foods through satellite data and AI. They tell him that, oddly, what buyers, brokerages, commodity traders and finance firms want is what the government report will say about harvests, not about the actual harvest. This is because government reports move markets, not facts on the ground. 75-80% of commodity futures trading is now done with computer program algorithms, while real producers are dropping out, so the market is now data vs. data. The other price he talks about are those of external costs to the environment, which are never included in capitalist market calculations.

Russell speculates that heavy climate shocks will be able to sink the whole world financial system, making Mad Max a reality. In his visit to Mogadishu he finds out that warlords and groups like Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and others attract poverty stricken locals with food, housing and a small 'wage.' Al-Shabaab uses food as a weapon by ambushing relief convoys, taxing travelers and confiscating cows. They also make money smuggling charcoal and sugar into Kenya without import fees. It's an arbitrage business he concludes. In Guatemala coffee prices crashed due to hedge funds shorting coffee futures. This created empty villages and migrants heading north as coffee rust, the price of fungicide and excessive rain killed their crops. The crisis on the U.S. southern border is mostly a price crisis according to Russell. It is certainly blow-back!

He finishes the book with a mini-history on the role of prices in various crises, starting with Louis XVI in the late 1700s who followed the advice of an early libertarian named Turgot and allowing bread prices to 'freely' operate. We know how that turned out in 1793. The hedge fund masters and private equity pooh-bahs know a massive 'black swan' event they engineer will put their own heads at risk too.

Louis XVI after letting bread prices 'free.'  

A Working Class Solution

The socialist solution is a near fixed or low price for the necessities of life – transport, food, healthcare, clothing, housing, education, etc. Another is adjusting the social wage price and the labor wage price. Russell has no solutions, content to journalistically describe the world as it comes apart at the seams. His reductionist, one-size-fits-all narrative is limited, especially just focusing on finance capital, but it does reveal something fundamental. The narrative indicts capitalist markets as a creator of chaos, as capital is a violent, disruptive and unstable force. Stability is what people most want in their lives – not disruption, leaving their homes, unemployment, poverty, crime, war, starvation or climate extremes.

The Marxist idea of prices under capitalism is that they reflect the socially necessary labor time involved in the exchange value for all commodities, not just the work involved in getting raw materials like oil, grains, copper, hogs, etc. The price includes surplus value robbed from the worker and from nature. However Russell is concerned mostly with raw materials. Speculation and 'the market' make the commodity price, the 'money-form,' variable, tradable, pliable and almost imaginary. It is not a straight expression of value or price or labor or nature, as one day a barrel of oil is worth $50 and the next $100. Russell would agree that this is one of the roots of chaos.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Ubiquity – Why Catastrophes Happen,” “Deep Survival,” "Can History Predict the Future?" “The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution” (Prashad); “Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution,” “Saudi Arabia Uncovered,” “Capitalism in the 21^st Century,” “How Will Capitalism End?” “Debt, Prices and Credit,” “Mad Max – Fury Road,” “Venezuela,” “Central America,” “What is the War on Terror,” God is Not Great.”

May Day Books has many volumes on economics from a Left perspective.

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / April 16, 2024

The Lumpen-Bourgeoisie

 “A Fever in the Heartland – the Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them” by Timothy Egan, 2023

This is the story of the 1920s Klan in Indiana, which became the biggest section of the national organization under the leadership of a drunken, violent and charismatic greed-bag named David C. Stephenson. At the time most of Indiana was known as 'north Dixie' due to its proximity to the real Jim Crow Dixie, along with it's rural and very Aryan population. Segregation was practiced there and hatred extended beyond 'people of color' to Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Greeks, Finns and Bolsheviks.  The “New” 1915 Klan was a continuation of the Know-Nothings, the 1860s old Klan and the White Leagues. They were forerunners to the Black Legion, Silver Shirts, the German-American Bund, the John Birch Society and now the Trump MAGA movement. It's obvious from the book that these movements are all connected by ideology, methods and class leadership, having existed for much of U.S. history.

What Stephenson tried to do was to link midnight terror with political power and a moderate image of a Rotary-style civic club. This book makes it clear the leadership of this Klan was a 'higher' class of leading citizens – lawyers, shopkeepers, businessmen, dentists, bank presidents, civil servants, prosecutors, judges and salesmen. Stephenson himself lived in a mansion near Indianapolis, had many automobiles, a summer home, a yacht, a plane and the rest. 

 He was a hypocrite who drank heavily but endorsed Prohibition, brutalized his wife and women as a 'family values' kind of guy and bribed many Protestant ministers to spread the Klan's message. Stephenson ran drunken bacchanals at his mansion and repeatedly sexually assaulted women. He turned a legal Indiana horse thief patrol into a morality police. They punished sexual 'deviance' like necking, parties, drinking, dancing, divorce, abortion and any illicit contact with 'real Americans' and the rest. The Klan formed an alliance with a female temperance leader and the Anti-Saloon League, which led to a ladies Klan auxiliary. The Klan shut down shops run by Jews or Catholics and promoted 'white's only' shops while attacking dark-skinned folks trying to live in the 'wrong' neighborhood.

Stephenson was part of a coup that deposed the original leader of the Klan in Atlanta and he became it's exalted national Grand Dragon. Stephenson's innovation in Klan policy was to get the judges, politicians from both Parties, newspapers, preachers, businessmen and cops to back him in a bid for political office in Indiana, then the U.S. Presidency. He was probably the most powerful person in the state for awhile, as his word was 'law.' The stage was set.

Problems in Paradise

In opposition, an Irish anti-fascist from Chicago named Patrick O'Donnell organized an anti-Klan front and rallied in Indianapolis, a hotbed of Klan power. They outed Klan members, doxing them by stealing their secret membership lists, which included a leader of the Republican Party in the state and a number of state officials. A newspaper editor in Muncie repeatedly denounced the Klan and was ruined for it. An NAACP official in Indianapolis organized against them. Elderly Union Civil War vets who had fought the Confederacy publicly opposed the Klan. Students at Catholic Notre Dame defeated the Klan in a pitched battle on the streets of South Bend, which is where the name 'Fighting Irish” actually comes from. And the Klan still grew in Indiana and Northern states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado and Oregon where European immigrants or dark-skinned Southerners were moving for work.

1925 Klan Parade in D.C. of 100s of Thousands

Stephenson's next idea was to take over Valparaiso University, which was almost broke, and create a white nationalist KKK school to challenge Harvard. He never graduated from high school, though he claimed he had gone to college. The rest of his self-serving biography about being rich, a war hero and having no family was a fraud. The Klan's Grand Wizard in Atlanta vetoed the move, and this made Stephenson plan a break with the national Klan. In 1924 the U.S. Congress passed a restrictive immigration bill that the Klan applauded, stopping those from southern Europe, Africa, Jews, Chinese and others from entering the country. Among those stopped was the family of Anne Frank. The Klan promoted eugenics and sterilization, along with segregation in housing, work and federal jobs and were successful. In public schools they pushed teaching the Bible and banning evolution.

In the elections of 1924 the NAACP broke with Indiana's Klan Republicans and voted Democratic, signaling a nation-wide trend. Nevertheless the Klan's candidates won the 1924 Indiana election from Senator and Governor on down. Their national high point was the massive 1925 march in Washington, D.C. attended by 100s of thousands of Klan members and a good number of members of Congress.

Trials & Tribulations

But Stephenson's flaws were becoming worse. A brutalized and raped young woman Madge Oberholtzer, who died by her own hand, was able to narrate her story for a legal Affidavit before succumbing. The crime became public through many witnesses and landed Stephenson in jail and court. Other women came out to tell their stories of being drunkenly raped or attacked by him and 500 women in Indianapolis demonstrated outside his jail cell. The 'family man' was exposed and expelled from the national Klan as part of their faction fight. 

Nevertheless he expected that the local Klan-backed Indiana judges, media and politicians would free him. They cut funds to the prosecutor's office, threatened the prosecutor's life, began purchasing witnesses and eventually chose the jury – middle-aged white farmers, 3 of whom were Klan members and 2 of whom they tried to bribe. Yet the Judge allowed Oberholtzer's dying declaration into evidence. The defense resorted to victim-blaming, painting the dead woman as a loose floozy and a depressed suicide. The jury saw through the deception and sent Stephenson to prison for second-degree murder. He filed 40 appeals, all rejected, and served his long sentence.

Madge Oberholtzer & Stephenson

As to the book's title, it's an exaggeration, as the national “Invisible” Empire continued for many years after that, though in a shrunken state. Nor is Indiana in the middle of the West - Midwest – it's in the North and was during the Civil War. The story is a paean to the U.S. justice system, something we know is not always true at all, but sometimes it works. A cascade of legal trials after this trial convicted Klansmen in a number of states of sexual attacks, bribery, racist violence and perjury, with national Klan numbers dropping by 90% according to Egan. Their last lynching in 1930 in Indiana went unpunished however.

This book has color, with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Malcolm X, Clarence Darrow and John Mellencamp getting mentioned. The 1921 massacre of African-Americans in Tulsa, OK was in a city with a very large Klan presence. Woodrow Wilson actually segregated the federal workforce, partly under Klan influence. An Indiana law for forced sterilization of various 'undesirables' was put into place by Klan politicians and that law was imitated across the country and by the Nazis. Even Prohibition was partly their work.

This is a riveting story of a certain reactionary lumpen-bourgeois type that we all know. If the history sounds familiar, it's because the author is aware of the similarities between Trump and the MAGA movement, along with every other right-wing monster to stride across the U.S. stage. Trump has been a reactionary, life-long fraud who has escaped a reckoning so far. Will Stormy Daniel's be his Madge?  Instead of a white hood his allies wear fatigue militia caps. I suspect that in order to defend ourselves from Trump and his militias we will need a new Anti-Fascist Front come November - no matter who wins. Be prepared!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Worst Hard Time” and “The Immortal Irishman” (both by Egan); “Fascism Today – What It is and How to Fight It,” “A Confederacy of Dunces?” “Struggle & Progress,” “BlacKKKlansman” (S Lee); “Drivin' Dixie Down,” “Monument – the Untold Story of Stone Mountain,” “U.S. Army Bases Named After Confederates” or 'Jim Crow.'

May Day has many anti-fascist books.  Be prepared!

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / April 13, 2024

Climate Fatalism

 “An Inconvenient Apocalypse – Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity” by W. Jackson & R. Jensen, 2022

What else can be said about this issue? Most people following the topic have seen, heard or read about it so much they are already 'up to here.' Real solutions on the ground are the thing lacking. I'll try to parse anything new the book contributes, while pointing out it's predictable errors. These two seem more like socio-biologists than anything else and are basically middle-class climate fatalists.

The authors (J&J) verge on deep ecology, as they start off with a discussion of how to limit the world's population to 3 billion a la Malthus and Ehrlich. It's at around 8 billion now. They put the blame for the present environmental crisis on the development of agriculture thousands of years ago – humanity's original sin. They want us to do away with cities, nations or large social bodies and go back to living in small communities of about 150 people – perhaps becoming hunter-gatherers again. They suggest forming these communities now. If this doesn't point to deep ecology anarchism, I don't know what does. J&J predict a world apocalypse based on scientific facts, not one based on the nonsense in Revelation. It's too late to stop these 10 horsemen, so they recommend adaptation. Consumerism is a big enemy. Speed is of the essence. All of that is true.

To them, the overwhelming cascade of complex and dangerous problems is key. Here is their list: 1, over-population; 2, decline of resources like water; 3, mass extinctions; 4, global warming; 5, pollution by chemicals; 6, food insecurity and nutritional deficiency; 7, nuclear arms; 8, pandemics; 9, uncontrolled technologies; 10, national and global political failures. No mention of massive migration, failed states, starvation and war, though those might be related to #10 or #6.

J&J don't believe in a Goreite techno-utopian capitalist solution - like solar, wind, EVs and batteries.  They don't support survivalism, growth in any area, a commodity economy or the efficacy of individual efforts to deal with climate change. They advocate a future of necessities only and call the future 'gritty and grim.' 

They ignore the 'great acceleration' hockey-stick of world carbon rates and the car economy that shot upward after WWII. They seem not to have heard of the severe drop in birth rates in countries like Japan, South Korea and China and the low rates in many other center countries. This is due to higher economic development, abandonment of religion, women's liberation and contraception. They understand modern agriculture as using massive chemical and carbon inputs but don't focus on organic, veganic or agro-ecologic methods - though they hint in that direction. They generally tip-toe around the overwhelming arc of carbon capital in so many economic sectors, afraid to take it head on with a social revolution. They talk about a future steady-state economy but ignore the word 'socialism,' mentioning eco-socialism once. 

They endorse Jared Diamond's analysis of 'collapse' related to social over-complexity and environmental weakness. They propose that we focus on a 'remnant' that will be left after the collapse. Yet they want to forestall being called 'preppers' and are not buying canned food and bullets. Maybe they should.

J&J's idea of preparing for the future is 'envisioning' what is going to happen, a passive method if there ever was one. They see a frugal and low energy future that will affect agriculture, communication, social spaces, transport and which distinguishes real needs from unnecessary consumerist wants. They make the point that the consumerism of 'high-energy' stuff is at an end, or should be. They claim to be deeply Christian and secular at the same time, which accounts for their Christian references and touchy-feely approach, even rattling on about the patriarchy. Perhaps the frugality of a community of monks is their real attraction. They end by rejecting hope and making a plea for love. Really?

Reading this stuff shows the limitations of basically hard-liberal but comfortable environmentalists who realize the game is up but have no clue as how to weather this storm. Not a word about socializing the carbon companies, their banking allies or the Federal Reserve. Not a word about a mass movement or organizations of any kind. Not a word about political action, internationalism or a total overturn of erroneous capitalist 'growth.' Not a word about capital's very recent carbon drive, which is not just associated with agriculture or industrialism, but spiked to incredible levels as capital covered the globe after 1945. All of this is ignored, so put your head in the sand, find some friends, get quiet and start growing your vegetables.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Collapse” (Diamond); “Tar Sands,” “Climate Emergency,” “Planning Green Growth,” “Robbery of Nature,” “Marx and the Earth,” “Marx's Ecology,” “Against Doomsday Scenarios” (all 4 by JB Foster); “Oneness vs. the 1%” (Shiva); “Vanishing Face of Gaia”(Lovelock) “Reflections on the Environment and Consumerism,” “The Ministry for the Future” (KS Robinson); “The Insect Crisis,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “The Tragedy of the Worker,” “A People's Green New Deal,” “Catastrophism,” “On Fire – The Burning Case for a Green New Deal,” “This Changes Everything” (both by Klein), “Reinventing Collapse” (Orlov), “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (Malm); “Rally Against Enbridge and Line 3.”

May Day Books has many left-wing takes on the environmental crisis

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / April 10, 2024