Texass Housing Is No Longer Cheap Because ...

 Insurance is the Climate Change ‘Canary in the Coalmine’

The constant severe storms and tornadoes across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and beyond this year are getting more frequent.  Watching small towns leveled, trailers upended and huge ice balls hitting the ground is constant weather porn on The Weather Channel or Fox Weather.  Listening to escapees with southern accents describe their dire situations is standard. In the homeland of the neo-Confederacy, Texas, insurance rates are rising as in Florida and California, but actually are worse given its unregulated market.  Texas’ car and sprawl culture is getting its blowback by nature.  

# of climate disasters

“Texas emits more greenhouse gas emissions than any other state, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It accounts for 14% of the nation’s climate-warming emissions, and produces more than twice the total emissions of California, the next largest greenhouse gas emitter. Texas is also the nation’s largest oil and gas producing state, accounting for more than 40% of the nation’s oil production.”

There have already been 16 disasters in Texas this year (2023) that cost $1 billion or more — a new state high for billion-dollar disasters in a single year, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration inflation-adjusted data. And that’s during a year when no hurricanes struck the Texas coast: Almost all of those weather disasters were severe storms.  Over the last two years … property losses from convective storms, which includes thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, and heavy rains, have dramatically increased.

The impacts are being felt on homeowner’s pocketbooks: Insurance rates in Texas have skyrocketed 22% since the beginning of this year according to an S&P Global analysis of Texas Department of Insurance data.” – Texas Tribune - 11/30/23

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“According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, between 1980 and 2023 Texas experienced an average of four natural disasters per year with damages in excess of $1 billion—droughts, floods, storms, tornadoes, wildfires, and winter storms. In recent years, such disasters have become much more frequent. Between 2019 and 2023 Texas suffered an average of eleven billion-dollar events each year, with sixteen in 2023 alone.”

Texans pay so much more than Californians thanks in part to our business-friendly regulatory environment. Unlike California, where insurance companies must seek state approval before raising rates, Texas is a so-called “file-and-use” state. Here, insurance companies can implement a rate hike first and seek state approval later—a variation on the principle that it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.” – Texas Monthly – 4/24/24. 

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The last big Cat 4 hurricane in Texas was in 2017, Harvey, which severely flooded the Houston area, killed over a 100 people and cost $125B.  The recent environmental disasters afflicting Texas are not from hurricanes – yet they wait in the wings, perhaps for a final knock-out blow to some insurance companies.  There is a rise in small and medium size insurance companies going bankrupt across the U.S. and especially in the South.

While Texas does not have state income taxes it does get its money in other ways like sales taxes and property taxes.  Texas property taxes used to be the highest in the nation – rising 26% between 2019 and 2023 - until state Republicans realized that was a bad look and funneled $12.7B of ‘guvmint’ money into property tax relief in 2023.  This affected how much schools and local cities could raise for taxes on property, resulting in net cuts to them.  This is also during huge spikes in Texas housing values and because of this some just saw a leveling off of property taxes. Facts from the Texas Tribune – 4/26/2024.    

Because of all these insurance and tax impacts, foreclosures and evictions are rising in the Lone Star state – mostly in Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and Austin, according to Bloomberg.  The ‘golden hour’ is over, along with pandemic rent supports.  Some Texas conservatives want to get rid of property taxes themselves, which would put a $55B yearly hole in the state budget.  Perhaps they can go to homeschooling based on a Southern Baptist curriculum of Bible study.  They can revert to volunteer fire departments, do-it-yourself trash collection, neighborhood funded road work, and use their guns to guard their neighborhoods.

So beware that construction company asking you if you need a new roof on the insurance company’s dime because of that last hail storm. They will actually just pitch this as ‘do you want a new roof?’ Do you actually have damage that can’t be easily repaired?  In Minnesota hail storms are increasing too and it shows in the spike in Minnesota’s insurance-damage costs.  A wing of capital is starting to register the damage done, making insurance a national housing issue, not just rising rents, house prices and property taxes.  Housing is a human need and a human right, so the fact that capital cannot provide it is another sign of its demise.

Rent Control. Restrict development in ecologically sensitive areas like seashores.  Metal roofs to be mandated. Ban AirBnB and Vyrbo. National real estate insurance.  Freeze prices on housing.  Nationalize the insurance companies. Take over empty properties. Socialize the land. 

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Texass,” “The Confession” (Grisham); “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “Cranky Yankee” or “Texas.”

Cranky Yankee / June 1, 2024

Representation is Not Feminism

 “San Miguel” by T.C. Boyle, 2012

San Miguel is one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California, near Oxnard. It's now a National Park you can visit on a day cruise covered with nesting birds, hiking paths and constant wind. But before that it was for years a sheep farm. This is the story of two families trying to run that 'ranch' in the 1880-90s and again in the 1930s. It's really the story of 2 women and a girl who find the island either claustrophobic, dangerous and boring or an idol of pioneer life. It attempts to be a romantic location from Wuthering Heights but fails for two of them.

The first family, the Waters, consists of an adopted teenage girl, her mother and a stubborn husband, a veteran from the Civil War. The mother is an educated neurotic, a consumptive, used to city-life and a total misfit in the run-down, moldy and filthy ranch house left to them. The daughter wants to be on stage and is stifled by life on the island and later treated cruelly by her step-father. They both want out. The weather – by turns wet, windy, foggy, sunny, cold and unpredictable - is the worst kind of weather to cure a sick and weak consumptive. The husband took $10K of her money and bought into the sheep-farm, even though he's new to ranching. Everything is 8 hours away by the occasional boat – doctors, supplies, help, animals, other humans. They do have a young maid, which brings its own complications.

The second family years later, the Lesters, live in a better house on the island, as the first is left in ruins. They eventually have two young daughters whom they home-school. The woman, though citified, becomes an excellent cook and worker, while the husband is energetic, inventive and kind. He also is a veteran of the First World War. They still use a wood stove, a privy, oil lamps and don't have a radio and a generator until later. So they are called the “Swiss Family Lester” by the press, even though they live close to 'modern' California. Willa Cather seems to be their model. Eventually war, ranching and accidents catch up to this family too.

Why did Boyle write this story? This is his second one about the Channel Islands. The first was an environmental pissing match set in modern times called When the Killings Done (reviewed below). The only character that ties these two families together is a ranch hand, Jimmy, who we see go from a kid to an aging man. These are women's stories, and women dealing with men who have problems. Boyle usually writes tales of political and satirical import but here power devolves into representation only. Stories for stories sake. This one is based on two memoirs by both women, so you could say this is historical fiction with the usual dose of necessary imagination.  

Is this feminism?  I don't think so, as it stops at representation. "Telling Your Story" or "Being Invited Into the Conversation" - staples of NPR therapy-speak - do not concern power.  Feminism goes beyond invisibility issues to the question of women's power.  Revolutionary feminism, if you want to call it that, wants more than being interviewed or described.  All 3 women here were dragged out to San Miquel by their husbands or step-father.  Only the young girl ran away.

If you want to read modern 'pioneer' stories this might be it, where you can vicariously live through their experiences. If you want to read another of the millions of pro rata family stories or be depressed, this might be for you too. It's ultimately a sad book, as human life tends to go that way.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive using these terms: “When the Killings Done,” “The Harder They Come” and “Budding Prospects” (all three by Boyle) or the word 'feminism.'

The Cultural Marxist

In the Woods... May 28, 2024

A Movie, a Documentary and a TV Series Walk Into a Bar ...

 “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” by Wes Ball, 2024

The plot of this film is a picture of the post-revolutionary triumph of the Apes over Humans, led by a clever Ape named Caesar long ago. Caesar was the intelligent leader who said ‘Ape Not Kill Ape’ and 'Apes Together Strong' and wanted peaceful co-existence with Humans but also resisted their depredations.  Now quiet villages of primitive communism exist where Apes go about their business away from the exploitation, colonial rule and the cages of Humans, who they now consider stupid and almost extinct.  The Apes seem to be the proletariat or former colonial subjects, not just animals.

A Human woman shows up dressed in rags, but she is on a secret mission to steal a computer board from a power system to take back to her own secret Human fortress on the grass plains.  She represents the counter-revolution of the Humans who still seek to defeat the Apes. 

A group of large Apes led by violent Gorillas on horseback attack the village, capture the Ape residents and force them to move to a fortress on the coast.  It is the site of some kind of old Human nuclear reactor which the clever Ape King is attempting to get into and restart. So we understand that there are various strata of Apes, even in post-revolutionary times.  Who might this Ape be?

The Gorilla leader is an Ape dictator basing himself on force.  Noticeably red flags fly in his compound.  Eventually the peaceful Apes led by Noa (Noah) use their Eagles to win a battle against the Ape Dictator – who seems to be a stand-in for a Stalin-like ruler.  This is similar to a brutal Ape named Koba who fought Caesar in an earlier PotA movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  “Koba” was Stalin’s nickname.  As Noa notices, this Gorilla dictator is no Caesar, even though he constantly invokes Caesar’s name to justify his rule.  And so the name Caesar could be a stand-in for Lenin – or borrowed from the ‘angelic’ Caesar Chavez.  Commies and Apes together!

Sorry, just a Leftie here, telling you what is under this movie’s narrative hood.

“Broke” by Billy Corben, 2012

Based on a Sports Illustrated story about financial problems among professional athletes, this ESPN documentary interviews former NFL, NBA, MLB and other players about what happened to them after leaving the industry.  SI reported that 78% of NFL players were broke, divorced or unemployed after 2-3 years and 60% of NBA players were supposedly broke after 5 years. That is the hook, but each interviewee goes into the multiple causes of financial troubles.  Young men with too much money who have no financial training and aren’t thinking ahead. Mom gets a house; relatives get cars; friends and families get cash.  The players themselves buy a too-big house, a too-expensive car and everything else you can imagine – champagne, diamonds, furs, suits, yachts.  

Idiotic decisions are made about investments in bogus businesses like car washes.  Agents steal from them and lawyers need to be paid. Gambling addictions, high taxes and moving expenses are unexpected.  They are mobbed by gold diggers and end up paying child support for lots of children, as happened to Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson, who both declared bankruptcy.  The ‘ballers’ careers last on average 3-5 years, yet mortgages, debts and payments continue when they have no income – even during the off-season or during strikes when paychecks stop.  Medical costs from sports injuries continue too even after ‘retirement.’

Some of the interviewees are known, some will only be familiar to those who know each sport well.  Bernie Kosar, Marvin Miller and Andre Rison were those I knew but there are others.  They come clean and honest on what happened – and some make it through, some plan, some anticipate.  It’s a reflection of the Dough-Ray-Me economy where everyone thinks getting rich is the point, both as individuals and as corporations.  The sums to play are ridiculously and criminally high, in the multiple millions of dollars.  Are the statistics absolutely dead-on?  They have been disputed but all of this makes perfect sense outside the exact numbers, which is why the sports leagues are trying to ‘train’ athletes about money.  Whether that is actually working is another issue.  After all it is a capitalist industry, not a charity or a selfless sport.  Money is the point of professional sports now.

“Deadwind (S.1&2)” directed by Rike Jokela, 2018-‘19

This has all the markers of a typical detective series, except with a Finn Nordic noir and snow twist.  Cold seems to be the sign of death so it’s appropriate, as Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia are the locations . We have the semi-dysfunctional female lead detective, Sofia Karppi; the rebellious daughter, the overly-complex plots, the dead women in Season One; gruesome murders; drugs and more drugs; police partners that start abrasively, then get together; police supervisors that block investigations and go for the easy conviction, lying witnesses, many red herrings and detectives going it alone in deadly situations. There are the requisite chases through abandoned warehouses, buildings, factories and prisons, as these locations, like the snow, evidently signal crime.  SWAT squads, as in U.S. TV, show up on a regular basis as backup. 

There is always a tie to supposed political corruption and careerism at Helsinki City Hall or in the Finnish government. In Season One it is a wind-turbine real estate project in Helsinki; in Season 2 the ‘Pro-Change Coalition’ controls the mayoralty and is pushing for a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel under the Gulf of Finland.  In reality the Green League mayor runs Helsinki now, and evidently the screen-writers can’t make much of that.  It seems cynicism is their main idea regarding everything, though they show the Right to be more sinister and manipulative.  There are murderous cops, politicians and corporate players.

Karppi is the too-cute lead detective, brilliant in her hunches and attention to detail, but obnoxious and dead-faced to everyone she works with and thuggish to ‘perps.’  She’s too pretty to be wrong and she knows it!  At the same time she’s a negligent mother of a 7 year old and a teenager.  She doesn’t seem to eat or sleep, works nights like a vampire, is lucky to have some poor woman come in to take care of her youngster and drives her daughter away by making her the constant babysitter.  The daughter resorts to lumpenism and the son becomes a bully. They frequently miss school.  She’s a careerist after all and too pretty and pained to be bothered after her husband dies.  After awhile, she becomes somewhat repulsive. This is part of the ‘complex character’ screen-writer requirements of glorifying cops.  Her partner Nurmi also has trouble with relationships and kids but he’s not a single parent - yet.

You’d think Finland was a hot-bed of crime from this series, but its focus on the lumpen strata of society, like every cop show, distorts reality.  Perhaps this series is to provide a frisson of danger to the Finish middle class and beyond.  Are we tired of addicts and criminals yet – even in Finland?  Why, in fact, does so much TV focus on crime?  It’s actually a deeply conservative trend, making fear, anger and disgust primary emotions.  In reality some neighborhoods are deluged with it, but that is not the focus here.  It’s one of the hobby-horses of the ‘white’ political Right.  It’s common in the cultural output of country after country so it’s no accident or peculiarity but part of the cultural superstructure of capitalist society.  Thanks for nothing Agatha Christie.

Prior reviews on these subjects, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” “War for the Planet of the Apes,” “Playing as if the World Mattered” and “Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety” (both by Kuhn);  “Hey, How ‘Bout That NFL?” “Reflections on the Olympics 2012,” “Selection Day” (Adiga); “And Speaking of the Olympics;” “Trapped,” “Bordertown,” “The Cliff,” “Redbreast” (Nesbo); “Gorky Park” (MC Smith) or ‘detective.’   

The Cultural Marxist / May 22, 2024

"We Gotta Get Outta This Place"

 “Work, Work, Work – Labor, Alienation and Class Struggle” by Michael D. Yates, 2022

Yates is the son of a factory quality inspector who died of work-place related hazards.  He worked at some proletarian jobs himself before finding a sinecure in academe as a Marxist economist, then as an editorial director at Monthly Review.  His prior books “In and Out of the Working Class” and “Can the Working Class Change the World?” are reviewed below. This book is similar to these two books.  The title reflects something beatnik Maynard G. Krebs might have said in the sit-com Dobie Gillis but I’m not sure how many people want to read about working after working all day.

It mostly reads like a ‘greatest hits’ collection of left and Marxist references, with an odd fascination for guerilla war.  He riffs off Ben Hamper’s book about working in the 1970s in auto – “Rivethead” – a hilarious look at the assembly line that never goes into politics.  He attacks the fantasy of neo-classical economics which doesn’t offer proof of its nostrums while still parading as ‘science.’  He focuses on labor exploitation and the various social controls needed to continue exploitation and the accumulation of private wealth.  While Yates doesn’t look into the rentier (or financial) capital flows, the question he might ask is ‘who’ is building and maintaining the real estate and land that is such an essential part of those sectors? Workers!         

Yates surveys the many gruesome and precarious jobs across the world in opposition to the idea that everyone works in a white-collar office with dental benefits.  Garment workers, electronic assembly shops, restaurant and cruise ship peons, street vendors, waste haulers, rag-pickers, farm labor, roofers, prostitutes – you get the idea.  The ILO estimated that in 2019 1.48 billion workers in the world were at the very bottom of the heap, with 160 million of those child laborers. I think this does not include peasants and farmers.  During global recessions and depressions those numbers can double. 

Yates discusses “the injuries of class” that are ignored by liberals and the need for fighting racism and sexism as part of the class struggle, as skin color and gender are many times the markers of proletarian existence.  He has mini-sections on clerks, restaurant workers, security guards, postal and auto workers, custodians, secretaries and admins, medical and gig workers.  He has a chapter on the ‘panopticon’ of control methods – school, religion, laws, technology and media.  Within worksites these might consist of ‘team building,’ cross-training, Just-In-Time inventory, improvement meetings and ‘lean’ production – all somewhat aging methods.  He does address how technology speeds up Amazon workers, but only once, yet computerization has become a major driver of control and productivity.  He addresses the obvious divisions within the working class – religion, nationality, language, gender, skin color, sexual preference, etc.  He still makes the mistake of considering there to be multiple human ‘races.’  All this is pretty standard Leftie stuff.

SOLUTIONS?

What is the solution to this miasma of cruelties?  He takes particular aim at DSA and Jacobin magazine who promote social-democratic and ‘utopian’ solutions, perhaps because they are the biggest organization on the left and embedded within the Democrats.  He reprises his analysis of the rise and fall of the UFW union under the dictatorial and right-wing control of Cesar Chavez, which to my mind is the best chapter in the book.  Yate’s solutions range from traditional Left and environmental demands, transitional demands to some maximalist slogans.  The heralding of the familiar Brazilian MST, the Mexican Zapatistas, the Indian Naxalites, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Richmond CA Progressive Alliance; Cooperation Jackson MS; the Black Panther Party, the UE, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Venezuela, Cuba and Nepal is endless.  Hell, he even gives props to the Nation of Islam’s organic farms.  What is not mentioned is that all these forces either came and went or have existed for years without resulting in forward movement towards socialism. Some might play a role in the future in a revolutionary upsurge but it will not be coming from them at present.

Richmond CA Progressive Alliance

Yates supports a Labor or a Workers Party in the U.S., mentioning the successful role of the Richmond Progressive Alliance in electing people to office in Richmond CA.  This is in the context of a somewhat dated discussion of the failures of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, the SEIU, the UAW and others.  He supports ‘direct action’ and mutual aid.  Importantly he understands the need for local ‘assemblies’ – like soviets or councils – that will slowly take-on local political power as they have done in some areas like Venezuela, forming a basis for future workers’ rule and participatory socialism.  He focuses on the issue of agricultural land and thinks small, local farmers and lower tech pursuing agroecology will be the solution to the environmental ruin of the land.  Yates should note that China has in practice abolished social ownership and control of the land that the Maoist revolution first initiated. He has several lists of transitional and revolutionary demands and a long section on revolutionary education, befitting a professor.  Yates adopts wholesale Andreas Malm’s 10 environmental proposals.  He understands that Stalin reversed many progressive policies of the Bolsheviks, especially in the field of women’s rights.  

As part of Yates' demands, he includes some that are clichés and me challenging them might be controversial. “Abolition of the prison system” seems to be a long-range socialist and communist goal but utopian even after a revolution.  “End the incarceration state” or "organize prisoners" might be better transitional slogans.  “Community-based” policing also seems utopian in a capitalist society, though a parallel armed force arises under dual power or in situations where the state becomes weak.  “Open Borders” also seems to be a utopian demand, especially in a capitalist world falling apart.  Nations and their borders will slowly dissolve in a post-revolutionary socialist world society so that is the ultimate goal.  Immediate work programs at the border, organizing immigrants into unions and aid to people’s organizations in the affected countries to fight persecution and for revolution might be better transitional methods.  The reason people are coming to the U.S. is partly due to past and present foreign, military and capitalist U.S. policies.  It’s blowback.  No one actually wants to leave their home if things are going well, so that is one of the keys.  

Yates also wants to ‘demobilize’ officers in the U.S. army.  That is not going to happen except when the ranks take over army units in a revolutionary upsurge or rebellion, as happened in the U.S. army in Vietnam. Better slogans might be to unionize soldiers and to call for soldier’s democracy in the armed forces. Questionable slogans should not be swallowed whole just because they are repeated.  There is not just social-democratic utopianism but also revolutionary utopianism expressed as maximalism.  There is a difference between tactical demands, strategic and transitional demands and long-range goals.  Mixing them up can bring political damage, like making your main demand ‘Socialism Now!’ which some Left groups have done. 

There is nothing about an Anti-Fascist Front, a Left Front or other methods of organization, like revolutionary parties or an International.  He does not mention that “Mutual Aid” efforts can devolve into charity or that cooperatives have become corporate over time.  At any rate, a rare U.S. Marxist academic continues – and repeats - his trajectory.  It is not clear if he is a member of any Marxist group.  He seems closest to or nostalgic for old-line Maoism but includes demands from other tendencies. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “In and Out of the Working Class” and “Can the Working Class Change the World?” (Yates)l; “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (Malm); “Behind the Kitchen Door,” “Walking With the Comrades” (A Roy); “Monthly Review,” “The Precariat” (Standing); “The Sinking Middle-Class” (Roediger); “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” “Jacobin Magazine,” or “Venezuela,” “UFW,” “BLM,” “Occupy Wall Street,” “Labor Unions,” etc.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / May 19, 2024

A Long March

 “Until We Fall”– Long Distance Life on the Left” by Helena Sheehan, 2023

Sheehan is a former member of the Irish Communist Party (CPI), a journalist, academic and philosopher.  She had many contacts in Europe and the U.S. during her time as a member, reporter and academic and they show in this virtual travelogue.  The book is a memoir of the collapse of the USSR and the workers’ states in East and Central Europe and subsequent travels to South Africa, Cuba, Greece, Libya, Mexico, the U.S. and beyond.  Against the various pro-capitalist, social-democratic and nationalist tendencies which came out of the former bureaucratic ‘Communist’ strata in these states, she holds to a kind of left-reformist Marxism, feeling close to U.S. groups like the Committees of Correspondence and Monthly Review.

The book goes from 1987 to 2022 and is written as a collection of notes – people she met and argued with, forums and meetings she attended, countries and cities she visited, bits and pieces of ideas that were discussed. It’s all a bit sad, confusing and personal, but some vivid pictures sometimes show through.  The absorption of the GDR by West Germany is shown as a hostile takeover.  Leftists lost their jobs and were barred from future employment in their areas; Socialist Unity Party offices and institutions were expropriated; public property was put up for cheap sale to capitalists or shuttered; an avalanche of real estate pirates descended on East Berlin; former landlords, barons, small and big capitalists demanded their estates, land and housing back while unemployment skyrocketed.  East Germans thought they were getting rock & roll, jeans, consumer goods and ‘freedom.’  What they also got was precarity, crime, trash and the dictatorial rule of the deutschemark. The ‘purge’ extended across the whole Warsaw bloc and took place at a lightning pace.

As someone to the left of the CP who thinks Trotsky had it quite right, it’s astonishing to see how disoriented the leading cadres and intellectuals in ‘really existing socialism’ were. Sheehan was also astonished. Their version of socialism had failed, though it wasn’t even achieved if you go by Marx. This is not the first book that depicted the deep social-democratic, nationalist, bureaucratic, careerist and liberal notions lurking among workers’ state CP leaders.  After the fall Sheehan fights the post-modernists, the corporatists, the identity-only theorists, Afro-centrism, mysticism, anti-modernism, positivism, Heidegger, Irish religion and all the other ragged ideologies in the West that proliferated in the reactionary crucible of the ‘new’ World Order.  The subsequent 9-11 attack, the Iraq invasion, the 2008 financial crash, environmental disasters, Brexit, Trump, CoVid and the temporary ideological triumph of neoliberalism didn’t help.    

Sheehan wrote an introduction to the newly-found writings of Nicolai Bukharin, works he penned during his stay in prison in the 1930s.  She discussed the role of Marxism, dialectical materialism and science at conferences, as she had written a seminal book on the latter topic “Marxism and the Philosophy of Science.”  It opposed Lysenkoism and Stalin’s ‘science’ and showed that Marx and Engels had the same attitude towards science against the claims of some. She insists that Marxism is the best understanding of capitalism and the only theoretical approach that knits together the broadest view of reality.  She terms it somewhat over-inclusively as a “totalizing philosophy of history.”

Sheehan repeatedly visits South Africa from 2002 to 2018, taking a position on the left of the South African CP and against the ANC and Zuma’s neo-liberalism.  She’s not big on praising Mandela as a ‘saint.’  Her descriptions of the conditions in the townships is devastating – crime, poverty, unemployment, violence, rudimentary housing, water shortages.  This eventually resulted in Zuma’s fall, as the ANC and some SACP members administered capitalism in a very Unpopular Front, with corruption being added to that burden. After Mandela died in 2013, the left revolt spread inside COSATU, the Miner’s union and the formation of farther Left parties who saw that new conditions mandated a direct battle against South African capital, not its maintenance.  

Sheehan endorses Erik Olin Wright’s ‘all of the above’ multiple strategy of: 1) rupture with capital and its state; 2) building counter-institutions; 3) using the capitalist state.  There are Left formations primarily promoting all 3 strategies – revolutionary, counter-cultural / cooperative and social-democratic.  The first includes a ‘transitional program’ of demands that strengthen the class and can lead to revolution.  The second focuses on workers buying companies or forming cooperatives and perhaps unions.  The third works in the Democratic Party in the U.S.  So she spreads herself between orthodox Marxism, cooperatism and social democracy as main strategies, a polyglot theoretical mix perhaps short on consistency but certainly crowd-pleasing.

Sheehan traveled from being a Catholic nun to Sinn Fein, to the Irish CP, to the Irish Labour Party, to working with Occupy and Syriza, eventually trying to form a broad left front in Ireland. She visits Coyoacan, Mexico and pays respects to Trotsky, remembering all the deeply stupid, sectarian stuff about ‘ice-picks’ she heard in the CPI.  She defends Marxism at every turn, crusades against the lowering of standards in academe, opposes bourgeois feminism and, as a former nun, opposes the veil – human and divine.  The real impact of the book is to show what it takes to be on the Left for many, many years – almost a life-time for Sheehan.  It seems what is necessary for her is a consistent framing of social life, a ‘total’ philosophy grounded in actual history and a continued engagement with ideas and events.

The book is a memoir and travelogue, with limited uses beyond that except some of the facts you might pick-up in the process.  While it seems not to be Sheehan’s purpose, the book speaks to leftists who have spent years organizing and agitating for socialism.  Is there a better way to spend your life?  Is there even a choice?  Most do not think so, given the shallow, personal and conventional alternatives, and we’ve had plenty of proof that many can’t handle this particular ‘long march.’  Sheehan did, in her own way.

P.S. – The painting on the cover, “Raising the Banner,” (1960) by Kely Korzhev, is an example of his art, a collection of which is held by The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis.  They do not, as I recall have this painting, but I think I have seen it there once.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “SecondHand Time,” (Alexievich); “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” (Cohen); “The Contradictions of Real Socialism” (Lebowitz); “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism” (Horvat/Stiks); “A Socialist Defector” (V Grossman); “Unlearning Marx” (Paxton); “The End of the Beginning” (Martinez); “Mandela, Obama, Castro & Kennedy,” “Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom,” “Understanding Class” (EO Wright) or the word “Marxism.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / May 16, 2024

Libertarian Commerce

 “Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion,” a documentary by Eva Orner, 2024

No matter what you look at under capitalism, something is going wrong.  Such is the issue of clothing.  Teen fashion brand Brandy Melville (BM) is the poster child for dysfunction. It is advertised on Instagram, Tumblr or TikTok by teenagers posing with Melville’s bland, cheap clothes that are considered the height of cool-girl junior and senior high-school threads.  It has attained a ‘cult-like’ status among some young people. The brand relies heavily on social media featuring popular and slim ‘white’ girls, who are also their target market and many of their front-line employees.  How fucked up is this company?  Let me count the ways.

The owner, of course, is a libertarian bro, Stephan Marsan, whose roots are in Italy.  The clothes did not sell well there, so Marsan moved to locations in Los Angeles, California for that breezy, beach girl look and found gold.  The clothes say ‘Made in Italy’ but they are manufactured in Prato, Italy by Chinese contractors working virtual labor slaves in sweatshops.  So the location is accurate, but the quality of the clothes is poor – thin material, bad seams, disposable designs. It’s throwaway stuff and cheaply priced.  It’s not Gucci or Versace in spite of its ‘Italian’ origins.

This is where the ‘fast’ part comes in.  BM copies designs from other companies (and has been sued for that) or asks hired teenagers and employees what styles they like and then cranks that out to see if it sells.  There is no painstaking ‘designing’ or couture here. When the kid gets tired of the bare midriff t-shirt with a puppy on it, it gets discarded.  Like other fast fashion brands – Zara, Uniqlo, Topshop, Primark, Shein, H&M, Gap, Old Navy and most mall brands – the clothing gets dumped into places like the Atacama Desert in Chile or the markets, waste dumps and beaches of Accra, Ghana.  This is usually because of a political agreement between a central capitalist government and the clothing’s endpoint in Africa, Latin America or Asia.  Overproduction of clothing is standard operating procedure for a ‘market economy’ more interested in selling commodities than providing real use value.  You might think that textiles can be easily recycled, but there is no requirement to do so.

Oddly BM sells only one ‘size’ that they claim will fit ‘most’ – S or XS.  Slim, young girls and women are able to fit into their flirty stock, so you can imagine the ‘body positivity’ issues this brings for teenaged girls.  This is their cheap way around manufacturing clothing that fits other teenagers.

Marsan, the Libertarian dude, has a sub-brand called “John Galt” – yes, the capitalist hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  Ron Paul and anti-tax stickers were plastered on this store’s walls.  Marsan himself is a 40-something out-of-shape, dumpy-dressed CEO.  He heads an internal group chat for managers that features sexist and racist jokes, Hitler and Nazi memorabilia and the kind of crude humor some 14 year old boys might engage in.  BM under Marsan asks customers and employees if they can take their pictures in ‘store style’ and most say yes.  Marsan stores the pictures in a vast pedo photo database and he will hire or fire girls he likes or doesn’t like based on these photos of their looks.  Other pics go to social media.  Black and Latino girls get shunted to the basement stockrooms. This is labor discrimination which has nothing to do with skills, reminiscent of how they used to hire stewardesses.  Thin suburban blondes rank high for this early Fox News rehearsal or Berlusconi bunga-bunga invite.  A few of these girls get promoted, featured in social media or sent on trips to China and Italy to look at and recommend styles as ‘product research.’  There is an allegation of rape of one young girl at a ‘stopover’ apartment in New York by an older Italian man so far.  But the overall public vibe is ‘girl power.’ 

Thrown-away clothes on the beach in Accra

The pattern across the whole industry is the use and abuse of women and girls –for growing the raw materials or in manufacture, in advertising, in retail work and in the distribution of the waste clothes. They are the final target of the sales effort too.  It is a proletarian feminist issue.

If you’ve wondered why so many people in Africa or poorer countries are wearing logo t-shirts from the United States or Europe, now you know.  Clothing has actually come to the point where it is so cheap to manufacture that it could be almost free – though the full environmental or labor effects are not shown in this documentary.  It features many interviews with former young employees at BM, a reporter, an activist, a photographer and two former executives.  The BM employees finally realized what a toxic environment they were working in.  Marsan refused to be interviewed of course.  His brand has 3 million followers on Instagram, 36 locations in the U.S. and 94 locations worldwide so his fast and cheap fashion is still riding high and he can afford to ignore critics.

The solution given in the documentary was not to buy so many clothes.  That might be a start but tell that to the next young teenager you meet… though their parents might agree.  There is no regulation to this out-of-control capitalist market, no requirements for recycling or second-hand circulation, no environmental or carbon controls and few labor controls.  Private enterprise is still king and public ownership or public input is off the table.  It is a source for vast wealth, as the Spanish owner of Zara is one of the top billionaires in the world.  It is clear that more than consumer actions are necessary. 

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion” and “Stitched Up,” (both by Hoskins); “Fashionopolis,” NPR’s 1A,” “Shopping World,” “Inconspicuous Consumption,” “Worn,” or the words ‘fast fashion.’ 

The Cultural Marxist / May 13, 2024

"A New Terrain of Accumulation"

 “Defying Displacement - Urban Recomposition and Social War” by Andrew Lee, 2023

The author is an anarchist housing activist who runs down the main causes of homelessness, poverty and conflict in the rentier housing sector. He worked in Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto and Philadelphia.  His disgust at the forces of Big Tech, its employees, including universities like Stanford, is obvious.  The problems are: “Affordable housing” plans that aren’t.  Gentrification.  AirBnBs and holiday lets.  Empty second, third or fourth homes.  Corporate ownership of housing and trailer parks by outfits like Blackrock. Mega-projects that displace residents.  Empty city and privately owned houses due to foreclosure.  City governments that change ordinances and zoning in order to clear the way for real estate ‘development.’ Intentionally pricing workers out to the peripheries of cities, increasing their commutes.  Pandemic ‘remote work’ gentrification that affects some small towns, as white-collars move away from big cities. And through it all – displacement of the original neighbors by more well-off professionals, business owners and managers, mostly light-skinned. 

All of this relates to the capitalist nature of society, where land ownership is private property and class and color castes are intrinsic to society.  Capital connects the production sector and the rentier economy, as low wages and labor exploitation price people out of housing. Lee slights the struggles of waged and precariat workers to focus on geographic struggles. 

Political Terms

Lee’s talks about various battles against these symptoms of private ownership and the housing 'market.' He sometimes equates ‘white’ with a petit-bourgeois or professional class or strata, which reflects an identity approach.  It is clear that chosen minority working-class communities are the targets of gentrification and that the real estate collapses in 2001 and 2008 hit minority communities the hardest.  But ‘white’ workers and artists have also been displaced and pushed to the edges. Class encompasses them all, as most minority people are working class at various levels. 

Capital will use any method, from literal slavery to debt slavery, neo-colonialism, rentier and financialized economics, so-called ‘neo-feudalism,’ prison labor and police to aid in supplying surplus value.  Lee does not point out the connection and writes as if these were separate economies. 

Avoiding the working class is usually the doorway to reformism by substituting other forces.  Whether it is the ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie; the ‘patriotic’ bourgeoisie; the lumpen-proletariat; the peasantry; a vague ‘community,’ housewives, youth, a certain ethnicity, the ‘poor,’ even the professional strata and sometimes a ‘Party” - all substitute for a working-class thrust.  In this case Lee shows how the peasant struggle in China was led by workers displaced from the cities; as was aid to the Zapatistas and Castro’s guerillas.  Now that the majority of people live in urban areas across the globe, national independence was formally granted for most and rural guerilla struggles are few, the main locus has shifted to urban areas.  This gives actual Marxists encouragement, as their first inspiration was the Paris Commune.  Lee centers the city as the site of the coming revolution, not waged workplaces in that city.

Lee’s recommended tactics are Land Trusts, squatting, blocking freeways, square encampments, rent parties, stopping evictions, cultural defense of landmarks and old neighborhood names and defending tenants and unhoused ‘villages.’ He never mentions political engagement, electoral work or voting. He cites the pellet-gunning of Google buses, destruction of gentrifiers’ property and opposes the antics of the upscale YesInMyBackYard (YIMBY) redevelopment crowds.  He understands that a home is more than a building, but contains memories, many relationships, history, personal labor and the like. Losing it is more than just physical displacement.

San Jose homeless camp grows for every increase in rent

Precarity and Dispersal

Lee’s main point is that the dispersal of large worksites of the working-class out of cities, to be replaced by small businesses and isolated white-collar and service workers, pushes urban labor and struggle toward new forms of organization by geography.  Precarity through subcontracting, high turnover and the legal fraud of ‘independent contractors’ makes stable labor concentration in one place even more difficult.  This was a lodestone of older Marxism.  Lee disparages the Google workers association, saying it is no union, claiming they get stock options so they are materially invested in Google.  Yet some unions also have this benefit.  The working classes have a broad range of strata, from top to bottom, and the idea is to get them to work together if possible.  This organization might be closer to a professional association, but Google has a range of jobs like every other corporation.

Lee seems to think that all unions are business unions and hence treacherous, while saying we should investigate “…it’s use as a node in the class struggle…”  reflecting unionism’s dual nature.  Instead Lee creates a straw man:  “The tribunes of left-wing orthodoxy contend that to look for the class struggle beyond the workplace (and unions) is impossible…”  Not sure who the hell ever said this.  It is clear though that he wants to move away from workplace organizing. 

Lee’s experience in how a Google mega-project was carried out in San Jose is indicative of how capital, government, NGOs and unions sometimes collaborate.  The project would take 150 acres of land, including ‘condemned’ housing and businesses and introduce 20,000 new tech employees to the area.  Google gave millions to non-profits as a sweetener and was only partly opposed by the local Working Partnerships of the AFL-CIO and a local community group Silicon Valley Rising.  The City Council voted for it after a year of secret meetings and arrests of mostly Latino opponents at Council meetings in what he calls a ‘managed democracy’ charade.   This is similar to mega projects like stadiums in other cities, where actual democratic input is managed, ignored or repressed. Evidently not one council person was opposed to a project which would raise housing costs and displace residents.  Nor does Lee consider this. 

Lee treats Google’s tactics to be counter-insurgency methods, but applied to domestic political issues.  The role of the police in real estate commodification is less understood, but he contends they increase their activities in minority neighborhoods slated for gentrification with killings, arrests and harassment.  This was the case in the Breonna Taylor shooting in Louisville and even Cop City in Atlanta fits this profile.  This is all part of a class war in a “new terrain of accumulation” where for the community, “representation is substituted for power.”

Atlanta's Cop City removes humans and trees

Theories

Lee does discuss the situation abroad a bit - tourist and expat-driven gentrification in cities like Barcelona and privatization of apartments in Old Havana for tourist or small business purposes.   He has no words on U.S. climate displacement and ‘shock doctrine’ redevelopment or international migrants and refugees, which are also forms of removal.  

A useful book looking at present incidences and battles around neighborhood commodification and gentrification, but it also contains sectarian thinking around labor organizing and electoral work. Nor does he mention socializing the land - a basic step taken across the world, or communes and cooperatives.  He has a capsule history of DSA and social-democracy and the bourgeois ‘campism’ of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, equating the latter with “Leninism.”  He then endorses ‘the metropolis’ – echoing the autonomous current in Italy led by Antonio Negri and insists cities now rank above capitalist nations as power-centers. He seems to think that the Tech giants are primarily rentier forces, not based on surplus value extracted from workers across the globe. He attacks, like Kropotkin, Marx for thinking primitive accumulation ended – when no Marxist thinks that, not even the first Marx.  It is called ‘combined and uneven development.’ Like most anarchists, the book ends with a polemic against a confabulated view of Marxism.

Lee does question the anarchist verities of nostalgia for the Spanish anarchists, Emma Goldman and the IWW – much as some Marxists can’t quit talking about 1871, 1917, the 1930s or 1949.  At least he demands a modernization of a materialist analysis, which is sorely lacking in modern socialist and anarchist groups.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box in the upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “How to Kill a Neighborhood,” “Capital City,” “Cade’s Rebellion,” “Tales of Two Cities,” “Minneapolis 2040 Housing Plan,” “Rebel Cities” (Harvey); “Balinese Political Art,” “A Walk Through Paris,” “Planet of Slums” (Davis), “Hinterland,” “Riot, Strike, Riot,” “Shock Doctrine” (Klein), “From Factory to Metropolis”(Negri) or the word ‘gentrification.’  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / May 10, 2024

One, Two, Many Flints

 “Dirty Waters”film by Todd Haynes, 2019

This is the true story of the discovery of the toxic effects of PFOAs / PFOS / PFAS from the manufacture of Teflon, flame retardants, pesticides, sealants, carpets and more, specifically by DuPont de Nemours Inc.  It is called the ‘forever’ chemical as it never degrades and just accumulates. If a film stars liberal actor Mark Ruffalo, you know where it’s headed.  He plays attorney Robert Bilott who is still litigating PFOAs.   

The lawyer sees the dead cows.

A gruff dairy farmer in West Virginia finds many of his cows dying with enlarged livers, cancers, crazed behavior and more, drinking the water from a creek running by his house.  Upstream is a waste dump run by DuPont from effluents out of their Teflon factory.  The town of Parkersburg, West Virginia is dominated by the firm’s factory, as it pays well.  Bilott, a newly-minted law partner, is told by the angry farmer that ‘the system is rigged’ when Bilott suggests he'd look into the matter, as the man is an acquaintance of his grandma. Seeing the many humps of buried cattle was convincing.

Oddly Bilott works for a corporate chemical DEFENSE firm in Cincinnati, so he’s usually on the other side of these legal fights.  Bilott has to play down the fact that he’s from ‘hicksville’ West Virginia to his white-shoe co-workers.  Somehow his boss allows him to take on this charity cow case and file a quiet suit.  Somehow!  What follows is a long, long legal fight to stop DuPont and bring financial compensation, as it’s a civil matter.  What he discovers is that beyond the cows the drinking water in town is also contaminated with PFOAs, leading to higher than average rates of human cancers and other health problems.  Workers on the Teflon line have miscarriages.  People in town are dying.  He discovers DuPont knew that PFOA/PFOS were harmful in the 1970s but kept it secret – just like the tobacco, Round-Up, asbestos, DDT and carbon companies did for their products.

The case in the film starts in 1999.  It ends with high individual and then class-wide legal settlements in 2017 – 18 years later.  The EPA did not regulate PFOAs because of their neo-liberal policy of allowing industry to police itself. DuPont knew that 1 part per million was toxic, while the incompetent West Virginia EPA claimed it was 150 parts per million.  Later tests revealed that 6 parts per million was in the water.  The law Bilott used was that if a firm knew something was harmful, that knowledge was the legal standard absent government regulation. 

After discovery, Bilott eventually forces DuPont to settle with a smaller settlement and medical monitoring.  80,000 residents are tested, the largest epidemiological study in history.  But it takes 7 years for the results to be tabulated while Parkersburg citizens continue to die. When the results come in, they indicate at least 6 deadly diseases.  So DuPont reneges on the agreement to compensate the class, and he has to take them to court, one plaintiff at a time.  He wins big, so they finally settle for $671M for the rest of the class.  The original farmer has long died of some kind of disease, possibly related to the water. 

There is an unlikely scene of lonely Bilott going through hundreds of boxes of original paper documents by hand, on his hands and knees, without a paralegal, high-speed scanner and OCR software.  All those were available in the late 1990s to a high-end law firm like his.  The film shows the slow but sure pursuit of ‘justice’ by U.S. courts and eventually the EPA.  It’s another familiar ‘success’ story against corporate profiteering and government complicity, as the regulators were previously captured by DuPont. But the 40 years of toxic effects were not reversed and are still on-going. How much of what we are still surrounded by contain PFOAs?  It is claimed that every person in the U.S. has them in their body.   Nearly everyone had a Teflon frying pan at one time for instance and to this day all pans do not list if they have PFOAs or not.  

The film is a snapshot of unregulated capital doing what it does.  And sometimes this has permanent effects. It shows the government, unless forced, to be in the pocket of capital.  It shows the drive for billions in profits will hide the science.  It shows the endless process of court actions when confronting a monied antagonist.  Heroic attorneys will evidently save us – a message pounded in for years in films like this.  Sometimes they are successful, though in this case the personal damage to Bilott and everyone else was very high.  But the basic problem of profiteering, regardless of consequences, remains even after this suit.

P.S. - Minnesota's own 3M invented these substances, and poisoned the ground and groundwater of 3 east St. Paul communities in the process.  They claim they will stop producing them in several years.  The EPA this year for the first time issued a warning on water levels of PFAs.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Blue Covenant,” “Ecology and Marxism,” “The Insect Crisis,” “The Tragedy of American Science,” “Reflections in the Woods,” “Stop Tar Sands Straw,” “Garbage Land,” “The Robbery of Nature” and “Ecological Marxism” (both by JB Foster); “The Playbook,” “How Beautiful We Were,” “Class Action,” “Gray Mountain” (Grisham); “Junk Science.”

The Cultural Marxist / May 7, 2024