That Damn Mine

 “Dead Mine Walking”by Rob Levine (June, 2025 Duluth Reader)

Give it to the Minnesota alternative press for this extensive, in-depth article on the proposed sulfide mine planned in the St. Louis River watershed that flows into Lake Superior.  The mine is variously called PolyMet and now NorthMet.  Levine, a former Minnesota Star-Tribune journalist, has done what his former paper will not do.  He’s detailed a travesty that has gained support from the upper-ranks of the Democratic Party in Minnesota (DFL) and their handmaidens in the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA).  The Republican Party is also fully on board, as would be expected.  Both pretend a sulfide copper-nickel mine is the same as an iron ore mine.  It is not.

Water-saturated areas around the proposed site

It’s a long, twisted tale of legal decisions, technical and geologic investigations, political pressure, regulatory laxity and potential profiteering by a Swiss/Canadian mining company, NewRange Copper Nickel (NCN), a joint operation owned by Swiss Glencore and Canadian Tech Resources.  It is also a political football on the national stage between Obama, Trump and Biden, along with the Twin Metals mine proposed just upstream from the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) in Minnesota.  In that mine Twin Metal’s tailings waste will flow north into the BWCA and Canada.  In fact, if Polymet is built, it will be easier for Twin Metals to be approved.

Here are the damning facts about Polymet as laid out by Levine: 

The Dam Proposal

A catastrophic mine tailings dam failure similar to the one proposed by NCN has happened already in Mount Polley, Canada in 2014; in Mariana, Brazil in 2015 and Brumadinho, Brazil in 2019. The content of the toxic soup behind the dam are sulfur, mercury, arsenic, copper, nickel and manganese that would be dumped into the watershed. Sulfuric acid is another byproduct, as tailings meet oxygen.  The ore to be mined has a low-grade copper/nickel content of .3%, while 99.7% is ‘waste’ rock, so this mine smells of capitalist desperation. In 2009 the Federal EPA rejected NCN’s ‘upstream dam’ plan, which was their idea to prevent this chemical soup from leaking. A 2012 leaked memo from a DNR employee said “…the proposed method … significantly increases the potential for a dam failure….”  “the dam must function properly for an extended period of time … perhaps 900 years…”

A proposed ‘upstream dam’ made of steps of rock tailings is weakened by both wetness, inconsistent bedrock and seismic activity.  Polymet didn’t test drill deep enough to actually know what kind of bedrock is below or around the proposed tailings basin pond, including the bedrock that their bottom ‘cut off wall’ will be attached to.  This wall is designed to prevent leakage downstream.  They are guessing, ignoring ‘well-known techniques’ that could have been used according to geologist JD Lehr. An analysis of their drill records by Lehr showed a high level of ‘artesian’ water activity flowing around the proposed pond, as well as highly variable bedrock, even at the ‘cut off’ wall. According to studies, 20% of these dams have stability issues, which is scientific verbiage for dangerous instability.  This one certainly is, given the present geologic and hydrologic conditions, along with the plan itself. 

DNR/MPCA/Polymet Collaboration

In 2018 the Minnesota DNR approved a dam safety permit for this project and the MPCA approved a permit to allow pollutant discharge.  In 2019 the Army Corps of Engineers approved a permit to destroy wetlands.   In 2020 an Appeals Court overturned the permits.  The DNR and Polymet jointly appealed the decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court.  In part of their legal argument the DNR argued that no one outside of the immediate dam area had standing, which included the downstream Fond du Lac Tribe and various Minnesota environmental groups who were parties to the suit.  This logic was rejected by the court. 

The DNR also argued that there was no definite ‘term’ to this contract or remediation.  I.E. they proposed a ‘forever’ toxic pond. This was admitted to by a Polymet spokesperson on Minnesota Public Radio in 2014.  The MN Supreme Court rejected a ‘forever’ definition of the word ‘term.’  Prior to this, Polymet claimed the term was 100-200 years, but in later filings any termination date disappeared.  Still, the MN Supreme Court granted 8 of Polymet’s 11 arguments, then sent the case back to an administrative judge for the rest.  Minnesota tax monies allocated to the DNR for the law processes to enable Polymet?  Between $2.9-$4.4M.  

SEEPAGE

To prevent seepage, the proposal is to pump water back to the top of the dam at 300 million gallons a year.  Then bentonite clay is to be dropped into the tailings pond by a boat to ‘cap’ the seepage.  The DNR’s own experts and consultants had said the plan to avoid seepage by using bentonite was ‘wishful thinking.’ Levine himself calls bentonite ‘magical’ in its ability to create a supposedly waterproof barrier.  The single case study the DNR used to prove their case was not published in the legal filings. 

While saying favorable things about the proposal, the administrative judge rejected the use of bentonite based on present Minnesota environmental law.  (Levine mentions that Minnesota laws are behind the times and have not been updated for this kind of mining.)  Even Polymet admitted that 160 million gallons per year (mgpy) will seep from the pond; 73 mgpy through the beaches; 65 mpgy will seep through the dams – for a total of 298 million gallons per year. “Waterproof?” 

POLITICS

The political circus around these mining projects reflect a 15 year process by DFL governors Dayton and Walz that aims to OK the mines for political reasons - to stymie Republicans in northern Minnesota. Both governors have appointed the MPCA and DNR commissioners who have backed Polymet.  So the environment is to be sacrificed for centrist political expediency.  According to Levine, a minority in the DFL, 75 out of 201, backs a “Prove It First” (PIF) bill in the Minnesota legislature which would put a 20 year moratorium on sulfide mines in northeastern Minnesota. This PIF bill has never been allowed a legislative hearing in 10 years, a blocking effort effected by both Parties.

Levine concludes his long article:  “…current efforts to mine low grade ore on the cheap in environmentally sensitive areas, and skirt or ignore the state’s paltry sulfide mining laws haven’t panned out, even as the state’s executives, legislative branch and courts have bent over backwards to make it happen.”  

It is clear that ‘environmentalism’ is a just a slogan for the state DFL leadership based on this story.  The DFL here leans right in their attempt to fight Republicans, just as the national Party does.  This even when their leftish voting base in the state overwhelmingly opposes these useless and dangerous mines, which when built, will employ few.  This is why Minnesota – and by extension the U.S. – needs a new Left political party, based on a revived labor movement cognizant of environmental issues, along with the cohesion of every Left, political and activist community group into one unstoppable force.  The key is organization, a united workers’ front.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Polymet,” “Twin Metals,” “Line 3,” ‘environment,’ ‘water pollution,’ “Democrats,” “DFL.”

May Day Books has a good collection of Left newspapers, magazines and journals for sale, but not the Duluth Reader.  It is free in the Duluth area. 

Red Frog / July 20, 2025

Consumer Camp

 “American Bulk – Essays on Excess” by Emily Mester, 2025

This young author has written what amounts to a consumerist memoir about her family’s desire to buy or hold onto everything in sight.  Mester describes weekly family trips to a Chicago-area Costco to ‘buy in bulk.’ It was their ‘church.’  She goes on at length about her love of Olive Garden and malls.  She details her life at a fat camp, her first job at an Ulta cosmetic store and her sojourn at an upscale private boarding high school in New Hampshire.  She gets panic attacks about ‘something’ during her graduate studies at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and goes to a shrink.  She wrote consumer product reviews, both raging and not, and entered contests for free stuff, both for years. 

As a child Mester was an extremely picky eater, a stage she calls neophobic.  She seems to still love junk food and the comfort food she ate as a youngster, and is kind of a food obsessive. She orders vast quantities of stuff from Amazon, has become an expert at returns, lives by Wirecutter recommendations and lists shopping as her main hobby.

It’s not pretty.   

In the rest of her family, her wealthy Republican father uncontrollably buys every practical thing he can imagine, including big ticket items and things he already owns - to the point of building multiple storage sheds on his property to hold it all.  Her lovable Tea-Party / Trumpy grandmother in Storm Lake, Iowa is a severe hoarder.  Mester is afraid to enter her junked-up home after she peeks through the windows.  It is all kind of depressing in the end, though it starts out funny. It is not. 

As the key recommendation at the Writer’s Workshop goes, ‘write what you know’ and Mester does, name checking every desire, brand, chain and product she remembers.  She’s like a pop-culture Tom Wolfe, but without the deeper social satire. Her family became wealthy enough to buy anything they wanted and she, like her lawyer father, was caught up in the pathology of middle-brow consumerism. Or ‘too much stuff.’  This, incidentally, is a problem many have and why the book resonates with others.  Capitalism’s skill is encouraging consumption. 

To most people, this is memoir about dysfunction, though dressed in the clothing of normality and humor.  To me, who dislikes shopping unless it involves books or records, it is a description of affluenza.  Her ‘hip’ bluntness about her consumer desires and opinions, with her nose ring and lesbianism, might appeal to some young people.  As a result I don’t think this book is as ‘anti-consumerist’ as it is made out to be.  I actually don’t know how it got on May Day’s shelves, but I guess it is a warning description of some kind of sickness.  Beware of retail therapy!  Don’t save every damn jar! Too much stuff!

Mester does make the point that the version of ‘recycling’ the U.S. has is just an invitation to buy more products guilt-free.  She ponders – for a second - whether doing anything as an individual to help the environment matters.  Nah. She has a remarkably thin understanding of capital except its product side, though she does mention how Agriculture Secretary Butz denigrated smaller farmers in the 1970s. 

Mester pokes around trying to understand the cause of hoarding junk and settles on some version of ‘putting things off”’ - procrastination.  She can’t quite analyze why some people buy and others are careful about buying – the latter includes her mother – but Mester hints that it might be related to her own messiness.  She does not attribute it to class background or foreground.  She dwells on Virginia Wolf’s disparagement of middle-brow taste.  She thinks Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” was an attack on fat people, who were supposedly the real bogey of the documentary.  As Mester remarks about her chatty time at Ulta spewing customer-friendly bromides, she’s good at selling.  And certainly, someone is buying this book because so many buy so much.

Should you buy it?  Well…

As a postscript:  What is a 20-early 30 something doing writing a memoir?  It reeks of me, me, me and I, I, I.  Is she a stand-in for a self-involved generation or ‘The American Way’ or the Iowa Writer’s Workshop way?  I do not think so, except the latter. After all, who gives a shit if you like Goldfish crackers or Diet Dr. Pepper? Or that you lost 25 pounds at fat camp?  A memoir like this secretly reflects a certain upper-class attitude prevalent in the U.S. and abroad, even putting aside its contents.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “recycling,” “shopping,” “Amazon,” “retail therapy,” “affluenza” “Tom Wolf.”

And I got it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist / July 17, 2025

Bigger Vampire Squids

 “Plunder– Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America” by Brendan Ballou, 2023

This is a reformist financial expose of the worst financial players operating under capitalism – the U.S. ‘private equity’ industry (PE). It is written by a former DOJ lawyer. The book is a collection of public horror stories organized around various economic sectors. Ballou’s proposals to ‘fix’ the industry – regulation, law, Congress, consumer and non-profit action – seem to be ‘weak tea’ to deal with the most powerful, monied interests in the U.S. Since 2008’s Great Recession, private equity has replaced the investment banks as the biggest ‘vampire squids’ of financial capitalism.  Their names are Blackrock, Bain Capital, Carlyle, KKR, Apollo, Fortress and more. They are the hidden force behind various businesses. I will skip the specific horror shows as there are too many.  You’ll have to read the book for that.

Methods

To profit after they buy a company, using an LBO, or ‘leveraged buy-out,’ PE firms:  1) sell a company’s real estate for a large profit, then force them to rent – called a ‘leaseback;’ 2) charge that company management, loan and transaction fees.  3) layoff workers and institute forced overtime; 4) reduce quality; 5) force partnerships on a company to work with their own suppliers; 6) raise prices, fees or rents; 7) legally insulate themselves by pretending to be an ‘advisor,’ not an owner of a company; 8) use tax avoidance tax havens, but especially the carried interest loophole; 9) stiff workers on severance; 10) take a company’s profits and force the business to get loans instead – called a ‘dividend recap.’ This loads a subservient company with huge debts; 11) use bankruptcy as a strategic option for a looted company, especially to dump pension obligations on the federal government; 12) roll up small companies and merge them to eliminate local competition and then raise prices.

Ballou names one instance of a PE firm helping Arkansas lumber company reopen and back on its feet.  One. 

Homes

PE used the 2007 housing crash to buy up single-family homes and trailer parks in a big way. In 2 years they bought 350,000 homes.  Nearly a third of all U.S. rentals are now single-family homes, consisting of 5.4 million homes in 2017.  This was abetted by Edward DeMarco at the government’s Federal Home Finance Administration who aided PE by not allowing principal reductions on mortgages.  Ben Bernanke, then of the Federal Reserve, agreed that renting was more profitable for new owners.  In these properties PE firms raised rents and instituted fees for landscaping, pets and ‘smart locks,’ while having renters pay utilities and make major repairs like dealing with black mold.  This latter is very unlike most apartment building landlords. 

PE also bought mortgage servicers and the result was lost files, inaccurate information, incorrect evictions and foreclosures, erroneous delinquencies and overall bad administration, including of federal relief programs.  By 2020 PE also spent $4.2B on mobile home parks and became their slumlords.  Fannie Mae, through pandemic ‘relief,’ gave them money for these purchases, making the formerly affordable mobile park unaffordable.  Residents had to cover utilities, property taxes and the costs of upkeep for the parks, along with rising land rents.  As Ballou points out, the lower levels of the working class are a special money trough of PE, as are federal funds.

Bankruptcy

Here is a partial list of retail companies piratical private equity has looted and then bankrupted using their methods:  24 Hour Fitness, Aeropostale, American Apparel, Brookstone, Charlotte Russe, Claire’s, Friendly’s, Gymboree, Hertz, J.Crew, Linens ‘n Things, Marsh Supermarkets, Mervyns’s, Musicland, Neiman Marcus, Nine West, Payless, Petco, PetSmart, RadioShack, Sears, Shopko, Sports Authority, Talbots, Toys “R” Us, Rockport, Wickes Furniture. In just one instance, at Petco dead animals piled up because PE would not pay to properly bury them. 

5 bankruptcy venues in the U.S. are special friends of the PE industry. PE pushes for ‘363’ sales in those court proceedings, which are a quick auction of a company’s assets.  In one case, the PE firm rebought the company they bankrupted for a pittance, but without its’ debits.  This is also the court arena where private pension benefits are dropped on the public, by being handed to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).  Over 10 years the PBGC was forced to cut $70M in benefits to employees after the pension plans were dumped on them. 

Nursing Homes & Health Care

If PE buys a small medical clinic of any kind; a nursing home or group of homes; or a chain of hospitals, health outcomes plummet, staff are reduced and people die. For instance 20,000 deaths are blamed on their nursing home management over 12 years. Statistics show their companies are at the bottom of the quality pile, even forcing one large hospital chain to close.  The medical industry has a constant stream of guaranteed federal money through Medicare and Medicaid, which is attractive to PE.  Ballou asserts that one of the causes of rising health costs is PE itself.  Just in 2021 they spent $150B to acquire health care companies in every area.

Anesthesiology, cardiology, cosmetic surgery, oncology, radiology, pediatrics, urgent care, mental health, dentistry, obstetrics and gynecology and even veterinary clinics are now on their books.  In the last 10 years they have spent $500B in this sector. They also own staffing companies that supply outsource workers.  They practice ‘upcoding’ to charge more; charge for equipment that is never used; pretended to have physicians as fronts in control of medical enterprises and bought competitors (rollups) so as to eliminate competition in a certain city and sector.

Ballou discusses how the U.S. government and law has dropped or weakened opposition to oligopoly / monopoly activities and mergers.  Mergers are now seen by the courts and government as the source of efficiency, lower prices, enhanced quality and new products, not the reverse.  After all, monopoly and oligopoly is the natural tendency of capital, so it figures.

Desperate?  It's Easy...!

Finance

PE private credit offerings were larger than stock market IPOs in 2019, with Blackstone and Apollo almost the largest in the world, right after a Japanese firm. This industry is weakly regulated or unregulated and opaque.  PE private credit was enabled by the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations, who opened the door.  At this point, they are also ‘too big to fail.’  Several firms anticipate $1T in assets soon.  In 2020 a letter from the DOL allowed private equity to gain access to 401ks.  This bonanza of 401K / 403B accounts allows them to offer buy-ins from large pension funds, retirement firms and advisors. 

PE is investing in insurance companies, which have far lower capital requirements than what is safe due to being registered off-shore, increasing the risk of collapse. In 2014 40% of their LBOs used excessive debt according to the Federal Reserve.  Another heavy investment is payday loan companies – you know, those outfits that will instantly send desperate working-class people money to buy groceries - but not broccoli.

Prisons

PE likes a ‘captive’ source of money and working-class prisoners are ideal.  PE firms now are contractors for prison health services, food, fee-heavy debit cards, prison library e-books and telephone calls across the U.S. All their ‘services’ are expensive and of low to abysmal quality – for instance maggots in the food, minimal health care or a phone call costing up to $25 for 15 minutes for indigent prisoners.  Local police and sheriff’s departments get a cut of the profits according to Ballou. 

The Courts, Congress & Local Govt

The legal system is in the pocket of private equity, all the way up to the Supreme Court.  This coziness is reflected in laws passed by successive Republican and some Democratic Party administrations - the prevalence of arbitration agreements, the difficulties of bringing class actions; the costs and lengths of litigation; the lock private equity has on Congress, federal and state regulators and the ‘ignorance’ of many courts. In arbitration hardly any customers win, but they are forced into it.  PE is highly unregulated, as it usually operates as ‘private’ capital, not on public markets.  It hides behind layers of ownership, the ‘corporate veil’ when it buys companies.  Suing their customers for failure to pay is standard procedure.  Lawsuits and evictions skyrocket when PE takes over. 

They can slough off pension obligations through bankruptcy or get some liability shields for their businesses in 38 states.  The amount of lobby money and ‘donations’ from PE is enormous. There is a revolving door between government and PE, including top people like Timothy Geithner, who is with Warburg Pincus and Newt Gingrich, with JAM Capital. Private equity is now buying municipal water systems, ambulance services, 911 providers, fire companies and for-profit colleges in the public arena and has made a hash of them all.  It follows a libertarian pattern of privatization and marketization of everything, which is the goal of both neo-liberalism and libertarian Trumpism.

It is not just national.  Sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia invested in U.S. PE firms. Blackrock is partly owned by a Chinese sovereign fund too.   

Ballou’s Solutions

Ballou is a former DOJ attorney, so he has 36 specific, mostly legal suggestions on how to rein in private equity.  He dreams of a new anti-trust movement like the Progressive period around the turn of the century that opposed the ‘robber barons.’ Given it takes forever to try to get even one reform through Congress presently, like the years-long failed attempts to end the ‘carried interest loophole’ which enriches PE bosses, this list more than anything else admits that the problem is systemic and unsolvable.  There is no going back to Teddy Roosevelt in dealing with this new gilded age, which now has a new Gatsby - bougie Stephen Schwarzman, head of Blackrock.

The personal take on this book is that anything connected with PE should be treated with extreme caution as a worker or a customer.  

Ballou thinks other capitalists should be concerned too, and opposed to the robberies carried out by PE, so he sides with one faction of the capitalist class.  On the other hand Ballou once mentions that perhaps it is the capitalist system that is the real culprit. This seems to be the actual conclusion anyone reading about this extensive mess would come to and hints that even he doubts his own solutions.  This is one of the first sectors that should be nationalized by a workers' government.

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “private equity,” “Blackrock,” “prison,” “rents,” “Gatsby,” “tax haven,” “LBO.”

And I bought it at May Day Books! 

Red Frog / July 14, 2025 – Happy Bastille Day!

One Line Reviews are Back!

 “Humorous Stories and Sketches” by Mark Twain

Twain is one of the first U.S. inspirations for thousands of comics and writers and could be called one of the original humorists.  Twain’s cracked as many wild ones as Oscar Wilde although he might not admit it.  This collection of stories are a taste, although his books are also full of satire, irony, farce and making fun too. Here are one-line reviews for those who are tired of reading.  In fact, perhaps reading can be dispensed with all together in this instance.

“The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” – A loquacious drunk tells a long, tall tale about the exploits of the wrong person and his frog.

“Tennessee Journalism” – A violently opinionated editor defends himself from all the blackguards he’s insulted, while his visitor takes the punishment. 

“About Barbers” – The familiar experience of a terrible shave and haircut by an obnoxious barber upon his wary victim.

“A Literary Nightmare” – An author and his friend are mentally afflicted by a stupid newspaper jingle and perhaps a simple-minded slogan they can’t get out of their heads.

“The Stolen White Elephant” – A seemingly meticulous police detective in New York exhorts money out of a gullible foreigner to catch his elephant, which is rampaging across 4 states at the same time.

“The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” – An incompetent bunch of teenagers from Hannibal, Missouri join the Confederate resistance, and half leave after doing lots of retreating and killing an innocent traveler. (After this, Twain ‘lit out for the territories.’)

Fennimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses - Whereas Twain caustically eviscerates a fellow author’s narrative bumbling, misspent words and factual falsities in The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder.  

“How To Tell a Story” – Twain claims ‘the humorous story’ is native to the United States, with its wandering bumptiousness, while the Europeans are mechanically comic or witty.  

On that last one, given he also had wit, Twain’s funning and trusting American nationalists to laugh. Twain’s implicit politics hide behind these stories, lampooning warriors, celebrated authors, ‘competent’ cops, drunks, barbers, advertising, Europeans and newspaper editors.  His acerbic take on the rubes of his day reveals both his winking and detailed knowledge of his compatriots and his astonishment at how dim they are.

And I got this at the library, but May Day Books has a lot of leftish political fiction. Come on in and buy some!

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

The Cultural Marxist / July 11, 2025

For Labor Power, Bigger is Better

 “Behemoth – A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World” by Joshua Freeman, 2018 (Part 2)

Socialist Views

Marx saw capitalism’s factory in a dialectical sense.  While it was the direct site of the extraction of surplus value and profits from labor while despoiling nature, it could also provide the means to make every worker’s life easier and still protect nature, if the means of production were fully socialized and taken out of capital’s private hands. In short capital was developing technology, machinery and now software which could alleviate backbreaking and monotonous labor, shorten hours and lead to a more pleasant life, while at the same time not being driven to destroy the environment.  A factory could produce more clothing quickly and cheaply than a woman sewing at home for hours, and possibly of better quality.  A water pump beat walking to the well.  A solar panel supplies better light and power than a fire.  And so on. 

Freeman spends time on the strikes and class battles that occurred at the sites of big factories in the U.S. and the U.K.  Many of these are legendary to this day.  He mentions the Luddites, the Chartists, the IWW and CP and Peterloo, Homestead, Little Steel, Fisher Body #1 & 2, Republic Steel and so on. State troops in the U.S. were called out over 500 times from 1875 to 1910 to deal with labor unrest, with hundreds of workers dying in strikes.  1919 was a peak year of labor struggle with tens of thousands out on strike, a reflection of events in Europe. All this happened before the massive upsurge in the 1930s.     

In the early Soviet Union, Lenin and Trotsky favored ‘modern’ methods of production management.  They endorsed Taylorism due to the low quality of Soviet labor after the decimation of the Civil War. Trotsky said it was efficiency or poverty and starvation in polemics against Party opponents in the Workers’ Opposition.  The WO said workers needed input over the ‘experts’ on how to improve productivity.  I tend to side with the WO on this issue theoretically, as those doing the work have the most intimate ideas on how to improve production.  But given at the time that many new, rural workers were completely inexperienced, it would have to be a collaborative effort – so it depended on what kind of workers and experts were there. I say this as a former 20-year factory worker who has seen my share of lunk heads and incompetence even in ‘modern’ times.

Of interest to socialists is the relation between American capitalists and the first 5 year plan in the USSR in 1929.  Many U.S. architects, experts and companies – even Ford – helped build an industrial base in the Soviet Union, but at breakneck speed. The huge tractor plant in Stalingrad, the massive 32,000 worker truck/auto plant in Gorky and the monstrous Magnitogorsk steel complex east of the Urals were based on U.S. designs and input. New planned cities arose around these facilities. As was to be expected, ex-peasants from small villages had no idea how to work in a factory.  At the tractor plant, initial production was very slow due to ignorance, damage, idleness and lack of good parts and machines.  

Some of these projects were built in the middle of nowhere, a form of industrial adventurism, which required belated attempts at housing and more. The factories employed thousands of prisoners, ex-kulaks and disgraced professionals in forced labor, who lived in terrible conditions in caged camps.  This was a pattern followed by the Stalinist bureaucracy as the Gulag system grew. In the end, a hyper-industrial base was built out of these cruel and bureaucratic methods, while virtually ignoring consumer production. 

REBELLIONS Due to Size

Giantist factories spread to central Europe after WWII, as Soviet methods were used in countries like Poland’s giant Nova Huta steel complex near Krakow and the Hungarian Sztalinvaros steel plant in what is now Dunaujvaros on the Danube.  A new city was built around Nova Huta, with mostly communal planning, to house the tens of thousands of new workers from the countryside.  The plant became a key redoubt of the Solidarnosc union in the 1980s, as Sztalinvaros became a redoubt of the Hungarian Revolution and workers’ councils in 1956.  During the 2011 Arab Spring in Egypt, the huge Misr Weaving Company in Mahalla, Egypt provided one of the centers of resistance and inspiration for the overthrow of Mubarak. Yet in Germany the massive Volkswagen complex in Wolfsburg employs 72,000 workers and the 39,000 employees of BASF in Ludwigsafen are not as combative due to social-democratic policies in Germany.  

Factory giantism had the same political effect in the U.S., emboldening labor.  This was shown by the massive strike wave in 1946 after WWII, centered on large employers with big factories.  After this, U.S. corporations started moving away from large plants, dispersing workforces to rural areas and the South, an early harbinger of the ‘Southern Strategy.’  The political point here is that small factories, dispersed or isolated locations and friendly anti-union political climates all impact the siting of new capitalist production facilities.  This is because they know large factories can become hotbeds of class consciousness, unions and labor power.  Capital is allergic to that.

FoxConn factory in Zhengzhou

CHINA & VIETNAM  

The books’ remaining examples of industrial giantism are in China and Vietnam, concentrating on private capital. 4 examples in China are the huge Foxxconn City, owned by a Taiwanese firm; Pegatron, another Taiwanese firm employing 100,000 tech assembly workers in Shanghai; the Huafeng Group, a Chinese textile firm housing 30,000 workers in one building; and Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings Ltd., a Taiwanese firm employing 110,000 workers making shoes – the largest textile factory in history.  One factory in Datang made one-third of the world’s socks in the mid-2000s.  In Yiwu, 600 factories produced 60% of the world’s Christmas decorations.  Foxconn itself could turn out 10,000 iPhones a day over 3 shifts. 

Just In Time methods, as well as harsh labor conditions in these factories, eliminated inventory and provided a flood of products quickly, using software communications and data, air-freight, container ships and ports to make world-wide distribution easier and faster.  These techniques were essential to the basic strategy of mass labor.

Freeman notes the back and forth struggle in China between ‘politics being in command’ and production being in command in the period after the 1949 socialist revolution.  This was reflected in both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as the Maoist ideal of incorporating workers and communities into production was carried out by what can only be called primitive or ultra-left means.  This definitively ended after Mao’s death and the triumph of the adherents of ‘production only’ under Deng Xiaoping. 

The leading faction continues this policy to today, expanding it to allow a huge sector of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the growth of huge private Chinese companies.  Strikes were made illegal in 1978 and ‘special economic zones’ were set up in Guangdong and Fujian provinces for FDI. Decollectivization and later, privatization in the countryside pushed rural workers into the low-tier hukou system to flood into these factories.  As under Stalin, peasants in China became the chief losers in industrialization, but perhaps not quite as brutally.  The ‘market’ had won.  Freeman notes this ‘liberalization’ process also took place in Vietnam under Doi Moi. 

Strikes still occur regularly in China over pay, benefits, pensions, dormitories, the work load, long hours, cruel supervisors, injuries, food, fines, useless unions and foreign exploitation.  The state attempts to reconcile strikes until they become too large and disruptive, after which repression is used.  Factories are secretive, guarded compounds filled with plain buildings, alongside regimented worker dormitories.  The dorms are reminiscent of early English mills and Lowell’s textile towns. Inside the big box plants semi-military discipline is employed.  At the same time Foxconn has a large number of amenities on their ‘campuses’ like libraries, hospitals and sport facilities, so it might be more pleasant than an isolated and poor village. Chinese vocational schools require students to work at low pay for 6-12 months at a factory, providing another source of cheap labor. And yet industrialization has eliminated acute poverty in China, unlike fully capitalist India.

In Vietnam there are more strikes percentage-wise, as strikes are legal there and fining workers is forbidden.  Strikes against Nike, Adidas and other brands took place in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2015.  The famous 2011 strike against Yue Yuen involved tactics similar to the Luddites, with scores of factories destroyed or damaged around Ho Chi Minh City by an angry Vietnamese working-class.  

CONCLUSION   

In his conclusion Freeman notes that capitalism and socialist attempts both use industrial technology.  The question is what is produced; how are the workers treated; how much power do they have in the plant; what happens to the profits; what damage is caused to nature; what tech is appropriate; how are factories designed; where are they built and more.  He notes that many old, large factories are no longer functioning or are severely shrunken.  River Rouge still as a small amount of production going on.  Capitalist boom and bust cycles, tech changes and most prominently the class struggle actually determine how long factories will last. 

Large factories still exist across the world outside China, Vietnam and Germany.  A private Chinese company, Huajian Shoes, opened a giant factory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2010 at a $30 a month wage, as the average monthly wage in China is $560.  This shows the Chinese private sector is now using ‘low cost sourcing,’ exploiting African, Asian and South American labor in the process of wage arbitrage, just like every other capitalist entity.

Instead of production facilities, Freeman notes that ‘sophisticated’ capitalist money is now invested in rentier profiteering or financialization. For instance The Vanguard Group owns the second largest shares of stock in Foxconn’s owner, Hon Hai Precision Industry.  Vanguard is the third-largest shareholder in Pegaron Corporation, and the ninth-largest holder of Yue Yuen shares.  The present version of Chinese ‘internationalism’ is to allow U.S. private equity to own big chunks of Chinese production to this day.  How that bodes for the new cold war against China is another matter.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “factory,” “USSR,” “China,” “peasant,' "Cultural Revolution."    

And I bought this book at the used/cutout section of May Day Books!

Red Frog / July 8, 2025

Factories Create Modernity

 “Behemoth – A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World” by Joshua Freeman, 2018 (Part 1 Review)

A factory isn’t just a building.  Though it is that, but designed in specific ways, some quite impressive, and in this book, quite large.  It is also a center of consumer culture; a locus of class struggle; a social force impacting communities; a site of surplus value; a building riven by class; a cultural icon; a signifier of modernism; a church of technology and skills; a place to get injured or sick, a temple of discrimination; a life history.  In short, the factory created the modern world.

Freeman takes up all these aspects as he narrates the stories of the first silk and cotton mills on the rivers of Great Britain; the textile mills in Lowell Massachusetts; the giant steel plants in the U.S.; the even bigger automobile plants in Detroit; the huge heavy industry factories in the USSR; their spread into central Europe after the war and the Foxconn & Co. assembly complexes in China. He is interested in the issue of ‘size’ and why factories grew large.  For instance Ford’s River Rouge complex was the biggest one ever built in the U.S.  It was more like a city with over 100,000+ workers at its height in 1929.

Freeman makes fun of the ridiculous notion that we live in a ‘post-industrial society,’ as claimed by people like Alain Touraine and Daniel Bell in the 1960s.  We are still absolutely surrounded by things made in factories, mills and plants. Just look around. Yet ‘factory life’ is the last thing on hip people’s minds, immersed in their computers while visiting malls and living in housing developments that were built over former factory land.  But factories are still here – all over the world and even in the U.S.

Why Factories?

Freeman quotes Charles Babbage and other early English writers as to why factory ‘size’ mattered.  The reasons were economy of scale; the ability to supervise; higher productivity, attracting workers and increasing output due to the growth of colonial exports and domestic markets.  The large domestic market was especially true in the U.S. for textiles. The factory is really the physical embodiment of arriving capitalism, and some were bigger than churches in England, which astounded locals.  The first English plants became tourist sites. River Rouge itself hosted 2 hour tours every half hour.

The textile mills of England were the first signs of this new society, a model which was then copied across the world.  Steel mills like the huge Carnegie’s Homestead plant were the handmaidens to the railroads, which vastly improved transportation. Ford’s acres-large Highland Park plant developed the Model T, the assembly line and efficiency studies, and the car culture took off.  “Fordism,” partly a Keynesian idea that pays labor enough to buy their own products, was experimented with – and dropped. Soviet factories later helped repel the Nazis, and U.S. plants were quickly converted to war production too.  Foxconn’s plants have helped put the internet in almost everyone’s pocket across the world.

The factory changed communities – it made former farmers and irregular or home workers into clock watchers, fined for tardiness or absence.  It created cities and depopulated rural areas. Manchester grew into a crowded, polluted slum due to coal and poverty after the mills moved from horse power, then water power to steam. Coal and later gas and electricity were required to power these factories, so those extractive industries thrived as a result. Early English and U.S. textile companies hired young women and children, who they thought could do detail work needed with their ‘tiny’ hands.  Companies built new cities around their facilities. Some industrialists built housing next to the factories, part of a company town where they tried to control and surveil the morality of their workers.  Religion, abstinence from alcohol, cleanliness and chastity were the hallmarks.  This was especially true for new immigrants at Ford and the rural girls in Lowell and Lawrence. Yet Ford had huge problems with turnover – 370% in 1913 – until it introduced the $5 a day wage and profit-sharing.   

Politically in bourgeois thinking, factories were seen as harbingers of ‘modernism’ – a project of social uplift, wealth generation and consumer society.  They spread the idea of ‘joint stock’ companies and vertical integration.  They were celebrated in industrial exhibitions.  They were the wellspring of a new world, a new capitalist social system, praised as such until the dark side revealed itself.  Pollution, long hours, drudgery, injuries, low pay, exploitation, sexual and physical abuse and child labor made it more akin to slavery, especially as seen by reformers, unionists and Marxists. This is where we get the notion of wage slavery.  Freeman quotes Engels frequently, who helped run a textile plant in Manchester, to illustrate the Left side of the equation.

CULTURE

Freeman hits cultural notes too, as factories and industrialism impacted culture, as would be expected.  He spends time on the great Detroit Art Museum murals by Diego Rivera based on scenes Rivera observed at River Rouge.  He describes Charlie Chaplain’s social-comedic film Modern Times and mentions of Ford in Dos Passos U.S.A. series volume, The Big Money about the Detroit auto strikes.  He dwells on Blake’s invocation of the ‘dark Satanic mills,’ Charlotte Bronte’s attack on the Luddites in the novel Shirley; the descriptions of factories in Dicken’s Hard Times and Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong.  He discusses Dziga Vertov’s film about Ukrainian factories called Enthusiasm; Margaret-Bourke White’s photos of auto plants; Alexander Rodchenko’s constructivist photo montages of industrial facilities and many more. (END of Part 1)

Note: Freeman is a history prof in NYC specializing in labor and comes from a working-class background.

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

And I bought this book at the used/cutout section of May Day Books!

Red Frog / July 5, 2025

A Two-Summer Read

 “A Perfect Spy” by John Le Carré, 1986

This is a sprawling, gargantuan story, quite unlike the tight, plot-driven spy books of Le Carre’s prime.  It is his Infinite Jest, his wander, his cornucopian novel that explains the long makings of a ‘perfect spy.’ It is hard to read actually, as it is a slog at almost 600 pages.  In time, it zips back and forth.  It is filled with hundreds of characters.  It is tongue-in-cheek satire to the highest degree.  It is a psychological portrait most of all.  It looks at the impact on a son of a father who is a hypocritical liar and con man.  It has manipulative spies working on the same gullible 17 year old student. It pictures a boy and later, a man with no particular skills except deception and weak adherence to “Britain.”  It makes fun of an apolitical but kind ‘liberal’ who can be on both sides of every story and has more feelings that brains.  It highlights a weak ‘yes’ man – or so you may think.  Yet even yes-men eventually say no.

Pym is the spy in question, who eventually either goes rogue with Czech intelligence or didn’t or did.  The story is not really about tradecraft, a plot with a point, skullduggery or political murder.  It is a long joke about Britain – its classes, its ridiculous characters, its clichés, its tired architecture and rundown edges – an empire that once was. Le Carre makes fun of U.K. politicians, spies, business men, the ‘special relationship,’ petty criminals, military men, voting rubes, chauvinism, royal titles, silly names and village life.  At the end Le Carré makes fun of the whole spy business and the cold war itself.

The writing is heavily detailed and ornate with a mysterious “I” occasionally appearing.  The ‘I’ might be Pym writing his own autobiography for his son, interspersed with a dominant third-person narrator.  Every individual is described a bit and then made fun of.  It’s a picture of the various cultural tribes of Britain.  It is a patchwork, ‘kitchen sink’ bildungsroman, but in a good way.  And yes, Pym is as middle-class as they come.  In fact he’s from his mother’s side of titled English gentry, if he says so himself.

Pym spies on young Communists at Oxford.  He betrays a new friend in Bern, Switzerland with a suspicious origin and no papers.  He shuts down a woman whose inheritance was stolen by Pym’s father. He saw Pym Sr. badly treat his mother, and he alternately hates and sucks up to his dad.   He cannot form a real relationship with a woman – it is only sex or as a cover. He’s finally recruited to His Majesty’s Service as the ‘natural’ he is and sent to Vienna.

The ‘spy’ dimension in the book is focused on the Czech Communist intelligence network and M6’s Austrian Station.  What Le Carre emphasizes is that much spy work is detail-oriented regarding personal emotional issues and micro-surveillance.  Pym becomes an apparently ‘good’ spymaster by accident and his psychology becomes key after he disappears.  Reflecting on his own time in Intelligence, Le Carre nails the various types of people he worked with – only a few of whom are actually perceptive.  Who knew spying involved genteel British boobs?  They might remind us of boardroom types at the top of a corporate ladder.

Pym gets his start in Austria watching the Russians across the border, handling ‘never-wozzers’ according to Le Carre.  Then he strikes seeming gold because of an old relationship, and it’s all downhill – or uphill - from there.  Pym becomes a 30-year agent for both sides in the cold war and the global class war, a double-agent and ‘middle-man’ representing just a tiny country inhabited by two buddies who happen to be spies. In a way the book belittles the whole, long intrigue between the two blocs.  As successful spies they make it to ‘America’ and are promoted to the big time to continue spying until they are caught.  And that, evidently, is perfection. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “spy,” “Le Carre,” “Le Carré,” “CIA.”

P.S. - Of course now the perfect spy is a computer algorithm.  

And I got this at the Library!  May Day Books itself has a significant amount of books on espionage by the U.S. government, CIA and others.

Kultur Kommissar / July 2, 2025