College Library Browsing #20: The Unsinkable Left?

 “The Return of the Left in Post-Communist States,”edited by C. Bukowski & B. Racz, 1999

If you see people always reading musty old books about politics or history in a rapidly changing world, realize that they are living in the past.  That is not always bad, but it does indicate that their ideas might be archaic too. This book has some ‘dust,’ especially given the changes from Russia to Romania since 1998.  I will try to eke out what might be relevant to today.  The volume covers Russia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Romania.  I’m only going to cover the intro and epilogue, then Russia and Hungary. 

These are the points this collection of mainstream liberal historians made at the time. Their focus is on groups or Parties rooted in some aspect of Marxism or Left and socialist politics, even if they have strayed significantly.  Remember, this is after the fall of the workers’ states in these countries:  1) The rumors of socialism’s death were premature.  In elections after the fall of ‘state socialist’ governments, the Left still had a presence and was not wiped out.  2)  Violence was absent in the collapses except in Romania, which they characterized not as a Party-controlled state, but as a personal dictatorship under Ceausescu. 3) Youth were not attracted to the ex-Communists, even in social-democratic or socialist forms in this period. 4) The fortunes of the new market economy played the key role in the rise or fall of leftists in subsequent elections. 5) Almost every former Communist Party became social-democratic or socialist.  Those claiming to still be “Marxist-Leninist’ were a tiny minority.

RUSSIA (M. Cichock)

The largest formation coming out of the 1991 collapse of the CPSU was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) led by Gennady Zyuganov – and predictably still led by him.  Presently the Party is the loyal opposition to Putin, and has whole-heartedly endorsed the Ukraine invasion.  It is described by those to its left as nationalist and ‘social patriotic,’ abandoning any pretense to Leninist internationalism. The KPRF call it ‘popular state patriotism.’  During the period under Yeltsin, Putin’s mentor, the KPRF did quite well in the 1995 and 1996 elections after the chaos of capitalist ‘shock therapy’ and Yeltsin’s violent 1993 assault on the House of Soviets that left almost 150 dead.

The CPSU at its height had 19.4M members out of 292M citizens. The KPRF had 540K members at this point, made up mostly of white-collars, the elderly and former apparatchiks according to Cichock.  He estimates that 13 organizations came out of the CPSU in one way or another.  The social-democratic dream of people like historian Michael Cohen about the rise of social-democracy after Gorbachev turned out to be false, as the social-democrats made no headway. The KPRF however was strong enough to block Yeltsin’s plans to privatize much agricultural land.  3 de facto factions existed in the KPRF, and in 1998 it let Duma deputies vote in secret, thus not being able to control their votes.

The Russian Communist Workers Party was the 2^nd largest organization, at 50K members, along with the Agrarian Party, which opposed privatization of agriculture.  Roy Medvedev’s “Socialist Party of the Working People’ had a known figurehead yet little of a ground-game.  ‘Far left’ and “Marxist Leninist’ groups are mentioned and they all criticized the KPRF as social-democrats and too close to Yeltsin. These groups attempted to work together but failed, while a KPRF coalition – the “Peoples Patriotic Union of Russia” (NPSR) in 1996 was more successful nationally, becoming the main opposition. Yet the ‘far left’ kept the KPRF from moving too far to the right.  No Trotskyist groups are mentioned, though there are at least 3 in Russia now. 

Cichock predicts that unless the KPRF oriented towards economic issues, and away from patriotism, it will be unable to successfully combat the new capitalist forces. Its aging membership at the time needed to recruit youth too, and that still seems to be the case given what I saw in 2017.  He predicted it will become a ‘perpetual opposition’ in its present condition.  That prediction has been born out during the Putin years, as it has only been able to defeat Putin’s United Russia and the rigged electoral system in several oblasts.  There is no mention of Alexi Navalny’s liberal forces in the book, as this predates Navalny, who started political activity in 2011.  Navalny didn’t come out of any area of the left anyway. 

HUNGARY (B. Racz)    

The dissolution of the former governing Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP) in 1989 led to the formation of the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP), a social democratic / socialist organization that still exists, now known as the MSZP.  It supports the EU, opposes Orbanism and remains the main liberal opposition.  In 1990 they got 10.9% of the vote after the collapse, with ‘left’ groups as a whole winning 26%.  However the HSP was able to win a majority after the 1994 elections due to the chaos created by capitalist restoration.  In 1990 Orban’s Fidesz (AYD - Alliance of Young Democrats) was a liberal group promoting free markets, minimal state redistribution, speedy privatization and limited social policies. After their loss in 1994 the AYD moved further to the right.  They now govern Hungary almost permanently.

The HSP joined the Socialist International while the HSWP rump became the Workers Party (WP), which called itself ‘Marxist-Leninist’ and got 3.68% of the vote in the 1990 elections.  The Hungarian Social Democratic Party (HSDP) only got 3.55%.  The Agrarian Alliance opposed willy-nilly privatization of agricultural land into pre-1947 small-plot farming.  Racz also notes a large amount of non-voters.

Racz does a careful and detailed analysis of the 1990, 1994 and 1998 elections, noting the vote totals of the various left forces. He christens Hungary as a ‘one-thirder’ political culture – right, center, left.  Yet plant closures and the shuttering of large-scale agro-enterprises undermined the governing conservatives who had won in 1990.  He notes the dormant strength of the left in the labor unions, workers’ councils and parties.  The HSP allowed factions and inner-party democracy, and yet there were no splits.  HSP cadre were more sophisticated and battle-hardened than other liberal and conservative groups, so they were able to build a grassroots base for the 1994 election.  In 1992 they formed an alliance with the largest union, the NFHU.  Unemployment reached 700K in 1992, so job security, Kadar nostalgia, privatization and welfare policies became increasingly important.  The HSP also treated Hungarian minorities in other countries in a less confrontational way, opposing the ‘greater Hungary’ methods of the conservatives and Christian Democrats. "Greater Hungary" has become a current platform for Fidesz.

This led to the HSP winning a landslide victory in the 1994 election, with an absolute majority. As Racz puts it, the HSP supported a “market economy with social responsibility’ so a sort of welfare-state capitalism.  The HSP got 33% the vote, with 54.14% of the seats; while the WP shrank to 3.19% and the HSDP almost disappeared at .95%.  Fidesz only got 5.19% of the seats. Two-thirds of the HSP vote came from blue-collar workers.  The HSP joined with the liberals of the Alliance of Free Democrats (AFD) to form a governing coalition. 

As is predictable, economic problems, specifically interest on the ‘vicious circle’ of loans from the IMF began to take their toll on the national economy.  Kadar had first started the loan process in Hungary when it was dominated by the HSWP.  Investment from outside capitalists had yet to flow into Hungary at that point.  The turn came in 1995 when Lajos Bokros became finance minister and Hungary ‘balanced its’ books’ to avoid ‘bankruptcy’ on the back of labor and farmers… its electoral base.  Wage increases and benefits were ‘forcefully’ limited, the forint was devalued and for the “average wage earner … stagnation and/or reduction of living standards.”  The coalition AFD liberals heartily endorsed the policy while the HSP was of mixed-minds.  But they had jettisoned what Racz called 'solidarity politics.' 

The 1998 election resulted in a narrow 158-165 loss of governmental power for the HSP/Liberal bloc, which was predictable given the economic situation.  The 3 left formations still got 37% of the national vote. Racz goes on to predict that “real GDP growth … of the Hungarian economy will be limited for some time to come.” This continues under the conservative Orban, even with EU subsidies, investments by China and Europe, along with continuing corruption, white elephant projects and the starvation of Budapest’s finances by the national government. 

This book shows capitalism eventually creates its own labor and electoral Left opposition, which can be moderately or extremely successful unless a dictatorship of some kind is imposed.  This dictatorship has now happened both in Hungary with the autocratic ‘illiberal democracy’ of Orban, and the capitalist police state of Putin in Russia.  Orban’s Fidesz sought to never again have the Socialists win, and set up a legal and financial system that made it very difficult after they won in 2010.  Putin has made it almost impossible, except for loyalists of some kind like the KPRF, to actually oppose him.  Plane crashes, window falls, explosions, exile, prison, poisoning and prison deaths are all administered to opponents or failures.  It also shows that Stalinoid ‘Marxist-Leninist’ support dries up without a one-party state.  And it shows that economic issues are at bottom the main source of logic for the left, to be ignored at their peril.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blogspot search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Hungary,” “Russia,” “shock therapy,” “CPSU,” “Kadar,” "central Europe."

May Day has books on what happened after the fall of the USSR.  I got this one at the college library!

Red Frog / April 30, 2025

Anti-Capitalism & Poverty

 “Trash – A Poor White Journey” by Cedar Monroe, 2024

This might be seen as a personal follow-up to Nancy Isenberg’s book “White Trash,” which was a history of working-class ‘white’ people in the U.S.  Monroe writes this as a sort of anti-capitalist memoir, as Monroe also grew up poor and ‘white’ on the Washington state coast.  It was in a situation of abuse, shame and poverty, with an unhappy father who raised vegetables while working in a warehouse.  The family practiced a primitive ‘home schooling’ – if such a thing is really possible - in the white nationalist religious context of Quiverfull. 

250,000 people die each year from poverty and inequality in the U.S., the 4^th highest cause of death.  66 million ‘white’ people are low-income or poor in the U.S., out of 132 million low income or poor across most ethnicities.  A total of 10 million do not have stable housing.  These are the stark facts behind the lower end of the U.S. class structure.

Monroe’s county in Washington State, Grays Harbor, was first seized from native Americans by the U.S. government, privatized, then logged over by Weyerhauser and is now one of the largest meth centers in the U.S.  Monroe is gay, while some of her relatives were not ‘white,’ which helped Monroe break from the isolated religious world she was brought up in.  Monroe flipped her conservative Baptist upbringing by becoming an Episcopal Church deacon after going through Divinity School in Cambridge, MA.  Instead of ‘whiteness,’ Monroe also flipped that script, ministering to working class and poor native Americans, Latinos, European-Americans and African-Americans back in her home county. Monroe mentors those she finds in trouble as a deacon and ‘tells their stories’ in this book.  But Monroe has still not lost an identification with ‘whiteness’ as a main theoretical axis.

Monroe’s time at the university in Massachusetts showed that middle-class liberal European-Americans looked down on working-class ‘whites’ as stupid, dangerous and lost.  Monroe only found kinship among African-American professors who understood the class ramifications of being working-class in a bourgeois context.  Monroe understands that classism is key to the oppressive narratives of capital, easily denigrating ‘rednecks,’ ‘white trash’ and ‘trailer trash’ as inferiors, something done by both main bourgeois parties.  This strategy is used to demonstrate the personal failures of poor ‘whites’ and to separate them from their class brethren.   Note:  *I use ‘white’ not as a real descriptor, but as an easy identifier.  Monroe believes there are separate races when there is only one – the human one. Skin color and physical features are not ‘races,’ no matter what racists or liberals say. 

The Locals

Monroe discusses potlach and communal traditions of the local indigenous tribes, among them the Quinault, where private property is not sacred. 40% of the reservation is now in tribal hands, when before it was in the single digits. Many of the poor in Aberdeen, the biggest town in the county, are indigenous. Local tribes, with few resources, do more social service work than the County government, while also protecting salmon and preparing for sea-level rise.  It seems native Americans are one of the few organized grown-ups in the county.  Monroe describes the homeless encampments along the Chehalis River in Aberdeen, which have their share of addicts, sex workers and the mentally unstable, but also its own women leaders and creative types.   The city regularly bulldozes or destroys their living structures, while the local poor do what they can to survive. 

Monroe mentions that one out of 15 kids in the county are taken by family services and put into foster care or adoption, due to problems with a parent like addiction.  The poor in this county lose their children on a regular basis to this racialized process.  Then there is youth incarceration, which is high in Washington State.  The schools can commit children to juvenile court; parents use physical violence on their children; the juvenile jail puts kids in solitary for long periods of time; the judge in court is cruel.  What does this all do to future adults?  Nothing good. 

Monroe recounts incidents of widespread police violence against homeless, minority and poor people, some of whom have parole violation warrants. Monroe notes that some hard-up light-skins, including some in Monroe’s family, joined the police or prison guards and end up disciplining darker-skinned poor people.   Monroe spends a lot of time visiting jails and prisons to tell their stories, especially local indigenous people locked up on a regular basis.  White supremacist prison gangs like the Asatru Folk Assembly and the Klan organize inside prisons trying to get all ‘Caucasians’ to join for protection.  She notes that some Latino prison gangs accept whites now, so that is not the only route anymore.

Early death through suicide, medical neglect, violence, disease, alcoholism, exposure and overdoses are the wages of poverty in Grays Harbor County, which is mostly white.  Monroe tattoos the names of the dead on her body like a ‘holy rosary,’ while spending much time at hospitals attending to contacts and friends.  Hospitals are underfunded, under-staffed and difficult to reach without good transport.  Funerals are frequent and Monroe is involved in many as a chaplain.       

Aberdeen, WA homeless encampment

POLITICS

So on to politics:  Monroe posits that white supremacy materially hurts ‘white’ people too, inhibits working-class unity, allows the rich to run everything while poisoning its believers.  Monroe has a basic understanding of capital through private property in land and its source in labor and nature exploitation, resulting in commodification of everything.  This extends to the role of the state, the police and the laws which protect Weyerhauser’s private land, a firm that still owns 40% of Grays Harbor County.  Fell one tree on their holdings and you have committed a crime, much like ye olde English peasant who snares a rabbit for dinner on his laird’s immense estate.  Nothing has changed in that respect, especially for the homeless.  Monroe reports on a legal struggle with the city of Aberdeen to protect the land along the River for squatters, which resulted in some land near city hall set aside while shelters along the river were bulldozed again.

Local whites came out to terrorize the homeless and their allies like Monroe in some of these confrontations.   

Monroe’s solutions other than holy oil?  Very little of what she talks about involves ‘white’ people working.  Monroe centers the book around the homeless, and while it is well known that many homeless work, this is not shown. This book is about the ‘poor,’ a concept that is fuzzy about economic roles, but the implication is that they don’t work except selling drugs or in petty theft.  Monroe describes little political action involving these folks, as most are too busy trying to survive.  Monroe draws ire advocating for clean needles and Naloxone with the local city council and health authorities, but it seems to be a lonely fight. 

Monroe advocates a new Rainbow Coalition, the present Poor People’s Campaign led by Reverend William Barber and the Young Patriot Party of yore. The PPC talks about ‘low wage workers’ not just poor people.  Monroe thinks it might take another 500 years “to fully end this system” so it seems progress is not really forthcoming anytime soon.  Monroe’s church opened a community center centered on ‘lunch, pastoral care and occasional events,’ pursuing ‘education and narrative building.’  Monroe’s church also opened shelters in church parking lots, then inside a church after vigilante threats were made against them and the homeless.  Monroe began to carry a loaded gun for protection. 

Most of Monroe’s activism is social work and charity.  One march in town was held, and was opposed by threats.  3 acres of land were rented to form a CSA to provide vegetables to the hungry, and was later bought by the diocese as a permanent farm.  Monroe titles a chapter “Healing is Revolutionary” which works as a feel-good narrative but it doesn’t really undermine the system at its root. Liberation theology has to be taken to its logical conclusion to actually achieve liberation.  Monroe and the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia’s work could be an adjunct to mass class struggle at some point, but now it salves the multiple wounds of capital.  

Monroe’s work linked up with several local indigenous Nations, which is a huge plus.  A true mass movement will link other organizations, like unions, labor, left parties, community rights and single-issue groups in a united front against capital, on a national and even international scale.  Monroe would not oppose this, as she supports alliances of some kind.  Without that unity poverty will continue.  Certainly the concept of an anti-capitalist united front is still far off.  Is it a daunting task which may be beyond the ability of the working classes and anti-capitalist Left in the present moment?  I have seen some begin to turn towards this concept given the reactionary assault by Trump forces, but it is slow going, as liberalism and socialism do not mix in the end.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “poverty,” ‘poor,’ ‘white trash.’ 

And I got the book at the library!  May Day has many books on poverty, homelessness and the like.

Red Frog / April 27, 2025

Anti-Racist?

 “Benito Cereno” by Herman Melville, 1855

This is a novella by one of the great masters of American literature, Herman Melville, who is most famous for Moby Dick.  Both are sea tales, but this one concerns slavery, which Melville seemingly hated.  A Spanish slave ship has run out of food and water rounding stormy Cape Horn and has drifted into a bay in Chile with torn sails.  It is captained by a seemingly arrogant or incompetent Spaniard, Don Benito Cereno.  Also in the bay is an 'American' sealer led by a kind and somewhat naïve Captain Delano, who comes to the ragged ship’s aid.  Yet the story is set-up as a kind of mystery.

A few remaining crew members, an ‘invalid’ captain and slaves tread the decks of the ruined San Dominick. There are many more slaves than crew, which they explain was due to the crew getting sick and dying because of their weak constitutions.  Delano provides food, pumpkin, water and cider to the ship in a ‘Republican’ fashion, yet notices some strange behavior on the part of captain Cereno, his black servant Babo, the other slaves and the remaining crew members. For instance there are no officers left except the captain. Two white crew members are thrown to the deck or cut by a blade while Delano watches.  He is surprised and can’t get an answer. He never gets straight answers to his questions from Cereno because of interruptions, coughing fits or silence.  Presiding over the decks are four grizzled Africans, sharpening hatchets incessantly.  In his time on the ship, he mulls every possible scenario but one, some very dark, then always reverting to optimism. 

Cereno tells a story about damage to the sails, men swept overboard, scurvy and fever and being becalmed for two weeks after rounding Cape Horn.  Delano notes that it would only take a day after rounding the Horn to get to this bay.  Cereno then forgets that he said he rounded the Horn.  Even more curiously, he refuses to meet with Delano alone, without his faithful servant Babo and refuses to leave the ship alone either. 

The story is told in a slow, florid and overly-detailed narrative of Delano’s thoughts and actions as he wanders the decks of the San Dominick.  Melville ends this brooding story, full of suspicions and foreboding, with a battle.  According to critics, the story highlights ‘the unreliable narrator’ concept. Like a detective story told by a biased detective, we gradually realize what is really going on.  As Delano bids adieu from his whale boat to the San Dominick to get back to his own ship, the Bachelor’s Delight,  - Cereno and the rest of the white crew suddenly jump into the sea.  Only then does Delano realize something unforeseen is up!

It was a slave rebellion all along.  Delano's crew rescue Cereno and 3 sailors and capture Babo as he has jumped after Cereno and Delano to kill them with two knives.  They give chase to the San Dominick, which is drifting away.  They succeed in retaking the ship after a battle where their arms and organization prevail, killing some 18 'pirates.' 

What follows is a long deposition of Cereno at a court in Lima, Peru, detailing the whole incident, from the slaughter of the crew and the slaves’ owner and the play-acting meant to deceive Delano.  This included fake-chaining one of the uprising’s giant ring-leaders to seem like a prisoner instead.  The ultimate goal of the mutineers was to round the Cape of Horn and reach Senegal in Africa.

What is odd about this story is that Captain Delano, who is from Massachusetts, has few thoughts about slavery itself.  He accepts it and takes a patronizing attitude towards blacks instead, seeing them as primitive but pleasant.   1855 was in the run-up to the U.S. Civil War and it was one of the burning topics in the North. Massachusetts was a hotbed of abolitionism.  Delano seems a fictional creation, a kind, liberal dimwit of sorts, a necessary foil to this plot.    

What a ‘white’ reader in 1855 might of thought during this story is not of the cruelties slavery forces on people, but that ‘Ashantees’ are duplicitous and deadly even to kind people, and anyone should be wary of them.  Melville quotes Cereno as to the ‘shadow’ here – it is “the Negro.” Babo, the leader of the revolt, is hung, his head put on a spike in Lima’s central Plaza and his body burned.  I am not sure this is an anti-racist or anti-slavery story as advertised by the lit critics! An abolitionist might think, 'well, that was inevitable, given the violence inherent in slavery.' However, to many other 'gentle' readers in 1855 it would actually inspire fear and horror, and not of slavery, but for its white victims.  

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

May Day Books has many volumes on the Civil War, slavery and the like.  I got this at its ‘used book’ section!

Red Frog / April 24, 2025

College Library Browsing #19b: The Moor, the Mole and Old Nick

 “Last Years of Karl Marx – an Intellectual Biography” by Marcello Musto, 2016 (Second review)

The book pictures Marx in his last years, 1880-1883, but dips into the 1870s in its discussion of his unfinished work on Capital Vols. II and III, and various translations of Vol I.  This is when he wasn’t reading about electricity and immersing himself in French novels for distraction due to sickness.

The final part of this book is a story of inability to work, sickness and death.  For almost a whole year he could not really produce anything.  Marx’s wife Jenny von Westphalen died of liver cancer in December 1881; his eldest daughter Jenny Longuet died in January 1883, also of cancer of the liver, and he died on March 14, 1883 at the age of 64.  He suffered from bronchitis, rheumatism, a constant cough, pleurisy - eventually dying of heart failure brought on by tuberculosis. 

Prior to this, doctors sent him out of the drizzle of London to Eastbourne, then the Isle of Wight; then to the Parisian suburb of Argenteuil where his daughter’s family was living.  They sent him on to Algiers for a long stay, then Monaco, Cannes and Geneva to try to get warmth and dry air into his lungs and body.  Many of these places had rain instead, so he was not ‘cured,’ while the travel exhausted him.  He was not able to work and could only keep up with the news.  He had one meeting with supporters of the French Workers Party in 1880.  Oddly, both son’s-in-law had moved towards anarchism and this upset him greatly.  This is when he wrote his famous quote about some ostensible ‘followers’ of his – “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist.”  This was in reference to ‘revolutionary phrase-mongering’ by his sons-in-law.      

Marx consulted on the relevant Electoral Program of the French Workers Party.  It included:  1) Emancipation of the productive class will include every ‘race’ and sex.  2) Producers can only be free when they control the means of production. 3) Freedom of the Press. 4) Equality at work between men and women, native and immigrant. 5) Defunding the religious orders. 6) Elimination of the public debt. 6) Abolition of standing army and arming of the people. 7) Ban on child labor; one day a week off; workers’ determination of a minimum wage; equal pay for equal work. 8) Free, professional public education. 9) Care of old and disabled; 10) Workers accident compensation. 11) Labor power on the job. 12) Socialization of public property through workers’ control of banks, railways, mines. 13) A progressive income tax. 14) Suppression of all inheritances over 20,000 francs.

Reading this, you will see that this program has been partly enacted in many bourgeois democratic countries due to pressure by labor.  It seems eerily familiar!  The issue of immigrants came about partly due to his readings of the unequal treatment of Chinese workers in the U.S. who were especially used in railroad projects.

Algeria was the only country Marx visited outside of Europe and he wrote anecdotal social observations in letters to Engels and others.  This location seems significant given his nickname ‘The Moor.’  He noted in Algiers that while classes existed, there was a level of social equality between the well-dressed and the ones in tatters, perhaps attributing this to Islam.  The state, in the form of police and soldiers, was almost invisible to him.  He even got a haircut, stripping his face of its imposing white ‘St. Nick’ beard. 

Marx in Algiers

CAPITAL

Marx first published an edition of Das Kapital, Vol. 1 in 1867 in German, then 2 more revisions were brought out.  A French translation was done by him during the late 1870s, as the translator was ignorant of economic terms.  Translating took an immense amount of his time.  What is notable is that the French translation included changes from the German editions.  He was still working on various aspects of these in the late 1870s and early 1880s. This shows you that, even at this point, nothing was ‘set in stone’ in the details.  Revision, like change, was a constant.  That is a philosophic point too, as well as a writer’s truth.  Being 'done' is a decision, not a final understanding.  

Capital, Vol. 1 began to be read in Russia, Germany, France and even in philistine England during this period, as Marx’s influence spread beyond his role as the subversive devil of the First International, promoter of the Paris Commune and author of the Manifesto.  It’s not to say everyone understood it, but some began to make headway. Blanqui, Proudhon, LaSalle and Bakunin were still prominent influences in various countries at this time.  Marx’s Capital was almost unknown in the U.S., as an English translation only became available in 1887.   

Marx studied what happened to Russian peasants after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. He looked at the role of solar energy, especially a writer who claimed socialism would utilize it better than other social systems.  He studied books on banking and trade, the formation of joint-stock companies and ‘loanable capital,’ geology, agrarian chemistry and mineralogy. He asserted after some of his investigations that:  “The energy of the universe is constant” so he did not limit himself to economics or politics. Marx wanted to flesh out the relation between ground rent and profit, which became a section in Capital, Vol III.  He noted that revolution was not a single event, but a process, thus echoing his own phrase about permanent revolution from 1850.  He stated: “Socialists invent no movement, but merely tell the workmen what its character and its ends will be.”  This shows he was aware of the role of spontaneity.  His wide reading made it clear to him that no world-wide ‘schematic’ would account for all societal forms and development.  He told Engels that he was ‘secretly ashamed’ for relying on him for funds.  Marx noted that, due to his age and wisdom, he was careful about what ‘fights’ he engaged in, as so many were a waste of time.  A truth we can all appreciate.

As you can see, even in ill-health, Marx continued his work towards socialism, which was his life-long passion. Musto’s work here is drawn from the voluminous Marx-Engels Gesamtaustaube (MEGA) which in 2016 reached 67 volumes, including many of Marx’s notes, letters and unpublished manuscripts.  These documents were unavailable to earlier Marxists. 

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

May Day has many books on Marx.  This I got at a college library!  I am waiting for them to discover, empty and burn the Marxist section however, at the rate things are going. 

Red Frog / April 20, 2025 / Due to sickness, this review has been delayed and truncated. 

College Library Browsing #19a: Citizen of the World

 “Last Years of Karl Marx – an Intellectual Biography” by Marcello Musto, 2016 (First review)

The book pictures Marx in his last years, 1880-1883, as a kindly grandfather, a curmudgeon making fun of his political opponents, a dedicated researcher, a theorist discovering new angles and a man and family suffering from health problems.  Surrounded by books, newspapers, government folios, documents and letters in his study on Maitland Park Road in London, Marx touched on every subject he could as an omnivore of knowledge.  He studied current mathematics, anthropology, current politics, colonialism, chemistry, languages, economics, physics and so on at a tiny 2’x3’ desk. He read classics of literature and poetry, knowing passages by heart. It was estimated that his study contained 2,000 books.  

Musto covers some of his last investigations, which do not show a ‘dotard’ but a man working as he always did – methodically, thoughtfully and flexibly.  Much of Musto’s own work here is drawn from the voluminous Marx-Engels Gesamtaustaube (MEGA) which in 2016 reached 67 volumes, including many of Marx’s notes and unpublished manuscripts.  Much of this was unavailable to earlier Marxists.  Musto points out some of this work contradicts the dogmatic ‘truths’ of Soviet Marxism in its various forms, from Stalin to Gorbachev.  Musto highlights the simplistic idea that socialism was ‘the superior development of the productive forces’ and other shibboleths.

So what does Musto look at?  His investigation into the ending years of Marx’s life refutate Eurocentrism, economism and socialist inevitability.  But first, personal life.  Jenny Marx had cancer while Marx himself suffered from a ‘nervous disorder’ and both had been banished to Ramsgate on the English Channel for rest. He was described by a U.S. journalist in 1880 visiting him there as a kindly, courtly and merry man with a sweeping ability to knowledgeably converse about almost anything. At the time he was surrounded by 10 family members on a sea-side walk with the journalist, including his sons-in-law Longuet and Lafargue.  

Marx’s house on 41 Maitland Park in north London was not far from where Engels finally settled at 122 Regents Park Road.  Engels house is where the ‘party archive’ was kept – correspondence and internal documents of the First International. (This house is still in existence.)  Marx took walks in Maitland Park and Hampstead Heath, enjoyed his 3 dogs and was a member of the ‘Dogberry Club’ that read Shakespeare aloud at Engel’s house.  When a job took three grandchildren to Paris, he was very lonely.  In a way, it’s all a picture of a semi-genteel English gentleman created by a Dickens, but behind the image, he was no Mr. Pickwick.  Leftist visitors from all over the world visited Marx for advice, like Bernstein and Kautsky.  Whether they took it is unknown, but evidently not.  Marx later said Kautsky was a ‘hard-working mediocrity.’ 

THEORY

Theoretically, Marx studied communal land ownership in India, Russia, Latin America and Algeria. In the process he did not conflate Indian society with European feudalism, as serfdom did not exist in India.  This points out that he had no supra-historical template to lay over every society, but based his conclusions on investigation.  He wrote 4 parts of notes on Indian history, condemning British colonialism to the utmost focused on the East India Company.  He observed that colonialism immediately made common ownership of land a target, as the French did in Algeria by distributing clan holdings to private owners.  Once that was accomplished, the French could then buy the land themselves.  The privatization of land also broke the power of overall clan resistance to French colonial rule.  Marx believed this process was not inevitable, unlike others. But privatization was key.              

During this period Marx closely studied the Russian ‘obshchina’ – peasant communes that still heavily dominated the rural areas of Russia outside of the landed nobility.  Instead of aligning himself with his ‘scientific’ supporters in Russia, he blocked with the populists in seeing obshchina common property as a boon to socialism in Russia. The ‘scientific’ supporters believed that Russia would have to go through capitalism, so the muzhik commune would have to be privatized.  Writing to Vera Zasulich after reading Chernyshevsky and doing much independent research, Marx asserted that “the commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia.”  This marked an increased sophistication as to whether the European model of ‘going through capitalism’ was to be applied dogmatically and schematically everywhere in the world.  Marx said no and hinted that that would be reformism.   

Gathering on the obshchina commune

Mariategui in Peru later made the same observations about the Quechua indigenous ‘ayllu’ – based on common ownership of land in post-Inca rural society. Marx had noted this earlier about Aztec and Incan property forms.  Marx himself could find no real common land ownership equivalents in Europe, as all communal ownership had been destroyed by capital when it ‘enclosed the commons.’  Here in the U.S. there are still remnants of common land ownership on Native American reservations, called ‘in trust,’ which are owned by the tribe, not individuals.  However, the BIA ‘manages’ this land, and could overrule a tribe.  Most reservation land is ‘in trust’ according to one source.  Our national parks, forests and lands, now under privatization assault by private logging, mining and entertainment capital, are another common land.   Some land is held by private ‘land trusts’ as well.

Forms of Communism

Marx did a study of Australian aborigine society, countering the colonial idea that it had no law or ‘culture.’  All of this was not to romanticize or urge a return to primitive communism as idealized by some anarchists and libertarians, but to build a new, technologically advanced communism on the communal structures of the old.  Musto clearly notes that Marx understood capital as providing tools to ease labor, if it was only appropriated by the working classes.  Marx made examples of 1800’s European technology that appeared in rural colonies.  This would be similar to the present:  solar panels now provide electricity in Africa without a system of electrical transmission lines or power plants; phones no longer need telephone poles and switching centers.  A ‘leap’ has been made, though, like the car replacing the train, some ‘leaps’ need to be reversed. Marxism it is not a form of tech utopianism, as Marx himself rejected certain ‘advances.’

In an isolated comment, Musto quotes Marx:  “…where the state is itself a capitalist producer, as in the exploitation of mines, forests, etc., its product is a ‘commodity’ and hence possesses the specific character of every other commodity.”  Remember, Marx saw the commodity as the modest key to capitalist production.  That is how Capital starts, by describing it.  Was he only talking about a capitalist state?  In 1880 that is all there was.  Does this apply to a workers’ state after attaining power?   A workers’ state far down the road, like the USSR and China?  Marx never predicted any stage such as ‘state capitalism’ but here he again hints that capital still can haunt society even after a social revolution.

During this period Marx read Morgan’s “Ancient Society” (1877) and fiercely took notes on Morgan’s treatment of production and tech progress as playing a role in social developments, creating his own Ethnological Notebooks.  Morgan showed that human progress quickened under conditions of increasing wealth, not scarcity.  However Marx never made this a determinant.  One aspect he confirmed with Morgan was that the patriarchal ‘nuclear’ family was a new development under capitalism, whereas prior families included the whole extended family of kin, plus servants – the Roman ‘gens,’ almost like a caste - practicing a “communism in living.”  In some of the gens in other countries, women had greater power than men.  Morgan was quite clear on the deformations introduced by the division of labor, property and the origin of classes.    

Marx also studied algebra, numbers, calculus and geometry, looking at Newton and Leibniz work and taking 100 pages of notes on math.  Marx kept in close touch with developments throughout Europe, Ireland, Russia and the U.S., reading the bourgeois press, the working-class press and letters from comrades.  He considered the Russian Tsar to be the ‘chief of European reaction’ and so paid careful attention to matters in Russia.  Marx was initially involved in the early development of the 2^nd International, though he remained skeptical.  He helped a merger of French working-class socialist currents.  He developed a ‘Workers’ Questionnaire’ about proletarian conditions for them, along with a transitional program.  He polemicized against a U.S. economist who thought the solution to capitalist exploitation was to tax rents, ignoring surplus value in the process.  This is similar to present leftists like Varoufakis who think we live under ‘feudal capitalism’ or like Hudson who believe we are dominated by pure ‘financial capital.’   

Due to sickness, this review has been delayed and truncated.  Part 2 is next. 

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

May Day has many books on Marx.  This I got at the Library!

Red Frog / April 17, 2025

Interop, comcom and Big Tech

 “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation” by Cory Doctorow, 2023

Doctorow made a stunning appearance on Democracy Now! on Feb 26, 2025, attacking Musk and Oligarchic Tech in new theoretical flavors and he didn’t repeat the same rhetoric we hear all the time. By the title you might think he’s some kind of libertarian communist, but Wikipedia says he’s a member of DSA.  This book is about how to begin to partly socialize Big Tech – from Amazon to X – using technical and political tools.  In the end he’s really a proponent of small business entrepreneurship, as he thinks a breakup of the big monopolies is impossible.  He’s not anti-capitalist, as he does not call for social ownership and control of these oligopolies.  He thinks anti-trust law has been fatally bowdlerized, as every business segment in the U.S. is now dominated by a small oligarchy of companies. 

Capital automatically develops private monopolies and oligopolies, and that has been proved by its history.  Until the system is fundamentally ‘rewired’ they are inevitable.  The actually of these massive companies heralds them as part of a socialist transformation of society, something Doctorow ignores. 

This wonky book is for people who have some familiarity with computerization and its history, or want to learn about it.  Doctorow is a leader of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Creative Commons, but he writes as a journalist and public intellectual, not an academic.  The key buzz word here is ‘interoperability’ – which he simplifies to ‘interop,’ or ‘competitive compatibility’ and ‘comcom’ for short.  What this means is the monopoly/oligopoly control of Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/FB and Microsoft can be weakened using law and tech to seamlessly open their ‘walled gardens’ to other vendors. According to Doctorow Apple is the best at maintaining their walled garden, especially their app store and enforcement of repair ‘rights.’  This applies to similar businesses too, from VIN-locking auto companies like Tesla to the 'smart' home.  

This book is mostly concerned with laws, standards, mandates and contracts to my mind. Big firms use lawyers, bought bourgeois politicians and captured regulators in place of competition. This involves patents, trademarks and secrets, copyrights, non-competes, tortious interference claims, non-disclosure, terms-of-service and other intellectual property (IP) rights.  It mentions many of the legal cases that involve IP – Betamax/Sony re VCRs, Internet Explorer re search engines, Napster re audio downloads, Apple v Microsoft Office, DOJ v. IBM (IBM won) and the endless AT&T breakup. The phrase ‘consumer welfare’ became the legal logic behind monopoly’s benefits, due to its ability to simplify systems and cut costs for consumers.   

Doctorow uses the image of a big tech firm as a ‘feudal’ castle that will protect its peasants from marauders and thieves, but will not protect the peasants from the castle’s feudal lord once they are inside the walls.  This relates to the problem of escaping a tech like Facebook.  These “switching costs” are high unless you can continue to communicate with those left on Facebook.  Doctorow says this is the role of interoperable tech, which would allow you to do just that.  Just like leaving an actual castle, unless the castle wall is opened to let in legitimate princes and outsiders. 

Other examples are software ‘repair’ blocks on cars, equipment, tractors, phones and more, which force users to go back to the seller of the product, the ‘dealer’ so to speak, to get anything fixed. The big firms oppose the ‘interoperability’ of others fixing their stuff.  No one wants repair blocks, but legal struggles in courts have yet to break down these locks. The U.S. passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which protects these locks in 1998, Clinton time, so the government backed up the oligarchs. These kind of laws have spread to other countries, with the exception of the EU.  On another front, Doctorow exposes the practice of ‘notice and takedown’ regarding alleged on-line IP infringement and ‘fair use’ as rife with censorship, extortion and other problems.  

Interop?

The EU passed a Digital Markets Act to allow interoperable technologies, Application Program Interfaces (API), reverse engineering and the like to achieve tech universality.  But Doctorow says that firms ‘cheat’ and use a barrage of highly-paid lawyers and a ‘thicket’ of other laws to push back. It is part of their business plan.  For instance a ‘Right to Repair’ law was passed in Massachusetts in 2012, but is still held up in court.  Even U.S. army procurement is subject to huge replacement-part costs due to being locked into single suppliers.  Doctorow says “We have tried to make Big Tech better for decades.  That project has been an abject failure.”  This is why he claims he is pushing for the reforms of technical and legal comcom as solutions. It seems to me this might take decades too. 

Doctorow supports ‘technological self-determination,’ where a ‘federation’ of services connect and work together to provide a seamless internet – the early dream of the tech idealists and optimists.  This all seems to be possible only through the abolition of private corporate property in the dominant sectors of the economy, in this case tech.  This would break their economic, legal and political power.

Doctorow has a short section on Apple providing back-doors to Chinese (he does not mention the U.S.) surveillance of communications, VPNs and encryption.  He also briefly discusses all the problems on the internet – surveillance, fraudsters, identity theft, trolls, harassers, sexual abusers, privacy, algorithms and block-chains in short sections.  His explanations of how interoperability might help with this are weak. For instance he wants moderation by the community over a clunky ‘rules-based’ AI approach to trolling. Is that when we shut down a troll or crude insulter in the comments or by a site admin?

If you are interested in ways to weaken Big Tech, this book might appeal.  It does show a legal and technical way to universalize tech, but what is missing is any discussion of the ultimate role of the profit motive in blocking interoperability.   

P.S. - the FTC is currently prosecuting Facebook for being a monopoly over their ownership of WhatsApp and Instagram too.  The hearings are going on now.  Whether Trump intervenes to try to stop this process is still up in the air.

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive using these terms:  “technology,” ‘internet,’  

May Day has many left books on technology.  I got this at the Library!

Red Frog / April 11, 2025              

Absurd Individualism

 “Rhinoceros” a play by Eugene Ionesco, 1959

“Rhinoceros” is a play by the ‘absurdist’ Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco. I attended it on April 6, 2025 at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis, MN, USA.  Unlike the liner notes by Pangea World Theater, this play was inspired by Ionesco’s contact with the rise of the fascist Iron Guard in Romania in the 1930s.  Romania was Ionesco's home country.  The liner notes claim it is also about ‘the spread of Communism’ – which speaks to a political sentiment by someone in the theater perhaps, but not originally by Ionesco.  

One version of the play

I did a word search on several .PDFs of the play as well.  One character in an office in the play, Botard, does not believe in the rhinos, even though others have seen them.  Botard comes off as an arrogant dope.  Botard is also identified as a ‘union’ member in this translation of the play.  One of the .pdfs does not contain the word ‘union,’ while the other does.  Seemingly union people are oblivious according to that translation.  Botard also makes a comment about people seeing rhinos as an ‘opiate of the people’ – a clear Marx quote.  Aside from a reflection on his personality, Botard raises this in connection with fascism being a ‘mass delusion,’ much like religion or the Protocols of Zion.  In one .pdf the phrase was found, in another it was not – again referencing which translation was used by Pangea.

Historically it was the Left that was most aware of the rise of fascism, and the chief battler against it.  Berenger, the hero of this play, is not a leftist.  He is an individualist taken from Ionesco himself.  He alone opposes his friends and neighbors becoming rhino fascists.  But he would certainly be an ally of the Left in any anti-fascist front.

This points to certain other modernizations of the play to make it more current or acceptable in language. Computer words are projected onto walls behind the scene, a Pepsi is mentioned, as is #MeToo, and so on. A cat is trampled on by a rhino and this cat becomes symbolic of the cruelty of the rhinos.  Innocent, centrist and ignorant people believe that this rhino ‘epidemic’ will pass, but they are gradually caught up as conformists of a sort. If you’ve had people you are close lose themselves in conspiracy theories and right-wing bullshit, you know what the play is talking about.  Berenger’s best friend turns into a rhino in front of him, getting a rubber hoof and horns.  This reminds one of Kafka’s older story “The Metamorphosis,” where a man turns into an insect one morning.

The two manager/capitalists in the play also become rhinos, as does ‘the logician.’ The transformation of the logician especially affects Berenger, as this seemingly ‘rational’ person has also succumbed. Yet the play makes fun of the logician repeatedly, as empty ‘theses’ and predicates are shown to mean nothing in the real world.  Ionesco, after all, was a materialist of sorts, which is why human society and the ‘human condition’ struck him as absurd.  He knew humans die and that made their ‘logic’ and struggles somewhat pointless and inaccurate.  

On the philosophic front, the phrase ‘natural’ is repeated as the logic of the rhinos.  They are closer to nature as full-on animals, unlike the humans Berenger stands for and represents.  Berenger is a flawed character – drinks heavily, is frequently late, doesn’t seem to work much – but he is also kind and forgiving, unlike the rhinos. The dead cat, the odious noises and grunts of the rhinos, the thundering hooves, the hard green hide, the blinding bandanas – all repel the audience member. But even Berenger finds the rhinos to be, in a way, beautiful compared to his fat, old body.  Yet he does not succumb.

Ionesco is hoping that decent individuals will rebel, agreeing with Camus.  The flaw in the play itself is that Berenger is alone, even in his village.  His weak woman friend deserts him at the end as well.  There is no collective resistance, as befits the tortured existentialist intellectual, just his isolated fortitude.  As anyone knows, fascism, or any oppressive system, cannot be defeated by lone individuals.  It might start there but it cannot end there. Wikipedia notes that Ionesco actually sympathized with the Italian pacifist “left-libertarian Transnational Radical Party” in real life.   

“Rhinoceros” will be showing at the Southern Theater until April 19.  Prices vary based on what you want to pay.  The theater was half full for this matinee, which is followed by a chat with the actors.  The lead, Berenger, is outstanding.  For some others, their voices were not directed or projected towards the audience, so what they said was lost in mumbles.  The play especially dragged at the end.  A live musician and pre-recorded sounds provide the soundtrack.    

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “rhinoceros,” “theater,” ‘play,’ ‘existentialism,’ ‘fascism.’    

The Cultural Marxist / April 8, 2025