A Geo-Fix?

“Category Five – Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them” by Porter Fox, 2024

This is a romantic and terrifying story of the power of the world’s oceans as they respond to global warming. The oceans that cover most of the earth, combined with the sun’s flares and the turning of the globe, provide the main forces behind the wind, rain, drought and severity of the world’s weather.  And yet much more is spent on Martian-type space research than ocean research, a typical ‘head in the clouds’ move, now compounded by Trump’s defunding of NOAA.  Fox describes individual super-storms, hurricanes, typhoons, supercells and cyclones to make his points.  They are nature unleashed in all its fury, resulting in damaging effects, especially to landlocked and coast-dwelling humans and any poor souls in its watery path. While this book mostly focuses on northern and central American oceans and seas, it references events in the Indian, Arctic and Southern oceans too.   

It is told through the eyes of Fox, who spent a lot of salt time on the Atlantic even as a youngster.  It is also an homage to his father, who built an advanced boat in his Maine garage, and started a boat business which later failed.  It includes an extremely experienced storm sailor; a dogged English mariner who logged old written storm data into a valuable book; a U.K. researcher organizing the inputting of hand-written data from the 1800s into a digital database; a private inventor of a sea drone gathering electronic ocean data; NOAA oceanographers working on current buoys, datasets and software and a world-wide ocean emergency crew leader describing the disasters he has seen.

Ah, POLITICS?

The book is not political in the sense that Fox thinks that only ‘money and data’ are the things stopping an understanding of global warming and attendant climate change action.  Right. He has no concept of politics, which is especially relevant after global warming denialists have been put in charge of the U.S. government.  With the defunding of NOAA and the ending of any climate change initiatives and policies in other parts of the federal government to benefit the carbon capitalists, the situation is dire. It is not just the carbon firms or banks that stand in the way, now the government is openly in the way.  Stories, first person interviews and data won’t change this.

As a landlubber whose contact with water and weather is through freshwater canoes, kayaks, a 10-horse motor on a rowboat, a small sailboat and occasional piloting of a pontoon or speedboat, I can say this book is very exotic stuff.  The ocean is another beast entirely. These folks are fascinated by the ocean in all its moods, but mostly hellish and difficult turns of weather.  They can pilot sailboats with ease, or at least competency, in the face of storms and towering seas.  Winds howl and waves are stories tall.  At 8 pounds per gallon of water this adds up to tons in a wave crashing on a deck. The experienced ‘rough seas’ sailor took a group of trainees straight through a near hurricane and they did not sink, with only one man being injured. 

But this is not just some adventure story.  The sailors, as amateur oceanic scientists, noticed the increases in waves, rain and wind years before the IPCC, Al Gore, the Paris Accord or 350.org. They saw these changes picking up speed and becoming more extreme.  The ‘ocean-atmosphere flux’ is a key ‘border’ location that moves CO2 in an ocean conveyer belt up, down and sideways.  This interface between air and water was, unsurprisingly, first measured by Exxon in the 1970s as it was trying to estimate the impact of burning fossil fuels.  The data was not good for Exxon and they hid the results.  As Fox emphasizes, ocean data is the missing piece of the environmental picture.  Unfortunately an un-manned surface sea drone discovered several years ago that the Southern Ocean around Antarctica was now emitting carbon, not storing it.  This is a telling fact if true.

Rescue outfits that arrive after hurricane storm damage report complete devastation in areas.  The 9^th Ward in New Orleans is still 25% of what it was before 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.  Especially in the Caribbean, many island nations encumbered by poverty and hit by cyclones have never recovered. Even in the U.S., after the headlines move on, the people left behind are forgotten and devastated for years.  Yet people are still moving to Florida and the Gulf Coast - though that ‘tide’ seems to be shifting, partly due to the bean-counting exigencies of the U.S. insurance industry.

Fox has a vision of an apocalyptic storm that directly hits New York City in 2100, powered by warm ocean water, salt content, a sinking eastern coast, prior sea level rise and horrendous 200 mph winds, all combining to overwhelm the massive newly-built ‘gates’ to New York harbor, flooding Manhattan. It is no little Superstorm Sandy. Buildings collapse on Manhattan and for 48 hours the slow-moving storm ravages the city and its boroughs.  What is left is uninhabitable.  This is no movie, it is the future for every city on the coasts of the world until something drastic is done.  And it might happen long before 2100.

Saved by the Ocean?

A Geo SOLUTION?

Fox’s solutions? It is a technical one, at least to him. He sails his father’s first boat far down the Hudson from its moorage, then around Manhattan, up the East River and into Long Island Sound to Woods Hole, Rhode Island. It is an extremely weather-impacted trip to find out the rumored geo-solution. He has to face one of his greatest fears in Long Island Sound – a storm that he cannot handle if he is to reach his destination. For the first time his level of confidence in his training and his father’s boat give him relative peace, with this storm at least.

Fox meets two oceanographers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.  They think the solution to reducing climate carbon is in the deep ocean and the multiple life forms hidden there, almost unmapped by science. This lightless area is called ‘the twilight zone.’  According to Fox, they are in a race against the brutal industrial fishing industry, which will destroy many of these life forms using miles-long nets.  Because no one owns the ocean, it is still the ‘wild west,’ a lawless bonanza.  So here it is.  The biological carbon sink of the deep ocean via various forms of plankton up to giant whales sequesters far more carbon than some high-electrical engineering fix, or land-locked soil, trees, mangrove swamps, bamboo or hemp.  It sequesters 15-20 times as much. And it is mainly through fish ‘poop,’ or as it’s scientifically called “marine snow.”  Fox details how the ocean has prevented the worst effects of global warming – so far.

Woods Hole maps this ‘twilight-zone’ of zooplankton, fish larvae, gelatinous organisms, tons of microorganisms, along with organic waste and detritus at the bottom of the ocean through submersible drones, robots, cameras and sensors.  As Fox puts it, they are ‘following the CO2’ into the ocean, which even the IPCC hasn’t done.  So here are their preliminary findings:  the deep ocean contains 10 times more organic life than originally thought.  In 2014 a study of this mesopelagic zone estimated 10-20 billion tons of fish, shellfish and microorganisms exist there, which is far more than on land. Here is where climate change and your diet connect once again.  Capitalist commercial plans to drag and harvest everything in the ocean like this could drop these numbers to the point where this carbon sink is … sunk.  But thank you sushi!

To increase the amount of carbon sequestration given the amount of fluctuation in different geographies, one scientist wants to use iron fertilization in the ocean, which increases the amount of CO2 making it to the deep, dark ocean floor.  Seaweed is another method, though how that works is left unexplained. These are ‘geo’ solutions and no one in the book mentions if scattering iron in salt water has blowback effects.  That is Fox’s fix.

A tidbit from this somewhat lyrical book reminds us that Ernest Hemingway wrote a story for the New Masses called “Who Murdered the Vets?” It was about war veteran construction workers left on an island in the Florida Keys that died after a vicious 1935 hurricane hit.  The story led to a scandal, and later, federal legislation under F.D. Roosevelt to establish the National Hurricane Center.  So socialists even had a role in that. 

I got this book at the library.  However May Day Books has a good selection of books on climate change and science from a left-wing environmentalist point of view.

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “global warming,” “climate change,” “science.”

Red Frog / June 22, 2025

The Permanent Rent Strike

 “Abolish Rent – How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis” by T. Rosenthal & L. Vilchis, 2024

This short book by two Los Angeles rent activists who helped form the LA Tenants Union (LATU) has revolutionary undertones and lots of facts and examples to buttress its case.  LA is one of several places in the U.S. that are ‘ground zero’ for high housing costs, which especially affect minority communities, so their experience is valuable.  Every tenant’s rights advocate should read it. 

There is plenty of familiar rhetoric here, so I’m not going to belabor that.  Generally, the business of cities is real estate.  City councils are the caretakers of this private land casino, usually run by Democrats.  They work closely with developers and landlords, while laws are written to protect private real estate ownership.  The LATU says “the real estate state” is waging “a war on tenants” along with private industry.  As Mike Davis put it, LA was a “rent plantation.” 

Here are the facts and points they make about the exploitative and racist rental industry in the U.S., and how they organize against it: 

     1.   “Half of the 100 million tenants spend more than a third of their income on rent.”

     2.   “In LA alone, 600K people spend fully 90 % of what they earn keeping a roof over their heads.”

     3.   “Every minute of every day, landlords file 7 evictions – totaling 3.6 million evictions a year.”

     4.   “In 2019 alone, rent payments totaled $512.4 billion.” 

     5.   “This is a transfer of wealth from over 100 million tenants to just over 11 million landlords.”  They do not include a profit rate.

6.   Large corporate and private equity landlords are more likely to evict, raise rents and gouge with fees and fines.  They are increasingly buying homes, farms, trailer parks and apartment buildings.

7.   The state’s physical force - the police and sheriff - back up landlords.

8.   Developers and landlords do not want to build or own real ‘affordable housing,’ no matter what they say. Right now …“There are 33 homes for every 100 families living in poverty.”

9.   New housing development, the so-called savior according to the market clowns, slows down rent increases but it does not stop them.  Engels pointed out that there is always a ‘housing shortage’ in a capitalist society - on purpose. 

10.       “68% of the world’s wealth is held in real estate.”  Most is in personal housing.

11.       Empty apartments and buildings sit alongside homeless encampments. “A $100 increase in rent means a 9% rise in homelessness.”

12.       The LATU supports public housing.  A long line of U.S. anti-communists have denounced public housing as ‘socialism.’  The neo-liberal Clinton administration destroyed thousands of public housing units in the 1990s. 

13.       The authors advocate an eventual ‘permanent rent strike’ to squeeze out landlords.

14.       They retail a classic and excellent story of a year-long rent strike in Boyle Heights in 2017by Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos against the gentrification of their building.  Stories of other LA tenant struggles across the city are also told.

15.       The LATU helped the Boyle Heights struggle, and advocates tenants’ associations in buildings or neighborhoods.  The point is to build tenant power not by the rules of non-profits, certain council persons, state housing departments or establishment lawyers.  (They do use sympathetic lawyers.)

16.       A tenants union or association is a vehicle of class struggle. The key to building a union is “building community” and breaking out of isolation.

17.       Their union has “won collective bargaining agreements; reversed illegal lock-outs; canceled rent debt; secured building-wide repairs; lowered rents and built tenant dignity.” 

18.       Eviction is personal, so one unit of the LATU specializes in “naming landlords, publicizing their neglect, visiting their houses and disrupting their social lives.” 

19.       Organizing buildings reclaims local space and the commons.  They note that a rent strike is similar to an occupation.  This is all linked to the struggle for land.  One thing they advocate are tenant gardens, for instance.

20.       The capitalist state and its politicians answer tenant political and social demands with privatization schemes, gentrification and unaffordable public/private projects.

This book has the details that any tenant, tenant organizer, tenant lawyer or socialist needs to know.  One caveat:  The authors seem to think that everyone who owns a home is exempt from housing problems.  Rising mortgages, taxes, fees, repairs, utilities, insurance and weather play a negative role for ‘home owners.’  This is a link with the problems of tenants, which at some point could forge a united front between the two.  The LATU’s ultimate aim is “a world without landlords and a world without rents.”  That is a socialist goal I think. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “eviction,” “rent,” “gentrification,” “housing.”

And I bought it at May Day Books, which has a good selection of books on housing.

Red Frog / June 19, 2025  - Celebrate Juneteenth!

The 2.5 International?

 “Class, Crisis & the State” by Erik Olin Wright, 1976-1978-1979 (Part 2)

Wright was a Marxist sociologist who specialized in analyses of politics, class and economics.  In the second part of this book he looks at 3 ‘Marxist’ theories of crisis in capitalist economies; and secondly, goes on to compare Max Weber and V. Lenin over the issue of the state.  His method in the first is to combine all the theories as relevant at times, while trying to find a medium between Weber and Lenin on how to deal with the capitalist state, i.e. in his words “using the capitalist state to destroy the capitalist state.”  Shades of the 2 and a Half International!

A Crisis

Wright runs us through the basics of the Marxist analysis of labor and surplus value; the conversion of surplus value into constant and variable capital and the push for capital reproduction on an ‘every-expanding scale.’  He uses complex graphs and math to partly prove his points, but these are for specialists. The three theories Wright deals with regarding capitalist accumulation failures are: #1) falling rate of profit. #2) under-consumption. #3) rising wages. Wright adds a very interesting caveat, that ‘the state’ – the Keynesian state specifically – has a ‘contradictory’ role in accumulation.  In other words it doesn’t just prop up capital with indirect aide, it can drain capital as well with various ‘unproductive’ and ‘non-commodified’ investments like welfare, unemployment insurance, military spending and the like. Ultimately it is unsustainable in a capitalist context. This is why a growing wing of capital opposes the ‘welfare’ state, especially in unprofitable times.  Wright does not intend to look at circulation issues – debt, credit and monetary values.

Wright asks if a stagnant, no-growth, non-accumulating, ‘stagflation’ capital is possible as a form of permanent crisis, but leaves it at that. Certainly that has happened, so it is possible historically, and for certain firms, inevitable. “Accumulation plays a vital role in containing and channeling the class struggle” according to Wright, so guess what happens when the money runs down? Repression and austerity!  Welcome to the actual reality of economics in class society.

1) Wright explains that, for the ‘falling rate of profit’ argument, since the only source of surplus value (profits) is living labor, investments in substitutes like equipment, machines, robots, software and buildings has a ‘tendency’ to reduce profit rates.  Marx explained this in Das Capital.  A drop in profits creates a crisis, which the larger capitalists respond to by liquidating weak capitals and bankruptcies, but also attacking the working class through various means – speed-up, layoffs, price rises, cutting production and the like. 

2) The second so-called reason for crises is that workers’ are unable to buy things, so production stalls and profits fall.  The underconsumptionists look to ‘consumption’ as the driver of profitability, not production.  The ‘falling rate of profit’ folks would say this is a result of a profit drop, not the cause, just as overproduction is a result. Engels pointed out that ‘underconsumption’ is a standard state for the world working class, and for Sweezy it becomes worse under monopoly / oligopoly capitalism. This impacts smaller, ‘competitive’ capital and its workers, along with rents. Methods to deal with underconsumption by ‘unproductive’ or even wasteful expenditures include using consumer credit, planned obsolescence and Keynesian state intervention in the economy to prop it up. 

3) The third idea, which has also been proclaimed by Wall Streeters, is that higher wages drive down profits, and incidentally, boost inflation as capitalists try to stabilize profit rates.  This is a result of successful class struggle by workers, in effect taking back some profit in the struggle over the surplus. Class struggle also affects the length of the work day and the intensity of work. This is inevitable in a class society, but it can also go the other way, as has been the case since the late 1970s in the U.S. This history undermines this argument as a reason for crisis, as a number have happened since 1978.  Its proponents believe these crises are ways to discipline labor and push down wages.    

Wright thinks all of these things can contribute to crisis, and are ‘integrated’ either as dominos or as a web of interactions in a crisis economy. He leans a bit more to argument #1, as a ‘high organic composition of capital’ weakens attempts to increase exploitation.  While he did not find much data to support #1 in the 1970s, Michael Roberts and others have since provided strong evidence. The weakening of the profit rate, for whatever reason, leads to movements towards speculation.   

Wright points out ‘tight’ domestic labor markets mean that capital has to import labor from other countries, certainly relevant now in the context of Trump’s counter-productive terror campaign against immigrants.  Wright discusses the concept of ‘unproductive’ state welfare and military expenditures that come out of tax revenues from labor and capital  He moderates this view by observing that the state also indirectly supports capitalist business accumulation and exploitation in myriad ways.  So the state has a dual economic function. Wright consequently understands that all taxation is not a drain on surplus value, as the libertarians would have it.  

The State and ...

Max Weber insisted that a ‘rational’ and well-run parliament skilled at compromise is the key to democracy.  If it existed, the ‘bureaucracy’ of the state would be reined in by this extraordinary parliament.  Lenin insisted in “State and Revolution” that any bourgeois parliament was dominated by large capital and so was the upper bureaucracy in that state.  All of it had to be overthrown for actual democracy - workers democracy - to take hold.  For democracy, Weber posited an efficient parliament; Lenin soviets.  Weber thought the soviet, as a form of direct democracy (also called council, assembly, commune), was impossible.  Lenin said it worked during the Paris Commune.  He pointed out that a ‘well run’ parliament was possible, but still inimical to the interests of the working class. Weber claimed the state was neutral; Lenin knew it was not. These two ideas are polar opposites.

Wright expounds on each opinion, revealing the weakness in Weber’s classless congress and uses history to poke holes in Lenin’s theory about Soviets.  Lenin thought a rooted and efficient ‘vanguard party’ and an educated working class would solve bureaucratic problems in the soviet state.  Wright spots Lenin’s inability to locate contradictions within such a single party or state.   Wright thought a growing bureaucracy was inevitable in a capitalist state.  Lenin understood the value of scientific and trained experts in various disciplines in government, as long as they were under proletarian leadership.  Weber ignores experts and believes everyone in government is a ‘bureaucrat.’  Oddly, Wright never mentions law, the key to any armed state, and instead concentrates on the concept of bureaucracy. 

Wright’s solution to this debate is to posit that “socialists can use the capitalist state to destroy the capitalist state.” Wright does not identify this as a social democratic tactic.  He explains that this might be possible because, in the face of a capital strike or economic sabotage by capitalists, the state’s financial role is large enough that it can defeat or stabilize the working classes’ living conditions.  He advocates a socialist government back nearly all efforts by social movements and unions in their efforts to further democratize government beyond just voting.  He advocates working with the ‘extra-parliamentary revolutionary left,’ not repressing it.  He points out that the lower ranks of civil servants are proletarianized now and, while they live off tax revenue, they could play a vital role in replacing the top capitalist bureaucrats in government.  Lastly, he thinks that the Left can split the military when the inevitable attempt of a capitalist coup or counter-revolution happens.  

Wright never mentions fascism.  He does not advocate dual power, workplace committees or assemblies/ councils/ communes/ soviets, nor arming the working class to the point of having workers’ guards. He has nothing to say about nationalizing basic industries, rent control or a debt jubilee.  He ignores transitional demands that strengthen the class, though he hints at an elected workers’ government pushing in that direction.      

Wright’s prediction for the future was for greater state involvement, which has certainly happened in one way, but not that way he thought.  While the state has repeatedly had to prop up capital during crises – see especially in 2008 – neo-liberalism and libertarian ideas on the dominating role of the market have become the rule.  Under Trump and the Republican Party it has become a scorched earth tactic, as it has in other authoritarian ‘democracies.’  Wright underestimated the vileness of capital in the 1970s, which also undermines both Weber's 'rational' parliaments and the underconsumptionists' love of Keynes.  

This is a thoughtful book worth reading, filled with newish ideas and accurate perceptions, even if you don’t agree with all of them.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Erik Olin Wright,” “Lenin,” “Weber,” “falling rate of profit,” “underconsumptionism,” “Monthly Review,” “Michael Roberts.”   

And I bought the book at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 16, 2025

Classy Stuff

 “Class, Crisis & the State” by Erik Olin Wright, 1976-1978-1979 (Part 1)

Wright was a Marxist sociologist who specialized in identifying class structures in states like the U.S.  Here he analyzes Nicos Poulantzas’ sectarian view of class.  Poulantzas’ formulation of a ‘new petit bourgeoisie’ includes all white collar workers, state workers and service workers, among others. To Poulantzas the only proletarians are blue-collar workers performing ‘manual’ labor building physical ‘things.’ In his definition of class he uses suspect social and political estimates of class, while disowning the economic role as primary.  The upshot is that with Poulantzas’ figures, about 20% of the U.S. population is in the ‘proletariat’ while 70% is in the ‘petit-bourgeoisie.’  The bourgeoisie even gets bigger according to him. Wright takes him apart.

Wright has a dialectical, flexible and nuanced view of class, though both of them drag behind the present as would be expected. The lack of a modern, grounded subtly is irritating, but it is perhaps because of the time period it was written in.  The growth in ‘precariat’ and ‘gig’ labor is missing, along with the professional strata.  Concepts like intellectual property as a commodity or service labor as a commodity are only hinted at. Poulantzas, who seems not to have worked a day in his life in a factory, warehouse, truck, cube or in a service role, especially hides behind rigid, abstract categories.  Wright introduces the concept of “contradictory locations within class relations” to explain the subtle combinations of class aspects in some jobs, which breaks from dualistic either/or thinking.  He introduces ‘shades of grey’ to complex class environments.

The Arguments

Wright’s main angle is that the class struggle demands understanding of who might side with you. He shows how the state and economy are all affected by class struggle.  Wright maintains there are 3 views of what constitutes the working class – 1) everyone who earns a salary or wage; 2) white collar workers are included in the proletariat, along with others; 3) only those who do manual labor.  Poulantzas holds to the latter; Wright comes out somewhere in #2, because of course there are more strata of white collar labor than just cube dwellers.  For instance Wright includes most housewives in the working class, especially if their husbands are of that class, doing mostly unpaid reproductive labor. 

Poulantzas uses the distinction between productive and unproductive labor to help settle class boundaries.  I.e. producing use values is productive.  Everything else is ‘petit-bourgeois.’  Now this would mean nurses and teachers, or anyone who sells their labor to maintain the working class, is ‘unproductive.’ Yet without both of these relatively low-paid categories a working class would be stupid and dead.  Poulantzas insists all commodities are physical and ‘material’ – ignoring contributory labor like this or the very real capitalist commodities of ‘services’ and intellectual property.  Both which lead in exports from the U.S. by the way, and seemingly unknown to Trump.  This ‘factory fetishism’ – and I say this as a former factory worker - is absurd.  Even truckers, the largest group of workers in the U.S., produce no ‘thing,’ yet Poulantzas includes them in the working-class as transporters of things.  What about the techie who maintains a purchased download to ‘move’ software into a local computer?  

Wright points out that so-called ‘unproductive’ workers still have the same class interests as the ‘productive.’ Grocery clerks move products to shelves, but they also check out customers, which could be called ‘unproductive.’ This creates a dual role.  That they are ‘petit-bourgeois’ according to Poulantzas will be news to all the grocery store unions and nearly all of these workers. 

Poulantzas next idea is ‘technical’ and ‘social’ divisions of labor.  This addresses the issue of technical ‘supervisors,’ which bedevils a good part of this argument.  What kind of ‘supervision’ are we talking about?  Union ‘lead’ men who direct a crew?  A supervisor who sits in an office and knows nothing about the work, but is an arm of HR?  A foreman who has no power outside directing work? A corporate manager who can hire and fire? There are various strata of ‘supervisors,’ including some that do their own work outside HR mandates, like lawyers, a professional strata.  Wright does not fixate on the social ability to ‘hire and fire’ but he concludes that supervision can be an example of a ‘contradictory location.’  Poulantzas says they are all bourgeois or petit-bourgeois just from their job role.

Another duality discussed is ‘possession of the means of production’ versus economic ownership of those means.  Poulantzas says that because managers ‘control’ the production process, they are part of the bourgeoisie.  How much they actually ‘control’ is dubious and, as you can see here, economic ownership is not his loadstone for the identification of the bourgeoisie. Another false dichotomy used by him is the ‘mental versus manual” one, when anyone who works a job knows every manual job requires mental labor of varying degrees, and every ‘mental’ one also demands manual skills of varying degrees.  Even software requires hardware.

Where are you in the pyramid?

Wright’s Arguments Against Poulantzas

Wright creates various diagrams that show the interaction of the various categories, class layers and class antagonisms.  These are not very helpful, but perhaps a sociology student will be thrilled. He does nail Poulantzas use of political and ideological criteria in his class identifications over economic.  In a way Wright identifies the creep of identity politics in his thought.  As he points out even ‘unproductive’ capital – i.e. bankrupt or zombie corporations – are still linked to the bourgeoisie.  Engineers and technicians are ruled out of the working-class by Poulantzas, but as anyone knows, there are various strata within these occupations.  Some engineers are indeed in the petit-bourgeoisie by virtue of their salaries, role in production and outside real estate or market holdings, like all professionals.  Some will even own a side business and become part of the petit-bourgeoisie that way.  But others, like some tech coder, computer repair technician or highly-skilled HVAC labor?  Wright again employs his category of ‘contradictory location’ to some.

As has already been seen, Wright pillories Poulantzas’ structural critique as virtually eliminating the modern working class. It ignores the neo-liberal move in the center capitalist countries towards service labor, intellectual property, reproductive and maintenance labor.  In 2025 this issue is even more obvious.  In the 1970s, 15% of women and 23% of men were working-class according to Poulantzas.  How this minority will overthrow capital is beyond me. 

Wright illustrates how the ‘old petit-bourgeoisie’ (which he does not identify as small capitalists too…even though that is the exact French translation) is threatened by big capital.  In contradiction, the so-called ‘new petit-bourgeoisie’ actually owes monopoly corporations their existence.  So how are these both part of the same class, as insisted by Poulantzas, when they have different direct enemies and different possible solutions?  One wants a ‘free market’ for the little shark, while the others, if they are revolutionary, would call for the nationalization and workers control of their corporation. 

Wright replaces Poulantzas definitions with his own, using the ‘contradictory class position’ logic, discussing professors, researchers, line leaders, clerks and secretaries and so on. He estimates that 18-23% are in ‘contradictory positions’ while 41-54% are in the working class, which he defines as “’non-supervisory and non-autonomous.”  Combined they add up to between 60-70% of the population, which I still consider low. 

He considers students to be marked by their ‘class trajectory.’  Retirees, house wives and house husbands, permanent welfare recipients and (though he does not mention them) criminals are to be analyzed for “their immediate and their class interests.”  In other words, the relevance of reforms and revolution to each. Housewives and husbands are directly related to the class position of the wage earner.  Retirees (pensioners to Europeans) are also marked by their ‘class trajectory.’  He cannot identify the class position of permanent welfare recipients, although it seems obvious that, barring severe personal damage, most would benefit from economic reforms.  

Wright treats the last group as those employed by the political and ideological apparatus – equating professors with police, prison guards, bureaucrats, politicians and preachers.  An odd combination which some might choose to oppose, as many profs are untenured and paid poorly.  It is clear this group's role in how they prop up capital is key.  Does every professor do that?  I would add big entertainers and ‘public intellectuals’ as part of this cohort.    

Wright dwells for a long time on the concept of ‘loss of control of the work process’ as a marker for proletarianization.  However, every worker has a certain amount of ‘control’ of how they do their job, rising with certain jobs to the point that some bosses don’t know how or what they do except in the vaguest terms.  Again, it’s not an either/or proposition.  Capitalist ownership and direct capitalist control have devolved through stock ownership and managerial compensation schemes, as these are no longer small companies.  Yet in this apparent contradiction big stockholders still own and run things, while CEO managers can come and go.  Shades of grey.

Wright lastly focuses on the role of class struggle in modifying every class, every class structure and every state apparatus, as it is obvious each is the product of this historical battle on both small and large scales.  Every single nation and geography is marked by how this struggle went or is going.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “new petit-bourgeois,’ Erik Olin Wright, “Poulantzas,” “class.”

And I bought the book at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 8, 2025

Time-Wasting Sci Fi

 “Mickey 17”film by Bong Joon Ho, 2025

This is a dystopian space 'comedy' about a disposable worker stuck on an ice planet in 2054.  With the advent of human cloning through a digital meat printer injecting everything from vegetables to shit into the mold, it can re-create dead people.  And Mickey is 'it.' His memories are kept in a database and inserted each time he dies.  Mickey is up to his seventeenth life on the planet.  Ho was the director of Parasite and the class issue is fairly obvious here.  Most real workers are actually also disposable, so Mickey’s no fluke.

Mickey has no skills and is escaping from a poverty-strewn Earth run by corporations and deadly loan sharks, which isn’t far off the mark. He’s a bit of a half-wit and signs up to be a disposable. The meat printer was designed by a psychopath, but that doesn't stop the program.  The space ship to the planet, and the colony once it gets there, is owned and run by a blowhard Tech bro, which should ring some bells. Mark Ruffalo gets to ham it up as this obnoxious Overlord. 

After dying a bunch of times in Nazi-like experiments as a 'team player,' Mickey is reported missing in a crevasse, and so a multiple clone, Mickey 18, has been created.  This Mickey 18 is at first somewhat cruel and bloodthirsty, so something went wrong with the cloning.  Multiples of one person are illegal in this world and against ‘god’s plan’ or some such drivel.  This is the complication which leads to Mickey 17s life being put in final jeopardy. 

In his wanderings through the snow fields, Mickey 17 met sentient ‘creepers’ who save his life from the crevasse.  They are sort of like wiggly armadillos with rasping suction mouths, but in the end they become allies against the Tech Bros, the loan sharks, the stupid co-workers, the cruel ‘expendable’ program and its cloning machine. The colony lives happily ever after in the final battle.

The actors are Euro-Americans, not South Koreans, so this film is aimed at the U.S. market more than the Asian.  To me, other than the ‘thin satire’ and obvious social pokes at Silicon Valley ‘transhumanism’ and creatures like Elon Musk who are in love with space, the film seems to be an exercise in gruesome and trivial fantasy, a wasted pastiche of twists and turns.  Why?  As David Foster Wallace might have remarked in Infinite Jest, post-modern entertainment has become a catatonic diversion from life.

Don’t waste your time unless you are a die-hard sci-fi fan. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “science fiction,” “Parasite,” ‘satire.’ 

The Cultural Marxist / June 4, 2025

Safe As Milk

 “Half-Blood Blues” by Esi Edugyan, 2011

This is a story so familiar it seems predetermined.  It is about some jazz-men in the 1930s-1940s in Berlin and Paris who are of mixed ethnicity, dark-skinned and mostly ‘Americans.’  So you gotta know that Nazis, anti-Semitism, WWII and racism are involved.  These are safe topics for liberal readers, who this book is obviously pitched at. It includes Louis Armstrong in Paris, wetting the appetite of every Ken Burns fan.  The genius music ‘star’ is a skinny young man born in Germany to African-German parents, Hieronymous, who is known as ‘the Kid.’  Is he like Kid Ory?  He’s a brilliant sax player if the adulation is to be believed.  The whole point is to cut a record called “Half-Blood Blues” in Paris, riffing off the Nazi anthem “Horst Wessel,” but turning it upside down.

So we have a femme fatale singer named Lilah who is a mix of Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker.  Narrating is the somewhat stupid and angry bass player Sidney; his long-time buddy, sharp-witted drummer Chip; a German producer, a Jewish piano player, a big fat trumpet man and so on. Part of this group cuts a ‘legendary’ record that draws the 1992 Berlin jazz crowd to a documentary about the group, who are now in their ‘80s. The supposition is that Hiero was nabbed by ‘the Boots’ in Paris, sent to a camp and died there, so only Sidney and Chip are left to attend the 1992 screening. 

The best scenes are those of the evacuation of Paris, as panicked crowds attempt to board trains at the Gare d’Austerlitz or stream down the Boulevard St. Michel south before the arrival of the German army in June 1940.  The most chilling is a visit to a zoo in Hamburg, which houses not just animals but Africans, Eskimos and Polynesians in open air cages.  The rest is catty dialog between the band members and a bad love affair involving Sidney and Lilah. Looming over it all is, yes, scary Nazis and the band's political stupidity in the face of events, all for their love of the music.

Since no one can tell a linear story anymore, this one jumps back and forth between modern and old Berlin, modern and old Baltimore, modern and old Paris and points in- between.  Poland even figures in. It actually weakens the story and seems more of an irritant than anything else.  There is no goddamn aesthetic reason why it was done.  Of course, getting an MFA, which she did, requires one to toss timelines. 

The main criticism of this very popular WWII genre – look at Netflix, Britbox and others and count the WWII films – is that it is safe, too safe.  The ‘good war,’ the obvious baddies, the obvious ‘goodies,’ the cultural sophistication of jazz, the lovable half-black men, the talented genius – it is all too easy. This is why you see almost nothing anymore about the Vietnam War except books by Viet Thanh Nguyen. And Iraq?  And Gaza?  Nada. 

A recent film by a young African-American director Ryan Coogler, Sinners, is also a big success because Coogler discovered ‘the blues.’ Like jazz, the blues is another respectable genre which has also been around for ages.  Much as I love the blues, it’s too safe nowadays too.  To top it off, Sinners is set in Jim Crow times in Mississippi, featuring juke joints and yes, vampires. These are all, at this point, deep cultural and political clichés. 

Writers and directors have to write about the present.  Some have, attempting to bring the fight against fascism, racism or capitalism into our modern reality, or as close to it as they can get. There are even attempts to pick up on current culture. But police brutality, poverty, war, imperialism, police states or exposes of some fascist group in the U.S. are tricky, as they involve politics.  As we know, politics hurts box office or positions on ‘best seller lists.’ They are not ‘safe as milk.’  Much as I personally like jazz or Paris or hating on old-time Nazis, it’s too easy.  Time to redirect our guns, if not for anything else, to escape the cultural predictability of easy boredom.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Nazi,” “jazz,” “World War II,” "blues."  

And I got this at May Day’s excellent used/cutout section!

Red Frog / May 31, 2025

Viejo Gringo Reports #5: Peruvian Creativity

 Jose Carlos Mariategui Casa & Museo - Lima Peru

This was the final home of Mariategui, one of the most creative Marxists in Latin America.  It was preserved and then turned into an official museum by the City of Lima in 1994.  Mariategui is one of the first modern Marxists to consciously incorporate indigenous people into the revolutionary movement.  He influenced the origins of Liberation Theology by realizing the role of ‘myth’ and belief within the socialist movement, as socialism can also be messianic.  He analyzed the role of colonialism and imperialism in economic and political detail in Peru, and by extension, all of Latin America.  He was also fluent in cultural matters.

On organizational issues, Mariategui opposed the left-nationalism of APRA, which was based on the ‘anti-imperialist’ wing of the Peruvian capitalist class and later won elections as a bourgeois-nationalist formation.  APRA’s founder, Haya de la Torre, was influenced by the Mexican Revolution, not the Soviet one.  Not surprisingly APRA, like the bloody Kuomintang, was inducted into the Comintern by Stalin. Instead Mariategui rejected instantly forming a Communist Party without roots in the proletariat, campesinos and peasants.

A Peruvian Socialist Party was finally formed in 1928, but without mentioning ‘democratic-centralism’ – a concept which was being transformed into bureaucratic centralism by the Comintern.  Mariategui preferred a class-based ‘front’ that would challenge capital across the board, and hoped the PSP would help form that front. All these approaches set Mariategui apart from the slavish CPers who aped everything from Moscow.  He was denounced by their mouthpieces for various deviations in a Latin American conference

Amauta and his various interests.

My Spanish is rudimentary, so I could not work with the guide in this free, gratis, museum, though I was able to read some of the texts.  They would not even take a donation – very socialist.  Mariategui visited Europe once in 1919 with comrades, meeting Togliatti, Barbusse and Zinoviev, and embraced Marxism during that trip. This was in the period of the Spartacist uprising in Germany, the Italian factory occupations and the formation of the Italian CP – tumultuous times. 

Mariategui had 4 children and was crippled by a joint injury in his left leg as a child, which later led to amputation and a wheelchair.  He founded the journal Amauta (Quechua for ‘wise’ or ‘teacher’) in 1926, was imprisoned in 1927 and in 1928 broke with APRA.  He was one of the founders of both the PSP in 1928 and in 1929, the General Confederation of Workers of Peru.  He died in 1930, buried after a massive funeral procession.  He lived a short but productive life.

A communist breaks with bourgeois nationalism.

Today a statue of him is in a city plaza not far from the museum.  Here are some more pictures from the museum: 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Peru,” Mariategui.”

The Cultural Marxist / May 26, 2025    

Like the colonialists, we must carry death.

Funeral at top.

Viejo Gringo Reports #4: Old Mountain, Old Reality

 A Wonder of the World

A visit to Machu Picchu is an event, a trip to one of the ‘7 Wonders of the World.’  However it is also mass tourism. Many tickets are required. Hordes wait on the train platforms.  Lines can be long. Timing is all important, and you only spend about 3 hours at the site, most with voluble guides.  The air is thin and some steps tricky.  Since we have all seen multiple pictures of the little city on the mountain, backed by its rounded, pointed peak, it seems unreal.  Am I really here?  Was I there?  Is this happening?  It is a bit disconcerting.  Tourists are snapping selfies and pictures of themselves endlessly, as if to prove the fact.  I would rather sit in one place for a time and absorb the thing. Do it if you go.

Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu

What is funny is that these tourists are from all over Latin America and the world.  Many have some kind of religion other than that of the Quechua Inca. Some have none.  Yet it is a pilgrimage to an important pagan religious site.  The architecture, agronomy, sun temples, holy rocks and mountains all play a role in that story. People flock to Notre Dame and the Siena basilica, the mosques in Casablanca and Mecca, the shores of the Ganges in India or temples in Ankor Wat.  Machu Picchu represents grounded paganism, though even paganism has its ridiculous side too.  Nevertheless I’ll quote a funny Facebook meme of a native American replying to a European priest and explorer in the 1700s:  “But dude, the sun is real!”

In the little mountain town there are dug-out places for offerings to Pacha Mama – Mother Earth. Llamas and alpacas were sacrificed to her. There is a stone condor, perhaps as a nod to the air and gods in the sky.  There is a semi-circular Temple of the Sun, designed like Stonehenge to catch the rays of sunrise on the summer solstice. There are terraced fields to grow food and also test varieties at height as a science experiment.  Quinoa, potatoes, chilis and corn were some of the foods.  There is a grassy central plaza where ceremonies, flute music and ball games took place.  It is the terminus of the walkable Inca Trail from Cusco, so it was tightly connected to that city. About 500 lived there other than the royal family.  What is somewhat tragic is that when the conquistadors and Pizzaro arrived they were still building structures.  So Machu Picchu, like life, went unfinished.

PAGANISM & HISTORY

And now for something different, but not quite.  It is also well known that Marx, in the “Gotha Programme” pointed out that labor ‘and nature’ create all wealth. There are also many quotes from Marx about the link between human biology and history.  Here is one I easily found by Engels:  "Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst..."

This is not biological ‘essentialism’ or crude empiricism.  This is a crucial fact, as we are very conscious and hard-working animals.  Marx studied ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ because they are the foundation of human life.  He determined that the capitalists would figure out the lowest amount they could pay for workers to survive, gain knowledge and reproduce more workers and consumers.  It was and still is an essential calculation for many capitalists.  In other words, how much can we get away with?

These processes are the root of history since hunter-gatherer times. We are born into history, yes, but with a human body that still has ‘needs.’  Do a thought experiment about a ‘being’ that doesn’t need to eat, never gets hot or cold, never dies, is not bothered by rain, snow, sleet and the like, and can create others like him with the snap of a ‘finger.’  That would be a science fiction or religious ‘thing’ – it would not be human. It would be a product of Silicon Valley corporate ‘transhumanism.’  

And where would literature or film be without the gravitas of mortality?  Creativity, work, striving, building are all aspects of this 'human condition.'

Agricultural terraces at Machu Picchu

The ‘sacred valley’ of Peru leading to Machu Picchu provides clues as to this notion of human needs.  Why was the valley ‘sacred’ to the Inka?  Because of its agricultural productivity.  Terraces on the mountain sides, agricultural bottom-lands and a consistent rainy season made it a fertile place, along with rivers like the Urubamba and snow caps above. What pagan entities did the Inka worship?  The sun, moon, water and “Pacha Mama” – or mother earth.  Why?  It seems obvious.  This was their grounded, material “Trinity” unlike the ridiculous and idealist Christian / Catholic one – Father, Son and Holy Ghost - which has no connection to nature.

Machu Picchu provided a summer refuge from Cusco for the royal family.  Note, every royal family has a ‘summer palace.’ Now the question arises, who got the surplus that funded the building of Machu Picchu as a center of learning, astronomy, shamanism, botany, stonemasonry, textiles, architecture and agronomy? The Inkan ruling class were the beneficiaries, along with their experts and shamans, while the peasant farmers and building laborers provided the labor, and the soldiers, protection. Which might remind one of the Egyptian pharaoh’s and their skilled layers too. Yet this grew out of the human drive to survive entailing food, clothing, shelter and community.  All these things are only made possible by the latter, community, which is key.  And the lords controlled the community, though egalitarian peasant communes called allyus existed far from the empire's control. 

There is a centuries-long tradition of textiles in Peru, which needs no explanation. The conquistadores burned indigenous textiles in their destructive religious frenzy, along with melting all the gold and silver into ingots and shipping them to Spain.  The Inca did not use gold and silver for money, only in ceremonies to decorate their upper classes.  Pre-Incan societies had many artifacts for fertility and those depicting sex, which figures.  Why did they need children to know anything, as they had a very large school in that little mountain town erroneously called Machu Picchu?  Why did they need children, period?  That answer too is obvious.  It's a note to post-modernist liberals.

This is how pre-colonial human ‘history’ functioned at this point, an archaic society rooted in the highly-conscious and hard-working human animal’s life-needs and life-force, which eventually produced a surplus for their holy ruling class.  Then Pizzaro’s colonialist diseases, cavalry and troops arrived and killed or destroyed what they could.  Another system began to grow in Peru – extractive colonialism which turned the Inca into virtual slaves. The Incan allyu of collective farming also began to fall victim. This was a defining moment in Peru’s history from my contact with the guides here.  

History is determined by systems of production and reproduction, initially based on survival, that flower into class struggle over the surplus and issues of exploitation.  With better development in tools, technology and machinery based on surplus accumulation, along with waves of class struggle, capital has moved away from relative scarcity in some cases to plenty, much as Marx predicted.  But only with a social revolution would this be possible to spread world-wide.  This would bring shortened labor hours and a happier life.  The means of production and reproduction would become social property and valued, not private property for the enrichment of an upper class.  Simple stuff really, though perhaps too simple for the academic philosopher, estranged intellectual or reformist Marxist.  Sorry!

A link to a Blogspot book review about how ‘human nature’ was fundamental to Marx and Engels approach to social life – “Marx and Human Nature – Refutation of a Legend” by Norman Geras:  https://maydaybookstore.blogspot.com/search?q=geras  

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to search our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Peru,” “human nature,” “paganism,” “Geras,” "tourism." 

The Cultural Marxist / May 23, 2025