A Culture of Murder

 “Killers of the Flower Moon – The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” book by David Grann, 2017

(Spoilers ahead.) 

This is a penetrating look into the continued attack on indigenous people in the U.S. in the 1920s.  The murders are framed by discriminatory federal policies applied to reservations; private property created on reservation land; paternalistic control of Osage wealth; plain old violent racism and the power of money to corrupt legal systems, lawyers and individuals.  The book is valuable because much of this is still true.  As a key organizer of the murders, a large rancher and businessmen in Osage County said he was confident his wealth and power would acquit him.  Sound familiar?

After several years of incompetent investigations, the FBI took the lead.  If you are uncomfortable seeing the FBI as the decent prosecutors of some of these murders, it doesn’t change the fact that J. Edgar Hoover also created a punitive political surveillance apparatus aimed at the Left. Back in the 1920s, Hoover ‘modernized’ national policing by using scientific techniques to catch criminals, like finger prints, mug shots, written reports and hand writing analysis, which had not be used before by the sloppy and brutal local police of the day.  Amateurish ‘inquests’ were the police rule in Oklahoma, for instance.  Of course Hoover hid the FBI’s bungling and mistakes in this matter too in order to jump-start the myth of the perfect FBI. 

This is an extraordinary and bloody tale.  Native oil wealth had turned Osage County into one of the richest pieces of real estate in the U.S. The reservation lands were hilly grass prairie, filled with rocks and desolate when the Osage were forced to move in the 1870s from southern Kansas to northern Oklahoma.  The joke on the white folks was under the soil, the ‘underground reservation.’  A clever Osage attorney had included land trust oil and mineral rights in the tribal legal documents, which went undiscovered until too late.  To recoup that wealth, a white rancher, his prominent compatriots and local thugs used poison, explosives and executions in their successful attempts at taking over some oil-rich tribal lands in Oklahoma, which had made many Osage wealthy.

A Real CONSPIRACY

The book is a picture of a large conspiracy which only a powerful and monied person or group could organize. At least 24 people officially died in various ways – Osage, witnesses, accomplices, enemies, lawyers. It was later called a ‘reign of terror.’  Any class-conscious detective would immediately see who could be behind such a large local conspiracy.  The first step was to overlook the false façades of friendliness towards the Osage by certain ‘upstanding fellows.’  Lies, threats, murder, bribes and disinformation were the methods of power used by the conspirators to avoid being caught or convicted.  Sound familiar?

Behind the whole situation was Federal law, which allowed these crimes to commence.  The structural racism against the indigenous included land allotments. This was a widespread Federal policy to privatize parts of the reservation so as to have them sold later to people outside the tribe. The oil and mineral rights would be included in these ‘headrights.’  In addition, a murder on that land could be held in the prejudiced and corrupt state courts instead of a better federal court. 

Another key aspect of Federal “Indian” law at that time was that all full-blood Osage were declared ‘incompetent’ to handle their financial affairs.  Light-skinned men were put in guardianship of their assets and were able to steal their money, misdirect it, with-hold it, invest it as they chose and more.  If you were white and married an Osage woman, you could inherit her money if she died.  So even ‘romance’ and marriage was bloody suspect.  The racism was so thick around this situation that one white man married to an Osage woman knew who was killing her relatives and only later confessed.

A Culture of Killing

Grann goes on to describe how Hoover used this case to propagandize for the FBI. Grann reports on the later life of Tom White, the organized and civil lead investigator on some of the Osage murder cases, though many were never brought to trial by the FBI.  Grann visits the Osage Nation several times to dig into loose ends.  He finds the local oil boomtowns are abandoned ruins or shrunken hulks. 10,000 derricks rust or pump a dozen gallons a day, as the oil curse is over.  But the Osage Nation now has 20,000 members, revived from 3-4 thousand at the time of the killings and the bison are back.

Oklahoma Tribal Nations

The head of the conspiracy, Hale, received a life sentence, but was paroled after 20 years.  Grann meets with relatives of one of the principals during the terror, Mollie Burkhart, who was a full-blood Osage at the time.  He visits the graves of Mollie and her 4 murdered relatives. He investigates the unsolved murder of a lawyer who was thrown off a moving train because he knew details of the conspiracy. Archived grand jury, news and financial documents located by Grann indicate a County banker named Burt was the most likely murderer of that lawyer and another Osage, the latter via poison. Both were his wards.  The banker was never indicted, though he was close friends with Hale.

Grann is told that many more Osage people died during the terror than just 24.  He investigates another shooting and concludes, while not connected directly to Hale, it was part of a plot to inherit money by a wife and future husband.  There was no indictment there either.  He concludes that while Hale’s murder spree went for 5 years, there were ‘headright’ killings from 1919 to 1931.  In the guardianship logs Grann found in the archives, he notes prominent white guardians in the County had a high number of dead wards, into the 100s.  Many ‘mysterious deaths’ were registered by the corrupt coroner to the point where nearly every Osage family was affected.  The death rate was far higher than it should have been.  So it was not just one conspiracy, it was a racist financial situation that resulted in ‘a killing culture.’

The FBI tied up the murders in a nice bow, but the spree went far beyond Hale’s crew.  Hoover didn’t care about that. The real cause of all these murders was private property and private wealth, this time in the hands of the ‘wrong people.’  The injunction to ‘follow the money’ is usually correct.  Crime is a function of first class and then cash. As long as those exist, crimes will follow – even without the Osage.

Like the KKK in the South, the conspiracy to kill Osage stake-holders was led by the most prominent people in the County according to Grann – cops, doctors, judges, businessmen, undertakers, coroners, lawyers, bankers, ranchers and politicians.  It was a class conspiracy. They gave the orders to the criminal thugs and weaklings to do their dirty-work. This is the class basis of the murder spree.  Some non-tribal people were aware of what was going on.  Some were afraid to say anything.

The story is another reminder of continued exploitation of Native land and peoples long after settlement. Incidentally, this will never change. Native reservations should be considered areas for social revolution, as their land is still partly socialized and partly under tribal law.  They are also becoming areas with their own working-class.  They are rural bastions of some social change, especially on environmental issues, and as such should be considered allies by urban workers.  They are a progressive base in the countryside, and perhaps someday, a military base too. Though as it is, every reservation leadership is not oppositional and some have been bought by carbon companies, as we saw in the Line 3 struggle here in Minnesota in regards to the Fond du Lac Band of Chippewa. 

A work of solid reporting which formed the basis for the film of the same name, with Robert DeNiro as the leader of the killers, but it goes beyond that film as do so many books.  It also beats all those fake murder 'entertainment' series on streaming because it is real and it is political.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Native American,” “indigenous,” “oil” “FBI,” “murder,” “conspiracy.” 

And I got at May Day Books’ excellent used/cutout book section!

Red Frog / June 29, 2025

Literary Summer

 “The Great Gatsby”by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

The Great Gatsby might be the most famous fictional view of class from a liberal point of view in the U.S.  It was given free to soldiers during WWII in pocket books, and then became required reading in high school English classes.  It seemingly still is. Modern writers like Tom Wolf were inspired by its social perceptions and ribbing of the rich. He even borrowed a hit-and-run from this book for his novel “Bonfire of the Vanities.” “The Wolf of Wall Street” film echoes Gatsby’s glitz, which seems to be the only thing that has stuck in popular culture. Fitzgerald died virtually penniless in Hollywood at the age of 44, a heavy alcoholic, so he never joined the elite fraternity that he always admired. His class consciousness never led to class antagonism - but perhaps it should have.  

Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a stand-in for Fitzgerald himself. Many of the experiences in the book happened to the author. Nick is a middle-class ‘mid-westerner’ and Yalie, now aspiring to be a Wall Street bond man.  On nouveau riche Long Island he is accidentally close to the mansions of the wealthy – multi-millionaire Gatsby’s and Tom & Daisy’s, the latter who he has known from Chicago. Tom’s a racist, muscular jock with money who is having an affair; Daisy is an effervescent child-woman, but also mother of a 3 year old girl.  They are both ‘careless people.’  Her friend Jordan Baker is a familiar of ‘the sporting life’ in well-heeled towns around the U.S., a lover of parties and gossip.

The preface makes claims that every teenager would identify with Gatsby, and gush over his romance with Daisy, as if all kids are on the threshold of the American dream, as if all were millionaires in waiting.  In my farm-college town in Minnesota, that was far from the case.  I doubt anywhere in the country it was true except in upscale precincts.  These imaginary types were odd airheads to the rest of us. Or as Fitzgerald puts it “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”    This is not an unusual sentiment - unless you’ve never met one or someone aspiring to be one.  Many have not because they stay hidden. 

One stand-out character in the narrative are the large mansions and their many rooms; the huge gardens; the beaches, boats and exotic cars.  These are all a stage at Gatsby’s for the champagne, the gin, the dancing and the tented parties; the endless foodstuffs; the hot band; the Roaring, Riviera excess. This is what we gawk at. It would work as an over-the-top episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and the dream of every lazy, louche money-grubber.  In popular culture it is this flashy detritus that stays with us.  It is the golden toilet.

Gatsby pays for all this.  He is rumored to be descended from royalty. He tells Nick that he came from money and went to Oxford for a short time, and used to dabble in oil and drugs, or at least drug-stores.  His wealth actually comes from bootlegging at those drug stores according to Tom.  He’s friends with the police commissioner and closely associates with Manhattan crooks who sometimes provide him with staff.  One conversation reveals that some money might come from bond forgeries or theft.  He smacks of the lumpen bourgeoisie.  Gatsby becomes a moveable stand-in for every ambitious rich person you’ve ever heard of. He actually came from poor farm stock in North Dakota, a truly benighted place in the view of New Yorkers. He got a cash stake after working for a rich man in Minnesota.   This is really a rags to riches story, the most common kind of Horatio Alger mush but with a dark, romantic twist.

Fitzgerald’s mission is to humanize the man.  And so we witness his adolescent love affair with a former teenage Daisy who he met 5 years ago, and now lives across a large pond from him, married to a terrible husband.  Gatsby’s lonely and obsessed with her. So we get to like this love-struck man fatally living in the past.  The old cliché of ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’ or ‘money doesn’t buy love’ ring in the ears of the reader, even if they are not written down.  We are to pity the rich fool, even as he sadly dies a martyr to love.  This muddled view of class is then christened ‘The Great American Novel.’

The Party is on on Long Island

Daisy, Gatsby’s love, supposedly has a voice that ‘sounds like money.’  Fitzgerald describes her as ‘the golden girl and ‘the King’s daughter.’  She’s upper-class from Louisville, Kentucky, a southern belle and yes, careless.  If you are a certain male reader you might have a class crush on her too, just as Fitzgerald himself had on a real upper-class beauty from Montgomery, Alabama.  And the cliché that “you can marry a rich girl as easily as a poor one” pops into the reader’s mind.  Though that is not true either.

“The Great Gatsby” replicates the particularly ‘American’ fascination and yearning for wealth that the whole culture radiates - even if that wealth has a dark side.  It is why the rich run the Democratic Party of liberals and centrists.  It is why the rich dominate the Republican Party of conservatives and hard reactionaries. It is why the capitalist money system hides in the shadows, even though it dominates every moment of our lives, including our culture.  The book is part of a temporary time of cultural excitement in the ‘roaring 20s’ when fun and money were one.  It is an endless, romantic summer without war – though both Fitzgerald and Gatsby had been in the military in WWI.  But that war has no impact on this book, and the sad ending has no impact on the summer.

In 1925, socialism was growing across the world, revolutions and insurrections had occurred, a Depression and an even bigger war were brewing, fascism was making strides and surrealism and modernism had become world-wide cultural movements.  At this moment in history good ‘ol Scott was only vaguely touched by all this.  There are plenty of writers like him even now.  So you can choose – upper class aspiration, class awareness or class antagonism. Fitzgerald choose 1 and 2, which is sometimes more than most. Time for #3. 

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

May Day Books has a large section of left-wing fiction.   

The Cultural Marxist / June 26, 2025

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