Mayday Books

I'm a Refugee

2012-01-23T19:03:00.005-06:00

“Tropic of Chaos – Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence,” by Christian Parenti, 2011

Well, this book shoots that theory of ‘super-imperialism’ all to hell. (Super-imperialism – oligarchic corporations completely control world market with no national issues remaining.) Instead, Parenti describes a world where the violent patterns of the old ‘cold’ war, neo-liberalism and climate change are combining to produce failed states, massive migration and violence in the global ‘South’ - and an armed life-boat mentality among the imperial states of the ‘North.’ In other words, a centrifugal world – not a centripetal one. Parenti concentrates on the situation along the equator between the two longitudes – hence his title.

He traveled around the world to tell this story – spending time in Kenya, Afghanistan, India, Kyrgyzstan, Brazil and Mexico. He could have looked at Asia too – Burma or Indonesia would have given him plenty of support for his thesis. This book is a companion to Mike Davis’ “Planet of Slums” (reviewed below – use search). They both start by looking at U.S. Defense Department military planning, which visualizes combating guerrilla war in crowded slums – like Baghdad and Mogadishu – while dealing with millions of climate refugees. A look at the British film “Children of Men” gives an idea of what lifeboat militarism might look like. As the unstated assumption goes, if the corporate politicians never talk about it, it’s not because their armed forces aren’t fully aware. The situation along the Mexican border using high technology, massive force, fences and reactionary politics all illustrate what is happening even now. Mexicans are not merely looking for 'better pay,' as refugees from neo-liberalism - many are refugees from climate change too.

Parenti uses examples of individuals caught up in the present violence of climate change. He tells the story of a dead cow herder in Kenya, killed trying to keep his cows from tribal raiders because the water holes are drying up. He interviews poppy growers in war-torn Afghanistan, who can’t grow anything else except poppy due to the string of droughts there. (Poppy uses very little water.) The Taliban supports poppy, taxing it, while American policy is to destroy it. He talks to an ex-fisherman squatting in murder capital Juarez, Mexico, who’s livelihood was lost because of red algae in the over-heated Pacific ocean. Neo-liberal Mexican government policies which got rid of government supports for fish prices and fishing also played a role – combining to put him out of work. Farmers in northern India, who’s wells and rivers are running dry, tell him how they can no longer pay the usurers and banks for expensive Monsanto seed and chemical fertilizers. (AKA, the end of the Green Revolution.) Parenti points out that these are also grievances of the revolutionary Naxalites, whose base in among farm and forest people. (See Arundati Roy’s “Field Notes on Democracy,” reviewed below – use search.) Parenti travels to northern Brazil to talk to landless peasants squatting on unused land, using local ‘green’ techniques to bring back the soil and crops. The violent favelas of Sau Paulo and Rio are full of people from the Northeast who can no longer farm due to economic and climate conditions. Parenti notes that Lula, while redistributing wealth in Brazil, has not changed the basic class relations. Parenti tells the tale of ethnic violence in Kryghistan. One main reason is because the hydro-electric river dams no longer have enough water to power the city and countryside, resulting in escalating conflicts between Uzbecks, Tajiks and Kyrgyz. Formerly, the USSR provided economic support to all three now 'independent' states, and this enabled them to blunt negative effects like this.

Parenti describes climate change due to global warming as gasoline on the economic failure of market solutions and the arms issues of the ‘cold’ war. The collapse of Somalia is precisely where the cold war and later, American military priorities to control that part of the oil world, come together. Climate change is producing floods and droughts, tsunamis, melting glaciers, poor crops, dying animals, poor soil, dropping water tables, raging fires and disappearing forests. Neo-liberalism has already made water, trees, people, animals, land and crops commodities to be bought, sold and controlled only in order to make a profit. Which is why sustainability is being sold to the highest bidder. The cities of the ‘South,’ and increasingly the ‘North,’ are full of refugees from decaying eco-systems and eroding economies or classes. This book is another warning to those who don’t actually believe climate change will have any effect, or will ever impact themselves. I think this includes many Democrats, not just Republicans.

The weakest part of the book, of course, is the last chapter. Endings reveal underlying ideologies. Parenti, after roaring like a lion for chapters, ends squeaking like a mouse. He sounds basically like Al Gore – not that Al Gore hasn’t said some good things about climate change – but the Al Gore of the Democratic Party establishment. Parenti does not talk about conservation as a strategic response, or the limitations of the capitalist market – his fixes are mostly technological. He directly opposes eco-socialism’s idea that capital’s method of eternal growth is wrong. He visualizes capital growth in the direction of wind turbines and solar arrays. In that, he and Al Gore are in the same lifeboat. He thinks an enlightened market, seeking profits in green technology, can mitigate climate change to an acceptable degree.

I would disagree. This point in history is unlike any other ‘catastrophic convergence’ (Parenti’s own term). There is a ‘clock’ running and, even by his own standards, the present 390 ppm of carbon is already on the slope towards irredeemable global climate change. Capital may well be able to convert in ordinary timescales, after much destruction and squandering – but unfortunately, continuing to use market methods and ‘market’ politics in this situation will allow profit-making via destructive technologies and practices to continue long past the time when the clock stops. Since it is basically profit that drives this system, anything that makes money, no matter its inherent destructiveness (Rhino horns!) will survive. The people who control those industries will defend their positions on the normal terrain of the capitalist state for years to come. In other words, the solution to a ‘catastrophic convergence’ is not gradualist market politics and policies.

Parenti correctly points out that the main problem is a political problem, and the U.S. is the premier roadblock to tackling these issues. However, both U.S. political parties are dedicated to military solutions in many cases - just the thing Parenti warns against. They both preside over the largest military and arms dealer in history. Yesterday, Obama even admitted that military spending will still increase, only more slowly. (!) The ‘protected enclave’ is already U.S. military policy. Both parties embrace a status-quo picture of handling immigration and Mexican politics, with minor variations, continuing to make a chunk of the working class in the U.S. illegal. Both parties support the continuation of the drug war. Both parties have essentially done almost nothing about climate change, though the Democrats have made a few small moves in the right direction. Both parties support different versions of neo-liberal economic policies. So if the main problem is political – what is the ‘political’ answer to this morass? Parenti has none. Absolutely none. And reveals himself to be an excellent reporter, but not much more. His own facts condemn his politics.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, January 22, 2012

Sado-Capitalism

2012-01-18T19:54:00.004-06:00

“The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism – How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers,” by Michael Perelman, 2011.

I imagine you are not a fan of bondage or S&M. They say that rich people like it. Since most working class people exist in some kind of handcuffs all the time, they don’t relish putting on real ones. The only time that happens is when they are arrested by Officer Friendly. Perelman understands this. His play on Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market is … logical. After all, invisible hands create invisible handcuffs too.

Perelman is a professor of political economy at Chico, California, and proves that there actually are a few professors in the U.S. that do not smile kindly on capital. This book is a calm, somewhat detailed look at capitalism’s sorrier ideological aspects. Perelman takes an in-depth look at, among other things: Adam Smith’s real theory and history; the creation of the modern economics profession; how bourgeois economic theology makes work and the working class invisible; how control over workers is more important than unleashing the creative potential of human beings; the massive fraud that is the “GDP” statistic; how the Federal Reserve enables the capitalists; and the enormous waste embedded in the ‘rational’ corporate market system.

Controlling the working class is key to Perelman’s book. He frames it around the Greek legend of Procrustes. Procrustes was a bandit in Attica, who waylaid travelers and made them spend the night on his iron bed. There he stretched short men to fit the bed, or cut off the legs of tall men, so that all men eventually fit the bed – and died of it. His sadism made the surrounding countryside desolate. Eventually Theseus, who became King of Athens, subjected Procrustes to his own treatment. Perelman thinks that capitalism is like this Procrustean iron bed. As Frederick Winslow Taylor, the founder of Taylorism said, “The system must be first.” Even Margaret Thatcher, much beloved feminist, said of the market: “There is no alternative.” And, like all classically trained political economists, Perleman poses an alternative - Michelanglo’s “Bearded Slave” – partially encased in rock, yet attempting to free himself from the restraints of the stone.

Enough classicism. I actually do not think the ‘invisible handcuffs’ of ideology would be as strong if it were not for the real handcuffs that underlie them. Perelman has a good section on the ‘guard economy’ – the millions of economically useless jobs now invested in security guards, prison guards, border guards, CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, NIA employees and contractors, military contractors, home security consultants and systems, the military, the National Guard, police, judges, attorneys, ad nauseum. Quite clearly, if these people stopped doing their jobs as enforcers of the myriad political rules against working class people, the invisible handcuffs of belief would slowly disappear. After all, the 'rational' market, the “American Dream” the made-up ‘middle class” and the magical ‘invisible hand’ are all comforting things we tell ourselves at night - because to believe otherwise is to face our own comeuppance. It is precisely the inability to successfully act against the capitalist state and corporations that fuels belief in imaginary things. This is why successful strikes and a successful populist labor party movement are the most feared things in the U.S. They have the possibility of cutting through both kinds of handcuffs. But, as Zizek points out, the class war does not just exist on the real battlefield – it is also an intellectual war, which is why Perelman wrote this book.

I won’t go into each aspect of this book, but one thing struck me. Perelman discusses how the only agency a working person in a capitalist society gets, according to bourgeois theory, is through being a consumer. Work and its costs are kept hidden behind a dark, unspeakable curtain. Odd for an economy based on making ‘commodities’ eh? Like black people, working people are invisible too - until they enter a store to buy something. Then they are rational, valued ‘guests.’ But at work they are expected to sleep in the Procrustean bed, for the most part, with no health care, low wages, little respect and bad hours, just like that Target worker who dresses in red shirts and beige pants.

And I bought it at Mayday books!
Now buy it, Dammit, Gumby.

Red Frog, January 18, 2012

That Weird Little Country in the Middle of Europe

2012-01-13T19:15:00.008-06:00

Hungary Heads Into the Horthyite Past

If the EU, Bloomberg and oh my, Paul Krugman are talking about you, something must be right – or wrong. Hungary’s Fidesz government, lead by reactionary Viktor Orban, is making waves by heading towards bankruptcy and authoritarian rule. Of course, for Hungary, this is nothing new.

Known as an enlightened empire back around 1900, Budapest and environs boasted a Parisian-style life. However, anti-Semitism and rural nationalism were rising at that time in response to the domination of Hungary by urban capital - which many reactionaries saw as "Jewish." The revolutionary wave of 1919 in Europe brought the Hungarian Communist Party to power under Bela Kun for 6 months – the only successful revolution after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. The radical Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs was Commissar for Culture in this government. Romanian troops entered Budapest in August 1919 and crushed the workers republic. Lukacs organized a Communist underground while Bela Kun left the country and went to the USSR. After the Romanians left, a White terror followed, sponsored by Admiral Horthy (yes, in a country with no seaport…). Horthy, on his white horse, took over Hungary, and oversaw an authoritarian right-wing dictatorship from 1919 until 1944, lastly as an ally of the Nazis. A Hungarian army was one of those encircled and defeated at Stalingrad by the Soviets. (See “Enemy at the Gates,” reviewed below.) Kun, who fled to the USSR, was later executed by Stalin as a Trotskyist in the 1930s. For his part, Lukacs was at one point put under Budapest house arrest by the Hungarian Communist Party, and served in Imre Nagy's government during the 1956 uprising..

Horthy was removed by the Nazis in 1944 for insufficient loyalty, and the “Arrow Cross” Hungarian fascists put in charge. They carried out the deportation of the Jews of Hungary to the death camps. The German Nazis did not even have to do it – few were in Hungary anyway. It was Hungarians who stocked the death camps at the end of World War II - a point surviving Hungarian Jews consider significant. However, today the Budapest museum of the “House of Terror” (headquarters for the Arrow Cross and later the Communist secret police) celebrates the period prior to post-war communism – the Horthy period - and the reign of the Catholic Church. This is the period that Orban would also like to return to.

A new Constitution took effect January 1, 2012 that gave Fidesz control over the news media, the courts, religion, and the central bank. Orban has ‘decertified’ 348 religions – although not the Catholic Church, which is now one of 14 ‘state-recognized’ religions. This in a country where only 21% of the population attends church at all. The government has even nationalized pension funds and put the unemployed to work digging ditches. Abortion is now illegal and hetero-sexual marriage is the only form of marriage. Christianity is now recognized as the ‘foundation of the nation.’ Fidesz appointees will hold key government positions for years in the future. Major decisions can now be made by a bare majority of the Parliament. The courts have been packed with Fidesz appointees. The press must now pass articles by a Board of Censorship, and 'violating' papers can be shut down. This is all based on a 53% Fidesz win in the elections – similar to George Bush’s idea of a mandate with 50.5% of the vote. Hungary now has 10.7% official unemployment, 14% of retail loans are defaulting, and working class people who got loans in Swiss francs or the Euro are now suffering the plunge of the forint.

The EU is only protesting government control over the central bank - their main interest, of course. Yet defeat of Orban by the Hungarian working class is what is really needed, similar to what they did in 1919 and 1956. 10s of thousands of demonstrators lead by the Hungarian Solidarity Movement recently forced Orban to leave his new Consitution event by the back door of the Buda palace, which is a start.

Hungary’s government bonds have just been declared ‘junk’ by 3 credit agencies, although these same agencies are suspect due to their own blindness before the 2008 U.S. crash. Hungary was able to get a massive loan from the EU in October 2008, just prior to the recent meltdown in Europe, which has saved it until now. Now Hungary is part of that very same meltdown, as the strapped IMF and the ECB are balking at more loans. Hungary is not in the EU zone, after all. The forint has dropped precipitously in value due to Hungary's difficulties. While some parts of the European populations are moving to the left, others are moving to the right, as the bourgeois ‘middle’ collapses along with its credit ratings and its fat wallets. Hungary provides an example of the latter.

What is the opposition? The Hungarian “Socialist” Party (“SP”) is what is left of the former Communist Party. It is a neo-liberal organization rife with corruption and prostration before Brussels - though it barely lost the last election. However, Fidesz has now passed laws making the SP liable for transgressions by the former Communist Party. The Communist Party has been branded a ‘criminal organization’ and the SP is legally identified as their successor. In other words, anti-communism continues, even against liberals. Sound familiar?

The other main party in Hungary is Jobbik – a far-rightist party that silently murders Gypsys, makes anti-Semitism a plank in their program, and trains with weapons. They have several seats in the European Parliament. For all practical purposes, they are the reincarnation of the Arrow Cross, as Fidesz is Horthy in a suit.

When old Jewish ladies in Budapest worry again – is it any wonder that they might wonder what capitalism has again brought to Hungary?

Red Frog
January 13, 2012

There's Actually Something on Television?

2012-01-05T09:38:00.005-06:00

“Tremé” – Season One, 2010

High-end pay cable has always been off limits as some kind of frivolity expense, where you waste money paying for TV, of all things. For years I’ve been reading reviews about shows I’ve never seen – fascist shit like “24,” gangster love story “The Sopranos,” and the swear-fest “Deadwood.” Now I’ve read and seen bits of the faux-authenticity of Mad Men, the standard sad cop drama “The Wire,” Tolkien rip-off “Game of Thrones” and the biker-thug fantasy “Sons of Anarchy.”

However, one program stuck out. Just one. “Tremé.” (pronounced “TremAY”) So I rented the first season.

Faubourg Tremé is a neighborhood in New Orleans, just west of the French Quarter, across Rampart Street. It is what remains of Storyville, the neighborhood that invented jazz and was behind the development of the blues in the 1920s. (see review of “Birth of the Delta Blues,” below.) It is full of musicians, and is mostly black. The series takes place 3 months after Katrina. It is filmed in a standard Robert Altman ensemble style, following the weaving stories of Treme residents - black Indians, bar owners, restaurateurs, musicians, music-lovers, attorneys and professors – all coping with the dead water left by Katrina. While somewhat romantic and familiar, (indeed, the theme song is a knock-off of “Lovelight”) I think it captures the best parts of the city well.

Tremé pulls few punches politically or culturally. It is the first show I’ve seen on television that takes black culture seriously, as something other than lumpen or buffoonish. The portrayals attempt real people, not thugs, not saints and not comedians. One of the Mardi Gras Indians stands up to the notorious New Orleans PD. He squats in abandoned federal housing untouched by the flood so as to re-open the apartments to the black Orleanians displaced from those buildings. Another story follows the mysterious death of a black youth in police custody just after the flood hit. A third tracks the life of a session trombonist trying to still make it.

Tremé, and by extension New Orleans, is a music city, and musicians are all over this series. Which is extremely rare on television. There are cameos and appearances by Steve Earle, (who actually plays a character), Allen Toussaint, Trombone Shorty, Dr. John, Kermit Ruffins, Elvis Costello, Rebirth Brass Band, Tremé Brass Band, even McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter. I’d say this is a better introduction to New Orleans jazz than the painfully sincere efforts of Ken Burns. Tremé filmed on Jackson Square among street musicians, on Frenchmen Street, and in the clubs of Rampart and others, catching the musicians in the real. Odd and knowledgeable DJ’s on the radio, Japanese jazz benefactors, second-line parades, impromptu concerts and jazz funerals punctuate the episodes.

Another theme is politics, though here the series pulls punches. John Goodman rages on ‘You Tube’ as an angry Tulane professor attacking ‘Katrina Fatigue”, NO Mayor Ray Nagin, Bush, the U.S. government, FEMA, NPR, the Po-lice, the Army Corps of Engineers and various shit-faces. Another character, angry at the police and the city government, starts a dope-addled campaign in his ward against the slickster politicians, and gains support. One of his slogans? (Legalize) “Pot for Potholes.” This campaign, however, is dropped like a hot potato in Season One, albeit humorously. The Mardi Gras Indian tells his ward boss to get some housing, and when only one FEMA trailer shows up, he tells him to stuff it. Later he spends Mardi Gras in jail – a sad event for a resident of the city - for defending himself from the police. A lawyer locates a prisoner who died from blunt force trauma in police custody, but the family decides not to go further. There is little united, consistent, organized action – although you can tell the progressive population hates the ruling elite of New Orleans. After all, this is still HBO. And HBO is never going to promote mass organizing against the system.

There is even a food subtext befitting this city. Some famous New York chefs do a cameo drop-in on a local Creole restaurant run by a talented female chef at the end of her wits. I don’t know who they are, but she sure does. Another meme is how “New York” is where you go to make it. The son of the Mardi Gras Indian plays cool jazz and bebop, not New Orleans style. He’s always running between the cities, trying to escape his past. Another character claims to want to move to New York. The capital of the 10% and NO silently duel.

The trajectory of the first season is down, however. Three of the characters spiral into failure and worse. One loses a restaurant. One becomes a drug addict and drops out of music. And, in a false note, one commits suicide. The missing black youth finally turns up the way you might expect.

Would like to watch just one pay-series? It’s Tremé. Although few programs can carry themselves for years. Even Dickens ended his written serializations when the story was done. Attempting to keep a story going after it’s ‘done’ is typical of profit-based American television, which is why so many programs die a slow death. It is quite possible Tremé attempts the same thing. Better the serializations on British TV, which do end well because they are on the public dime.

Red Frog
January 5, 2012

The Song of the Non-Industrious Poor

2012-01-01T14:08:00.012-06:00

“Debt – the First 5,000 Years,” by David Graeber, 2011

This magisterial work by a pro-Occupy professor from Goldsmiths University in the U.K. has gotten praise from, of all places, Bloomberg and the New York Review of Books. And that is odd for an anti-capitalist book that takes a hard-line against modern financial debt. Graeber sees communism as the basic human relationship between people, in much the same way that CLR James (see review, "Facing Reality, below) announced that socialism already existed everywhere among the western working classes in the 1950s. The book, however, promises more than it delivers.

Graeber’s contention is that debt – in various forms – has been in existence since the times of ‘primitive’ communism – among tribal societies, slave societies, mercantile societies, serfdom, early capitalism and now, modern monopoly finance capital. He makes the point that ‘debts’ are central to human society. The only issue is what kind of debt it truly is - social or private. This book is a work of economic anthropology that re-visits the cultural and economic history of society up to the present day, ‘re-imagined’ through the lens of debt – be it mystical, moral, social or monetary. Graeber approaches the debt issue on a world-scale, comparing cultures in China, India, Africa, Mesopotamia, the Americas and Europe. He focuses most on China, India and the Near East, and only later, on Europe.

Why should we care? Unlike ‘salt’ or steel, in the modern period, impersonal financial debt has become a central feature of the present structure of finance capitalism and its economic crisis. Graeber thinks the present U.S. treasury bill debt will never be repaid - it is instead functioning as a kind of imperial tribute to the U.S. government. He carefully delineates the issue of interest over time – including the successful use of bans on usury by Islamic markets and even early Christian ones. The complete collapse of laws against usury in the U.S. in 1980, allowing rates up to 120% on payday loans, marked a significant change in how this issue was handled. In essence, it made every U.S. bank a loan shark. Debt peonage continues to exist across the globe – even among U.S. college students who have forfeited many years of earnings to pay their loans – or homeowners that will never own their houses free and clear.

Graeber contends that debt is intimately connected to war and slavery. Slaves were one of the first forms of payment in tribal societies, along with cattle. In fact, the end of slavery marked a certain diminuation in the idea that everything is a commodity - although insurance companies still like to put a price on human life. Like Marx’s point about primitive accumulation, he locates the origin of impersonal markets in theft itself, usually during military conquest. He dismisses theological arguments by various religions that the debt we owe is to a ‘god,’ ‘nature,’ morality or some mystical entity. Real debts can only be between equals, or those within some approximation of legal equality.

Graeber takes aim at several modern free-market shibboleths. He divides the nature of markets between modern impersonal markets and intimate local markets, showing how early markets were really a function of social exchange, not profiteering against strangers. This point is a familiar one from pro-capitalist anarchists. He punctures Adam Smith’s myth of barter as existing prior to the development of money. Indeed, no anthropologist has yet located the barter system that Smith made up in his creation myth about money. He repeatedly hits the free-market libertarian fantasists who think gold and silver are not also ‘fiat’ money. Graeber says that money has never had any intrinsic value, even prior to the U.S. going off the gold standard in 1971. It has always been a social construct. Even a cow - one of the original measures of value - is worth more than gold. He spends a lot of time on the creation of money, showing how money originated out of debt, not barter. And how national governments adopted money for their own uses. The ‘market’ did not create money.

Graeber takes aim at the present legal definitions of property - which originated in Roman era law, then were transmitted through English law to U.S. codes. Rome was a society that supported slavery, and that 'logic' actually crept into its idea of property law.

Among many historical stories he tells is a significant one about the mining of gold and silver in Peru and Mexico by the conquistadors lead by Cortes. After slaughtering the Aztecs, millions of native peoples were used in the mining process. After dying in the mines, their dead bodies were left heaped around the mines like slag rock. While Cortes and his men never got free of debt – even though sitting on an ocean of gold and silver – most of these precious metals went to European bankers, and ultimately were sold to the Chinese so their governments could prop up their monetary system. Ordinary Europeans saw very few coins even at that time.

Graeber dates 1971 as the year that a new – and unknown - modern capitalist period started. When Nixon went off the gold standard that year it was an attempt to pay for the national debt of the Vietnam war. Graeber shows how war has been the chief driver of generalized debt since the beginnings in Sumerian Mesopotamia. The modern capitalist national debt was not created until the formation of the Bank of England in the 1600s, which itself reflected the King's war spending. Paper money, used in China and several other places, came into generalized use in England only after the intentional destruction of informal, local credit systems, part of what I consider the 'enclosure of the commons.' That grocer that used to let you run a tab? Now a distant memory. Trust and personal knowledge of people you knew was replaced by cold hard cash.

For a Marxist, Graeber’s most interesting point is about ‘free’ wage labor not being the universal standard after the development of modern capitalism. While wage labor certainly is the primary form labor took in most advanced countries - rural and urban debt peonage and other forms of pre-capitalist functioning continue to exist in mass forms under imperial capital to this day. Indian farmers are so in debt to usurers and banks for Monsanto seed and chemical fertilizers (which have destroyed the soil) that they commit suicide in consistent numbers. Many people are still tricked into working for free. Thievery and crime form the earnings of countless others. marginal peddlers working on credit are endemic to massive third-world cities. Virtual slavery still exists in sections of the world economy. As he puts it:
“We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn’t a capitalist was somehow able to become a respectable, regularly-paid wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that has never existed and never could exist.”
He follows that up by pointing out that the post WW2 Keynesian compromise between capital and labor has broken down – and will not return.

Solutions? After putting in a good word for the Sadrists in Iraq as perhaps having answers like their early Mesopotamian cousins, Graeber pulls up short. What popular movement will provide the answer? Graeber’s answer: “Who’s to say?” (!) He does call for a debt Jubilee, much like those under Hammurabi and others. And, interestingly enough, the ancient Mesopotamians seem to be to the left of the IMF, the World Bank and the U.S. political pygmies of both parties. The latter only take a haircut when the blood no longer runs from the stone. Who says history only goes forward?

Jubilees of this kind have been used in human society many times in order that the population not overthrow the rulers. Graeber consistently points to the pressure of the masses against debt during nearly all periods of history. However, a debt Jubilee still leaves the impersonal debt machine in place. While fulfilling its function of relieving the pressure of an angry population, and counting as a significant reform, it allows the machine to live, and the original communism of the human population to remain submerged.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog
January 1, 2012

Counter this Culture!

2011-12-17T16:34:00.004-06:00

The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac, 1958

Jack Kerouac wrote a bunch of books in the fifties, using his ‘automatic’ writing style, like a jazzman. No re-writes, only one time to get it right. The Dharma Bums (‘dharma’ means ‘truth’) is one of these books, which included “On the Road.” Kerouac’s writing style inspired a younger poet named Gary Snyder to adopt that same zen. Some critics would call Kerouac an amateur, but when you think of it, laboring over each word or sentence with a nail file might be easier than letting it all come out well the first time. Ask John Coltrane.

Gary Snyder, under the pseudonym “Japhy Ryder,” is Kerouac’s fellow ‘bum’ in this book – along with other pseudo-nonymous fellows like Allen Ginsberg (“Alvah Goldbook”); Michael McClure (“Ike Oshay”); Neal Cassady who appears in “On the Road” too (here as “Cody Pomeroy); Kenneth Rexroth (“Reinhold Cacoethes” – don’t laugh); Alan Watts (“Arthur Whane”) and John Montgomery (“Henry Morley” – a truly eruditely odd individual and Berkley librarian). And who knows, maybe Ferlinghetti or William Burroughs are buried in here too somewhere, under some verbal rock.

The younger Snyder actually teaches Kerouac a thing or two. Like orthodox Buddhism, which was in fashion among the literati of San Francisco in the 50s. They’d done got sick of Jesus evidently. And mountain-climbing. And camping. Both had a thing for nature, and really the ‘high’ points of this book are Kerouac’s meditations on mountain-tops, in deserts, under trees and on the beach. Snyder gets Kerouac to buy a little tent, sleeping bag and cook set. Kerouac eventually sleeps more in the sleeping bag outdoors than inside his shack at Cortes Madera in Marin County, just over the hill from Muir Woods.

The book has a simple layout. First the greatest poetry reading of American time - the October 13, 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco. Ginsberg read “Howl” and Snyder read “A Berry Feast.” Kerouac encouraged the crowd and bought wine for all. Then Snyder, Kerouac and Montgomery go up and down 'Matterhorn' Mountain in 2 days – and that says something for amateurs. Snyder finally makes it, while Kerouac enjoys the Buddha of quitting just before the peak. Kerouac follows that with a cross-country hitch-hiking and hopping-trains trip back to North Carolina, where his family lives, to test his camping skills. And if you’ve ever let yourself be guided by the accidents of the road while hitching, you will enjoy his description.

After that, Kerouac and Snyder settle into a shack at Cortes Madera, have naked, drunk bongo parties, savor their simple foods and do that Buddhist thing, or at least talk the Buddhist talk. You see, Snyder is scheduled to go to Japan and join a Zen monastery of some sort, and that hangs over most of the book. Snyder encouraged Kerouac to become a fire lookout as he had done, so Kerouac gets a job on Desolation Mountain up in the Cascades near the Canadian border, the same place as Snyder. Kerouac spends two months alone on a mountain above the clouds doing everything but seeing fires – mostly getting close to nature and satori. There the book ends.

How real was Kerouac’s Buddhism? Kerouac is really a very American soul, and his Catholicism saturated his Buddhism, which he saw as one thing. Watts, the ortho-Buddha-boy, said Kerouac had “Zen flesh but no Zen bones.” Even in the Dharma Bums, Kerouac (who’s pseudonym in this book is “Ray Smith”) gives Snyder’s Buddhism a running critique. Later, of course, Kerouac dropped the Buddha talk and walk. He later died of alcoholism, which is a sub-note lurking in this book like an infestation of ants.

Kerouac’s writing, if you’ve never read the beast, veers between colloquialism and poetry, in long drawn-out sentences. It is always accessible. He’s child-like and childless. This book gives a good picture of American life in the artsy margins. A bunch of refugees from capitalism - like Snyder, who was basically an anarchist - refuse to do an honest day’s work if they can help it, and live to enjoy life instead. When money, perhaps, was not the only thing. A lost time, indeed. When regular people had some standing, and simplicity was not a curse-word.

And I bought it at Mayday Books.
"HOWL" is also on sale at the Mayday.
(written with as few edits as possible, K-style.)
Red Frog, December 17, 2011

Look Who We’re Calling 'Comrade!'

2011-12-08T20:21:00.023-06:00

The 5% and the 10% and the 20%

The well known 1% figure used by Occupy Wall Street was first popularized by Joseph Stiglitz, a Keynesian. He said the 1% own 35-40% of the U.S. economy. That, however, is not the majority of the economy, nor the only people who made money over the last 30 years from Wall Street. A 35% stake in a company is not the same as outright control. That would be 51%. Nor is it overwhelming control – 70%-80%. The U.S. is quite frankly 'owned' just like a large corporation. Thinking that our problem is only the 1% obscures the allies of the 1%.

Nearly half (47%) of all members of Congress are millionaires - and two-thirds of the Senate. Democrats are actually wealthier than Republicans in both houses. Al Franken has assets of nearly $13M. Even Michelle Bachmann is a millionaire, but not on that level -Yahoo News, 11/16/2011 and Center for Responsive Politics.

“The average income of the richest tenth of the world population is now about nine times that of the poorest tenth, the Paris- based OECD said today in a report. The gap has increased about 10 percent since the mid 1980s. Mexico, the U.S., Israel and the U.K. are among the countries with the biggest divide between rich and poor, while Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Czech Republic are among those with the smallest gap. – Bloomberg, 12-5-2010

In the world, 10% of the population owns 85% of the wealth – Wikipedia

The top 10% owns 71% of the U.S. economy – Ron Paul, Think Progress and Fairfield Academy.
The top 10% own 66% - Oberlin Revue.
The top 20% own 85% - Domhoff.

Academics favor looking only at the 1%, the ‘400 individuals’ of the 1% and the quintile (20%) methodology. I think, frankly, this obscures a more accurate analysis of the U.S. class structure. But it comes up with gems like this: 6 members of the Walton family (Wal-Mart) own as much as the bottom 30% of the U.S. population - Sylvia Allegretto, an economist from UC – Berkeley, 12/8/2011

“President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most - 53 percent - will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts,” - Primer-Wealth

“The top ten percent of households owned 82 percent of all stock-market wealth... The top ten percent of the U.S. population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. (Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5)”. - Primer-Wealth. Also Richard Wolff.

The top 9% increased their earnings in the last 25 years, while all other groups lost. – 673Bn increase for top 1%; $140bn increase for top 4%; $29Bn increase for top 9%. - Mother Jones, “It’s the Inequality, Stupid.”

Everyone but the top 10% has lost an average of $900 on pre-tax income -Wikipedia

In 1998 the top 5% owned 59% of the wealth – Richard Wolff

Bottom 90% of population have 73% of debt. – My Budget 360. At least we lead in something!

WHAT IS A MILLIONAIRE?

“In 2006, 7% of all households were millionaires - 9.3 million people were in these households.” – Wikipedia.

What is the number of millionaires now? (based on net worth over $1M - Financial Assets - minus household value, car/household goods value) There are 3.1 individual millionaires re financial assets - High Net Worth Individuals - in the U.S. If each household is 4 people, that means 12.4% of the population; 3 people, 9.3%. Some are children, of course. And remember – this is a MINIMUM of a $1M. Most have over that.
- based on Wikipedia 2010 / WSJ 2011 figures.

Re: Blacks and Hispanics – since 2006, wealth fell 66% among Latino families and 53% among black families. So the wealth ‘gap’ is also an ethnic / national origin gap. – PEW Center.

“There are about 5.5 million U.S. households with at least $1 million in assets (excluding home, etc.), or about 5 percent of the population. Millionaires control 56 percent of the country’s wealth” - Fidelity, second-largest U.S. mutual- fund company. – Bloomberg, 11/6/2011

The Millionaire "Next Door"?

From Obama, yesterday pretending to be Teddy Roosevelt, all the while never having busted a trust: “Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year. I’m not talking about millionaires, people who have a million dollars. I’m saying people who make a million dollars every single year.” – Obama, 12/7/2011

Note the distinction between those who earn a million a year, and those who ‘have’ a million dollars in some form. Bloomberg noticed this right away. Obama does not use the method of most analysts who look at this metric. These analysts do not include the value of the house, car, furnishings or contents when they estimate millionaires. Only capital from other sources. Having a real million in assets is not the same as earning a million a year either. Evidently both kinds of millionaires - those who have a real million and those who have a million in all assets - are in Obama's desired base. Only those, rhetorically at least, who make a million a year are not. I won't go into a description of the Democrat's donor base at this point - suffice it to say many make a million a year. Obama and the Democrats are still #1 in donations from Wall Street this year, or perhaps a near #2.

Here Obama makes a play for the upper middle and upper class vote – you know, people who are lawyers, managers, doctors, professors, some small businessmen, even teachers, but who aren’t quite in the real millionaire club. And even the real millionaires. This has been a solid voting base for the Democrats. Obama himself is actually in the not-quite-a-true-millionaire club, if you include the value of his large home in Chicago's Hyde Park. And evidently he's also making a play for the real millionaire' next door.' The one 90% of the population probably don't live next to.

December 8, 2011
A Tip of the Hat to Rick and his Wonder Dog
Red Frog

They Don’t Call them the “Dark Ages” for Nothing

2011-11-29T19:26:00.008-06:00

The Dark Side of Christian History, By Helen Ellerbe, 1995

This short history of the truly dark ages, written by a pagan feminist, reminds us what Christianity did to Western civilization over a long, long period. This is not pretty stuff. And I quote Ellerbe: “As it took over leadership in Europe and the Roman Empire collapsed, the Church all but wiped out education, technology, science, medicine, history, art and commerce.” Nice. And not for 20 years either. Elements of direct Church rule lasted from its embrace by Emperor Constantine around 324 A.D. (sic) to the last of the Inquisition and witch hunts in the late 1700s.

Orthodox Christianity, as Ellerbe calls it, sold its soul when it became the official doctrine of the Roman Empire. The many tendencies of Christianity were crushed into one by people like Saint Augustine. Ellerbe seems to be a sort of early semi-Christian pagan, who feels affinity for the Gnostics, Kabbalism and Mary Magdalene, all extirpated from the official Bible. Echoing Nietzsche, she details the Catholic, and later Protestant, assault on human enjoyments like dancing, sex, drinking, theater, art, reading, nature and love, replacing them with the authoritarian principles of male chauvinism, obedience, fear and punishment. Which, as she uncharacteristically points out, any ruling class in the world would appreciate – especially the Kings and barons of Europe.

Ellerbe details the destruction of Jews, ‘witches’ and heretics brought about by the Inquisitions and the witch trials. She points out that book burning was also a method to combat heresy, which certainly sounds familiar. The trials were many times for material gain, as Inquisitors were allowed to seize the land and property of those condemned. The exact number of dead is unknown, but Ellerbe estimates in the millions. The Church openly authorized the holy use of bloody force and torture against ‘sinners’ and pagans. It also contributed to the spread of the Black Plague by opposing cleanliness, killing cats and dogs that were thought to be 'allies' of witches, and opposing any medical treatment but bleeding.

Ellerbe interprets the Crusades as part of the Church’s attempt to solidify its hold over Europeans by forging an alliance against the evil ‘Muslims’ – who, while obscurantist in their own way, did not drop to the depths of brutality as did the Church. Though a similar history could be written about the bloody rule of another group of desert fundamentalists, let's say the Saudi Wa'hhabists. The rape of Constantinople in 1204 stands as a monument to that most Christian ferocity. The Church destroyed the Carthars of southern France's Languedoc region in the Albigensian crusade, as they differed with the Catholics in a more liberal direction. Up to a million people of southern France were killed over 30 years of war, depopulating that part of France for many years.

Even Martin Luther’s attempt to correct the Catholic Church in 1517 did not really take Christianity in a new direction. Luther was as pro-Augustine and anti-Jewish as the next Catholic, and Ellerbe puts both trends in the same camp of orthodox Christianity. Ellerbe quotes Luther as calling for Jews to be enslaved or thrown out of “Christian lands;” that their ghettos and synagogues should be burned. In seems very clear that Nazi ideology in the 1930s was nothing but a return to earlier forms of Christianity. The 30-Years War was fought directly over Catholic/Protestant issues. The massacre of 10,000 Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day in France was more of the same. The founding of the U.S. by Protestant fundamentalists at Plymouth Colony and Boston would become a death knell for Native Americans. The first Thanksgiving was an accidental blip that Pilgrim colonists made up for 16 years later when they took revenge on a Pequot village of 400 souls over land issues, butchering all.

The Witch Hunts, which still existed in the U.S. in 1692, only ended in the late 1700s in Europe. They focused on women, who were many times mid-wives or carriers of herbal medical knowledge, both which threatened the Church. Ellerbe contends that the witch hunts destroyed Western herbal medical knowledge, and this accounts for why the tradition almost died out. Witches were burned, tortured, sexually abused – even girls as young as 9.5 years old could be accused. Ellerbe points out that, “Areas of political turmoil and religious strife experienced the most intense witch hunts.” Poor, older women – the classic knowledgeable ‘crone’ – were first and easy targets. The witch trial was both Catholic and Protestant church official policy. Figures of witch killings listed in Wikipedia are large undercounts, according to Ellerbe. She cites one Bishop of Wurtzberg who claimed 1,900 lives in 5 years, and a Lutheran prelate, Benedict Carpzov, who claimed to have sentenced 20,000 ‘devil worshipers.’ Orthodox Christian ideology made both the existence of God and the Devil necessary, and certainly, the devil must have his minions.

Ellerbe goes on to deal with the modern world, and in this part of the book, she fails. She spends time denouncing Darwin for being a ‘social Darwinist” (he wasn’t), ignoring his actual scientific accomplishments. She also denounces pre-Einstein science as purely a continuation of orthodox Christianity, due to its alleged infatuation with controlling nature. However, the scientific method has nothing to do with 'controlling nature.' She should note that it is scientists who are at present leading the fight against religious obscurantism's hostility to global warming, and in favor of environmentalism. It might be noted philosophically that Ellerbe’s pagan idealism is closer to Christianity in method than to science, and that it is she who shares the irrational mysticism of the fundamentalist Christlian, though in a different form.

Ellerbe promotes circular time as the correct and 'natural' way to view the world, all based on the seasons. She criticizes the concept of linear time promoted by religion, science and watches. However, she seems to be unfamiliar with the notion of spiral time, which more closely corresponds to the dialectical interplay of nature and linearity, combining the two concepts. After all, even in nature, every year is not the same - the theory of the anthropocene chronological period we are in shows that nature is not merely 'circular.' And as we know, time sometimes runs backwards in society in an historic and economic sense. Of course, for each individual, the clock always 'ticks.'

Ellerbe has no economic analysis whatsoever of the whole period of the dark ages, as if Catholicism and Protestantism happened in a material void. As a result, she cannot account for orthodox Christianity's relation to slave or peasant society or the birth of capitalism. Elerbe is an idealist who believes that the ‘divine’ needs to be wrestled away from the church. She believes that the source of orthodox Christianity was (and is) only a ‘belief structure’ and an ‘ideology’ held by evidently 'bad' or 'incorrect' people – and has nothing to do with material economic reality.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog, November 29, 2011

The Third Rail: The American Class Structure

2011-11-27T16:57:00.008-06:00

Namoi Wolf - Guardian, November 26, 2011 - Excerpts:

“Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests."
"As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels."
"For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president ..."
"Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force, and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping.
"So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams.”
Red Frog, November 27, 2011

No Turkey Pardoned Dept: Wouldn’t You Love to Be Locked in a Cage?

2011-11-25T09:32:00.006-06:00

“Fear of the Animal Planet – the Hidden History of Animal Resistance,” by Jason Hribal, 2010

In this somewhat poorly-organized book, Hribal nevertheless takes a topic that few have dealt with – basically, what animals think of confinement and overwork. As you might guess, they do not like it any more than humans enjoy a tiny uncomfortable cell or heart attacks. While this might be obvious to vegetarians or environmentalists, it is not to some people. Of course, if you own a dog, or live on a farm, you might have an inkling. Animals think, have feelings like pain, have a social life, have memories, use tools, and have strengths that humans do not, like a dog’s sense of smell, a cheetah’s swiftness, or a gorilla’s strength. In essence, the difference between ‘animals’ and humans is many times quantitative, not qualitative. Marx drew the qualitative distinction at the ability of humans to ‘create’ and produce. However, humans are actually animals too. In spite of this, philosophers like St. Augustine called for the trial and execution of animals for ‘crimes,’ Rene Descartes’ believed that animals were ‘machines’ and Adam Smith thought they were ‘property.’ Of course, capital believes humans are variations of all three.

Hribal focuses on animals caged in zoos, aquatic parks, circuses, breeding farms and research facilities, calling many animals by their human-given names. He tells the stories of elephants, gorillas, orcas, orangutans, chimpanzees, polar bears, tigers, sea lions and dolphins who have attacked their ‘trainers’ or keepers, or even strangers who have harassed them. The animals do not normally attack randomly – they actually seek out those who have harmed them. The dirty secret is that zoos, circuses and aquatic parks almost never admit what has really happened – everything is an ‘accident’ or just ‘acting up’ – when the real cause is confinement, control and its consequences. Hribal also details innumerable escape attempts by animals. Even though they know the sometimes deadly consequences of escape, they do it anyway, preferring that to continuing caged labor. The orangutans are so intelligent that they pick locks, observe when electricity is accidentally shut off on fences, and have even ‘shorted out’ an electric fence to escape.

One of Hribal’s continuing points is that not only are these animals caged, but they are also working animals who earn thousands or millions of dollars for their owners, in exchange for a pittance of fish or straw. And, like humans, the animals are nearly always overworked – sometimes to sickness and sometimes to death.

Hribal starts out detailing the story of “Jumbo” the most famous elephant of all time, who became upset with his vicious English trainers and was killed by a train while escaping. Until it was outlawed in the U.S, circus and zoo animals were regularly hung, shot innumerable times, decapitated and executed in various manners for the crime of escape or retribution. And then there is “Shamu” – Seaworld’s longest living orca, if you believe the 50-something orca’s all named “Shamu” are the same whale. The many Shamus and his fellow aquatic animals have made millions of dollars for Seaworld as the flagship act. Caged animals only live half as long as those in the wild, but “Shamu” lives forever – or at least as long as the Seaworld Corporation. Many times the mother animals have to be killed in order for the ‘babies’ – of elephants or sea lions let’s say – to be taken away. These institutions were and still are directly responsible for decimating wild populations in their pursuit of the next performer.

Recently, a small zoo owner in Zanesville, Ohio let his animals go, and they were gunned down by the local police. The owner shot himself right after letting them out, perhaps in a fit of guilt. After you have read this book, I think you will refuse to attend circuses, zoos, aquariums or support most research on animals. Protecting animals is part of the same worldview as protecting the majority of humans. To paraphrase Marx, you can judge a society by how it treats the most vulnerable – in this case, the most vulnerable are animals.

Postscript: Jeffery St. Clair wrote the introduction to this book. St. Clair gets a dig in against Castro, who enjoys the zoo in Havana. Then in a somewhat odd attack on Marx, he accuses Marx of calling his enemies ‘baboons’ – and then details all the horrible things that capitalists have done to baboons – as if Marx did them! Even for an anarchist, that is a stretch. In addition, I could find no reference to Marx calling anyone a ‘baboon.’

For a defense of Marx on the question of animals, see, “Marx, Myths and Legends – by Lawrence Wilde” on the net, quoted here*. Of course, John Bellamy Foster also defends Marx on issues of the environment and nature against erroneous liberal and anarchist attacks.

Wilde: “A clarion call for the liberation of animals is cited approvingly by Marx in On the Jewish Question (Marx, 1975: 172). The words themselves belong to Thomas Münzer, the leader of the German Peasants’ Revolt in the early sixteenth century. What attracted Marx was Münzer’s view that under the dominion of private property and money, nature is treated in such a contemptuous way that it is debased. Münzer had concluded:
‘...all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.’ “*

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, November 18, 2011

Pictures are worth a ... many words

2011-11-21T18:32:00.013-06:00

Militarized "police" in Chapel Hill, North Carolina advancing on Occupy protesters who had squatted in an empty car dealership. Notice the Lawyer's Guild member falling backward, the two drawn M16s or AR15s and the .45 handgun. Iraq? No, just the fruit of the Department of "Homeland" Security. Which we paid for.

An 80+ old activist lady, after being pepper-sprayed in Occupy Seattle.

Lastly, Craig wanted me to post this picture of jailbird Eugene Debs. This free sticker with your Holiday Book purchase.

And I got it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 11/21/2011

Yuppies, Foodies, Cheapskates, Drunks, Oh My!

2011-11-15T19:45:00.005-06:00

“Waiter Rant – Thanks for the Tip – Confessions of a Cynical Waiter,” by Steve Dublanica, 2008

Workers don’t usually tell their tales. Well, this one did - the front of the house speaks! If you’ve ever been at a restaurant table, uncomfortable with the inability of a loved-one to make a simple food decision, or the demanding micro-attentions an aging in-law makes on servers, it has not gone unnoticed by those other than you. Dublanica writes a waiter’s blog of the same name, and got his book contract through that. He’s taken the inspiration from his posts and made a book out of it.

The Waiter hates demanding yuppies who have to have special tables, or ‘know the owner’ or parade their arrogant - and sometimes incorrect - foodie proclivities before the wait-staff. Or those who don’t tip well, or at all. The Waiter estimates 20% of diners are ‘socially maladjusted psychopaths.’ Of course, this Waiter works in New York. Thinking of eating out on Mother’s Day? Forget it – crowded, guilt-laden pandemonium. Valentine’s Day? Another crowded con with elbow-to-elbow diners.

As Dublanica puts it: “Today, waiters are expected to be food-allergy specialists, sommeliers, cell-phone-rule enforcers, eye candy, confessors, entertainers, mixologists, emergency medical technicians, bouncers, receptionists, joke tellers, therapists, linguists, punching bags, psychics, protocol specialists and amateur chefs.” Then he goes on about food porn from there.

It all actually makes you not want to eat out. Of course, if you read “Kitchen Confidential” by Anthony Bourdain about ‘the back of the house,’ you really won’t eat out.

Dublanica worked at an intense upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan for 7 years before he burned-out as the head waiter/manager. Before that he waited a restaurant that was so dysfunctional he couldn’t last a year. He now works a low-key place that doesn’t pay as well. He was 31 in 1986, when he ‘fell into’ working as a waiter, after stints in a sexually-repressed Catholic religious school and a crooked health clinic. If you only thought old-country Greeks and Italians lasted that long in the waiting business, you guessed wrong. Throughout the book Dublanica worries about his status as an aging ‘loser,’ and while not the best part of the book, he finds it necessary to dwell on it constantly. Which is a gauge of how devalued the trade of waiter is.

The Waiter is kind to the ‘back of the house’ staff, as the cooks are called. As he puts it, if they made Mexicans from Pueblo illegal in the U.S., there would be no one to cook in restaurants. The restaurant industry would shut down. He knows that cooks contend with brutal hours, burns, cuts, low pay and crazy demands. However, he’s not so kind to the owners of these restaurants, who are many times petty, crazed tyrants. Or some of his fellow waiters, who backstab in order to get ahead. As he analyzes the wait-staff, a good proportion are ‘live for the moment’ alcoholics and druggies who get high on nights with $250 in tips. Though he’s not afraid to souse his exhausted miseries in three-martini late-nights after work. Vampiric? Hell, yes.

Of course the favorite topic of any waiter is tips. 15%-20% is expected, at least in the U.S. Among his other duties, however, Dublanica is not a sociologist, so he might be surprised to find some – even many - societies do not have tipping, and certainly not on the U.S. scale. American customers subsidize waiter wages, as dreadful state laws mandate tiny minimum wages for wait-staffs. This is a simple gift – call it corporate welfare - to the restaurant industry. And customers know it. It creates a ‘feast or famine’ atmosphere among U.S. restaurant staffs instead of some reliable baseline of pay. Tipping is not expected or required in India, China, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Finland, Spain, Cuba, etc. Sometimes it is only countries that are close to the American tourist or model that tipping is similar to the U.S., like Canada or Mexico. What is striking is that tipping in many countries has no mandatory level, and if it is done, is only for exceptional service or for kindness. The U.S., alone in the world if you believe Wikipedia, mandates a 15%-20% tip. Think about it.

The Waiter’s most miserable moment came when his restaurant, the fictional ‘Bistro’ as he calls it, suffered a failure of air-conditioning and the ‘POS’ computer system on the same very hot New York night, as crowds of hungry people lined up outside the door. ‘POS’ seems to be the order/billing software. Demanding customers, a boss calling him every three minutes to make him explain, clueless waiters who did not know how to add up bills without a computer, a dining area that reached 95 degrees and a kitchen that reached 110 nearly brought down the whole restaurant. Somehow, Dublanica pulled the restaurant through without having to close it. The show must go on. Dublanica also shows great generosity of spirit and psychological understanding to troubled souls who reveal themselves in restaurants. As one woman said to him while watching him gently talk a drunken lady into leaving the Bistro, “You’re not just a waiter, are you?" No, he’s not. No one is 'just' anything, of course.

Among other high-profile guests, he once waited on The Gladiator – Rusell Crowe. Crowe was the only one who publically identified him as the “Waiter” behind the “Waiter Rant” blog. Dublanica was flattered – and surprised.

Over the past 30 years, with the financialization of American life, and the destruction of private time, restaurants meals have grown in ‘necessity.’ I call it the privatization of the family meal. Instead of inexpensive, healthful food skillfully prepared in a low-key way at home, eating is now supposed to be a public event involving being served as if we were still children – or bosses. The food is lower quality, of excessive quantity and the prices are higher than most home meals. People who constantly go to restaurants even lose cooking skills. The U.S. restaurant industry survives on the backs of immigrants, bad government laws and low pay. If a government was to mandate a living wage and other benefits for workers in restaurants, many restaurants would disappear. As far as I’m concerned, that would not be bad at all. A restaurant that cannot provide health care, decent wages, regular hours and normal work conditions does not deserve to exist. And we don’t need them either.

And I bought it at Half-Price Books,
Red Frog, November 15, 2011

Marionettes at the Gates of Dawn

2011-11-07T20:22:00.010-06:00

What Piper Plays the Tune?

Certainly not Syd Barrett. This week George Papandreou advocated allowing the Greek people to vote on whether to accept the ‘rescue’ package offered by the ECB, EU & IMF. The moment he stopped speaking, there were howls of outrage and anger from the assembled Euro Heads, from the corporate Press, from the Pundits, from every capitalist voice. The DOW swooned 300 points. How DARE he bring the people into this? Did you hear one voice in the media commending this action? One?

The right in the PASOK, including the finance minister, called for his removal –– and threatened to bring down the government. After several nasty phone calls and private meetings with the EuroHead – i.e Angela Merkel – Papandreou backed down. It was odd and somewhat poignant to see a man who had cravenly agreed to every single demand by the banking sector and the powers that be suddenly grow a spine – and just as suddenly collapse it. This is, after all, the Second International we are talking about here. Perhaps it was the sweetness of the 50% haircut Merkel/Sarkozy had pushed on the banks, in exchange for a larger financial bailout fund. Of course, the real people who forced that 50% haircut were the Greek people - by saying ‘hell no.’

Papandreou was replaced by a U.S. educational product, Lucas Papdemos, a Harvard and Columbia professor, graduate of MIT, senior economist at the Boston Federal Reserve and a member of the Trilateral Commission. I.E. the banks have their 'technocratic' man in place.

If this sounds familiar to what the ruling elite did, in a trivial way, around the Twins stadium debate (and what is still going on with the Viking stadium,) you’d be right. It is also what the Congressional ‘super-committee’ is all about – an undemocratic star chamber assigned to be head butchers. Increasingly, as capital finds itself in trouble, it will do away with ‘democratic’ procedures and go straight to edicts and back-room deals. Democracy is a window-dressing that is dispensed with if necessary – or if not needed. Which is why the U.S. only needs two parties, right?

Now Italy is the next one on the hot seat. The clown Berlusconi has said he will resign, and Italian government bond debt, as of November 9, is almost at the bailout-point. The markets are swooning again. The Guardian estimates that 1 trillion Euros will be necessary to bailout Italy. And that is getting very close to an amount no entity can afford. Banks that over-leveraged themselves loaning money to every door-post in sight might not be 'rescued' if the rescuers don't show up. As Galbraith pointed out, this is not a Euro crisis or a 'sovereign debt' crisis, it is at bottom, a banking crisis brought about by over-leveraging. The real question here, then, is what objective amount of debt is 'too big to succeed?'

What did our President say in response to Greece? The U.S. had earlier refused to give more money to Europe through the IMF, and opposed the EU proposal to tax financial transactions. Here is Obama speaking during the recent G20 meeting in Cannes. (Really?! Cannes?) about the Greek situation: “They're going to have a strong partner in us," Obama said, "but European leaders understand that ultimately what the markets are looking for is a strong signal from Europe that they're standing behind the euro."

“…what the markets are looking for...” You see, the ‘markets’ talk. Or perhaps they are ventriloquists and have others talk for them? Perhaps they are now ‘people’ and have ‘freedom of speech’ just like corporations? Is Obama the direct translator of the ‘markets’ – marketese perhaps? It seems so. Of course, Wall Street opposes the tiny tax on financial transactions, because it might slow down program trading or speculation. And that is also the position of the U.S. government. And Wall Street also supports austerity for the European and U.S. working class. Wall Street – “The City” in London, the Parisian Bourse, the German Frankforters and the Swiss – or should I say Suisse - bankers - look like they do have another marionette.

And indeed the day Papandreou backed own, the markets rocketed back up. They are the epitome of ruling class opinion - like a thermometer stuck in a babies bottom. In fact, it is almost axiomatic that how the markets behave dictates what the politicians say - sometimes immediately, sometimes a few days later.

Red Frog
November 7, 2011
94th Anniversary of the outbreak of the October Revolution in Russia through armed insurrection in Petrograd, New Style Gregorian Calendar. (Oct 25, 1917 Old Style Julian calendar)

Everyone in a Trailer Isn't Trash

2011-11-05T10:32:00.007-06:00

“Why the South Lost the Civil War,” by Richard Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones and William Still, 1986

This is an example of my reading a book so you don’t have to. This tome, written by four professors, attempts to answer a question that doesn’t seem to be one, but actually is. Many students of the Civil War – and other wars – assume it was the superior manpower and industrial strength of the northern states that lead to Appomattox, and, incidentally, the ending of slavery. Even modern-day Confederates want to believe this. The ‘revisionist’ view – which is also hinted at in “The People’s History of the Civil War” (available at Mayday) and other books – is that internal weaknesses within the southern people lead to the defeat. As the Vietnamese and other guerrilla wars prove, mere dominance in numbers or ordinance or technology does not create victory.

What was the fatal flaw of the Confederate cause? Asked in this way, the answer is pretty obvious. But for die-hard Confederates, who imagine God on their side, Bobby Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest in the saddle, and a ‘War of Northern Aggression,” it is still confusing. Even unionists of that day who rejected the Emancipation Proclamation – like the Democrats lead by McClellan and other Copperheads – thought it was only the power of the original Union that triumphed.

The authors trace the defeat to a failure of ‘Southern Nationalism.’ They point out that the south was similar in culture to the north, except for its overwhelmingly agricultural roots, and especially those roots in slavery and the plantation system. So the real and only basis of ‘southern nationalism,’ at bottom, was the slave system, and the existence upon slavery of a planter class. And this was, as Marx pointed out, a historically regressive system, which is why he supported the north in the Civil War. This should not come as news to most modern people. The twist however – and I put this in the face of bourgeois northern bigots who talk about’ rednecks,’ ‘crackers’ and ‘trailer trash’ as especially a southern phenomena – is that it means the majority of southerners ultimately wanted slavery to end in order to end the war. Their ‘southern nationalism’ was skin-deep.

A geographical map of the south will show the areas of most resistance to the war. Mountain areas and wood zones show the regions where few slaves were held, and most southerners were poor white working people eking out a living. East Tennessee and Kentucky, western Mississippi, wooded northern Alabama, the mountain areas of western Virginia (which became West Virginia because of the Civil War), western North and South Carolina and northern Georgia, and the swamps of southern Louisiana were all outside both the cities and the large farms and plantation zones. The “State of Jones” (reviewed below) was in the piney woods of western Mississippi. “Cold Mountain” is in western North Carolina. None of these people had an immediate financial stake in slavery. Their farms were either too small or unproductive to support slaves, or they could not afford slaves or – as in the case of Newton Knight, their religious and political beliefs prohibited slavery. Painting all southerners as supporters of the Confederacy is a foolish mistake. In fact, as most historians now recognize, if secession had been put to a popular vote, it would have failed in many southern states.

The conflict at Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for soldiers turned many southern Unionists into reluctant supporters of their ‘state.’ Robert E Lee was only the most well-known one. These authors show how, as the war progressed, support for the ‘southern’ cause diminished, desertion from the armies increased, protests against hunger grew and non-compliance with the draft and Confederate army property requisitions increased. Peace societies became more public in the South after 1863 and the defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Old pro-unionist politicians (who still supported the war) won a majority in North Carolina in the 1863 election. By the end of the war, the majority of the southern population preferred re-union over continued warfare. And this, the authors contend, is the real reason the south lost.

They go into many of the conventional arguments about its failure in some detail. Some think that an excessive concentration on ‘states rights’ did not allow the south to win. The authors clearly show that in the main two states whose governors conflicted with Jeff Davis – Georgia and North Carolina – both states sent more men and goods to the Confederate armies than states that did not conflict with Davis. One North Carolina politician, William Holden, famously said that “It was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” This echoed the thoughts of Newton Knight, who objected to the Confederate rule that planters with 10 slaves were exempt from service, and was one of the reasons why the "Knights' turned against the Confederacy.

The authors show figures that indicate the Union blockade of southern ports was very porous. They describe how southern military organization was superior to the Union’s in that it recruited people from the same locales to join existing units, instead of creating new, green units of unaffiliated people, as the Federals did. As to the issue of industry, the south was able to quickly create a large metal-working, armaments and clothing industry under central control of the Confederate government. While I do not agree with their assertion that Confederate soldiers were as well supplied as Union soldiers – many sources conflict with this – they consider this not to be the decisive question. They do show how there were always guns, bullets and cannons at least.

The main contribution of the authors is to compare the thoughts of classic military strategists who studied Napoleon and Frederick the Great – Clausewitz and Jomini – against actual military events during the war. They contend that the south actually had a military advantage through its huge territory, interior lines and mainly defensive strategy, citing both Clausewitz or Jomini. So, again, why did they lose except through extra-military issues? And here they point out that Davis and the Confederate government put all its emphasis on military victories and none on ‘propaganda’ or morale-building or paying attention to the condition and opinions of the civilian population. As we know from Vietnam and other wars, like Iraq, the opinions of the U.S. population play a role in the withdrawal of troops. However, when the war is actually in the territory of the population (unlike Vietnam or Iraq) this can be decisive.

Another contribution of this book centers on its coverage of how religion impacted both northern and southern peoples’ morale. As might be expected, both sides thought ‘God’ supported their cause. Almost every church in the U.S. split into a pro-slavery southern wing and a pro-union (and maybe anti-slavery) northern wing, even the Catholic Church. Many religious preachers joined the armies, the most famous being Leonidas Polk, a Tennessee planter and a bishop in the Episcopal Church, who found his way to the Confederate army. Polk was later blown in half at Pine Mountain near Marietta, Georgia, by a shell from one of Sherman’s batteries. So I guess God really ‘did’ support the North. And this odd idea – odd to an atheist at least – began to creep into Confederate thinking. If ‘God’ allowed the ‘Yankees’ to win, then either he was ‘testing’ southerners in their faith, or else he was ‘chastising’ them for imagined failings. As time went on, some southerners even decided that God wanted the north to win because perhaps slavery ‘was’ a sin. And there goes your morale and your morals – at least for a believer.

The most unusual point they make is that they delineate how the Confederate government created a centralist state and economy during the war. This should terrify the present southern Republicans and Libertarians. The South actually initiated a draft a year before the north. Writs of habeas corpus were suspended at the same time, and martial law declared. Impressment of goods by government soldiers was legalized, though they were supposed to pay a ‘reasonable amount.’

Basing themselves on the 1978 work of Raimondo Luraghi’s “Rise and Fall of the Plantation South,” the authors describe how the Confederate government took over 39 iron furnaces, ‘nationalizing the whole productive power of existing manufacturers” for war production. The government provided 50% loans to create new industry, limited profits, fixed prices, built publicly-owned mills like the giant Augusta, Georgia, Powder Works – the largest nationally-owned factory system in the world at that time. Shipyards were put under government control, and new ones built under government ownership. This forced industrialization changed Richmond, Augusta, Columbus, Atlanta, Macon and Selma into industrial centers. They, however, only later passed laws limiting planters from producing cotton, as cotton brought in higher profits than food. Many blockade runners were carrying cotton, and not getting food back, but only luxury goods for the upper class. As such, centralization did not fully extend to the planter class and their plantations. Since the Confederate government was based on this class, that made sense.

My main issue with these authors is the idea of ‘victory,’ which is the bulk of the book. They do point this out tangentially, but not in a direct way. If victory means the end of direct slave labor, than the Civil War can be considered a complete victory. But if ending slavery also meant equal democratic rights for Black people, equal property rights for Black people, the provision of land and an end to sharecropping and the plantation system (especially in the Mississippi Delta) than the Civil War was not a victory. The violent defeat of Reconstruction through guerrilla warfare by ex-Confederates and the ex-planter class showed that they – now private farmers and businessmen – actually won the longer war for white supremacy. In place of slavery, black people got the KKK, Jim Crow segregation, share-cropping and the poll tax. It was the northern capitalist class that sat by and watched and essentially collaborated with the southern capitalists on this issue. So that is perhaps why the South 'lost' the Civil War - they saw it as only a series of battles in a longer war.

It was only after 90 years that the Civil Rights Movement punctured segregation and gained some democratic rights like voting for Black people. And even now, those voting rights are under attack, as was shown in Florida in 2000. Black people are still the poorest and most exploited southerners, and still discriminated against, segregated and disdained. The “civil war” still continues and will not be finished until the modern reincarnation of the planter class and their allies – are removed.

And I bought it at a garage sale in Athens, Georgia
Red Frog – November 5, 2011

Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do?

2011-10-26T19:18:00.014-05:00

The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows

I watch cop shows. I admit it. Not sure what it is. The out-side normal characters? Knowing the enemy? The bad guys getting collared or shot? Because of course the real ‘bad guys’ of the world always have high-priced attorneys. Gritty attempts at realism? The science of forensic everything? A cornucopia of large handguns? Corpses getting Y-shaped stitches? Or just the proximity of real hard death.

Whatever it is, cop shows have replaced cowboy shows in the pantheon. ‘Law and Order’ is the granddaddy of them all, although now its shrunken to just “Special Victims Unit.’ They specialize in prosecuting sexual abuse using cynical or troubled but self-righteous cop characters. At one time it played on ‘ripped from the headlines’ story lines, which actually seemed political sometimes. Now they barely go there – evidently having run out of headlines. It also frequently avoided the standard ‘black/Latino/white weirdo/Mafia’ targets, but instead pilloried affluent assholes. So that you might cheer when they got nailed. However, on L&O, you could also count on them threatening some guy with a gun or a punch or an occasional water-boarding – just to get them to talk. Always justified. Or telling some scared schlub that if they didn’t hand over the information – why, they’d get a subpoena! ‘Not that,’ exclaims the frightened frog, ‘ANYTHING but that!’ L&O proved that rappers could be cops - see “Ice-T” - and that cynical actors and former comedians like Richard Belzer can make money anyway.

Then there was the ‘tall bending guy’ on 'L&O - Criminal Intent' – Vincent D’Onofrio, who set the stage for a whole new group of cops – the magic ones. He would be able to get the Stone Reaper to confess in a few minutes. More on that later. It was no accident, however, that everyone behind the scenes hated this guy. After all, who can put up with a pompous mind-reader?

The most ridiculous show in the cop parade is ‘CSI-Miami.’ Not a show passes without a dressed-up CSI in a plunging neckline and high heels bending over a dead body. The CSI lab is a Pixar fantasy of high-resolution graphics, colorful lighting, reflected glass and uber-computers. Every database in the world seems to be instantaneously connected to the CSI lab in Miami, including the ‘paint chip’ world master database. And of course, who can forget the Hemingway of Cops, David Caruso. This one man single-handedly drives his giant gas-guzzling black Hummer up to the camera, slides on the shades, gazes into the sun and says, “Crime doesn’t pay – it only pays me.”

CSI-Miami spawned CSI-Vegas (of course!) and CSI-NY (inevitable). You can get your fill of forensic science trivia and dead bodies from no finer sources.

Then there are the shows I call the ‘flack jacket fantasies.’ You know, where you watch storm-troopers in heavy protective gear, large handguns and assault rifles, storm into houses, warehouses and burrito joints on every show. “Criminal Minds’ is one of these, along with NCIS-LA and NCIS itself (the father-ship). Criminal Minds has a bunch of FBI ‘profilers’ who suss out the ‘un-sub’ (short for unknown subject) in groupthink sessions, aided by a curly-headed nerd genius that they hope young hip people can identify with. Buff ex-military guys, surf guy and a beautiful female cop adorn the NCIS-LA set, which is ‘set’ in a fucking large historic mansion, run by a tiny woman with glasses who they are all scared of. There are no ugly women in cop shows, remember this – except this one old lady. Oh, and one show features a tubby nerd-computer genius who gets them all their computer info – she’s the only other exception. Of course, most of the corpses are beautiful young white women too. Even though most murder victims are minorities.

LL Cool J, another rapper, found a home on NCIS-LA as a buff cop who could outrun getaway cars. NCIS itself features Mark Harmon as Jethro Gibbs, gruffly getting info from his scamp-like staff and a good-looking tattooed-pierced lab-rat girl sucking down 64-ounce shit sodas. How cool is that?

There are a few ‘missing persons’ shows too, like “Without a Trace” – not sure what demographic this appeals to – nervous mothers with children? Every show usually has an 'older' person anchoring the crews. The most obvious is "Blue Bloods" where Tom Selleck has graduated to elder statesman. This show attempts to return the cop show to the 'Irish family' angle, as if being a cop was just a noble family profession and nothing else. Of course, when the whole familiy sits around the table eating, while Papa rules the roost, I'm not sure if I'm not seeing the Corleone family instead.

My favorite, and symptomatic of the ‘trend’ started by Law & Order’s D’Onofrio – is “The Mentalist.” The lead, Patrick Jane (‘Jane’ for short – how’s that for not macho?) drives a Citroen, does not carry a gun, and lounges around the police station on a couch until the real cops need him. He’s just an advisor, you see. While they go off looking for facts like dumb cops, he intuitively understands the criminal and goes off on a completely different psychological tangent – bringing the cops into the picture at the end. Jane is handsome, wears a sports-jacket and vest and hates psychics, religious phonies and self-help gurus. The show sets up frequent clashes between Jane and the latest ‘mystic.’ He stands up the to police brass and also boldly exposes the bad guys or the rich assholes in public, which is something we’ve all wanted to do, but somehow never got around to. So you gotta like this guy. Except he works for the cops.

The magic angle has spawned shows like ‘Unforgettable” (at least I think that is what it is called) about a woman cop who never forgets anything. And the “Ghost Whisperer” about a woman that can visualize the dead and how they got that way. (This show must have been named after the ‘dog’ whisperer and the ‘horse’ whisperer. I can see the story pitch in Hollywood now…) Visualizations of bullets going through bodies or knives through thighs abound in all these shows, as the cops ‘figure out’ what happened – in their heads.

The worst enemy of the police in show after show is ... dum, de dum dum ... 'Internal Affairs,' who are always depicted as evil, manipulative trouble-makers who are never right.

So what are the meta-messages? Cops are fucking geniuses – even psychic. Cops are hip and really good looking. Cops have lots of guns, but we knew that. Cops have all the information at their finger-tips. Cops need to break the rules frequently. TV, in fact, is one big advertisement for the hipster police state.

Now we have to compare the TV cops and FBI with the actual ones we meet every day. The ones who shoot black guys because they’re nervous. Who enjoy evicting people from their houses. Who volunteer for overtime in order to thump anti-Republican demonstrators. Or FBI agents who collar anti-war activists and socialists. Or 'blue-blood' cops who invite the CIA onto domestic turf to spy on ethnic groups. Or DEA cops who raid pot farms and burn thousands of plants. Or cops who escort scabs through picket-lines. Or FBI agents that couldn’t get a terrorist unless they set up a terrorist plot themselves. Or BATF agents who sell guns to the Mexican cartels. Or county deputies who makes sure anti-Wall Street demonstrators don’t put a stick under their tarps. Or if they are in Oakland, CA, practice using 'bang' grenades and rubber bullets on unarmed sleepers. Or cops who arrest farmers for having Monsanto corn blow onto their property. You get the picture. Almost none of us have met a TV cop in real life. But they sure crowd the airwaves.

Why isn’t there an ‘anti-cop’ show on TV? Other than “Reno 911” perhaps? You know the answer.

Red Frog
October 26, 2011

Occupy Wall Street, then Expropriate It

2011-10-20T17:41:00.008-05:00

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, 2010

Michael Lewis wrote “Liar’s Poker” (reviewed below) about the financial crash of the late 1980s, based on junk bonds, insider trading and the S&L industry. Lewis is pro-capitalist, but an honest observer and reporter, and that is a valuable thing. “The Big Short” is the best look at what was going on inside Wall Street in the period leading up to the crash of 2008. Like Kevin Phillips book, “Bad Money” (also reviewed below) it focuses on the period before 2007, culminating in the implosion of the sub-prime derivatives market in 2007 with the forced sale of Bear Stearns. Lewis reminds us that this Wall Street circus has actually been going on since the 1980s, when many derivative products were first ‘invented.’ As Lewis puts it, “the bonus pool remained undisturbed” since then.

The key characters of this ‘mystery’ are those who saw that the mortgage industry and the investment banks had created a colossal Frankenstein, which nearly brought down capitalism, and has still deeply wounded it. They themselves went from a cynical view of what Wall Street represented to a social view. As Steve Eisman put it, lecturing Bill Miller, a hot-shot investor in Bear Stearns: “The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, “This is wrong.” And no one ever gave a shit about what I had to say.”

To this day, nothing has changed. And we can thank not just the big media whores, who have created a myth about a mere ‘crisis of confidence,’ or the ostensible ‘protectors of the public’ like the SEC, but also the Democratic and Republican parties, who are for the most part the political arms of Wall Street. Lewis himself does not go into how deeply these forces reinforce Wall Street. That is for others to do. But as he puts it, “…pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich.”

What Eisman, Michael Burry, Greg Lippman, John Paulson and a few other hedge fund managers did (including White Box, located her in Minneapolis) was actually understand what was factually going on. Lewis carefully explains the structure of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and the specific errors of the ratings agencies. He shows how a “one-eyed money manager with Asperger’s syndrome” like Michael Burry (the first money-manager to understand the coming collapse of the mortgage market, and by extension, its ‘asset-backed cousin’ the CDO and the CMO in 2004) could, just by reading the prospectuses (which no one but the lawyers who write them ever do...) and studying a website of details on mortgage loans, figure out what CDO’s were going to fail first.

No one – not even the rating agencies – actually had the intimate facts on what mortgages had been bundled into what derivative. Nor did the rating agencies ever carefully vet the details of each ‘product’ – they skipped that part too. Instead, they accepted the assumptions of the Wall Street firms. There is even a statement that the models used by the ratings agencies did not include a possibility of a drop in housing prices. The rating agencies were more interested in just getting paid by Wall Street firms. Lewis calls them, “Nobodies … in blue JC Penny suits.”

Burry and analysts like Eisman looked at both specific and more general statistics on home loans, like what states the CDOs originated out of, or how many mortgage loans were ‘without paper’ or ‘second loans’ or balloons or for high amounts. They found the errors in the ‘FICO’ scores and the “Black-Scholes” option pricing models used by traditional Wall Street analysts. The funniest part of the book is Eisman insulting each and every financial and Wall Street CEO he ever met by telling them exactly what he thought – that their optimistic views and hazy understanding was bullshit. Hilarious, to the point, and absolutely unbelievable. In a way, the whole Street and industry had agreed that only 5% of house loans would go bad, and house prices would always rise. That was their faith, their 'party line.' As Eisman pointed out, all it took was a 7% failure rate for a CDO to default. The rates eventually reached 40% in some pools of loans.

Some of these guys started out as ‘value investors” like Warren Buffet. What these money managers did, once they understood the inflating capitalist mortgage and derivative bubbles, was to buy credit default swaps (CDS) on various CDO’s. CDS’s are like insurance on the failure of a certain investment, but cheaper than buying options. So in a way they were ‘shorting’ the whole U.S. mortgage machine, which had become the largest part of Wall Street’s ‘products.’ A 'short' means you wager money that the price of a product will decline. Hence the name of Lewis’ book. Once they did this, they took out traditional short options on the stock value of various financial institutions, mortgage companies and hedge funds backing mortgage-‘securities,’ just to rub it in. They knew their prices would decline when the bubbles popped.

At a certain point, as the CDO market began crashing in mid-2007, they sold the CDS’s to frantic Wall Street firms, because they knew that some of the CDS’s were guaranteed by AIG or Bear Stearns – both firms they realized could fail. And they did. Eisman, Burry, Lippman and others made millions while Wall Street/The City/The Bourse/Frankfurt capital markets firms lost billions of dollars, and ultimately, the U.S. government, and the U.S. taxpayer, had to step in with trillions to prop up what were now legally called ‘banks.’ Bernie Sanders now puts the number at $16T, not just $800B in TARP funds.

Some people will read this book in order to understand how to make money on Wall Street. Marxists and revolutionaries read it in order to understand financialization, which seems to be a terminal disease of world capitalism. Lewis considers the pebble that started this avalanche of financialization to be the moment that his original target in ‘Liar’s Poker’ – John Gutfreund – turned Salomon Brothers from a partnership to a corporation, thus transferring the risk from the partners to the shareholders. There is some truth in this contention, but it seems another small pebble in the overall pattern of financialization – which really got started when the derivatives market in currencies developed after Nixon ended Bretton-Woods in 1971.

As Christopher Ketcham recently put it: “The One Percenter seeks only exchange value, as opposed to real value. Thus foreign exchange currency gambling has skyrocketed to seventy-three times the actual goods and services of the planet, up from eleven times in 1980. Thus the “value” of oil futures has risen from 20 percent of actual physical production in 1980 to 1,000 percent today. Thus interest rate derivatives have gone from nil in 1980 to $390 trillion in 2009. The trading schemes float disembodied above the real economy, related to it only because without the real economy there would be nothing to exploit.”

Lewis is wrong because the risk has not just shifted from the partner to the shareholder – the risk has now been transferred to the public at large. And the ‘public at large’ is now the guarantor. Derivatives themselves are empty suits, they were not just invented by empty suits. You will hear the rhetorical homilies about how commodity futures are ‘farmers guaranteeing their product price in the future.” Since commodity speculators have taken over the trading pits, as Ketcham points out, these ‘honest farmers’ are less than 3% of the commodity futures market. The problem is far deeper than one single legal change.

Unfortunately, Ketcham is wrong too. The 'real' economy includes Wall Street. The real problem is ‘the system’ – one which cannot survive at this point without the debt casino of Wall Street. This constant narrative of left-liberals that the 'bad' financial capitalists are ruining everything - and we should just 'regulate' them more - is belied by financial capital's empirical support for the expansion of monopoly 'manufacturing' capital all over the globe. The present state of global monopoly corporations would not have been possible otherwise. Financialization is not a ‘growth’ upon capitalism, but its logical conclusion.

And I bought it at Jackson Street Books, Athens Georgia
Red Frog, October 20, 2011

Topeka Says “JUST LEGALIZE IT!!”

2011-10-13T19:28:00.001-05:00

In a move sure to get Charlie Sheen and Chris Brown looking to take up residence in the Ward-Meade Mansion, The City Council of Topeka, Kansas voted 7-3 on Tuesday night to save money by decriminalizing…. wait for it…. domestic violence!

Over 30 domestic violence cases (18 since September) have been dropped in the area because no one will prosecute. The Shawnee County District Attorney responded to cuts to his (note the shocking pronoun) budget by delegating misdemeanor cases to the City. The cuts haven’t gone into effect and won’t until next year, but best to be proactive, I guess. The City responded in the only responsible way by making misdemeanor domestic violence not illegal under State Law. Hey, 423 such cases were prosecuted last year. All that court time, counseling, therapy, and infrastructure to support victims ain’t cheap.

The City Council is banking on the decriminalization forcing the hand of the DA’s office since domestic violence remains a crime under State Law (for now.) The idea is basically “hey, if we can’t prosecute at the City level because there is no City Law violation then the County has to pick up the tab, Right?

Wrong. DA offices all over the country prioritize some cases over others. Misdemeanor charges are dropped for any number of reasons all the time. Nothing says that has to change. Domestic abuse cases are tragically under-prosecuted as it is. This pissing match between the City and the DA’s office has only managed to send a public message that women are second-class citizens and if anybody wants to slap one in Topeka he probably won’t get punished.

This is just one more example of the seemingly never-ending shift to the right in “mainstream” politics. Slash every budget and encourage people to just get stronger and richer if they don’t want to be victimized.

But at least the National press has gotten behind this, right? Christ, after I was told about this repeal being considered I had to read about it in Forbes. Fuck everybody.

American Fiction Writers - Follow-up to a Smack-down

2011-10-11T15:53:00.007-05:00

Alexander Nazaryan had an interesting article in a recent Salon.com on why American writers have not recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. He also appeared on NPR talking about this issue. Nazaryan says that recent "American' fiction is dominated by 'great white male narcissists.' (Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, John Updike ...cough cough...) After you stop laughing, I think unfortunately this extends to many U.S. female writers too. The white guys get the awards, but the women bring up the rear in the self-same department. Self-involvement is the heart of middle-class fiction, after all. This is not to say that all literature does not borrow from a person's life - the question is, how much?

Toni Morrison, a black woman, was the last U.S. citizen to win a Nobel in 1993, probably for "Beloved" - which was a great book, but not about Toni Morrison. Take heed.

Nazaryan and others locate one of the promoters of this small-bore navel-gazing preoccupation in the MFA programs at our esteemed universities, which counsel - 'write what you know.' And this truism disguises the fact that what many peole know is ... not much! Female writers are urged at the Loft and other centers to write 'memoirs' - even if nothing in their life is memorable. We are treated to endless stories of addication and disfunction, as if literature was purely therapy. In this culture, middle-class writers shy away from large social issues in order to fit in politically and culturally. They would rather write about personal issues like infidelity or adultry than unemployment - which they probably haven't experienced anyway. It is all disguised, sometimes, as 'art for art's sake' when they are feeling especially peckish.

So the comparison I did between "Prague" and "Petrol Bombs" is typical of the real problem. There are no more John Steinbecks or Upton Sinclairs. At least not on the NY Times bestseller lists.

Red Frog, 10/11/2011

Middle Class v Working Class FICTION SMACKDOWN!:

2011-10-03T18:42:00.004-05:00

“Prague, a Novel,” by Arthur Phillips, 2002 / “Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs,” by D.D. Johnson, 2011.

The Americans who eat in Budapest cafes: The Scots who work in burger joints:

In my continuing interest in fiction, I chose these two books accidentally. The first book seemed relevant because I wanted to read something about central Europe. And of course the joke is, while the book is titled ‘Prague,’ that city of the Czech Republic, its really about Prague’s somewhat less glamorous cousin, Budapest, Hungary. The supposition is that all the trendy American tourists who want to go to Prague may pick it up and read it. Ha ha. The second book fits in with the ‘anarchist’ theme, so I got that too.

‘Prague, a Novel’ was a ‘national bestseller,’ got kudos from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and many other newspaper credits. It even has a somewhat cute ‘readers circle’ question section at the back, so you can take it to your book club. Phillips hails from Minneapolis, went to Harvard and seems to be an all-around young and handsome genius. He is squarely in the upscale hipster writers camp.

The book centers on a group of young expatriates sitting around the bars and cafes of Budapest right after the Soviet Army pulled-out of Hungary in 1989. This lead to the collapse of the deformed workers state there, and the slow restoration of capitalism. Johnny on the spot, these Americans now smell an opportunity, or ‘something different.’ The group includes: Emily, a bland cheerleader whose job is being a go-fer for the American ambassador; Charles, a suave and arrogant American/Hungarian investment banker looking for investment opportunities in the ‘new’ Hungary; Mark, a gay post-PHD researching a book on nostalgia; Scott, the inevitable English-as-a-Second-Language teacher and blond athlete, and also an angry and sarcastic young man; and John, his brother, who has just followed big brother Scott to Budapest and seems to be looking for love, or something.

So the first question any reader asks themselves is: Do I even want to sit at a table with these people? Thought about it? OK, don’t answer that. It doesn’t help much that it starts with a beer-laden ‘can you tell the truth?’ party game.

This is not so much a story of the ‘ugly’ American as it is a story of the useless American. Some of the book touches on humor – John’s infatuation with the doltish Emily being a long thread. Or John’s infatuation with his brother, a rude loser underneath. Mark has a hilarious desire to re-create and live in the past, catching it just at the corner of his eye while the rest of us remain oblivious. The book details the group’s contacts with the alternatively impressive, poor, sad or crude Hungarians. The plot of the book centers around Charles attempt to invest in a famous and heroic Hungarian publishing company, the “Horvath Press.” Since this is not so much a cliffhanger as an inevitability, the book really centers around drinks, dances, meals at restaurants, cafes, bars and nightclubs, with a some sex, meals and drinks in apartments thrown in. Charles succeeds in bringing back the Horvath Press to Budapest from Vienna. Emily continues to walk in and out of the embassy. Mark gives up on nostalgia and leaves. Scott marries a Hungarian girl and moves to Transylvania. And John, who seems to be the most sensitive, finds love with the women he didn’t expect, and still yearns after the woman he did expect.

It is called a ‘novel of ideas’ but I failed to locate any. It is charged with being a ‘caustic satire,’ but the fun is actually quite gentle. It is called ‘elegant and entertaining.’ For some it must be. I eventually started turning the pages quickly, as gradually, nothing happens. Of course, no one in the book gets to Prague. Other than name-dropping parts of Budapest – the Gellert baths, Adrassy Utca, the Gerbeaud restaurant, the Buda hills, the Castle and various squares – the book was not about Budapest, nor the Hungarian people, let alone Prague. It was about some young, vaguely interesting, Americans. So even in a foreign country – the real topic of any good American – is themselves.

And I did not buy it at Mayday Books
Red Frog, September 13, 2011

“Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs”

So imagine you are sitting at another set of tables – this time in a burger joint in Dundule, Scotland in 1998 called “Benny’s Burgers.” No wine, no table cloths, no serviettes, just paper napkins and lots of beef. The action is not happening at the tables. It is in the back room and the kitchen, where a large set of disgruntled Scottish lads and lassies are so pissed about their menial lives that one of them forms “Benny’s Revolutionary Army” and several become anarchists or revolutionaries.

The book opens during a smoky confrontation with police at the 2000 World Bank summit in Prague, somewhere around Wencelas Square. Unlike the deadbeats from Budapest, these folks actually get to Prague, and find the revolutionary worm has turned. It follows a love-sick burger-flipper, the invisible Wayne, who travels across Europe after the 1999 Seattle protests – to Prague in 2000, Mayday in Parliament Square in 2000, Thessaloniki’s riots in 2003, to Paris, back to London and again, Dundule. It is not just the ‘struggle’ but various revolutionary or plain sexy girlfriends that lead him on. The scenes are set in the bars and Benny’s of Dundule, and its “Breast Mountain’ of garbage, to a London squat, then Greek dorms overrunning with thousands of leftists, to various parent’s homes and back to Scotland. Petrol bombs explode in Greece, the black bloc moves from street to street, pathetic protests fail to make a dent in Paris, and Benny’s Burgers gets well-defaced several times around the world.

Johnson’s use of Scottish brogue is great, as is his description of the gang of political working-class ner-do-wells and the officious tripe they encounter. Time jumps around in the novel, first ahead, then behind, but eventually it makes sense. There is a hilarious conservative Indian wedding where the groom, a sub-manager at Benny’s, sounds more like Kumar from “Harold & Kumar” than a Punjabi prince. Johnston also gets in some fierce digs at the British Socialist Workers Party, and later, various anarchists types, including the declining stages of the “Anarchist Book Fair.” Another scene where he robs his exes apartment using a cab is pure slapstick. His comment about one of his exes? “She still kissed like a Labrador.” “Petrol Bombs” is funnier than “Prague” by a long-shot. Of course, you have to appreciate crude, straight-forward humor.

Eventually Wayne tires of anarchism (after being dumped by his French anarchist girlfriend, Manette) and goes home, stealing valuable antiques from another ex-girlfriend’s female partner on the way – the cab story. He finally ends up in Manchester. The only similar link between these books is that both central characters look for love in all the wrong places. Which seems to be the only place to look.

The winner of the Smackdown? “Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs” by a TKO for humour, dialect, politics and action.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, October 3, 2011

From the Anarchist Book Fair:

2011-09-25T19:29:00.007-05:00

“Anarchism and its Aspirations” – by Cindy Milstein, 2010

This short book has been described as a good introduction to modern anarchism. I’ve reviewed several books in the anarchist tradition or close to it: “The Coming Insurrection,” “Non-Violence Protects the State” and “Facing Reality,” the work of CLR James (however, a council communist), and the Situationist ‘Society of the Spectacle,” (all reviewed below.) However, this book is different in that it tries to layout the politics of anarchism in 122 pages.

I expected much more. In fact I was somewhat shocked by how naïve this book seemed. Of course, there are various brands of anarchism, and not all of them can be judged by these writings. Milstein points out that anarchism is primarily an 'ethics.' And the ethic leads to the destruction of capitalism, any state and hierarchy – and this all in one time period, simultaneously. In other words, communism now. And it is to be done by free and happy people who will reach the true, the good and the beautiful. Milstein centralizes the role of ‘ethics’ in anarchism – as if anarchism was kind of a hyper-humanism or hyper-liberalism. She uses the term ‘substantive humanism’ and ‘libertarian socialism’ to describe it. The phrases “class consciousness’ and ‘class struggle’ are nowhere to be read. The working class makes no appearance. Milstein does endorse much of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, but not his view of the state. Milstein considers the state to be a separate entity from capital, representing a third force in society, not the expression of the ruling class, as Marxists understand it. However, what economic class this ‘state’ represents is unclear. She brings forth no factual basis for the existence of this ‘third force’ or economy, but her intent here is not factual or scientific analysis.

Hatred of an abstract 'state' is also popular on the libertarian right, which some say is the anarchism of small capital. And it is, of course, the main target of the Republican Party - or at least those parts of the state that don't benefit them. So the left anarchist attack on the 'state' finds echoes in the broader culture. And this may explain the ease with which some youth accept anarchism.

Milstein insists that modern capitalism can exist without corporations – and indeed that is a truism. But monopoly indicates what form is really in control now – and it is not shoe-store owners. She praises anarchist attempts to build counter-institutions, and I have no problem with this. Of course, a counter-culture is not the product of anarchism alone – populism, Marxism and simple cooperation among people lead to various co-operative endeavors being constructed. You have only to look at the grain co-ops from the 30s or the food co-ops of the 1960s to see this. However, a ‘counter-culture’ was tried in the 60s, and failed to overwhelm the capitalist system – because you cannot ignore the system away. Capital, as it did to the former workers’ states, will attempt to destroy or undermine anything that does not conform to it.

This leads to another thing missing from Milstein’s book – the idea of a revolution to overthrow the state. Milstein ignores the question of force, as if the capitalists will just disappear when their oil wells, car factories, steel mills and wealth are taken from them. The implication is actually that you can just ‘work around’ the state, and ignore it. She praises what could only be called ‘charity’ efforts by anarchists in this regard. Yet, as even churches understand, the scale of misery in the society cannot be ameliorated by charity alone. Much as Republicans theorize otherwise, and evidently, some anarchists too. Without Welfare/WIC, unemployment insurance or social security/Medicare, etc., the working classes in this society would be even more destitute.

Milstein’s argument against Marxism is a somewhat inaccurate one – that a ‘classless yet statist society’ is undesirable. (p. 81) Well of course it is. Because it is impossible. States do not need to exist if classes disappear. Milstein evidently does not agree that a state exists because classes exist. It is not really clear why she thinks states exist except perhaps that ‘mean people’ organize them! People do not set up a bureaucracy, system of laws protecting private property, and back them up with many armed bodies of men if there is no significant economic privilege to maintain. In a way, Milstein also disappears economics, replacing it with a hostility to ‘hierarchy’ in any form. Of course, what is actually behind her criticism is the very real experience of Stalinism and bureaucracy in the workers states, and the congealing of the Leninist party into a bureaucratic organization. However, anarchism is not the only political force in the world that noticed this.

Milstein believes in direct democracy (although she makes some nods to the practical necessity of electing delegates at times) but, along with the other invisibilities, never mentions elections or voting. Anarchists believe on principle in not engaging in the political arena, I suspect, and that is the reason.

Milstein is not totally sanguine about anarchism. She seems to be aware of some of its limitations – even calling the anarchist founders ‘naïve’ over their endorsement of the essential ‘goodness’ of human nature. She also says that some ‘street actions translate into nothing more than counter-cultural version of interest group lobbying…” And her take on small-group actions (perhaps the ‘black bloc’…)? “There is ultimately something slightly authoritarian in small groups taking matters into their own hands …”

What Marxists, democratic socialists and anarchists can agree on, I think, is that society should eventually be run by workplace and geographic councils. Of course, the whole issue right now is just getting there. And there's the rub.

And I bought it at the Anarchist Book Fair from Mayday Books!
Red Frog, September 25, 2011

Last Battle of the Civil War?

2011-09-13T19:37:00.006-05:00

James-Younger Gang Attempt to Rob Northfield Bank – 1876; Reenactment in Northfield, September 11, 2011.

I stopped by Northfield this weekend to check out the reenactment of the James-Younger gangs raid on Northfield back in 1876. The town has been putting this show on since 1948. The bank and hardware store are preserved as a historical site and museum. Dark black circles surround certain large holes in the old bricks of the hardware store, where old bullets are reputed to have struck.

I call it the last battle of the Civil War, although we might reflect that the civil war is still going on. Unlike old histories, such as George Huntington’s 1896 “Robert and Hero,” which does not mention the issue; or the 1972 film the “Great Northfield, Minnesota Bank Raid,” full of idiotic historical fantasies as big as the 'mountains' looming over the town, neither focuses on the strong Civil War connection.

The raiders did not come to the town because it had ‘the most money’ west of the Mississippi. It was one of several banks targeted in southern Minnesota. To get sympathy from ex-Confederates, Cole Younger mentioned to the press that Benjamin Butler, an abolitionist union general, had money in the Northfield Bank, as did Adelbert Ames, former Reconstruction governor of Mississippi. (See Ames mentioned in the review of the ‘The State of Jones,’ below.) In doing this, he implied that this was one of the reasons they chose this bank to rob. However, Younger was wrong, as it was J.T. Ames, the brother of Adelbert Ames, who sat on the board of directors of the bank. Butler’s daughter had married Adelbert Ames, so there was indeed a family connection at the bank - and a Union connection.

There is an argument as to whether Adelbert Ames was in Northfield on that day - the re-enactors say he was. Or whether one of the Ames brothers was addressed as ‘guvnuh’ by a southern voice as he crossed the bridge to the Ames mill (now owned by Malt-O-Meal), which caused Ames to glance at the riders and see pistols under their linen dusters - also claimed by the re-enactors. This alerted Ames and supposedly lead him to follow the riders back into town. However, it is no secret that Joseph Heywood, the bank teller killed by Frank James, and others in the street in Northfield shooting back, were former Union soldiers. Heywood fought at Chickasaw Bayou, Champion’s Hill and finally at Vicksburg under Sherman and Grant, after which he got sick. Anselm Manning, who killed raider Bill Stiles/Chadwell, had been a Union soldier. The Younger brothers – Cole, Bob & Jim - and the James brothers – Frank & Jesse – all had ridden with Quantrill’s blood-thirsty cavalry in the Confederate Army.

Raiders Clell Miller and Chadwell/Stiles were killed by the armed citizens of Northfield that day. Cole and Bob Younger were injured. During the manhunt, lead by Union veteran William Murphy and also organized by J.T. Ames, the Missourians fled towards Madelia, Minnesota. There Charlie Pitts was killed and the three Younger brothers captured. The three were later sentenced to Stillwater Prison, where Cole Younger started the prison newspaper. Only the James brothers escaped, though, typical of this history, there is a bit of doubt whether one or the other was in Northfield. It was admitted to by several of the band, but Cole Younger tried to deny their presence, which is something any smart 'pard' would do. Six of eight of the gang were killed or captured (though some claim there was a ninth gang member on the edge of town), and this ended the exploits of the James brothers. The re-enactors take great pains to point out that the James/Younger gang was no bunch of “Robin Hoods’ but were instead interested only in buying good liquor, prostitutes and high-quality horses and guns. They gave their money to no one but themselves.

The roots of this raid in the Civil War are unmistakable. These Missouri bushwhackers, who were part of a movement that had burned down Lawrence, Kansas and killed dozens in cold blood there, lived up to their name, again, even in 1876. Both Heywood and a Swedish immigrant, Gustafson, died that day. But the ex-Confederate raiders met the same fate at the hands of Minnesota farmers and unionists in Northfield as the Confederate Army met in the battles of Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Missionary Ridge and Nashville, where Minnesota units distinguished themselves.

Lessons? There’s only one way to deal with a slaver… and their modern equivalent, a fascist, if they ever show up again.

And I saw it in southern Minnesota!
Red Frog, September 12, 2011

Obama Wakes from his Beauty Sleep

2011-09-10T11:23:00.004-05:00

The American Jobs Bill Speech, Thursday, September 8.

Since the Simpson-Bowles Commission released its findings in December 2010, the bi-partisan discussion among both Democrats and Republicans has been about deficits. The basic question was how much to destroy the ‘safety net’ for the working class, and how much to hand money up to the wealthy and the corporations. Like any clever bill, a few good ideas nestled next to many reactionary ideas. Of course, they all had an equal chance of passing, didn’t they? In a sense, there was a complete continuum between the Tea Party and the Democratic Party leadership about the paramount importance of deficits, going on for 9 months now. Snzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

All of a sudden, as the stock market starts falling again, and the threat of another ‘official’ recession advances (as if the real recession isn’t still going on…) Obama has suddenly woken up and realized he has to get elected. Of course, to the short-term deficit geniuses of the U.S. government, this was all unexpected! In order to be re-elected, Obama had to attempt some kind of a successful deal with the Republican Party on ‘jobs.’ Hence the September 8 speech.

This speech was given directly to the Republicans, and no one else. Yes, The Mustache – Richard Trumka - sat in the audience and thrilled once again to hearing about how construction workers and teachers might be getting jobs. Or that rich people should pay their ‘fair’ share. Yes, the Alliance for American Manufacturing, also affiliated to the AFL-CIO, might hold their nose, but they were also generally enthusiastic. Yet nothing in this proposed bill hasn’t been tried before or agreed to before by some or all members of the Republican Party. Bloomberg even called it borrowing from an ‘old playbook.’ The AFL-CIO probably appreciated that the topic now was on jobs, and not the ‘deficit’ – but if you look carefully at this plan, it is also a sleight of hand – using the jobs ‘emergency’ to further the capitalist agenda. The chatter after the speech was all about how it didn’t have a chance of passing, and so was a political move by Obama to finally show he cared about jobs – again.

The real question is – what if all or some of these suggestions DO get passed into law? Because this reveals what the Democratic Party leadership is really all about. Let’s look into them in a bit of detail.

First off, Obama said, “it’s all going to be paid for.” How? The “Super-Committee”! This body of Democrats and Republicans is tasked with adding the $447B price-tag for this bill to their deliberations. If you’ve heard them talking, they thunder about not listening to ‘special interest’ groups, which presumably also means their constituents. We’ve seen this before. A member of Congress is elected, and then does what he is supposed to do by the unwritten rules of the ruling elements in the society, not what he was elected to do. Which shows every day that the bourgeois democratic system in the U.S. doesn’t work. What this means, if you read between the lines, is they will do what is best for the ‘country.’ And what is best for the country they understand is what is best for the capitalist economy. Which means, to hell with my constituents, I will cut spending like a muthafucka, as I'm being told.

So how is this a stimulus if they are going to cut $447B down the road? The only difference is timing. As one friend put it, they are ‘buying time.’ It might ‘dent’ another recession just enough to get the election over with. Overall, however, there will be insufficient Keynesian impact to this bill, even if passed, but many nasty effects that will last longer.

So what are the elements?

1. The biggest part of the bill is another tax cut – 3.1%. It is a payroll tax cut for businesses and workers, the money coming from Social Security taxes. The theory is that demand will increase, and pay Social Security back. However, as with most tax cuts, they actually have very little ‘stimulative’ effect. Most people use them to pay off debts, or stick the money in the bank – as corporations have been doing for years now. Very few jobs will be created and very little will be bought. If you look at the ‘Cash for Clunkers” program and the credit for purchasing a house - both were far more direct attempts to channel money into the economy – and their effects wore off almost immediately, a quick high. What this proposal will really do is further deplete the Social Security fund, which has been robbed by bourgeois politicians for years to pay for other programs. This is another blow to Social Security. This tax cut is part of the $250B in new tax incentives, now added to the ones passed during the deficit ‘emergency.’

2. More tax breaks with shaky effects: Tax holiday for new hires for one year. Bloomberg pointed out that businesses hire people for longer than one year, so the only people that might use this are seasonal or low-end service/retail businesses. This will not create long-term decent jobs. And again, fewer taxes paid by businesses means less tax money to fund municipal/state and federal jobs. Can you say 110,000 layoffs at the Post Office? Obama also proposed a fifty percent reduction of the tax rates businesses pay on the first $5 million in payroll; and a $4,000 tax credit for employers who hire long-term unemployed workers. But do they have to keep them? No.

3. A plan, now being used by Georgia Republicans, to make unemployed workers work for free for businessmen, which Clinton initiated many years ago under the “Workfare” label. I.E. taxpayers are directly subsidizing businessmen to hire people. More corporate welfare. What will stop them from not hiring people they intended to hire and instead hire ‘free’ labor? Nothing. Perhaps the next step will be lending out prison labor from our federal lockups to needy businessmen. Oh, wait, we do that already. Will they prevent this practice or stop the fake B1 Visa program to create jobs? No. That would piss off the corporations, you see.

4. Obama again brought up the ‘free trade’ bills for South Korea, Columbia and Panama – three of our direct client states – as a way to ‘create’ jobs. This plan has been floated since 2010. Identical to the debate over NAFTA, (as chronicled in the book on Wal-Mart, “God & Wal-mart,” reviewed below) Obama waived the ‘vision’ of American cars being sold in South Korea. Of course, under NAFTA, the exact opposite happened, and Mexican goods appeared in American Wal-Marts. And now, of course, Chinese goods are in Mexican and American Wal-Marts. The Obama administration has already put a rider to these bills concerning ‘possible’ American job losses and ‘retraining’ – so even they know what it will lead to. The AFL-CIO sees through this scam, of course, but John Boehner clapped! So the Republicans are on board. The “Jobs Council” Obama mentioned in the speech is made up of businessmen from different industries – which is sort of like putting the foxes in charge of preparing the chickens.

5. The best parts of the bill is some amount between $105B//$125B/$175B (estimates are all over the place) for aid to states for education and spending on infrastructure, which might prevent some teacher or municipal/state worker layoffs in the near future, and hire some construction workers. This is similar to the ‘shovel ready’ part of the 2009 stimulus bill. However, again, the money is being taken out on the back end by the ‘Super-Committee’, so this is really a ‘take from Peter to pay Paul’ scheme. Again, buying time. As the Keynesians are pointing out, even in the short term, too little to make a difference - similar to the first Obama medicine.

6. Infrastructure Bank – seems to be some kind of publicly-run hedge fund that will pay interest to private parties who invest in infrastructure projects. Is this a wedge to get private investment owning 'public' property?

7. $62B (per Bloomberg) will be to extend unemployment benefits for a year. If you noticed, the deficit bill passed by the Democrats and Republicans a few months ago after Naomi Klein's “U.S. deficit ceiling emergency” (see below – the ‘Accident on the Potomac’) actually got rid of extended unemployment benefits, so Obama is now trying to slip this back in. At this point, so many people have been out of work for so long that it is unprecedented in recent labor history. And these extensions have never been needed before. However, this, again, does not create jobs or aggregate demand.

8. Another tax break for businesses to be able to write-off investments quicker. Again, nothing to do with jobs. This was also in prior bills.

9. Help with refinancing underwater homes at 4% through FNMA/FMC. Again, not directly connected to jobs, but it would put more money in people’s pockets. However, will they spend that money on new purchases? The odds are no – what gets people to spend is a real job. Obama’s prior mortgage program basically did almost nothing to stem foreclosures. Also part of this is a plan to fix up neglected foreclosed homes. However, private parties seem to be already doing this, so this could be part of another subsidy to businessmen.

10. And quite noticeably, Medicare had a big red target publicly painted on it by this ‘Democratic” President. Obama vowed that Medicare, ‘with an aging population and rising health-care costs, is spending too fast to sustain the program.” This repeats in public Obama’s private proposal in the ‘grand bargain’ with Republican Paul Ryan to cut Medicare. And who is raising health-care costs? Hmmm? Big Pharma? HMOs?

11. There was no proposal to ‘tax the rich’ or the corporations, only rhetoric. Richard Trumka, sit down.

Right now, this is a ‘mini-stimulus’ bill that undermines Social Security and Medicare, will not result in long-term job growth and in some respects, undermines long term job growth through tax cuts and mini-NAFTAs. It continues the redistribution of wealth up the ladder through tax cuts. Even on its own terms – as a jobs stimulus – it is insufficient – and will not create enough jobs. It does not mention the elephant in the room – military spending – perhaps because the U.S. will never seriously drop military spending due to its key role in absorbing surpluses and policing the world for corporations.

This bill continues to pay bi-partisan credit to the myth that small businessmen are the ‘job creators.’ Given their failure since fall 2007 to create jobs, I’d say continuing to buy into this myth is merely throwing good money after bad. Of the 33 million corporations, partnerships and sole proprietorships in the U.S. only 200 corporations generate a 3rd of the profits and income. You do the math.

Capital in the U.S. is lurching from political paralysis to fighting the deficit to short-term stop-gaps. This bill is a last attempt to again come to terms with a situation that has been going on for 4 full years. They are betting the U.S. population will once again be satisfied with a small carrot, rather than the long stick. Their paramount purpose is to prevent any kind of mass mobilization outside the bourgeois parties – strikes, demonstrations, political activity, occupations, bombings etc. And so far, their bet that a Democratic president could control the mass movement better, in a time of economic and military failure, has been successful. Anti-war organizations like Move-On showed their real colors and shut up. The AFL-CIO is making 'noises' and tiny moves, but still ultimately buys the folderol. The 'left' of the Democratic Party has created no primary opponent to Obama. Not one single large organization has seen through the con-job, except perhaps parts of the Latino movement.

The real question is, is being afraid of Rick Perry enough to convince people that a 'soft' Rick Perry is a viable option?

Red Frog
September 10, 2011

Short Attention Span Theatre

2011-09-06T18:12:00.002-05:00

“Politics Noir – Thirteen Dark Tales from the Corridors of Power” – Various Authors, 2011

Fiction provides a window into the ‘memes’ floating through the culture. This collection registers immense cynicism about the ‘democratic’ system in the U.S., while still not going for the jugular. American politics is shown in this collection, in the words of Paul Baran & Paul Sweezy, as ‘how political parties evolved into vote-gathering and patronage-dispensing machines without program or discipline.’ Plus blood.

This volume is another in the series of short-story modern noir (‘Native Noir’ reviewed below). Murder is the central event of most American TV, and this volume does not shy away from many, many political murders. Of course, we know ‘noir’ doesn’t always have to involve death – sometimes living while maimed or humiliated can be worse. Perhaps the most ‘noirish’ of all is when the powerful and rich get away with massive political crimes, perhaps without killing a soul. In that case, our whole brightly-colored culture hides noir day-in and day-out.

While most killings written here are shabby professional hits, the most high-profile is an assassination planned in 2008 by a female Democratic Party politician of her half-black rival for the presidency. Another features several black professionals being ‘penalized’ for falling in love with Condi Rice. Mike Davis dips back into history for a story of Dick Nixon administering fellatio to long-time director of the CIA, J Edgar Hoover, and the rampant chances for black-mail that affords. A Minnesota local, Pete Hautman, gives us a somewhat unbelievable tale of political killings in the metro-area by a small-time politician. There’s even a story of how New York hip-hop can make and ‘break’ politicians. One story actually involves no murders – just the attempted hi-jacking of a NY borough election by bogus robo-calls, fliers and illegal removal off the voter roles – shades of Florida 2000, Ohio 2004 or Election 2012. Only one gun is drawn.

Some of the stories do not directly reflect on politics – at least not in the narrow sense. One narrates the struggle of a Mexican kid learning to surf, and the problems he runs into in all-white and all-blond Palos Verdes, California. Another details the ‘happy-ending’ of a fundamentalist Muslim inman in Pakistan being stoned to death for breaking his own Sharia laws – because of watching porn. Another portrays de-mobilized IRA soldiers taking on their former leaders, who now drive BMWs and live in mansions. And it proves that, indeed, Irish English is another language.

The series features plenty of power-hungry women who will stop at nothing to be elected or get their candidate elected. (Where does this come from?) And who’d have known politicians know so many hit-men? But when I say pulls its punches, it is because good noir should be believable. And many of these stories are humorous but overdrawn to make a point. And the point is that the political system is rotten to the core. However, you don’t really need to exaggerate much. Just look at the headlines

My dream noir story is about Dick Cheney ordering the assassination of Paul Wellstone. I think that would be very revealing – and not ‘noir’ at all. More like a documentary. Or the CIA smuggling drugs into south-central Los Angeles. Or the captivity of Bradley Manning. Or the situation in the maximum security isolation prisons of California. Or the 2000 election in Florida. Or Guantanamo/ Bagram Air Force Base/ Abu Grahib. The CIA even sent people to Libya for ‘rendition’ - how’s that for noir? Or the killings of Joe Hill, Huey Long, UAW leader Walter Reuther, the U.S. Phoenix program in Vietnam, Lumumba, Malcolm X, the Chicago Black Panthers, the Kennedys, Salvador Allende and his aide, Orlando Letelier, South African radical Steven Biko, Harold Washington and every other convenient political death.

There’s noir for you.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, September 3, 2011

Sorry! Once more on economics:

2011-08-28T18:50:00.006-05:00

“Monopoly Capital” by Baran & Sweezy, 1966

This classic of American Marxism, written in a clear, somewhat dull style unlike the sometimes convoluted meanderings of Zizek, or the algebraic chapters of Amin, remains relevant today regarding present economic debates. It was written in the mid-sixties, when the ‘exceptional period’ of American corporate capital was in full swing. It claims to be an examination of monopoly capitalism in its highest form, similar to what Marx himself did to early British capitalism in “Capital.” This was prior to the full development of the corporation.

Like people who drive cars or live in homes and understand almost nothing of what makes them ‘tick’ – so too, Americans live in an economy in which many understand little about how it ‘ticks.’ And the result is, just as you will eventually pay a lot to some ‘professional’ to ‘fix’ your home or car, so too will you pay a lot when the ‘professionals’ of economics – monetarist or Keynesian - try their ‘fixes.’ However, unlike automobile or house repair, which can involve unneeded costs but is still a relatively straight-forward mechanical process, the economy is ‘political’ in the deepest sense; not merely a machine but more like several living organisms.

I am going to bullet-point Baran & Sweezy’s (B&S) most salient points. They quote and use the statistical work of various authors – Thorstein Veblein, Vance Packard, Kalecki, Schumpteter, etc. throughout their book:

1. The first point, and one largely accepted now by everyone but monetarists, Libertarians and Tea Party rhetoricians, is that corporations control the U.S. (and world) economy. As a result B&S think that ‘competition’ is now largely a fiction. Within those corporations, or the “oligarchy’ as the authors call it, prices are controlled informally between the giant combines. Small business, entrepreneurship and individually-owned ‘mogul’ businesses are no longer the dominant paradigm of capital, and as such, the ‘competitive’ system is no longer truly competitive.

2. For me, and others I imagine, the main theoretical problem is addressed on page 72 of the Monthly Review edition, in the chapter “The Tendency of the Surplus to Rise.” The authors here make the point that monopoly capital has mostly overcome the problem of the falling rate of profit. Instead, the problem to be addressed under oligarchy is the inability to get rid of surpluses, and without getting rid of them, a resulting stagnation. Certainly, excess ‘surpluses’ explain part of the frequent financial and manufacturing bubbles / busts, the massive amount of waste in the system and even military spending. Ideologically, on the surface though, a system that has ‘too many surpluses’ seems a pleasant problem to have! Their analysis does not explain why oligarchic / monopolist manufacturing concerns needed to go to the U.S. south, to Mexico and overseas if their profit rate was adequate. A good Marxist argument has been made that capital earns super-profits by receiving ‘imperialist rent’ from the financial colonies, as Amin puts it. Nor do they explain exactly why Marx’s analysis of fixed capital has so changed. I think these two factors are actually operating side-by-side, even under ‘monopoly’ - perhaps because it is not a perfect monopoly due to its current world-wide character.

3. Back to the authors’ arguments: Surpluses under monopoly capital can then be: A, invested; B, consumed or C, wasted. Baran/Sweezy discuss the various means whereby the system attempts to get rid of its surplus – foreign investment, R&D, technological innovation, capitalist consumption, sales efforts, military spending, etc. They do not, however, dwell on the issue of 'waste' except tangentially. On the issue of why there is always ‘too much’ under monopoly capital:
“If he is a worker, the ubiquitous fact of unemployment teaches him that the supply of labor is always greater than the demand. If he is a farmer, he struggles to stay afloat in a sea of crop surpluses. If he is a businessman, his sales persistently fall short of what he could profitably produce. Always too much, never too little.”

4. Baran/Sweezy point out that under monopoly capital, sales issues come to even dominate production. They look at the car industry in the 50s and conclude that 25% of every car was needless changes for marketing purposes only. They show studies that indicate cars used more gas and contained more unneeded changes in 1956 than the 1949 model car, so the issue of ‘progress’ was actually backwards. They also estimate that a rationally-built car would cost 75% less than one made by GM. Following this, it doesn't take much to understand that the present constant software and hardware changes in phones, computers, games etc. are mostly cosmetic, generating sales - making prior products unusable, thus a big part of the whole process of planned obsolescence.

5. They note that the FIRE sector (Finance, insurance and real estate) reached 10.2% of the nation’s aggregate economy in 1960, large for its time. They call it an almost entirely parasitic sector. However, they make no case in this book for ‘financialization.’

6. Baran & Sweezy go on to talk about how the government can attempt to absorb surpluses in 3 main ways – defense, transfer payments and non-defense benefits. B&S back-up Keynes’ understanding that government spending, even deficit government spending, has a ‘multiplier’ effect that goes beyond the simple amount of money spent by the government. Government spending can make idle capacity come alive, which leads to higher private profits. Of course, this analysis hurts monetarist / libertarian theories of the dangers of deficits. However, they also point out that the oligarchy will only put up with so much 'deficit spending' - thus a Keynesian solution can never really be tried.

This logic should still apply, at least up to some point where debt service to the banks and rich, of course drags down the original stimulus. Baran & Sweezy wrote this when government deficits were small. I am not aware of any Marxist analysis of the level of corporate and government debt now, however, and whether this Keynesian point still holds. I myself do not think it holds to the enth degree.

Corporate taxes during the '50s and early '60s were high due to rises in the war years, yet corporate profits continued at the same rate. Corporations raised prices or cut benefits to workers to pay the taxes. As another foot-noted writer said, “the government simply used the corporations as tax collectors.” Another lesson about high corporate taxes.

7. B&S have a great description of the U.S. governmental system that runs a few pages, but essentially captures the hollow notion that this is an actual democracy. The Pith? The system is ‘democratic in form and plutocratic in content.’ In this context, Baran & Sweezy note that the greatest government spending increase in 1957 since before the Depression was a 66% increase in defense spending. They call this ‘the key fact of post-war American economic history.’ They contend that if that spending was taken away, the economy would have fallen back into recession or depression, as 9% of the labor force was involved in military production. And here we come to the crux of the matter. Well-meaning calls by anti-war activists and pacifists for a reduction of the military budget and a switch to civilian production is actually impossible under capitalism, as it is a key source for the absorption of surplus. But, according to B&S, a continually increasing military budget, to avoid stagnation, is not a reality either. They cite reductions in military spending in the early 60s to indicate that it cannot grow endlessly.

8. In short, B&S conclude, there is no fail-safe way to avoid stagnation over the long term. However two things do counteract the effect of overly-large surpluses, which then lead to lack of production, unemployment and empty factories, and end in stagnation. They are technological innovations and war. They track U.S. capitalist history since the 1870s, when monopoly became dominant in capitalist economics. B&S look at the economic effect of steam power, railroads and the automobile, all which lead to periods of actual growth. Then they track the obvious effect of the wars – WWI and WWII – and show the same thing. Notably, they diagnose a period before WWI – between the effects of railroad expansion ending in 1907 and war spending in 1915, which showed a period of high unemployment, low capacity utilization and stagnation. If you were to apply this logic today, you would look at the ‘computer’ revolution, which fits their definition of ‘overturning’ prior methods, and should be able to find growth based on this new technological paradigm. And of course, war is now almost a constant. But you should also be able to find the economic end of this paradigm.

9. B&S take up the black question and show that black liberation is not possible under capitalism. They raise the well-known history of prior immigrant groups – the Irish, the Italians, etc., and how they rose out of poverty and marginalization to become ‘accepted’ members of society. And yet black people – to their day, certainly, and to THIS day, have not moved beyond being at the bottom of U.S. society. In the 60s, Lyndon Johnson’s decision to back programs creating a black petit-bourgeoisie was part of a global struggle against the USSR, and was also a way to remove talented leaders from the black masses. Johnson had to prevent the development of a mass ’fifth column’ with no allegiance to capital. However, without leaving the South as sharecroppers and becoming employed in the army and later, government jobs on the municipal, state and federal level, black people would have never been able to increase their economic level. They also benefited from the automobile revolution, but that has now run its course. At present, black people are the main target of reductions in government workforces. This crucial attack may lead to a revival of the radical black movement, who’ve finally seen through the tokenism of Barack Obama.

10. B&S look at the imperial strategy of the U.S. during this period, which boiled down to ‘defending profits’ anywhere in the world. Ultimately, this resulted simply in opposing the U.S.S.R. and its surrogates, and any independent political movements in the world. While their economic scope is not international, B&S mention that all U.S. policy was driven by anti-communism after WWII ended. And that was because any encroachments by nationalists or socialists on private property had to be resisted for the corporations sake. Thus the long, bloody history of the post-war period. It should be noted that the decay and the collapse of the USSR and eastern Europe in the late 1980s (and the long-time abandonment by China of any revolutionary intentions) was not inconsequential to the ‘triumph’ of neo-liberalism domestically and across the globe. I.E., there was a ‘global class war’ – not just one inside the U.S. - and one side won, at least for now.

11. The last section deals with the quality of capitalist culture – education, housing, poverty, human relations and artistic endeavors. In ways, this is an odd section, but attempts to reflect the bourgeois economic effect on human life here in this country. B&S first take on U.S. education, pointing out that it was far inferior to Soviet education. In 1960, U.S. outlay on education was 5.5% of national income; in the USSR it was 10-15%. In third grade, the American child was supposed to be familiar with 1,500 words while the Soviet child was supposed to be familiar with 8,000 words. In fourth grade, the American child was supposed to know 2,032 words, while the Soviet child was supposed to know 10,000 words. These discontinuities continue up into the upper levels of college. Anyone who knows graduates of schools in the USSR or eastern Europe can easily acknowledge the difference. They rake “IQ” tests over the coals as merely showing the likelihood of success at U.S academics and nothing else – certainly not indicators of actual intelligence. They point out that teaching schools in the U.S. were academic jokes. This was all because, under it all, the real intent was that only a small proportion of the upper-class students were to be educated.

B&S point out that poor-people’s housing programs were done in such a way as to fail. In anticipation of the writings of James Kunstler, B&S examine the deformed suburban lifestyle based on the automobile. They jump around on their opinion of divorce, sounding sometimes like stuffy right-wingers, and sometimes not. They make the correct references to Michael Harrington’s study of poverty, Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd”, Freud and Wilhelm Reich; poke fun at sports conversations at work; seemingly knock Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee as ‘abandoning the language of art;’ (!) criticize people who collect records or books as phonies; and in one crotchety comment:
“so-called beatniks looking for emotional fulfillment through renunciation of the ‘square’ way of life with its comforts and amenities, and through the adoption instead of a way of life characterized by eccentricity, promiscuity and narcotics.’

OK, well, anyway, pass the weed. These chapters are still soaked – though unknowingly - in the coming civil rights, anti-war and cultural movements that were to define the second part of the sixties. Quite clearly, the early sixties were not a period of quiescence. At one point they make the claim that the war in Vietnam could be a turning point for U.S. capital – a prescient thought. This book is required reading for those seeking more modern Marxist viewpoints than the classics.

And I bought it in the used section at Mayday Books for $4.00.

Redfrog
August 28, 2011

Free! Two Reviews for the Price of One:

2011-08-11T20:40:00.005-05:00

“The Law of Worldwide Value,” Samir Amin, 1978/2010
And
“Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism,” Kevin Phillips, 2008.

Both of these books analyze capitalism from two different perspectives. Amin is a modern Marxist connected to the Monthly Review school, intent on updating the Marxist analysis of value on a worldwide scale, something Marx had planned to do in the 6th volume of Capital, but died before accomplishing. Phillips has developed his own idiosyncratic brand of analysis that combines historical analogy, regulatory reformism and a cultural critique to create an independent view of events. He is not a partisan of either party, and this gives him the ability to be intellectually honest… unlike those shills of the Democratic Party we know so well.

AMIN
Amin’s book suffers a bit from being originally written in 1978, thus missing the capitalist rise in certain 2nd and 3rd world nations. And this mars its somewhat muddy conclusion – exactly ‘who’ in the nations of the ‘periphery’ will rise above imperialist under-development. Amin seems to be a former member of the Communist Party of Egypt, and hence that might be where some of the confusion comes from.

Several chapters in this thin book devolve around economic algebraic equations – and for those, dear reader, I had to skip to the conclusions. Real economists might find them interesting. Amin’s central thesis is that ‘surplus value’ - which he calls ‘value’ – can be extended as an analysis beyond the borders of the central capitalist countries to include, not just unequal exchange of trade or import/export substitution, but the increased value culled from dependent nations he calls ‘imperialist rent’ – resulting in what he calls “globalized value.’ He looks at the relation between the imperial center and the financial ‘colonies,’ taking into account the ever-popular extraction of minerals (‘extractive’ or ‘mining’ rent), the exploitation of the natural resources of the imperial colonies (like water) and the extreme differential in wages for labor power – and combines them as a concept. Amin gets this concept of ‘imperialist rent’ from Marx’s ‘ground rent.’ He shows how alliances with colonies allow the imperialists to lower prices or wages in their ‘home’ countries. Imperialist rent is mostly invisible – ‘a transfer hidden behind the observed wage and price system.’ Amin maintains this asymmetry has been maintained and deepened by capital – hence the popular understanding of how capital ‘under-develops’ the rest of the world. As he puts it, the way capital functions will not allow the rest of the world to every fully ‘catch up.’ Amin calls his theory, the “shoreless Marx. He is not interested in just regurgitating Marx, but advancing Marxist analysis into the modern day, and that means a full grasp of the global profit system.

On the way, Amin makes a stab at Joseph Stiglitz, the sainted hero of the Keynesians. Amin says that at the UN General Assembly in 2009 Stiglitz proposed ‘an auction of the world’s resources (fishing rights, license to pollute, etc.)” This statement makes Stiglitz just another imperial barbarian waiting to buy the water from under Tanzania.

Amin endorses the Monthly Review position that, added to Marx’s ‘two departments’ (capital and labor) there is a 3rd economic department – the ‘state’ – which plays a role in absorbing surpluses. He also agrees with Monthly Review on the absolute centrality of the environment in any analysis of the economy and capital’s ruthless (and unavoidable) exploitation of it.

Amin maintains that there can be ‘no economic theory of the world economy,’ only an analysis of the elastic struggle between various factors and classes:

“Vulgar economics is obsessed with the false concept of ‘true prices,’ whether for ordinary commodities, for labor, for money, for time, or for natural resources. There are no ‘true prices’ to be ‘revealed’ by the genius of the ‘market.’ Prices are the combined products of rates of exploitation of labor (rates of surplus-value), of competition among fragmented capitals and the deduction levied in the form of ‘oligopoly rents,’ and of the political and social conditions that govern the division of surplus-value among profits, interest, ground rents and extractive rents.”

Until recently, of course, underdevelopment was the only pattern. However, we know, for instance in Brazil, that a booming local capitalist economy has been made possible by a partial liberation of the Brazilian nation under Lula’s “Worker’s Party,” which succeeded a long line of subservient (to imperialism) military and liberal comprador governments. However, all of Brazil is not part of this – not the landless peasants, not the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, and not the favela’s. While conditions have improved for the working classes, the rich and middle classes are the biggest gainers. And that is because Brazil is still under indirect imperial control. As Brazil shows, a simple endorsement of the struggle of ‘southern’ or ‘periphery’ countries against imperialism, as Amin hints at, is simply not possible as a tactic in the struggle against capitalism itself.

PHILLIPS

I have reviewed one other Phillips book, “American Theocracy,” (see review below) which is a better introduction to his thought. This book, “Bad Money,” is centered around the August 2007 events which lead to the deepening of the crash in 2008, and being written in 2008, smacks of some ‘haste’ to publish while the iron was hot. Even authors must make money. As such, he misses many events, but these would probably not change his views.

Phillips’ thesis is that mercantilist and fully capitalist societies which aspire to ‘empire’ are brought down by four things: finance/debt, religious rigidity, the failure of their particular brand of physical power, and war. It doesn’t take much time to show that the U.S. role as an empire is threatened by all four. Financialization and debt, according to Phillips, brought down the U.S. economy in 2007. (He repeatedly emphasizes, unlike the twin parties of government, that PRIVATE debt is far more of a threat than public debt. And indeed, corporate debt is the largest worldwide.) Fundamentalist Christian religiosity in the U.S. has captured at least one party, and part of another. Oil, the power source of the American imperium, is running ‘out’ due to peak oil. And war, the war economy, and the costs of war have become endemic to American capitalism.

However, Phillips should ask himself why all 4 seem to show up in Spain, Holland, Britain and now the United States. What underlying dynamic unites these nations? I would say it has to be the development of capital in each. Let’s just look at one of his arguments. Phillips spends pages thundering against financialization. He claims no one but Minsky (“the Minsky moment”) and perhaps the Austrians (!) caught the deep problems with it – except the …“Marxists, mostly given to repeating ideological doctrine.” (BM, p. 40) As we know, in America, Marxism is verboten. Yet much scientific and historical materialist work was done years ago, initially being included in Baran/Sweezey's "Monopoly Capital." Starting in 1972, again by the Monthly Review school, they picked up on the development of financialization (and debt) in the U.S. Dismissed, though. Invisible men, as they say. Even when you’re right, you’re wrong.

And what is Phillips solution to the financialization dilemma of modern capitalism (or the former capitalisms)? Re-regulation. A return to the ‘real economy.’ The return of manufacturing to the U.S. Themes echoed by Krugman, Stiglitz and other reformists, including trade union economists. Now it is not to say that these are not laudable goals. The destruction of the Glass-Steagal Act in 1999 by the neo-liberals under Clinton and the Republicans was a historic loss, leaving us open to more market-driven financial instability. Earlier revisions of financial law in the 80s under Reagan lead to the massive S&L crisis. However, it is happening for a reason.

Phillips himself mentions that many manufacturing companies (GE, Ford, General Motors) have immense financial arms. GE, Obama’s poster child, even gains most of its profits from operations abroad now, and a big chunk of that is financial. While Phillips tries to ‘separate’ finance and manufacturing capital, the actuality is that they are combined, two arms of the same thing. It was precisely the dropping of profits in manufacturing in the United States that led corporations to send manufacturing south, then to Mexico, then to China and everywhere else. And at the same time, those same firms turned to ‘paper’ to make more money, because manufacturing was looking for an outlet for their profits outside manufacturing. Manufacturing capital now needs the profits from Wall Street in order to fund their manufacturing operations - of course if they ever do so. That is the basis of M&As, IPOs, stock offerings, stock splits, derivatives, options, futures and every other arcane financial transaction undertaken by manufacturing capital. In essence, capital can no longer make money only ‘the old fashioned way.’ They have to have Wall Street, like athletes need steroids or junkies need a fix, to dispose of surpluses and, oddly enough, to make super-profits. Unlike the golden age of the 50s and 60s, manufacturing capital seems no longer to be able to fund itself from internal surplus value, gained off of labor, and must find other outlets. It must turn to derivatives and the casino to generate profits and/or get rid of surpluses.

So, re-regulation will actually not return the U.S. to the ‘good old days’ because those days are actually gone – the product of a short historical hiccup. Financialization is now the ‘real’ economy too. Manufacturing will only return to the U.S. if it can exploit the American worker at the same level as the Chinese worker. Or if oil becomes so expensive that shipping becomes less cost effective. Even Keynesian solutions will not be pursued by the American ruling class – not without class struggle. It is not an ‘intellectual’ question – it is truly a question of force. Krugman can talk all he wants about a jobs program – but until the American working classes put some kind of a political and strike gun to the government’s and the businessmens’ heads – there will be no jobs program. Nobel laureates do not win class wars. Classes do.

As to Phillips position on peak oil – he ignores global warming. Fighting peak oil with more coal will accelerate global warming. Or his idea that the U.S. can limit war making – it ignores the very real bind that capital is in. War necessarily absorbs and destroys profit surpluses, while providing part of the economy with a constant “Keynesianism” stability. Human society, not just capital, is in quite a bind, and capital, presently, has no way out.

I bought Amin at Mayday Books.
I bought Phillips at Chapman Street Books, Ely MN

Red Frog
August 11, 2011

The Accident on the Potomac

2011-07-27T22:22:00.009-05:00

Obama Set to 'Fold' Too

Well, if you’ve been trying to follow the accident on the Potomac, good luck. It’s like a crashing plane zig-zagging across the sky. Republicans making $350B math mistakes, Obama putting Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block, Vice President Biden getting a backroom deal to cut the bejesus out of the U.S. budget to the trillionth degree, the Tea-Party standing strong, markets dropping and rating agencies ready to downgrade U.S. treasuries and probably munis too, even without a formal default. And a frankly dysfunctional government. This is really a moment for U.S. capitalism, and we have to understand it fully. In 2008 the economy nearly collapsed. Now their government is on the edge of a crash similar to 2008. Although lord knows the U.S. debt is justifying a downgrade. Its just that many other country’s debt is even sadder, including the EU. Except perhaps the Chinese.

The silence on the left of the Democratic Party is deafening. Black representatives standing in Congress telling us that, no, Medicare and Social Security should not be cut for hard-working people, who spent their lives paying in. And all for show. Not a real spine in the House so far. Will Obama raise the debt limit by executive order? Hmmm. Not many indications he will do so.

The national course will be similar to the local course, unless something unlikely happens. And that is cuts. The vast agreement will be to cut trillions in aid to states and local governments, for one. States are already ‘planning,’ if you can call it that, because this situation is unprecedented. And it almost guarantees an ‘official’ recession to add to the unofficial one. Krugman is even calling the present situation the “Little Depression” and, based on length and actual unemployment, he has a point. Right now I'd say we are in the Great Stagnation or Great Decline.

In anticipation of a decline in bonds, or a crash, some investors are betting against an increase in value for U.S. Treasury bonds, the center of this financial storm. Right now PIMCO, a large mutual fund company, is shorting U.S. Treasury bonds, and has been since April. And who else is shorting Treasury bonds? Eric Cantor, Republican from Virginia, House Majority leader, is shorting Treasury bonds. So he will gain financially with a decline in bond values and even a government default. A Democratic Party with spine would go crazy over this, but not a word from the 'oh so polite' ones. Other's who are shorting the market or treasuries? Still hidden.

Here is what Jeffrey Sachs has to say. This is the man that brutally instituted instant capitalism in the Soviet Union, which lead to 10 years and more of misery under Boris Yeltsin. And regretted what he did ever since. Jeffrey Sachs on July 23rd, 2011:

“"The idea that the Republicans are for the billionaires and the Democrats are for the common man is quaint but outdated. It's more accurate to say that the Republicans are for Big Oil while the Democrats are for Big Banks. That has been the case since the modern Democratic Party was re-created by Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin.

Who runs America today? The rich and the multinational corporations. Who runs the White House? David Plouffe, whose job it is to make sure that ever word, every action of the president is calculated for electoral gain rather than the country's needs. Who runs the Congress, on both sides of the aisle? The lobbyists, who win in every negotiation. And who loses? The American people, who have said repeatedly that they want a budget that sharply cuts the military, ends the wars, raises taxes on the rich, protects the poor and the middle class, and invests in America's future - not just in Obama's speeches but in fact.

America needs a third-party movement to break the hammerlock of the financial elites. Until that happens, the political class and the media conglomerates will continue to spew lies, American militarism will continue to destabilize a growing swath of the world, and the country will continue its economic decline."

So get this, even intelligent capitalists are calling for an anti-corporate third party to keep capital from driving itself off the rails. Of course, they don’t call for an end to the capitalist system, which is actually the real culprit – not just a rigid bunch of free-market political chuckleheads. The working class can take advantage of this moment – of the supreme weakness of the capitalist government – to understand that it too is fundamentally broken – and will remain so permanently. There is no hope that the U.S. government will become a friend of labor, or able to change its declining stripes.

Red Frog
July 27, 2011

The Accident on the Mississippi

2011-07-15T15:42:00.003-05:00

Lockout Over - Dayton Blinks, then Dayton Collapses

Well, the sad, sorry story of the state government shutdown in Minnesota is nearly over. 22,000 mostly union workers let go, many other contractors out of work or sent away, parks shutdown during the 4th of July, gaming and gambling money not coming in, job search facilities shutdown, workers compensation investigations stopped, funds for private daycare facilities for poor parents stopped until a few days ago, no fishing licenses being issued and a looming transit shutdown in the Twin Cities. And worst of all - to some - liquor licenses not being renewed and booze disappearing from store shelves and bars.

Was it worth it? As one MAPE union official commented, "If Dayton would have gotten something out of this, it would have at least been worth the lost days. "

However, 'class-warrior' Mark Dayton, standing alone against the whole vicious Republican Party, like King Canute before the waves, or George Wallace in the Schoolhouse Door, with his union allies turning out in small numbers and most of the DFL silent on the issue of taxing the rich - blinked, then collapsed like a house of cards.

Dayton's position started by 'taxing the rich." That is what he was elected on. However, as the negotiations got underway, he quickly agreed to $3.2-$3.5 billion in spending cuts to solve the $5B deficit. Then 'rich' was redefined down to the 2% of the Minnesota population who are mostly millionaires. The unions like AFSCME got out their little banners out and waved them to 'tax the 2%.' Well, then that negotiating point disappeared a few days ago, and Dayton decided (like a long line of Democrats before him) to tax anyone who'd pay the bill, not just the rich or the 2% rich. You see Dayton, and the Minnesota DFL, long ago abandoned the position of 'progressive taxation' as some kind of socialist plot.

Of course, the Republicans said no again. And so ... Dayton agreed to the original Republican position on June 30 and opted for selling more tobacco bonds and delaying payments to the schools to make up the remaining $1.5B or $1.8B. These are same accounting tricks used by former "Real Estate Taxes" governor Tim Pawlenty of Nothing to postpone a real day of reckoning. The MAPE officer was pointing out that the 'lockout' lead us all right back ... to the beginning. In other words, the workers died for no one's sins.

Tobacco money is to be used to improve the health of the people in Minnesota - not to subsidize the rich or the corporations in this state. Minnesota's taxpayers will have to pay investors tobacco bond interest for up to 20 years, just to fix the budget for one year. Delaying payments to the schools only makes their situation more precarious.

Barring some right-wing culture war crap, this 'deal' has to be approved by the legislature. We can assume the Republicans will vote for it, and Dayton will sign it and all the disgruntled DFL'ers will ... grumble. It would be voted down by anyone with a spine.

Now let's look at the union leaderships on this. They had a demonstration on June 30 in the morning of about 700. They had a 'vigil' that night, shining lights on the Capitol as if that might make it come to life. They had a demonstration the next Wednesday of 400 calling for taxing the 2% and a demonstration the next week too. They also had signs saying that a deal had to be reached to get state workers back to work. Unsaid, they wanted any kind of deal. And they got their wish - any kind of deal. This confusion of aims, and slavish following of Mark Dayton has once again made the AFSCME leadership, and the leadership of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, an embarrassment to their members. They don't have an independent thought in their heads. And it seems the Minnesota AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Labor Council, the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly and even the state employee unions did not really pull out their members for any of these events.

The crisis of the labor movement is too serious to paper over with cliches and reliance on people like Mark Dayton or the Democratic Party. It is time for labor to run its own candidates on a program of progressive taxation and supporting militant labor action. Meet fire with fire.

Red Frog
July 15, 2011

Strike This! Workman-Like Book by Local Activist

2011-07-05T20:25:00.009-05:00

“Reviving the Strike” by Joe Burns, 2011.

Joe Burns hits the nail on the head. A local activist and officer in many different unions, Burns recently got a law degree, and put it to work analyzing labor law and case law. After diligent study of the corpus of labor laws in the U.S., including various key decisions, he concluded that the only way for the labor movement to succeed in the present circumstances is to … break those laws. This advice, incidentally, was raised by the AFT initially. This is not advice you usually hear from a union lawyer. Of course he is not speaking in that capacity, as lawyers (including union ones) are for the most part taught to advise clients on how to minimize risk … not build a movement. Which is why any union that relies heavily on its attorneys is headed for the ash-bin, albeit slowly.

Essentially the AFT proposal was based on isolating unions from fines or jail by organizing strikes outside of the official union structure. I.E., there is no ‘leaders,’ no treasury, no by-laws, no union hall, no membership lists for the state to go after - nothing to lose, just a shadow organization.

Burns carefully goes through the various strategies that the labor movement has come up with to avoid breaking the laws that prevent effective strikes. The sorry list is familiar to anyone who was told or shown the ‘latest’ thing – work-to-rule, corporate campaigns, civil disobedience, organizing the unorganized, work centers, consumer boycotts, inside strategies, working for Democrats, organizing community-based organizations and campaigns, consumer mortgage-strikes, etc. Or, as seen this Thursday at the Capitol – labor vigils. Burns is not against any of these strategies, although he gently derides them as occasional middle-class sociology or closer to ‘bearing witness’ than class struggle.

By going through the history and opinions of even the conservative labor movement – people like Samuel Gompers and George Meany - he shows how these methods have replaced one method guaranteed to succeed, and that actually built unions in the first place – the successful mass strike that stopped production.

Burns shows how labor law – even the hallowed National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935, ultimately puts the government in control of defining the labor movement. Sit-down strikes themselves were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1939. Burns spends much time on Taft-Hartley – the draconian anti-labor law passed in 1947 – which prohibited solidarity action. Wildcat strikes, jurisdictional strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, mass picketing, closed shops (creating ‘right to work’ states), the right of the federal government to institute injunctions and anti-communist affidavits for union officials were all part of the Act. Labor called it a ‘slave labor’ law. Even Truman said it restricted the freedom of speech of working class people. It imposed, in essence, a barrage of laws against labor protest so stringent that no other kind of activity in the U.S. faces the same restrictions. John L Lewis denounced it as the ‘first, ugly savage thrust of Fascism in America.” (Lewis, speech to AFL Convention, October 14, 1947). Taft-Hartley was a spear pointed at the heart of the effective strike and the labor movement itself.

Burns points out that, while labor grew even after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, as the labor movement in the 1950s was still strong, eventually the Act began to have its effect when the counter-offensive started in the early 70s. Judicial decisions built on the act had crippled labor in the courts. Burns has a section on how judges are from the upper-middle class, part of the ‘cream’ of the attorney strata, and most of them have never been in a union or workplace situation, and hence have no connection to the American labor movement, and no sympathy with it. Burns quotes one author who looked at many labor decisions and found that the hidden role of "property' was always primary, in spite of the fact that this 'force' was not even in the law. Just in the prejudices of the judges, the courts, the decisions, the lawyers, and eventually, the juries themselves.

Burns also clearly illustrates how the Democratic Party has played little role in defending labor. Many judges, especially liberal ones, enthusiastically enforce Taft-Hartley and other anti-labor decisions. A minority of the Democratic Party voted for Taft-Hartley itself. Truman himself, after panning it, used it 12 times. And can we forget that it was a Democratic governor, Rudy Perpich, who called out the National Guard on the Austin strikers in 1986, thus helping break the Hormel strike by escorting scabs past pickets? Or Jimmy Carter, who called out federal troops on the miner’s union in 1977? The Democrats recent tepid response to the card check is just the latest indication of where its real interests lie.

Burns calls capital’s laws ‘a system of labor control.’ He concludes that even when a law exists, if labor is strong enough, it can push past the law. Focusing on 5 recent strikes – the successful Republic Window’s and Doors sit-down, the Hormel and Staley strikes, the successful Charleston 5 solidarity actions and the successful Pittston strike, Burns hopes to draw lessons for a turnaround in labor, which he clearly admits is at a low point. Pittston, a strike lead by Richard Trumka, featured the union ignoring fines, at one point taking over a mine, engaging in mass civil disobedience, blocking roads with junk vehicles, sending masked roving pickets to other mines, and even tolerating random violence against scabs. The strike was won, leading to no concessions and an increase in health benefits.

Burns also clearly calls on an ideological change in American labor. The anti-communist clause in Taft Hartley – which John L Lewis refused to sign, and eventually did – is no accident. It is no accident that, de-fanged of socialist activists and ideas, labor is fighting with one – or eventually perhaps two - hands tied behind their back. The simple idea that labor and humans are not merely a commodity – which both Marxists and conservative labor leaders understood thoroughly in the past – is now no longer mentioned. We are instead told to sell ourselves to the highest bidder, like well-proportioned whores on parade. And indeed we are - until the concepts of real labor rights are renewed at the heart of the U.S. labor movement.

Burns makes a mention of how card check laws in Canada have stemmed the tide of losses in labor in some provinces there, but did not ‘revive’ labor there. However, the very fact of a card check law existing in Canada is a reflection of the New Democratic Party (“NDP”), a Party in which labor has a controlling stake. The NDP pushed for card check, and made it a reality in several provinces. Recently both Canadian postal workers and Air Canada workers staged large strikes shows that in Canada, like in every other country in the world, a strike movement is closely aligned to a strategy of labor political activity. It is no accident that in the U.S. labor is both virtually quiescent on the strike front and the political front, though events like Wisconsin shows this need not be the case.

And here is the main problem in Burns’ book. He makes, essentially, a syndicalist or ‘economist’ mistake – as Lenin used the term. Leaving politics (and law) to the bourgeoisie, and thinking that only militant strike activity is useful – actually hobbles the fight for an effective strike. The ‘30s are over – and one of the great failures of the 30s was the failure to create a political party based on the labor movement. If one had been created – not just in Minnesota but throughout the United States – the ease of instituting Taft-Hartley, of judges signing off on injunctions (80% of judges are elected - and who do you think is paying for their campaigns?), of political figures calling out police, of maintaining and increasing anti-labor laws, of a national debate where labor's needs are totally absent – would have been limited by a fierce fight in the political arena. Just using the ‘bully pulpit’ of political leadership to denounce anti-union, anti-labor laws will make them that much weaker and easier to break. Now we are relegated to the role of begging Democrats to be nice – a strategy that has clearly failed again and again.

Burns does point out that only two forces recently brought up getting rid of Taft Hartley in a mass way. The first was the Labor Party of the latter 1990s, which involved at least a 1/3rd of the union movement, including Trumka’s UMW – and the second, Ralph Nader, who always mentioned it in his speeches in 2000 and 2004. Burns has stated in talks that you ‘can’t get rid of Taft Hartley’ or engage in independent political activity – but then, the difficulty of ‘reviving the strike’ is equally significant. Somehow promoting one without the other makes little sense.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, July 5, 2011

Another Place is the Space

2011-07-04T16:46:00.005-05:00

Just Kids,” by Patti Smith, 2011

This is the story of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s not a biography so much as an homage to a time, a place and a relationship.

The time is the late sixties and early seventies. The place is New York. The relationship is a friendship/love between a young gay guy and a young punk girl. Although ‘punks’ hadn’t been invented yet. Mapplethorpe is the ultimate ‘gay best friend’ and lover, I guess.

Smith writes in a poetic but somewhat childish manner, which fits.

The first thing you notice is that Patti is no slouch. She has read more than most English P.H.D.’s – and is none the worse for that. She drops the ‘Rimbaud” bomb repeatedly (and the Verlaine, Genet, Cockteau, Gide, Baudelaire bombs, along with a wide array of other weapons), then follows up with plain old name-dropping. Allen Ginsburg tried to pick her up in an Automat. Until he saw she wasn’t a boy. But she did get some food out of the deal. See? She even pals around with Sam Sheppard, the playwright, by ... accident. While Patti hangs out in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, Salvador Dali arrives, cape and all, and approves of her hair-cut. (!) If you are a poetry or culture junkie, this book is for you.

At some point, Smith's fascination with French symbolism twice leads her to a trip to France, once to visit Rimbaud’s museum and grave. Her self-education contrasts with a great many of the hippies thronging Washington Square at that time. Smith came from a working-class background in New Jersey, and, if not for finding $32 in an abandoned purse, might not have had the money to buy a bus ticket, escape New Jersey factory life and land in the Big City. She wrote a song, “Piss Factory,” about escaping the factories. Essentially it shows that self-education is many times the route to a creative life. Just as self-education is the route to a political life.

Mapplethorpe is a young artist who looks a bit like Jim Morrison. Patti meets him by accident on the streets, and after he rescues her from some old guy, they move in together. They stay together, for the most part until he dies of AIDS. He’s an adept at three-dimensional constructions and collages, working through a Catholic upbringing. She writes poetry, and together they decide to be artists. Moving from living on the street to dumpy apartment to arty apartment, from junkie-ridden hotel to the Chelsea hotel, and then to a loft across the street from the Chelsea, the two trace slowly improving fortunes. Mapplethorpe has his eyes set on the Andy Warhol crowd in the back room at Max’s Kansas City. He makes friends with a prominent patron, and begins to sell photos to an august group – people like George Plimpton. August as all that.

Patti didn’t know quite what she wanted, but ended up reading poetry backed by a guitar, and the rest is history. She ends up at the Bowery bar CBGB’s with Television and Richard Hell, and the New York punk scene is born. That is, after she cut her hair and got a rooster. She eventually marries Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith of the MC5, after dating one of the members of Blue Oyster Cult. When Bob Dylan visited CBGB’s for a Smith show, she knew that ‘something was happening here.’ Dylan was the reclusive crown prince of the rock and roll scene in the city.

What is fascinating about this book is the sense of the place and time percolating a ‘scene.” Like Laurel Canyon (reviewed below) or the Mississippi Delta (reviewed below), the scene had a dynamic of its own, not determined by some outside influence. Patti, while living at the Chelsea in 1969, listens to Kris Kristofferson sing “Me and Bobbie McGee” to Janis Joplin, and doesn’t know what she just witnessed. The Chelsea is the historic hotel that Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, Bob Dylan, Arthur C Clarke and Oscar Wilde stayed in. At one point she goes next door to the Chelsea’s bar, the El Quijote, and in the bar sits Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe and the Fish, and Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane, waiting for Woodstock to begin. Slick says ‘hi to you’ – and Patti feels at ‘home.’ If you are a music junkie, this book is also for you.

This scene closely parallels the eruption of creativity that occurred in Paris, involving surrealists, symbolists, existentialists, and others in the 20s and 30s, which ended with the start of World War II. The earlier sequential development fed into the later one in the U.S., as transmitted by Patti Smith and others. The real question is if bourgeois culture has another spark of creativity within its ‘bohemian/beatnik/hippie/punk/alternative’ impulse, or if those counter-cultural impulses have finally been commercialized and made harmless by corporate capital. In other words, is rebellion now a commodity? Quoting Thomas Frank, I think for the most part, it is. So the real question is to make a 'culture' that cannot be bought.

And I bought it at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
Red Frong, July 4, 2011

Have you Forgotten Your Roots?

2011-06-19T17:15:00.004-05:00

In and Out of the Working Class, Michael D Yates, 2009

Yates is a well-known left economist in the U.S., one of only two Marxists to hold that position in the professoriate, according to him. Which shows you the complete control capitalist economics has in this ‘free’ country. He’s from a working-class background, and this background formed a touchstone for him through-out his life. Unlike some ‘working class boys done good,’ he did not betray his roots.

Yates grew up in a factory town centered around Pittsburgh Plate & Glass, not far from the mining town where he was born, and where his family lived for many years in Pennsylvania. This book is a collection of essays and fiction he wrote which revolve around the issue of class - the dirtiest secret in America. He is one of those increasingly rare people who basically jumped classes via education, or, in his description, went to the top of the 'aristocracy of labor.' Yates eventually got a PHD, worked as a professor for 32 years, taught working-class people at labor extension services and at union educationals, even prisoners at a local lock-up. However, he never himself worked in the factory or a mine, leaving that to his father, who worked at PP&G, and got emphysema from silica and asbestos dust.

Yates tries his hand at fiction in this collection, and several chapters are fictional situations that closely parallel his real life. In the real world, Yates tried to organize a union for professors, and further discovers the absolute personal politics inherent in academe; helps with organizing a union for college staff; ponders over the best way to teach Marxist economics against the religion of bourgeois ‘macro-economics;” teaches bored middle-class children from the Pittsburgh suburbs about surplus value; confronts the racism in his home town; talks about his time in a strict and robotized Catholic college; and eventually retires from teaching after a nervous breakdown. For a left academic, this book is a must-read. Let me quote one paragraph which shows what Yates was up against regarding his students:

“The enthusiastic first-generation college students we once taught disappeared with the mills. We replaced them with mediocre and uninterested youngsters from the middle-class suburbs of Pittsburgh. These students were not my cup of tea. They saw college as a place to party and a way-station in between high school and the real world. They expected to get a degree, and the better job and money that went with it, simply because they had purchased their place in our classrooms. If they didn’t do well with minimum effort, it wasn’t their fault. The ‘product’ … must be defective. They resented learning and made their disdain obvious.”

Yates enjoyed teaching working class people in his labor-education service classes, or even mostly black prisoners, because they actually understood the world and theory better than the careerist students he normally met. Surplus value is not so complicated when you realize the owners of your corporation are getting paid many times over what a normal 40 hours would bring, even at the best pay. Class is not a foreign concept when you cannot afford a car.

Yates worked for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers (UFW), and this chapter is the oddest of the book – but true. Yates was on the UFW staff as a professor, working on education, legal and labor issues for the union, and living in a broken-down ranch in California where the union headquarters was. However, there were complaints about the way Chavez ran the union, including from Yates. It was basically a personalist bastion, with no democracy. Chavez’s relatives and children held power with Chavez. One day the union staff had a meeting, and Chavez accused several complainers of being company spies, and threw them out. No facts, no due process, no nothing. Yates was not dismissed or arrested, but his innocent friend was, and Yates left the next day in sympathy. To this day, the UFW is a shadow of its former self, destroyed by Cesar's fame.

Yates ends the book with a cheery fictional cliff-hanger about a new union activist who gets fired, but who wins a 40 to 1 shot at the horse track, and with it thinks he will be able to defeat the company, and continue in the union, perhaps even running for its presidency. But the overall tone of the book is somber – being a Marxist in America is like being an Eskimo in Dallas, and it takes a personal toll on Yates. Better to just think of food and drink, entertainment or family, because that is all the system hopes to leave us with. Yates now drives around the U.S. in an RV, and is a full time associate editor at Monthly Review. So there is life after work.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

June 19, 2011

The Poverty of Philosophy

2011-06-11T21:15:00.004-05:00

Film: “Tree of Life” – Terrence Malick, 2011

Malick is one of these American film auteurs that is somewhat of a hidden legend, like JD Salinger or Marlene Dietrich. His first film, ‘Badlands,’ was a re-creation of the Charlie Starkweather mass murder spree in Kansas in the late 1950s, starring Martin Sheen and Sissie Spacek as young actors. The film is one of the great American movies. Malick followed with ‘Days of Heaven,’’The Thin Red Line’ and a few others that degraded in quality from his first.

Nevertheless, many critics and film-goers eagerly awaited Malick’s new film, “Tree of Life.” It won the Palm D’Or in Cannes, and film reviewers have written turgid, confusing descriptions of this film that make it out to be some cross between the Bible, ‘Texasville’ and ‘Solaris.’

Well, it’s really a very simple film. The film, based partly on Malick’s own childhood in Waco, Texas, is a meditation on the death of a son and brother. It essentially poses the problem of death / evil, and asks ‘God’ why this happened to such a young, innocent person. The two forces of the film are ‘grace’ and nature. Nature took the son, and now the parents (one in particular) and the brothers (one in particular) search for ‘grace’ to accept the death. In the process we see nature in all its ferocious beauty and power through time; and childhood in all its rosy hues and memories – and crises. In that childhood, the father, played by Brad Pitt (yes, that Brad Pitt) is a dictatorial parent, who eventually apologizes for his behavior (achieving ‘grace’ himself). And in the end, the film also ‘accepts’ the death of the son and brother. As the magic mother says, and I paraphrase, “I give him to you” while two angel-like women hover around her.

So, evidently, two forces of evil in the world – ‘human nature’ and death – are overcome by love and acceptance.

History plays a minor role in this film. The father and one son attempt careers – the son, played as an older man by Sean Penn (yes, that Sean Penn) succeeds, while the father eventually fails. At the end, the family is evicted from their Eden-like house in Waco due to his job loss. The children play in DDT fumes. The father and brothers visit black folks grilling food, which reminds you that 1950s Waco was segregated. Scenes of corporate American board-rooms remind you how life goes on now. But history is relegated to the sidelines. History is ignored, actually. And since no one lives in a time ‘outside history,’ this is a calculated deception. Even the father’s authoritarian style is actually straight out of the 50s.

History is irrelevant to the main thrust of the film, which is the images. And the images stand in for the beauty of life. Images of evolving ‘outer space,’ underwater life, volcanic eruptions, dinosaurs on beaches and along rivers, desert formations, star fields, cloud patterns and volcanic plains are interspersed with the gauzy, impressionistic family story evolving in Waco. Malick succeeds in evoking childhood quite well. The film is beautiful in a somewhat labored way, and it reminds every viewer that what we see, hear, smell, feel and touch every day are wonderful delights that should never be forgotten; moments that we should actually immerse ourselves in. For they may never return.

But as a philosophic film it fails. The massed classical choirs accompanying the evolving universe should be a tip off. Quotes from the Book of Job, phrases of ‘Why, God”, “Amens’ and southern Texas religiosity bathe the film throughout. The philosophic answer is actually a Christian message, diluted as it is. “God” is forgiven. His natural world is beautiful. Say “Grace.” Amen. As if the death of this boy was part of God’s ‘plan’ in the first place; as if God was actually involved in a specific drowning or death in Vietnam. This is a reactionary fantasy. So this film rates as a ‘deep thinker’ film for bourgeois critics, but when you look at what it is saying, there is much less than meets the eye. Sort of like the ‘meaning’ of the obelisk in “2001-A Space Odyssey.” Nada.

Current debates among film critics over ‘low’ versus ‘high’ culture (with this film in the “high” culture category…) ignore the fact that some so-called low culture is actually more progressive and emancipating than some so-called ‘high culture.’ Which, given the a-political bent of most film critics, is a completely confusing dialectic to them.

And I saw it in Uptown,
Red Frog, 6/11/2011

Poetic Fact

2011-06-10T18:31:00.002-05:00

North Star Country,” by Meridel Le Sueur, written 1945, 1998 Edition

Sometime C.P. author Meridel Le Sueur, our female Whitman, our prose Carl Sandberg. Historical pastiche, cutout, mosaic, montage, a writer’s canvas of collages. The down-home history of the ‘upper’ Midwest, of the central west, of the cold place of lakes, of the 5 Lakotas/ Minnesotas/ Iowas/ Wisconsins, from first white step to last big war. History of cruelty to the native tribes; rebellion in a near place. History of the strengths of the first whites. Plows and eats and plants and trees. Steam engines and pie tins. Hollers and reels. Wagons and timber. Corn and winter. 38 Santee hung. Acres plowed, bottom lands that never bottom out. Democracy rooted in a new country. Freedom’s people.

Minnesota. The North Star State. South Canada. The capstone of a continent. Where the waters divide.

But it doesn‘t stop there in a rosy, earthy, Minnesota memory. Its not all jack-a-wallop poetry. There is a human snake in paradise. It would be an insult to the snake to blame him. Railroad barons, timber kings, ore thieves, big mansions, small money-mad minds. Poverty-stricken timber-jacks. Bunions. Exhausted field hands. Foreclosures. Farmers buying farms for a $1, guns up. Roads of hoes. The unemployed. Strike killers, machine-gun cops, 2 dead, 65 wounded. And sent to war, all together, in the end.

Our own prose poetess, Le Sueur.

And I bought it at Mayday Books,
Red Frog, 6/10/2011

The Place is the Thing

2011-06-01T18:18:00.007-05:00

“In Search of the Blues,” Marybeth Hamilton, 2008

This professorial work by a former punk girl from LA sets out to debunk the idea of the ‘Delta Blues.’ In the process, she creates a good history of white attempts to understand the origins of the blues, while failing in her overall thesis. Just as the real ‘crossroads’ of the Robert Johnson song can only be guessed at (Highway 61 & 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, now a dreary intersection of gas stations, furniture stores and rib joints), so the origins of blues music is like a dark, cracked mirror.

W.C. Handy said in 1895 or 1903 he met a man playing guitar with a knife slide in the railroad depot in Tutwiler, MS, just south of Clarksdale. The man was singing an odd, plaintive music with the refrain, “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog." Handy maintains that this is the first time he heard ‘blues music.’ Handy himself later composed some of the first songs with blues in the title - “St. Louis Blues” and “Memphis Blues,” in the key of G, based on stomp tunes about levees and cane plantations he heard in Cleveland, Mississippi. The sheet music and 12-bar pattern of Memphis Blues was published by Handy in 1912. However, as Hamilton points out, the first commercial blues recording was “Crazy Blues,” by Mamie Smith, put out in 1920, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and was a national sensation. Hamilton doesn’t believe Handy’s story, and so invents her own.

Hamilton’s theory is that the “Delta Blues was not born in the bars and dance-halls of Mississippi.” The Delta Blues was ‘discovered’ or “invented by white men and women, as the culmination of a long-standing fascination with uncorrupted black singers…” As proof she says that in 1941 all the jukeboxes in Clarksdale carried black music you would have found in Chicago or New York, and no local singers. Of course, this only proves what was popular at the time, and what would promote business in a bar or club. Or even what was available. A scratchy song singing ‘hell-hound on my trail’ is not what people might want to listen to after a hot, exhausting day at work, even in 1941. Nor was the blues necessarily a music that had a mass black following for a long time. Like all music, other styles came in to replace it. Nor does a style have to be popular to be valid. However, as Hamilton herself admits, in the 1920s ‘race’ music, much of it blues, was everywhere.

A better guide to where the blues came from – i.e. ‘who’ invented it - is an annotated map of the Delta, and Mississippi itself. Who was born or lived in the Delta? White people? A few, and also Robert Johnson … and Willie Brown, James Cotton, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, David “Honeyboy’ Edwards, King Solomon Hill, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, Elmore James, BB King, Albert King, Big Daddy Kinsey, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Little Milton, Furry Lewis, Magic Sam, Charlie Musselwhite, Charlie Patton, Junior Parker, Pinetop Perkins, Jimmy Reed, Son House, Skip James, Otis Spann, Hubert Sumlin, Sunnyland Slim, Ike Turner, Muddy Waters, Bukka White, Big Joe Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howling Wolf … and many others. Even WC Handy lived in Clarksdale for awhile.

Here is one map. Others are sold at the Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi: http://webpages.charter.net/davidmmiller/deltabirths.htm.

I think Ms. Hamilton has gotten the word ‘invent’ and the word ‘discover’ – or actually “re-discover” - confused. Or even the word ‘promote.’ Music explosions are many times located in actual places – San Francisco/Haight-Ashbury birthed psychedelic music; Laurel Canyon in LA housed folk rock; NY/Greenwich Village promoted the folk revival and punk music; Seattle begat grunge; Detroit created Motown; Chicago produced the electric blues; Harlem made black renaissance music; Kansas City/Vine Street hosted dance jazz; New Orleans / Storyville / Basin Street launched Dixieland, a certain kind of blues and the original jazz; Nashville/lower Broadway saw country; Austin, Texas countered with outlaw country; Memphis/Beale Street generated rock & roll, Rhythm & Blues and rockabilly; Macon, Georgia played a role in southern rock, etc. The argument is not that no one outside of these areas is involved, but rather that the ‘heart’ of the music originates from a very real place, among a group of people that knew each other. Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lightin’ Hopkins, for instance, were from Texas, and Blind Willie McTell from Georgia – but that only emphasizes the main point.

The Mississippi Delta – so-named because it was created by regular flooding of the river north of Vicksburg into the flat plains east, extending nearly all the way north to Memphis – was just such a ‘place.’ And the place IS the thing. That ‘place’ was filled with what we northerners call ‘farms’ – but which are still called plantations. After the Civil War, these very large plantations were farmed either by sharecropping or by direct, paid stoop labor, not much different than in slavery days. This is the proletarian roots of the delta blues – a material basis which many modern blues fans ignore. Many bluesmen worked on plantations, or became singers to escape plantations. After all, what is more alluring – working all day under a hot sun doing back-breaking work – or drinking, traveling, singing, playing guitar and having sex? Not a difficult choice if you can sing and play.

Black theoreticians have always focused on the blues, so there was no need for white people to invent it, or even discover it. Frederick Douglass discussed slave songs long ago. WEB Dubois wrote “Souls of Black Folk” in 1903, and talked about ‘sorrow songs’ - work songs and field hollers; LeRoi Jones wrote “Blues People” in the 60s - and who can forget Cornel West, the ‘bluesman / jazzman’ PHD of our own time?

The real story here is the re-discovery of the blues by white people, which culminated in the 1960s. Hamilton bases her history on chapters about certain key individuals or groups of individuals who attempted to dig up the blues, or specifically the “Delta Blues,” and it makes fascinating reading. As is predictable, any study of black people in a reactionary and racist nation is bound to have political ramifications. Art is never isolated from politics.

Proper academic Howard Odum set out from Faulkner’s Oxford, MS in 1907 to catalog ‘the social and mental traits of the Negro,’ in a world not far removed from the Civil War. Odum rejected spirituals as the actual music of black people, given the Christian origin of the music. Instead, he attempted to record using a ‘grapho-phone’ invented by Alexander G Bell, which recorded on wax cylinders. In the process, he came upon traveling singers with songs made up of a three lines, two repeated, using slides of different types, and the word ‘blues.’ His recordings were not saved, but he remembered the lines, and compared them to blues songs of 1925, making a number of almost exact comparisons between his written and remembered lyrics. Odum later gave up the study of black music, as he could not handle close association with the itinerant players and their ‘rotten’ themes and activities.

Hamilton spends time discussing the effect of ‘recording’ on music, and also the intervention of white investigators. Zora Neale Thurston observed that spontaneous music and singing in a community were drowned out by the appearance of the 78 rpm record and later, radio. Folk culture was damaged by contact with these machines and people – at least to some folk analysts like Thurston. Others maintained that folks culture continues under different conditions, which was the position of the left at that time.

The next major white investigator of black folk music was Dorothy Scarborough. She, I think, is the model for the academic in Appalachia searching for ‘old time’ music, profiled in the film “Songcatcher.” As the grand-daughter of slave-owners in Louisiana, she remembered fondly the songs, lullabies, spirituals, and work music of the black people she grew up around. Scarborough decided in 1921 to begin an academic search for ‘uncorrupted’ black folk music prior to recordings. Her method was to contact almost exclusively other white people who’d had plantation experiences, and thus acquired many of her lyrics and songs from them - instead of talking directly to black folks. Occasionally an ex-slave who reminded her of the ‘old Negro’s’ she remembered did sing to her. Like Odum, she also used a version of the wax recorder. This all became the book, “On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs.” In it, Scarborough attempted to bring back the songs of the ‘old time Negroes’ and, indirectly, the ‘good times’ on the plantation. Scarborough called the blues ‘barbaric,’ ‘jerky’ and like a ‘cripple dancing.’ It is no wonder that she gave up the study of black music, and switched over to Appalachian folk songs, after her sympathetic take on ‘old’ Negroes butted up against the actual ‘new’ Negroes of the 1930s.

And now we come to the most famous white ‘song hunter(s)’ of all – John and his son, Alan Lomax. John Lomax first recorded cowboy tunes in Texas, then turned his attention to black song – and specifically those found in prisons, ostensibly because they were isolated places. Lomax got a job with the Library of Congress to record and he did just that, using bulky equipment invented by the Library technicians installed in their car trunk. With it, Lomax meant to take ‘sound photographs.’ In the classic story, Lomax and his young son Alan went to Angola prison farm in Louisiana in 1933, and asked to record the inmates. After fruitless recordings of mediocre material, a ‘trusty’ was introduced to them – a killer, Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. Lomax recorded Leadbelly and was astounded at the quality of his voice, and the tunes he had written, or remembered – some of them blues, some of them more like straight folk songs. Leadbelly was paroled because of his singing, and later worked for Lomax as a guide. At one point, Leadbelly told Lomax he was tired of visiting ‘correctional’ institutions, and so Lomax took him to New York.

Leadbelly performed for many audiences in New York. However, Lomax considered Leadbelly to be a low criminal, and refused to give him the money he’d earned at shows or as an assistant. He tried to restrict his movements in the city, racist bad-mouthed him, and at some point, Leadbelly had enough and left. This incident brought a parting of the ways between Lomax and his son, Alan, who started his own career of recording, but increasingly tied himself to the Marxist movement of the time. Alan was instrumental in the 1941-1942 recording of the Library of Congress disc, “Negro Blues and Hollers” – recorded in the Mississippi Delta. Lomax Sr. almost never found fault with Jim Crow, or the massive amount of black people in prisons in the South. And this ideological problem, which affected Odum and Scarborough as well, finally came home to roost. Lomax was supported by Thurston, the most conservative of the black cultural figures of the time. But Richard Wright, who grew up on a plantation just east of Natchez, MS, attacked Lomax in the pages of the “New Masses” as a patronizing racist. Leadbelly eventually came back to New York and became part of the left-wing folk revival, playing with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and others. Not surprisingly, Lomax Sr. also hated Woody’s voice and songs.

The next group of white people to investigate the blues were a group of New York record collectors interested in jazz – Frederic Ramsey, Charles E Smith and William Russell. Smith was a Marxist, Ramsey an owner of a record exchange, and Russell a patrician. They discovered the “Father of Jazz’ – Jelly Roll Morton – attending a run-down bar in Washington, D.C., and afterward collaborated on the book, “Jazzmen” for the Federal Writers Project in 1939. That book was a response to the positive hysteria over Bix Beiderbecke, a white jazzman from Iowa - a book that insinuated that white people were the best jazz players. In response, in "Jazzmen," the trio detailed the history of Basin Street and Storyville, an all-black neighborhood of flophouses, whore-houses and bars in New Orleans, next to the French Quarter. And how jazz … and perhaps blues … were invented there by black men - Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and especially, King “Buddy Bolden,” a cornet/trumpet player. Bolden was credited with starting the first jazz band in New Orleans. Oliver and Morton recorded in the 1920s, but they had played the city prior to that. One somewhat unreliable source from Bolden's band had them playing in 1895-1896, which seems to most far too early. Bolden had a song called “King Bolden’s Blues,” which is also translated as the “Funky Butt.” (A blues/jazz bar with that name is still on Basin Street, I might add.) The trio got this history down, partly through Morton’s talk recordings with the Library of Congress. Morton used the terms ‘blues’ and ‘jazz’ interchangeably, and recited lyrics that were straight out of a blues song. As Hamilton notes, most blues purists do not think that jazz is related, but there was, at some point, a relationship, before the branches … branched.

The last white individual is the so-called inventor of the Delta Blues, according to Hamilton. He was … a fanatic 78 rpm record collector from New York named – drum roll – James McKune. McKune was an alcoholic homosexual, who died in New York in 1971 nude, in an alley. Between 1944 and 1950s he became the leading blues music collector in the country, leader of a group of New York collectors called the Blues Mafia, keeping only the best and most rare music – 300 discs - under his bed in boxes at the Williamsburg YMCA. McKune discovered and promoted the earliest rural blues singers like Charlie Patton, Son House, Skip James and Robert Johnson to his group, and, according to Hamilton, set the stage for the ‘birth’ of the Delta Blues as a taste-maker. His promotion was purely aesthetic, not political, as befits conservative American culture.

However, it seems accurate to point out that Patton, Johnson, House and James were the earliest and also highest quality / unique singers, players and composers, and, as such, had a legitimate claim to borning the tradition. The fact that they were black, were from the Delta, and nearly all dead does not mean McKune sucked them out of his thumb. McKune recognized them. Hamilton does not mention a word about the British lads who brought blues out of these shadows to a mass white audience – John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Keith Richard and Robert Plant. Together with American’s like John Hammond & John Fahey; locals like John Koerner, Dave Ray & Tony Glover; and blues bands like Paul Butterfield and Canned Heat – you could even claim, like Hamilton – that they too ‘invented’ the Delta Blues.

For her next book, Hamilton should center on the invention of rock & roll. The story, I’ve been told, was that Ike Turner, a black man, wrote the first rock song, “Rocket 88” in the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, Mississippi. But then, there was probably some white tastemaker – like Sam Phillips - who really invented that song.

And I bought it at Square Books, an independent bookstore in Oxford, Mississippi
Red Frog, May 31, 2011

Malcolm X Lives

2011-05-23T19:57:00.008-05:00

“Malcolm X – A Life of Reinvention,” by Manning Marable, 2011

Manning Marable’s last book corrects some of the inadequacies of the “Autobiography of Malcolm X,” by republican Alex Haley, and also indirectly Spike Lee’s movie, “Malcolm X” - which used the Autobiography as its guide. Lee ate ‘whole’ the work of a black Republican. Which is like trusting a segregationist southern conservative like Robert Penn Warren to write a fully honest book about Huey Long, a southern radical populist. (See review of "All the Kings Men,' below.) Both Malcolm and Long were assassinated in reality, and later, in print.

Overall, this book sheds new light on Malcolm – shorting the criminal experience, unlike Haley or Lee, and going into great depth into Malcolm’s last year, when he traveled to Africa and the Middle East. Marable had access to Malcolm’s diary, and this obviously gives the book a wider dimension during this period and earlier. Marable delves more deeply into the political changes wracking Malcolm, and its corrosive effect on the two small groups he started after leaving the Nation of Islam – the political OAUU and the Islamic MMI. He describes the conflicts between the two, and the middle-class character of the OAUU at its outset. Marable focuses on Malcolm’s strategy of bringing the U.S. before the U.N. on charges of racism, which was obviously of great concern to the U.S. government. He is also not shy in mentioning Malcolm’s ties with the Socialist Workers Party and George Breitman. Marable points out that much of Malcolm's travels were paid for by conservative Saudi religious organizations, which was a revelation to me. And from a personal point of view, Marable paints the wedded relationship between Malcolm and Betty as awful. Betty basically raised 6 children mostly alone.

The 'headlines' on this book refer to its description of Malcolm's supposed homosexual and out-of-wedlock encounters, all of which are thinly sourced and for the most part irrelevant. But that is all the Right can talk about.

Figures like Amiri Baraka and others find both factual and interpretive errors in this book. (25 factual errors according to Herb Boyd.) Baraka is the most vociferous in claiming Marable, a social democrat, tries to make Malcolm into a less revolutionary figure, and more like a social-democrat. Of course, Malcolm is one of those people who act like a mirror to the beholder. Baraka also questions the inclusion of interviews with Nation of Islam members, who hated Malcolm. Marable does say at one point that Malcolm had moved away from defensive ‘violence,’ towards a more traditional position of supporting voting rights only, which was obviously untrue. Nor does Marable dwell on the social or economic consequences of following “Pan-African” socialism in the United States. This was the philosophy that Malcolm adopted after revolutionary black nationalism seemed somewhat limited to him. Nor does Marable dig deeper into government ties with Malcolm’s assassins. Marable does point out that Malcolm believed Black people needed their own political party, and could not work through either the Democrats or the Republicans. Which would be hard for a social-democrat to swallow, of course, so this reflects an honest portrayal.

What strikes one most strongly in this book is Malcolm's class character. Malcolm X / Malcolm Little was a proponent of the ‘field negro.’ And what this means is that he eventually came into conflict with both the petit-bourgeois leaders of the traditional civil-rights movement, AND also with the petit-bourgeois leadership of the Nation of Islam (NOI/Nation). The NOI was really a partial continuation of the Marcus Garvey movement, and in the 50s and early 60s a repository, in its odd way, of black nationalism. But it was a conservative movement, mired in religion (mirroring the Christianity it was born out of) and really focused on starting small black businesses. The petit-bourgeoisie has two wings, and the Nation was the wing of the proprietor, not of the academic / preacher / non-profit operator. The black masses, who were neither owners nor had a sinecure at a church or university, had a spokesman in Malcolm, who owned nothing and never graduated from high school. In a basic sense, Malcolm was a proponent of the black proletariat.

Marable exposes the real character of the NOI in the book. They were culturally odd – for instance only allowing members to eat once a day; regressive when it came to the issue of women; their leaders were secretly addicted to money; they were outside the normal Islamic theology, and most prominently, they were violent towards their own members. Two sons of Elijah Muhammad rejected the NOI’s weird theology for a more traditional Islamic interpretation, as did Malcolm. Members caught smoking weed or tobacco, or committing other petty infractions – like eating more than once a day – were beaten by the Fruit of Islam (FOI). The Fruit was the internal security apparatus of the Nation. However, it seems to rarely have been consciously used against anyone but NOI or former NOI members to keep them in line. Some of the assassins of Malcolm were from the Newark FOI. Sometimes the NOI/FOI instinctively defended themselves from police attacks. But the Fruit was not used consciously or pro-actively against the police (which Malcolm wanted to do in Los Angeles after Nation members were killed by police, but was forbidden by Elijah Muhammad) nor against white racists, or other reactionaries.

Malcolm was converted to the NOI in prison not by an Nation member there, but by his own family, which had joined in Detroit, and who later denounced him after he left the Nation. The man he met in prison was a non-Muslim, an atheist, who encouraged him to read about black issues. The biggest point of conjecture over Malcolm is what would have happened if he’d come to politics in some other way than the through the Nation, which was both an energizing and crippling form of political birth.

Lastly, the assassination. Marable goes into greater detail on the assassination. Every group should study it, for it is a textbook of mistakes and methods. Everyone in the MMI/OAAU thought that audience members coming to the event at the Audubon needed to be frisked. Only Malcolm disagreed, and here was the essentially anti-democratic and personalist nature of the organizations, because he overruled his supporters. Malcolm’s inexperienced security detail was instead scattered about, not in front of the stage. When a diversion happened in the back rows, they moved towards it. This left Malcolm alone on stage, with no bullet-proof vest and no protected podium. The shooter just had to stand up, step forward, and shoot, with no one in front of him.

Police infiltrators in Malcolm’s group had found out that there would be no check for weapons at this meeting, and this information was obviously transmitted to the Nation somehow. The police escort that was usually present disappeared from the front of the building, and the officers in the building were in another ballroom. The ‘official’ ambulance took a half-hour to arrive, even though there is a hospital across the street, and Malcolm’s men eventually had to get a gurney themselves. Police allowed a dance to occur that night only 4 hours after the shooting, and effectively destroyed much crime scene evidence in doing this. Only one of the real shooters was captured, and two other men not connected to the crime were convicted with no evidence. In other words, most of the real assassins were not pursued, much like the other political murders in the US in the 60s. The police work was a transparent joke.

Marable does not delve deeply into government/FBI/CIA involvement in the assassination, other than showing they provided information to the NOI and possibly shielded the real assassins. The government in this case evidently did not need their own assassins, but knew they could count on Nation members being enraged over Malcolm’s focus on Elijah Muhammad's sex scandals. I understand the FBI had an agent in the New Jersey mosque which committed the hit, and that agent could have quietly guided the NOI men involved. Any further information on this topic would be appreciated

Altogether a must read to further your understanding of Malcolm Little and the black revolutionary movement of the 60s and today.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, May 21, 2011

Zizek Says: Wage Theoretical Class War Now!

2011-04-28T20:25:00.008-05:00

“First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” Slavoj Zizek, 2009

This is one of Zizek’s shorter books - he goes light on the Lacan/Freud and the Hegel/Kant. His books are sort of seminars, where the professor rambles around the stage for hours, riffing on various ideas, and you get your gold pan out and glean for nuggets. However, sometimes he goes back to Philosophy 5.0:

“Badiou’s ‘subtraction,” like Hegel’s Aufhbung, contains three different layers of meaning: (1) to withdraw, disconnect; (2) to reduce the complexity of the situation to its minimal difference; (3) to destroy the existing order. As in Hegel, the solution is not to differentiate the three meanings (eventually proposing a specific term for each of them), but to grasp subtraction as the unity of its three dimensions: one should withdraw from being immersed in a situation in such a way that the withdrawal renders visible the ‘minimal difference” sustaining the situation’s multiplicity, and thereby causes its disintegration, just as the withdrawal of a single card from a house of cards causes the collapse of the entire edifice.”

OK, you can stop laughing now. I think that could have been said in a simpler manner, but we are not philosophers.

This book actually builds to a somewhat unique proposition, which is not always normal for a Zizek book. That we act “As If” (Zizek always capitalizes the Important parts…) economic and environmental collapse were Actually going to happen, and not act ‘as if’ we had time to watch it happen. You know, the famous phrase, ‘Well, let’s wait and see.” The paralysis of the will afflicting the Left in most parts of the advanced capitalist nations (and most impoverished ones, but not all) is a prime enemy. Zizek proposes what could be termed a communist / ‘voluntarist’ solution, or perhaps a far-seeing solution – to advocate, plan and propose as if these developing situations are NOT mirages. Communists are children of the future, not children of the present (as are the liberals) and not children of the past (as are the conservatives.) And as such, they have a unique ability to see forward. In other words, the people who understand that these events will occur, and actually understand they are already occurring, will be the ones who survive.

As Michael Ruppert says in the film “Collapse” about the people on a ship like the Titanic: There are three kinds of people on this ship: 1, the deer-in-the-headlights crowd; 2, the let’s do something to save ourselves crowd; 3, and the ‘nothings going to happen, so lets have a Martini’ crowd. The bourgeoisie and the Right are in the last group. The helpless liberals, centrists and a-politicals are in the first group. Because liberals don’t actually believe that the economy or the environment ARE going to significantly change. Most rooted, proletarian people are in the middle group. And that is the group that will take action.

Zizek puts it this way, “Critical Leftists have hitherto only succeeded in soiling those in power; whereas the real point is to castrate them…” and “Liberal-democratic moralistic blackmail is over…our side no longer has to go on apologizing. The other side had better start.” Zizek instead advocates a ruthless undermining of bourgeois ideology, which is the majority of this book. He quotes Marx about the ‘historicism’ of bourgeois ideology, which posits all other social systems as limited and historical, while capital will last forever. Zizek points out that capitalism ‘de-totalizes meaning’ – meaning it renders critical thought useless, and instead celebrates ‘efficiency’ alone. Another Zizek: “Who needs direct repression when you can convince the chicken to walk right into the slaughter-house?” (Apologies to the meat-eaters.) The ‘self-propelling circulation of Capital is the ultimate REAL in human life,’ according to him, and ‘money’ now the fifth element, after fire, water, earth and air. Zizek: The ‘denial of ideology only provides the …proof that we are more than ever embedded in ideology.’

Of course, the key question is, what are the limits of ideology? And ultimately, there are no ‘limits,’ only a counter-ideology based on reality. Zizek believes that advocacy of Communism is on the agenda, not ‘socialism’ (which he now no longer believes reflects the ‘lower phase of communism’) or liberal democracy, which has failed. He discusses Berlusconi as the ultimate capitalist bourgeois-democratic fraud who yet retains power, and the parallel commodification of environmental or social concerns as safety valves.

Zizek also opposes Muslim movements that seem ‘anti-imperialist’ (and are seen that way by certain Leftists) because they ultimately oppose Enlightenment values, and celebrate obscurantism and repression. Yet at the same time, they can reflect class tensions, absent an active Left (which has been mostly killed…) such as in Afghanistan. In this context he highlights anti-religious Middle-Eastern movements, like the Qarmatians, a Bahraini secular, communist group that seized the Black Stone from Mecca, signaling the end of the “Law” many years ago. Their rise was precipitated by a slave rebellion in the Basra marshes by the Zanji – 500,000 slaves over 15 years - that preached the radical egalitarianism of the Kharijites in the face of Islamic slave ideology.

Zizek understands that Obama will become “Bush with a Human Face,” but nevertheless does not denigrate the excitement of millions upon his election, as if some kind of corner had been turned. He also refers to Kant’s excitement concerning the French Revolution, and compares the two. This excitement reflects the true liberationist feelings of the majority of people when tyrannies fall, as if a weight had fallen from the head of the human race. Zizek goes back to his concentration on the Haitian revolution, which took the slogans of the French Revolution at good coin, and freed that island from colonialism and slavery in one fell swoop. The Haitian rebel army sang the Marseilles upon the approach of Napoleon’s troops, thus flinging the revolutionary song into the face of the now counter-revolutionary force. However, because the Haitians could not continue the revolution, a black landed-aristocracy grew up to control the island – an aristocracy which eventually made peace with French and then U.S. imperialism.

Zizek ends by again repeating that, “We are the ones we have been waiting for” and “There is no big Other to rely on” and “We must begin from the beginning’ again.And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog, April 28, 2011

The God That Failed

2011-04-17T11:20:00.009-05:00

Death of the Liberal Class – Chris Hedges, 2010

Met a real Democratic Party ‘liberal’ lately? Do you think they care about poverty? Or war? Or foreclosures? Or unemployment? Or even the environment? Most of them are economically very comfortable, and their wallet speaks for itself. But they do spend a lot of time telling you how stupid the right-wingers are, and how Sarah Palin is a loser. Or Glenn Beck. Or any number of obvious targets. And how bad Islam is. And that is it. That is the extent of their 'outrage' and knowledge. It’s more about cultural politics than anything else - a mirror reflection of the religious right's focus on culture instead of essentials.

Chris Hedges is an enraged, former member of the liberal ‘class.’ He was the son of a protestant preacher, a Master of Divinity at Yale and a former long-time journalist for the NY Times. According to him, the liberal class are the journalists, professors, artists, religious clergy, labor union leaders and members of the Democratic Party who have betrayed the working class and the majority of the population, and have instead grown to love, or at least compromise with, the ‘free market.’ And in the process, sold their soul to the devil. His moment of truth was when he publicly opposed the Iraq War at a commencement address in 2003, and was fired from the Times for it.

Hedges wants to borrow parts of Marxism – without Marx, of course – to reinvigorate a moral, left opposition to corporate control. As he puts it: “We have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed.” He should start with the title of his book. Hedges liberal 'class' is really a part of the American petit-bourgeoisie - the non-business owners, professional side.Hedges describes the present weakness of the liberal ‘class’ as similar to historical situations like Weimar Germany and pre-revolutionary, Checkovian Russia. To Hedges, capital needs a strong liberal class, but when that class disintegrates or becomes house-broken, capital’s worst elements are no longer internally restrained.

Hedge’s book is part of a trend attacking liberalism. 2006’s “Disappearance of the Liberal Intellectual,” by Eric Lott and 2006’s ‘Strange Death of the Liberal Intellectual,” essay by Tony Judt were predecessors. In a way, this book is the liberal’s “God That Failed.” Though it is odd that the term 'neo-liberalism' is not used in this book, I think Hedges is correct in seeing liberalism itself as the dead thing. Hedges always sides with small groups and heroic individuals (a la Camus) or intellectuals (Tillich, Neibur) as the main alternative to corporatism and fascism. He identifies the liberal slide into corporatism beginning with the First World War, a war which froze or destroyed the building populist, labor and socialist movements. The liberals enlisted on the side of Wilson’s ‘war to end all wars’ and the ‘war for democracy.’ As usual, these wars were couched in ‘humanitarian’ and ‘progressive’ slogans. And, as always, the liberals 'believed' them.

In separate chapters, Hedges takes on the permanent war society promoted by the liberal class. He takes on journalists who merely reprint the statements of government officials and think tanks, and no longer report on facts; artists who have no interest other than providing entertainment; clergy who are too timid to speak against right-wing religion and war and have retreated into ‘contemplation;’ professors who focus on microscopic issues to avoid conflict; labor officials who cannot break with liberalism and have betrayed their members. And as he calls it the ‘worst of the bunch,’ the Democratic Party, which makes betrayal a standing requirement. He defends the pariahs of American society – courageous truth-tellers like Ralph Nader, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, IF Stone, professors Richard Goldstone and Norman Finkelstein, journalist Sydney Schanberg and others. Hedges prefers intellectuals who not merely describe the world, but also the world’s contradictions. Of course, it has been said that the first duty of philosophy is the criticism of God and religion. And Hedges has a pronounced moral slant which looks for all the world like the musings of a former seminarian.

Downplaying Labor

Hedges, to my mind, generalizes frequently, and while hilariously correct in many instances, misses details that do not fit into his schema. Like labor. He says that the whole labor movement has been lost since 1948’s Taft-Hartley. And indeed, Taft-Hartley represented a severe counter-attack by capital against the brief spring in the 1930s. As did the anti-communist purges in the unions (and the Farmer-Labor Party), as well as the McCarthyite movement which accompanied it. The 1948 Progressive Party’s Henry Wallace campaign was the last gasp of that time. However, labor still held some kind of clout in American society until well into the 1970s. Labor’s second moment of political truth was really Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers – a seemingly skilled and white collar union. It’s third was Clinton’s passage of NAFTA. And its fourth is the present attack on public unions. In fact, it could be argued that labor activism in the 1970s lead to Reagan’s action (preceded by Jimmy Carter’s calling out the troops on the miners strike in 1978, thus signaling Democratic Party support for anti-labor measures…). The book, “Rebel Rank and File” chronicles the 1970s period of labor activism, mostly from below. Steve Early’s new book, “Labor’s Civil War” also covers this period, much of it inspired by activists from the left. So while Hedges wants to celebrate certain parts of the Marxism, he doesn’t seem to extend it to a thorough understanding of the working class movement.

Downplaying the Left

Hedges calls himself, at times, a socialist, of sorts. That is certainly commendable. In this book, however, he does not. He largely dismisses the 1960s-1970s new left’s concern with the working class, stereotyping the new left as a ‘mirage,’ as being only transient cultural rebels. Au contraire! Here is Hedges: “Only a few hundred radical Maoists, many of them living in communes in cities such as San Francisco, broke with SDS and took jobs in factories … but they were a tiny minority.” Other than this Life Magazine description of the left, he’s is definitely wrong. In SDS, one large section lead by Progressive Labor formed the “Worker Student Alliance” and encouraged students into the labor movement. After the split in SDS, every left grouping went into the factories, except the Weathermen. Black leftists went into the factories in Detroit and other cities. The SWP, an ostensibly Trotskyist formation, turned to labor a little later, and sent their cadre into the factories too. I know of no faction that did not, except the social democrats. This represented thousands and thousands of activists. But the ‘left’ as it exists seems to be a political opponent of Hedges, and therefore he has to minimize what it did. Certainly, ‘liberals’ and social-democrats were not going into factories. They were busy getting prestigious white-collar jobs and sucking on their wine glasses. They were busy blocking with the union leaders who had made their peace with capital. Hedges himself never clocked in at a factory – or even thought of it.

Downplaying the Mass Movement

Hedges does say we need to ‘…nurture, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement.” Hedges, like his other books, revisits the various progressive ‘stations of the cross’ – Thomas Merton, Deitrich Bonhofer, Father Berrigan and Dorothy Day – to illustrate what ‘true’ opposition to decaying capitalism means. However, he also talks about being like the ‘medieval monks,’ who had to preserve a ‘the moral culture’ for the future, in agricultural communities. Other than the obvious absurdity of in-grown theocrats carrying 'civilization' on their backs, Hedges here lays out a perspective of isolated communities creating fortresses of resistance. At the same time, Hedges says: “The fantasy of wide-spread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.” He makes no mention of creating a new populist labor party to contest for power. Well, then, is the only role of a movement to hand out bowls of soup? Hedges, to his credit, does not disown self-defensive violence by classes and communities. However, he denounces Marx as ‘violent,’ as if defending yourself is not exactly what Marx advocated.

Of course, this is the key question. Various people looking on the present reality either throw up their hands (party on!), advocate retreat into protected dugouts, or theorize about complete overthrow. Hedges, like most commentators outside the revolutionary left, tends to come down on the middle alternative. At any rate, his book is a welcome addition to the literature against the not-so-hidden enemy – liberalism / neo-liberalism. Capital has two main ideologies, and sometimes the whispers of 'friends' are more dangerous than the howling of overt enemies.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, April 17, 2011

The Play! See It Before Its Over:

2011-04-11T18:20:00.006-05:00

“Oil! & The Jungle,” adapted from Upton Sinclair, directed by Kym Longhi and Karla Grotting, 2011

Theater in Minneapolis is mostly middle-class entertainments, exemplified by the Guthrie, or trivial hipster indulgences like the “Fringe Festival.” However, given we are the Number Two theater town in the U.S. by population, there are other choices, from Intermedia Arts shows to the productions of August Wilson at Penumbra or the Pillsbury Theater, or the left-originated Mixed Blood theater and Frank Theaters. Please add the University of Minnesota Theater to the list. Because labor and socialism almost never get their due.

This play is adapted from the text of Upton Sinclairs two best novels, “Oil” and “The Jungle.” (Both reviewed below) Anyone who has read The Jungle knows it is a completely unforgiving description of ethnic working class life in turn-of-the-century Chicago. Oil! is a more nuanced panorama of social life in California around the time of the First World War and after, centering on the budding oil industry there, from the point of view of the new oil elite. “There Will Be Blood,” the excellent film starring Daniel Day Lewis, was based on Oil!, but did not really follow the text.

This play is a monster, in its own way. Using violent motion, acrobatics, multi-media, music and song, dance, text, carefully-constructed balletic movement, Brechtian acting, satire and socialist politics, it creates a new visceral whole. Even if you have not read these books, the message is staring you in the face. The set itself is a facsimile of the class structure, with the rich above and the workers and poor below. The “Oil!” world squats over the “Jungle” world. Some people go up or down a few ladders occasionally, but the two worlds are definitely separated by distance, and only joined by … money. It is on the spiral ladder that the limited class interactions take place. The play links present events to Upton Sinclair’s past - oil wars, the CDO derivatives crisis, present unemployment, the housing foreclosure crisis, the BP oil disaster, the on-going buying of presidents and the continuing brutal treatment of animals and humans in slaughterhouses, making this play not a mere historical artifact. At one point, the Marxist agitator from the Oil/Jungle (probably Eugene Debs) says, “It is up to you.”

This play could not have been performed by an older group of actors and actresses, due to its physicality. It would only be at the University that you could find the youth, energy and numbers to make this real. The large ensemble is lead by talented seniors. One senior acts in two roles at once, as the “Dad” in Oil! (using a dummy), and also as Bunny, his son. Others play multiple roles, as well as singing. An excellent job is done by all.

Warning! If you suffer from depression, are easily overwhelmed, are hard of hearing, are squeamish or prudish, expect a linear story, or are conservative in your politics, this play might not be for you.

This play is sponsored by Mayday Books.

Last 4 shows – April 13, Wednesday@7:30 PM
April 14, Thursday@7:30 PM
April 15, Friday@8:00 PM
April 16, Saturday@8:00 PM
$10-$18. Call.

And I saw it at … Rarig Thrust Theatre on the U of M West Bank.
Red Frog, 4/11/2011

“Freedom’s just another word ...” for wasting time

2011-04-03T11:17:00.006-05:00

“Freedom – A Novel,” by Jonathan Franzen, 2010

Reviewers gushed over it – Updike, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy! Book clubs, on-line and off, made it their centerpiece. It went to #1 on the NY Times sales list for weeks. It was hailed as the best book of the year, and perhaps for 10 years before that. Oprah selected it for her book club, christening it a ‘masterpiece’ - even after being insulted by Franzen for her embrace of his earlier book, ‘The Corrections.” It burned up Twitter. Obama was seen reading it, unlike the book "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,” given him by Chavez. The literary establishment had found a book they almost all liked, which is significant in the world of cultural politics and the middle-class cultural spectacle.

For that reason, it took me awhile to stomach opening this 562-page book. But authors, above all, write for themselves, and hence are not passive participants. After all, a guy who insulted Oprah couldn’t be all bad.

It dawned on me that the title is not an accident. “Freedom” is a generic term at this point in history, and certainly the characters in this book do not use their ‘freedom’ well – nor, I suspect, does Franzen think Americans use their freedom well. The characters spend it on jealousy, depression, drinking, sex, money-grubbing, fame, stupid politics and one doozy of an ‘environmental’ plan that involves mountain-top removal. Sort of like Homer Simpson as a ‘green’ job worker.

This book is full of accurate satiric comments on various cultural habits of present times, and these comic moments form little oases that carry one through the book. Without them, I don’t know if I could have made it. “Freedom” has been described by some as ‘political.’ And indeed it reflects the politics of the 9/11 - Iraq war era well, as reflected in several households – a middle-class one, a working-class one, and a ‘hipster’ one. War and the environment take center stage. The book is first set in St. Paul on Ramsey Hill in the late 80s, and in Grand Rapids, in a motel and cabin, then trails to Washington D.C., New York and West Virginia, so the local references work the same way they work in the film, ‘Factotum” – giving us all the ability to name-check.

Walter Berglund, the main protagonist, grows up in a working-class/small businessman family, and flees its northern Minnesota crudity to become a political correct liberal. He marries a jock girl, Patty, from an upper-middle class family out of Westchester County, NY (where else?), and the tale of their bad marriage forms the emotional center of the book. Walter eventually comes up with a scheme to save the ‘cerulean warbler’ by strip-mining a chunk of West Virginia, which is then supposed to be ‘reclaimed’ for all time for the bird. Of course, this is a transparent sleight-of-hand by some oil man to cover his tracks. Walter is aided in this project by a beautiful young Bengali women, Lalitha, who he falls in love with as his marriage falls apart.

Walter and Patty have a son, Joey, who leaves the family home and moves next door with a working-class family so he can have sex with their passive daughter, Connie. Joey later comes up with his own cock-eyed scheme, as a 19-year-old, to sell rusted Eastern European truck parts to the U.S. government in Iraq. And succeeds! Joey is torn between the sexy airhead sister of his rich college roommate and his real connection with Connie and her family. Through the whole marriage, Walter’s friend Richard, a magnetic punk-rock musician, completes an emotional ‘triad’ with Patty and Walter. Richard goes on to some success as an alt-country musician, and then as a film scorer. The book is book-ended by ‘autobiographical’ soliloquies by Patty, explaining her life and her self. And ends with what I consider a parachuted ‘happy’ ending. How a book ends is testimony to an authors toughness and truth-telling, and here, Franzen show cowardice and dodges the bullet.

In this book the working-class is depicted for the most part as a bunch of loutish, right-wing, obdurate drunks. This is pretty typical for middle-class writers. Connie’s mother’s monster-pickup boyfriend cuts down almost every tree in their yard, for instance. The middle-class is shown as ultimately sensitive and kind, though misguided and inept. Richard, the bohemian, is supposed to be the ‘truth-teller’ (Richard makes Marxist noises every now and then…) and for the most part, he does that - though he is ultimately most concerned about his music career and his sexual conquests. However, in the end, every character is a comic/cosmic joke, given the overall war and environmental concerns that Franzen evidently has. And here, I think, is the ultimate point. No one is up to the task of dealing with what the system is ultimately doing. In essence, they are not using their freedom well.

Most reviewers wallow in the personal stories of this family, as if the meaning of this novel was purely intimate. It strikes me that Franzen is not exclusively 'that kind of writer' - but since this is the road to success in the U.S., perhaps he will become more like 'that kind of writer.' None of these people are exactly likable, or reliable, but they do strike you as people you might have met at one time. And that is what makes this book a little like a deep rabbit hole, from which you will enter on one end, and come up miles away, in another.

And I bought it at the independent bookstore, Cheap Books

Red Frog
4/3/2011

Gaia II

2011-03-28T18:11:00.002-06:00

“Planning Green Growth – a Socialist Contribution to the Debate on Environmental Sustainability,” by Pete Dickenson, Socialist Alternative, 2003.

I asked some of the local Marxist activists if there was a somewhat ‘comprehensive’ analysis of the issues of global warming and peak oil by activists (not theoreticians or academic Marxists.) I was pointed to a pamphlet by an Australian member of Socialist Alternative, Pete Dickenson, dated in 2003. Just the dating and the distance of this pamphlet assures me that local activist organizations might be less than informed on this issue. They are probably in actuality relying on something they read from 1926, not anything relevant to today’s science and situation.

I asked this question because of a long line of somewhat bizarre comments on environmental questions by ostensible Marxists over the years. The latest was something about people who grow food ‘locally’ or source ‘locally’ are nothing but Maoists, and doing that is similar to the ‘back-yard furnaces’ of the Great Leap Forward. Well, if you can’t catch the difference between an onion and a small block of pig iron, I can’t help you. Right now, in the City of Havana, there are enough small gardens (“huertos populares”) to feed much of the urban population. This resulted from a relaxation against small farm ownership and production in that city. Due to the lack of phosphate fertilizer and oil, these gardens are mostly organic. The films "The Power of Community" & "The Greening of Cuba” are a good introduction to this topic. Detroit, courtesy of the experience of aging black sharecroppers, is now the leading urban garden city in the United States – of course because of poverty and an increase in abandoned land. I also recommend the excellent 2008 film on Latino/Black gardening in Los Angeles, “The Garden.” And the comments of Dimitry Orlov on how Russians survived the collapse of the Russian food economy brought on by counter-revolution and privatization – with two words, “kitchen gardens.” (His book “Reinventing Collapse” is reviewed below.) People are trying to build a system of urban and nearby food sources (Community Supported Agriculture - CSAs) because they see a potential collapse coming in the United States itself. To think we will always have food delivered from Chile is somewhat naïve. After all, that is what the Haitians were told to do.

I suspect most of the people making these comments have been no closer to a farm than a highway through Wisconsin, and think food comes from the supermarket. Of course, we cannot totally feed ourselves from our backyards or CSAs. But backyard gardens and larger farms are not mutually exclusive, but dialectically inter-related. The two together provide increased food security for the population, link the two areas intimately, and spread rural skills to urban workers, and visa versa. In fact, the growth in small farmers in the Midwest is almost totally through CSAs and organic farms.

So I read this pamphlet, waiting for the great bolt of intellectual lightning to strike. And it didn’t. Let’s quickly look at one of the ageing points this short pamphlet makes – after all, just the title - “Planning Green Growth” sounds likes something out of a 5-Year Plan. I was excited! Comrade Trotsky speaking from the grave!

Ah, no. Dickenson’s pamphlet is earnest, optimistic and lacking in key facts. There is not a word on peak oil. There is not a word on how quickly the environment is already changing, and the effect it is having on the world population. There is no understanding that ‘solar, wind, wave and other alternative energy methods’ cannot produce as much energy as oil, coal and nuclear. There is not a word on population growth. Dickenson argues that socialism is not based on constant growth as a target,( true…) which is why it is superior to capitalism in this respect. But then, in a key passage, he says, “assume that consumption under socialism will be 50% higher than the current level in the advanced industrial countries, which will provide a standard of living currently enjoyed by the middle-classes in the richest capitalist country, the USA.” If I understand this convoluted passage, at that level, my friend, the earth would be used up quite quickly. As it is, it is already being used up, even without this level of consumption. Dickenson does say that this ‘level’ might be above the ‘bio-physical’ limits of the planet, but refuses to make a decision as to whether that is true or not. As a result, Dickenson theoretically does not account for any limits. And hence, the somewhat Pollyanna tone of this pamphlet. Of course, it was written in 2003.

The key thing that socialism should provide is healthy food, clean water, good clothing that does not fall apart, and actually works, shelter that shelters, education for all, health-care for all, a consistent source of sustainable energy, necessary transportation, leisure time, non-alienated work and culture. If these economic and social basics could be provided for the whole world population – EVEN IF they were lower than the present American ‘middle-class’ – this would be an enormous gain for the world proletariat. As a casual conversational target, my guess might be the life-style of the American working class in the late 40s-early 50s could be a real target. This is, of course, before the full development of the internal combustion car economy.

The workers states provided some of these benefits after the social revolutions there, but not all. The workers states always suffered in comparison to the US and Western Europe in consumer goods, and this was one reason for their downfall. However, this was not just a failure of bureaucratic planning, but also a reflection of how much useless production a planned economy might not engage in. However, they too wrecked the environment even so. Vassily Leontiev, a Soviet GOSPLAN economist in the 1920s, was one of the first to attempt to integrate environmental costs into any economic model, yet this was never applied in the USSR. Anyone wanting to look at the exhaustion of the oil fields around Baku will see the horror tale writ large. Or the decimation of the Aral Sea. This problem in Marxism is what I call “crude productionism.” The Marxists who hold this idea equate simple increases in production, any kind of production, done no matter what, with a healthy society and environment. At one time, this kind of thing made more sense. But alone, as we have learned, it is no different than the growth-for-profit model of the capitalist business cycle in its effects on the biosphere. And that biosphere includes us.

And I got it on the U of M campus,

Red Frog, 3/27/2011

A Word suggested by William Golding ...

2011-03-23T18:32:00.007-06:00

“The Vanishing Face of Gaia - A Final Warning” by James Lovelock, 2008

James Lovelock is a scientist famous for inventing the apparatus that tested the atmosphere for ozone depletion, and warned of the consequences of that event. He is an Englishman who lives in the Devon countryside with his wife.

In this book, Lovelock switches between the disconnected ramblings of an aging conservative and a brilliant scientist dwelling on valid themes. Lovelock so frequently contradicts himself or makes factually ignorant statements that I’m not sure which we have here. You must separate the wheat from the chaff.

Gaia is a brilliant concept Lovelock came up with in the 1960s (no surprise here…) which refers to the totally interconnected nature of all things – humans, rocks, the atmosphere, the ocean, animals, plants, fire, human structures, energy sources – and how they are all one organism scientifically. This is not a religious concept but a scientifically observable one. I think his concept makes perfect sense, as it breaks down various isolated scientific disciplines, and instead explains what is happening on the planet ‘holistically.’ In essence, everything on the Earth, and ‘in’ the Earth, is Gaia. This theory allows Lovelock to bridge the gaps between biologists, climatologists, geologists and other scientific disciplines. As this applies to global climate change, it means that the earth as a whole is a 'self-regulating' system, so any disruptions in the dynamic system - such as excess carbon - will affect and be affected by nearly every part of the environment. And that environment will react. Lovelock contends that most Gaia predictions have been born out by testing.

I’m again going to bullet-point his main issues. I do this because many of these books are full of facts and ideas, and certainly not elegantly-crafted pieces making a central point. Lovelock wanders all over, repeating himself, and repetition is not a pretty thing:

1. Lovelock points out that the IPCC panel (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that issues UN reports on climate change is affected by political pressures and limited computer modeling programs to downplay the threat of global warming. Factual, scientific observations, even in 2007, showed their predictions erred far on the conservative side. The process of global warming is happening much faster than the IPCC is predicting.

2. The IPCC recommendation that 450 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere is acceptable is too high. Lovelock understands that the earth system can go from gradual change to sudden, irretrievable change in a very short period. The computer models used by the IPCC leave out many variables, and do not account for various multiplier/feedback effects. At 450 ppm he believes we are already past the point of no return. (Bill McKibben says we have to bring it back to 350 ppm. We are now at 385 or perhaps higher…) Lovelock created a more correct model called "Daisyworld" which more closely resembles what is actually happening on the planet.

3. Lovelock feels we cannot stop the slide towards a hot planet – 9 degrees hotter, given what he sees as the various human ‘weaknesses’ in favor of the status quo. He suggests we prepare to adapt to a hotter planet with higher seas by protecting various islands (England, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan…) and areas on the top and bottom of the earth that will survive the full effects of climate disaster. In a sense, creating protected enclaves. The vision he has is of nuclear-powered, dense cities, surrounded by walls, with green valleys that fade into red deserts. Sort of a sci-fi vision of the planet, come real. Or “Children of Men” - with a few children.

4. There are too many people for the carrying capacity of the planet. Lovelock says, “a massive natural cull of humanity’ could occur to bring ‘Gaia’ back into balance. Mass migrations and conflicts are inevitable due to climate change.

That is the bad news. As to solutions? This is where it gets dicey. Lovelock says:

1. Nuclear power and thermal solar are the only solutions that will provide enough energy to maintain the present standard of living. A solar thermal block 3,600 square miles (60 miles by 60 miles) in the Southwest, given DC transmission lines, would provide enough electricity for the whole United States.

2. The coal industry has provided a haze of ‘soot’ across the globe that has blunted global warming, reflecting sunlight back into space, at the same time as it is injecting more carbon into the atmosphere. So if coal plants are shut down without some replacement for the ‘soot’, that ‘soot’ floating in the air would disappear, and solar heat would grow even more intense.

3. Lovelock rages on and on again against wind power (and even solar cells) as a conspiracy by evil businessmen to just make money, and to lull us into a false complacency. (Presented by the Al Gore wing of the ruling class, I might add, as the solution.) He claims wind towers take up too much room, use too much concrete and would obscure his pristine view of Devon. However, he had a complimentary meeting with the head of Duke Energy in 2008, a large coal producer. And it is no secret that there are massive profits in nuclear power for firms like GE. Some could see Lovelock as a shill for the nuclear and coal industry – but I think he’s just somewhat clueless, to not see there is money to be made no matter which way you turn. One nuclear plant uses far more concrete than many wind farms. And wind farms can be farmed around – the whole area is not off limits to land use, as he imagines. He does support wind farms in the US Midwest – but only there. (The wind only blows steadily in the Midwest, you see.) And in a somewhat ridiculous passage, certainly not in merry old England. (“I must declare a special personal dislike of large wind turbines onshore.”) However, he is right that wind power cannot provide all the energy that nuclear or coal can. And there is the rub.

4. Lovelock is a big supporter of nuclear power. To argue his case, he claims that only 75 people died at Cherynobyl, ignoring the thousands that got cancers. According to observers, an area the size of Switzerland, or 16,000 square miles (41,000 square kilometers) around Cherynobyl, is uninhabitable for the next 300 years. He says that the objections to nuclear are 'trivial' – but he seems never to have read a word about nuclear contamination of groundwater coming out of plants like Hanford Nuclear Reservation (mentioned in St. Clair’s book, “Born Under a Bad Sky,” reviewed below) or the end-of-its-life Vermont Yankee plant. Here is Lovelock on nuclear power: “inexpensive”; “The falsehood that they are uniquely dangerous” and the best; “It is sad…that so many… still oppose nuclear on grounds as insubstantial as a fear of hellfire and Satan.” He even has a paragraph making fun of people worried about a small earthquake in Japan that released a tiny bit of radiation in 2007. What could happen? Recent events in Japan indicate that building a nuclear plant on a fault line, near an ocean, is really not a good idea. The problem with nuclear is not their rampant problems – it is that when you have one – it is a doozey. And we cannot overlook the direct connection between peaceful nuclear power and it’s wartime cousin – they are connected industries. Lovelock seems to think their connection is accidental. Lovelock, with some justice, makes fun of people who think radiation is always evil – as there is radiation everywhere. Some people are looking at ‘micro’ nuclear plants that might power only one town. At any rate, the key thing here is to understand our energy situation, not just from a Pollyanna view or a wood-sprite point of view.

5. Lovelock used to be a socialist in his youth, but now he yearns for a ‘Churchill’ to lead the struggle for little England against global warming. He even has a kind word for Obama and Al Gore (who was one of the 'first' to figure out global warming in 2004, according to Lovellock. Just like Gore invented the internet.) Lovelock does not think the ‘profit system’ is the problem – but never names names as to ‘who’ is holding back the fight against global warming. Not one oil or coal company gets a nod – just evil environmentalists and human nature.

6. There is a bit of truth in what he says, because ‘big’ Green groups actually hinder the fight against global warming by supporting corporate economic, environmental and political policies. They lull people into thinking carbon trading will somehow stop the process. However, Lovelock seems to loathe everyone who is an environmentalist – not just big Green groups or profit-seeking ‘green’ businessmen. The truth is, a technological fix is not possible. Lovelock sometimes believes the technological ‘fix’ is possible; and then sometimes he believes we should just start setting up our protected islands. I think he wants to do both.

7. Lovelock has no concept of peak oil or even peak gas (see fracking). Lovelock: “There are huge reserves of coal, oil and natural gas.”

8. To slow or stop global climate change, he suggests:
A. putting sulphuric acids or other materials in the air to re-create the ‘cloud’ now provided by coal plants – mimicking the effects of the eruption of Mount Pinitubo, which cooled the planet for 3 years.
B. Hang a sun-shade in space ten miles in diameter. Yes, you heard that right.
C. He thinks churning the ocean water with floating pipes can bring more algae to the surface, which will absorb carbon.
D. He wants to create low running clouds across the surface of the earth by spraying seawater in the air, thus cooling the surface of the earth.
E. Sequester carbon underground. One way to do this is making ‘char’ out of carbon, which is almost inert.
F. Create ‘Artificial trees’ out of treated concrete and rock that would remove carbon dioxide from the air.
G. Pay people not to cut down forests, not plant fake forests in empty places, and to let the empty places grow up naturally.
H. Use naturally occurring photo-synthesis to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He is not clear on this.

9. Lovelock supports vegetarianism/veganism because he knows that domesticated animals – and the food they eat – are a significant source of global warming and hunger. He even comments about pets being sources of carbon dioxide and an extravagance.

10. And then:: “We imagine that” …“organic food” is ‘fundamentally different and better in quality than what is manufactured.” (Notice the word ‘manufactured’ used un-ironically.) We 'imagine?' Most studies of the two show that organic is better for human health, for soil health, and is less carbon-intensive. But Lovelock seems not to have studied this topic either.

Lovelock has not a word about how our profit economy encourages the destruction of the environment. Taking from nature is seen as ‘free’ on the capitalist books. (See the review of “The Ecological Revolution,” below.) Unfortunately there is a cost to every withdrawal. At some point, the biospheric-bank will become depleted, and Gaia will be forced to make adjustments – as it is already doing.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog 3/23/2011

“The John Brown of Mississippi”

2011-03-09T18:58:00.002-06:00

“The State of Jones – The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy,” by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer, 2010

1862. Starving, exhausted Confederate soldiers ordered by pompous, aggressive plantation aristocrats into frontal assaults against fortified union positions at Corinth. 1862. A frightened, wet, cold, dirty deserter from the Confederate army, hiding in Mississippi’s Piney Woods swamp, waiting for a slave woman to bring him a plate of food. 1863. A prominent businessman and Confederate tax assessor shot through his own open window in Jones County, Mississippi. 1864. A 6’4” long-haired Mississippi man with a triple-loaded, double-barreled shotgun, standing on the edge of the woods with his relatives and neighbors, waiting for a group of Confederate cavalry to pass and meet their doom.

Welcome to the class war in the Confederacy. Contrary to the myth of the Confederacy promoted by reactionaries, the majority of southerners opposed the war when it started, but were not allowed to directly vote. Resistance to the vote for secession, the subsequent war initiated by the slave-holders and the draconian policies of the failing Confederacy against their own people far surpassed anything in the North. And until recently it has been a well-hidden secret – especially to southerners. The only glimpse we have seen of it in popular culture is the film “Cold Mountain,” set in North Carolina. After the Confederacy passed the "20 Negroes Rule" (which allowed planters with 20 slaves to avoid the draft) many class-conscious and non-slave owning southern men became deserters.

This book, a well-written and almost novelistic history, takes you inside the Mississippi resistance by poor yeoman farmers in 6 counties in central Mississippi, lead by a Confederate deserter named Newton Knight. It really answers the question of why Jeff Davis’ slave-holding class lost the Civil War. What would happen if you gave a war and people stopped showing up?

Knight hated the rich people in his county who stole from poverty-stricken farm wives, to both line their own pockets and to ostensibly feed the Confederate Army. Knight, like his fellow farmers, had nothing in common with large plantation owners who owned hundreds of slaves, and who continued to produce profitable cotton while the population starved. He refused to own slaves himself, and actually lived with a black slave / freedwoman named Rachel during and after the war, while also being married to a white woman, Serena. Knight, his neighbors and relatives, took control of six counties in south-central Mississippi, and ran the Confederate authorities out through carefully-planned guerilla violence. In the process, they were helped by black slaves and runaways who thronged the swamps that were a favorite hiding-place. His group, the Jones County Scouts, declared their allegiance to the Union Army. They met with union officers when Sherman's generals marched just south of Jones County, and also along the rivers, as some supplies were delivered by union boats. They defeated every Confederate incursion into the area, even by the most well-trained and violent Confederate units, mostly by knowing when to fight, and when not to. Newton claimed his troops were in 16 large engagements, and many smaller ones.

After the war, Newton later applied for a pension from the Union Army, but was denied because thick-headed northern legislators could not believe a southern man would fight for the North.

After a short period that can actually be called ‘reconstruction,' the violent racist businessmen of Mississippi and the demobilized Confederate Army (now known as the Ku Klux Klan), with help from northern racists like president Andrew Johnson, made the lives of black people and southern Unionists a living hell. In this few years of true Reconstruction, the vote and the Union army allowed black people and Unionist southern whites to hold democratic power, and begin to institute education, infrastructure improvements and democratic rights.

During Reconstruction, Knight had been an officer of the Mississippi government, as an officer of the peace and as a tax collector. He built a school for black children, but when black children were not allowed, the school mysteriously burned down. Later one of his nieces came back to Ellisville and started a school for black children, which was discovered by racists, and also burned down. He fathered many mixed children before his second ‘wife’ Rachel died. Serena eventually left him as well.

Because they could not actually win an election, the Klan and the prominent citizens of Mississippi used killings, burnings and terror to change the tide. Even U.S. Grant refused to call out troops in Vicksburg in the 1975 elections. In Vicksburg, neo-Confederate Klansman and “White Liners” killed dozens, ran the Unionist mayor out of town, and controlled the ballot box. So Grant lost the city he had so well-won in 1863. The famous Adelbert Ames, the Unionist governor of Mississippi (and probably the best governor that benighted state has ever had…) was threatened and lost the election, after making the mistake of disbanding the armed black militia. The “Black Codes’ were reintroduced, and black people faced up to 90 years without the right to vote, to own land or a business, or to an education. They had the ‘right’ to be poorly paid sharecroppers, and to be killed at will. It was slavery without the name.

Because of their history, and the failure of Reconstruction, the many members of the Knight family were shunned by local whites, and grew apart from the larger community, eventually inter-marrying. At some point the mixed family members, even the ‘white’ Newton, were declared all “Negroes” by the Mississippi census. They were known as the ‘Knight Negroes” to their deeply racist neighbors. Even some of the men Newton fought with could not stand against this tide, and shunned him too. Newton died in 1922, and in 1948, one of Newton’s nephews was put on trial for the ‘crime of miscegenation,’ as he was partly black. Since the evidence was so old, they could not convict. However, it shows you the vicious lengths the racists went in their crusade.

If there is anything this book teaches, it is that the divisions reflected in the civil war are still at the heart of the present struggle between the working class and the rich. It also teaches Knights lesson – that the only thing these people understand, ultimately, is a well-packed shotgun.

This story will soon be a film by Gary Ross, to be released in 2012.

And I bought it at Malaprop’s Books, in Asheville, North Carolina
Red Frog, 3/9/2011

Economics, Smeckanomics, What about the Oscars?

2011-02-27T12:42:00.007-06:00

“Zombie Capitalism – Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx,” by Chris Harman, 2009

Like Zizek’s book about the ‘End Times’ (reviewed below) Harman’s title is deceptive. You might think it is a prediction of a generalized capitalist stagnation, similar to the situation in Japan that went on for many years. The sub-title is really the title – Harman uses the key Marxist categories of the rate of profit, the organic composition of capital, the problems of over-production (over-accumulation to some); the growth in monopoly and the growth of the world working-class to show the superiority of the Marxist approach over the neo-classical, monetarist or Keynesian explanations.

Harman makes it clear that what caused the crisis was not ‘lack of regulation,’ nor ‘de-industrialization or ‘financialization,’ or imperialism, nor even the capture of the leadership of both U.S. parties by Wall Street – but a crisis brought on by the internal contradictions of capital itself, of which all these are only symptoms. Harman is not a great writer, but he is a somewhat clear writer, and this allows readers to use his points to extrapolate additional insights themselves. Harman is a member of a British group that was inspired by Trotskyism and later broke with part of Trotsky’s analysis, embracing the idea that the USSR and other similar states were ‘state capitalist.’ No matter what you think about his ‘statist’ perspective, Harman's method does have the benefit of including the USSR, China and eastern Europe in the analysis as more than invisible economic actors.

I am going to bullet-point his most salient thoughts:

1. Harman again affirms the truth of the labor theory of value, which classical capitalist theorists like Smith and Ricardo also utilized, and against the various neo-classical theories that give equal value to capital itself, rent, and interest. Most objections to Marx's labor theory center on the issue of time, demanding that all effects be immediate (called the transformation problem.) Harman notes that when you add time to any calculation, these objections disappear. Labor produces all wealth, and capital, rent and interest are only by-products of labor and/or nature.

2. The only point of capital is to make a profit – the most profit possible. If growing food would no longer make a profit, then food would not be grown. Eating is a by-product of the profit system. A falling rate of profit in a capital system is like a dropping air supply to a scuba diver – cause for drastic action.

3. Marx located crises within the capitalist form of accumulation – principally in what he called the ‘organic composition of capital.’ Basically, as time goes on, capitalists must increase their machinery and technology to get a competitive edge. The first adopters gain over their competitors, but as everyone adopts the same technology, the edge disappears. Productivity increases for awhile, then slows. But in the process, less labor is required, and as labor is the actual source of profit, the profit rate tends to decline. Harman locates this falling rate of profit, based on the increase in the organic composition of capital, as one of the main causes for the present crisis. I would identify the implementation, and now near exhaustion of the software / internet / computer technology ‘revolution’ as the specific technological issue. This I think is the most complicated part of Marxism to understand.

4. The profit rate falls, and as a result, a crisis – a recession or depression - breaks out. Bankruptcies occur, ‘creative destruction’ ensues and the remaining capitalists grow bigger feasting on the bankrupt ones, and a new cycle of accumulation begins again. During this crisis there have been many bankruptcies across the U.S., especially among small businessmen. This is also part of what happened in the recent Wall Street meltdown – we now have fewer, but larger FIRE sector entities. Harman does not, however, explain how the absence of even more bankruptcies (i.e. – the capitalist state saving the imperialist banking system, and eliminating the ‘moral hazard’ for some ‘too large to fail’ entities…) might interfere with the natural capitalist cycle of ‘creative destruction’ essential to a long-term revival of profit rates. This is, in essence, what happened in Japan, after their financial system was rescued by the state after a collapse in real estate value. It was a recipe for ‘zombie’ stagnation. In essence, without bankruptcies or war destruction, capital cannot re-start an effective profit drive.

5. The over-production of homes and real-estate values was a classic capitalist bubble. On top of the over-production, an excess of profits (‘over-accumulation’) led to financial speculation, hedges, derivatives, over-leveraging and debt, which eventually led to the crash, as all debts cannot be repaid. This is the “Minsky” moment. Marx called paper debt and paper profit ‘fictitious capital,’ which intensifies the natural profit-decline going on underneath in industrial capital. Harman does not complete this insight and speculate as to how much more intense financial capital’s massive size could make the next crash, given the increased debt at present. In other words, is there a maximum size of debt that can now be fatal? I.E. financial capital’s speculation is like gasoline on a fire.

6. Marx’s insight that capital tends to monopoly is truer today. Larger and larger firms of all kinds threaten the system as a whole if they go bankrupt, as they are so large they can bring down the whole capital system due to the massive amount of inter-locking economic relationships. Again, how big is fatally big?

7. Harman points out that while Marx and Engels understood the damaging effect capital had on nature, and wrote about it extensively, they did not conclude at that time that capital could actually exploit and destroy nature AS A WHOLE as it covered the globe in pursuit of profits. Harman is another Marxist who joins John Bellamy Foster (reviewed below) to point out that capital can have only one extended relationship with nature – an exploitative one.

8. Harman affirms Lenin and Luxembourg’s understanding that imperialism still needs war to survive, as war is part of the ‘creative destruction’ demanded by a falling rate of profit. Harman emphasizes that a corollary to this is the build-up of military economies (such as in the U.S.), which is not a chosen political ‘policy,’ but is actually an essential part of the stability of capitalism. This allows excess capital to be wasted on un-productive military spending (a sort of conservative Keynesianism supported by both U.S. political parties). It acts as a constant 'creative destruction,' so to speak, and slows 'over-accumulation' and bubbles. This allows U.S. capital to ‘destroy capital’ at home and also to literally ‘destroy capital’ in the Middle East, allowing firms to re-build the shattered Iraqi state, and allowing continuing waste in Afghanistan. (See Naomi Klein, "Shock Doctrine," reviewed below.) This is another difficult part of Marxism to understand.
Harman shows that state expenditures on armaments have only grown as capital has reached around the world. This is not a policy accident promoted by evil “Republicans’ but a requirement of capital. Harman does not draw this insight out as to the possibility or impossibility of a massive war of destruction similar to World War II ever happening again, and what this means for capital. As we know, it was not Keynesian policies that pulled the U.S. and world out of depression in the '30s, it was World War II. And that massive destruction of capital provided the opportunity for the golden decades of American accumulation which ended in 1970 or so. So, without another massive war, is that even possible anymore?

9. Harman emphasizes that ‘national’ states are not going to disappear under capital. In fact national states becomes more and more important as a base for various national capitals as competition goes global. The dream of capitalist ‘internationalism’ is just that. A collapse of the EU might be a graphic illustrator of that fact.

10. Harman looks at traditional Keynesianism (that favorite ideology of Krugman and various left-liberals in the Democratic Party) and concludes that it never really worked to rescue capital. (Keynes himself was against military spending as a form of government spending, by the way.) It was tried during the 3 recessions in the 70s and because of its failure, the ‘monetarism’ of William Friedman won the argument among the ruling elites. Today, the AFL-CIO and Trumka continue to make the point (as recently as a week ago on CNN) that capital needs a U.S. population able to buy its goods. This was true during the ‘credit card’ decades - workers were able to go into debt to buy those goods, and had the privilege of paying twice through credit card interest too! But capital now looks to a global middle-class to buy its goods, and does not need the U.S. working class to be as active a consumer. The crash has reduced the role debt plays in U.S. consumer spending as well, making a domestic consumer economy that much less attractive. Consumer debt is, however, taking off in India, Brazil and China.

11. Harman analyzes the USSR, China and eastern Europe and indicates that they were partly under the sway of the law of value. This is certainly true, as you cannot have a socialist economy in a block of states. He makes valuable points about accumulation crises in the USSR and eastern block that precipitated the collapse of those states. However there are multiple problems with his overall theory. The ‘state capitalist’ thesis seems to violate the Marxist theory of the state. It gives a regressive character to nationalization, or a possibly progressive character to a certain kind of capital called ‘state capital.’ It raises a question if there is a sort of 'intermediary' capital after ‘private’ capital. It argues against any transitional demands that call for the nationalization of property as being allegedly ‘capitalist’ demands. This part of his analysis is at bottom, I think, ultra-left and closer to anarchism than anything else. However, what I draw from it is that nationalization, in and of itself, cannot be the end-all of social progress, as it does not escape the totality of the market, and is also a fool’s definition of ‘socialism.’ See the market fundamentalists of the Republican Party for that foible.

12. Harman goes into an extensive analysis of which workers are productive, and which workers are excess, based on Marx’s concepts. I.E. teachers, while white-collar, raise the skill/productivity level of future employees, thus adding to labor value, while advertising employees are parasitic, useless to basic production. (Useful only in creating ‘commodity fetishes,’ I might add.) Legal workers essentially move capital from one pocket to another, usually among the capitalists, and are also non-productive. Nurses who participate in getting workers back to work contribute to productivity and labor, while medical workers whose only duty is to allocate bills are parasitic. (the majority of workers in the U.S. health system at present.) Cooks in a restaurant feed workers (part of the necessary maintenance of the class, usually done by unpaid family members), while some sales persons (not check-out clerks) in stores are parasitic. As you can see, the ‘service’ sector categories mix productive workers with parasitic jobs, which is why the statistics need to be carefully parsed.

Overall the world’s working class – blue and white collar - is now the biggest in history. Harman contends it is now the majority class in the world, if you include partial proletarians, as the pure peasant/farmer group has shrunk by being kicked-off the land by capital and environmental collapse. He also contends that the mixture of industrial workers, white-collar workers, peddlers, farmers, unemployed, students and other marginal categories are so inter-penetrated, that they allow ‘all community’ risings against capital, as people in the same family sometimes have contacts in many different employment zones. What the overall growing numbers of proletarians says about a global 'balance of power' between the classes is not drawn out here, but it seems to be positive for the working class. Harman takes a bit more controversial stand in claiming that the imperialist countries did not lose workers, they were just 're-arranged' into smaller entities within the capitalist countries. More data on this seems to be necessary, but it is hard to believe that the numbers of industrial workers in the U.S. are at the same level as in 1978, for instance.

13. Lastly, on the issue of taxes and the capitalist state – a burning issue at the present time – Harman has little to say. We are waiting for an economist who can explain the financial reasons for the destruction of aspects of the social wage and parts of the capitalist state. If we apply Marx’s theory – that the fall of the profit rate demands drastic action – than privatizing as many state functions as possible is a net gain for capital. Teachers are to be replaced by private internet schools. Road maintenance will be done by private contractors. Janitorial work is to be outsourced. Getting rid of the ‘social wage’ and various benefits increases the pressure on the remaining workers, which allows capital to increase the rate of exploitation. Getting rid of taxes on capital increases profits. The capitalists will only preserve the repressive and pro-corporate aspects of the state – and perhaps fire-fighting – but everything else will be corporatized.

Makes sense to me. The leadership of both capitalist parties approve solving the profit ‘deficit’ and their own massive debt by cutting into the hides of the working class. The only difference is in just how to do that. On Wisconsin!

Like all books, the book is far more complex than any overview.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 2/28/2011

A Response to the “High Priests of Modern Economic Quackery"

2011-02-09T21:17:00.009-06:00

“Global Slump – The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance,” by David McNally, 2011.

The recent crisis in capital has brought forth a slew of new Marxist analyses, as Marxism seems to be the only tradition that is able to clearly understand what is going on. David McNally is another Marxist professor, this time from Toronto, Canada, and also seems to be a long-time activist. McNally has some differences with Mezaros’s theory of a 40-year crisis (reviewed bel0w). He also de-emphasizes the ‘financialization’ meme promoted by the Monthly Review writers (also reviewed below), and emphasizes a more traditional Marxist interpretation of booms, busts and industrial capital during the last 40 years. I do not think, however, he radically differs with either approach – he adds a more grounded nuance, and his book is a welcome and clear addition to the ‘genre.’

McNally starts off reminding of us of how absolutely crushing the collapse of the financial and credit systems were. Starting in August 2007, it lead to the collapse of Bear Stearns, IndyMac, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, Northern Rock, RBS, HSBC Holdings, culminating in the September 15, 2008 crash of Lehman. AIG, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, GM, Chrysler and others followed – all told 8 major banks in the U.S. and 20 in Europe went under. Tim Geithner: ‘The U.S. risked a complete collapse of our economic system.’ Greenspan suffered “shocked disbelief.” Greenspan: “The whole intellectual edifice” of modern financial economics “had collapsed.” $35T in assets disappeared in 6 months. As McNally puts it, ‘the world’s ruling class lost its swagger.’ The “Efficient Market Hypothesis” was in shambles - the all-knowing ‘market’ had a hemorrhage. But instead of dying, the patient has been transfused with the blood of many millions of workers – and now perpetual austerity is on the table for everyone in the world except the rich. So who’s eating who for dinner?

How did this happen? McNally focuses on several events not usually discussed, which lead up to the present situation. He focuses on the end of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, which allowed the dollar to go off the gold standard and change to a floating exchange rate. Secondly, he points to the Volcker Shocks, starting in 1979 under Carter, and then in the 80s under Reagan. McNally thinks that the 1982 Volcker shock (monetary shocks run by the Federal Reserve which consisted of raising interest rates to kill inflation) ushered in the era of neo-liberalism, which brought profit rates back up for a long time – 25 years - until 2007. And indeed, after a slumps in the 1970s (3 recessions in 10 years), corporate profits began to rise after brutal attacks on the working class. These were first administered in the U.S. by Carter against the UMW miners strike in 1979, followed by Maggie Thatcher against the English coal miners’ NUM. The period coincided with the rise of Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” after the 'success' of the first international attempt at neo-liberalism – the fascist coup in Chile in 1973.

So McNally’s pattern is:
A. Post-War Expansion – 1948-1973
B. World Slump – 1973-1982
C. Neo-Liberal Expansion – 1982-2007
D. World Slump – 2007-?

I think for the most part this fits the facts. The decline in profit rates and over-production in the 1970s (McNally prefers the term ‘over accumulation’ but I think that is a deceptive word…) could only be answered by an increase in labor productivity. That is speedup in the blue-collar world or multi-tasking in the white collar world - both mean working like a dog. Legal changes played a role as well - the increased use of the legal category 'exempt' allowed employers to work ordinary workers overtime for no extra pay. And technological changes also apply: Blackberries allowed workers to be on call at all moments. Most important, 1980 was the mass introduction of personal computers, which helped increase productivity for a time. Increased labor productivity was also achieved through the disciplining of the world workforces, from Chile to England to the U.S. No worker who lived through the 1980s will forget the severe recessions, sharp strikes and defeats of the labor movement at that time. Real wages were reduced 11% during that decade. But labor productivity was up by 2% per year – so the rate of labor exploitation increased, and profits rose.

McNally backs up his thesis with discussions of increases in world growth in some major 3rd world economies during this period, like India & China. This coincides with the shift of part of the productive capacity of the advanced capitalist countries to the global “South” – something we all experienced. He contends that no explanation of capital can be limited to the U.S and Europe alone, as the system works as one. However, he does not specifically discuss what role the non-capitalist sectors of the world economy played at the time – the USSR, Eastern Europe and China. These accounted during this period for almost 40% of world economic production, and that would seem to be a significant fact. This is a common failing among western Marxist economists. He does later address some events in China during this period, however.

McNally contends that when Nixon went off the gold standard to protect the outflow of gold to other countries in 1971, this move actually introduced ‘financialization’ into the economic body. It ended a stable world price system. Trading in minute currency fluctuations created a new, massive, purely speculative market. Currency trading later had a bigger volume than trading in goods and services. The first derivatives were currency derivatives. Later, it lead to liquid assets being able to flow in and out of economies in days. This is his answer to those who think only ‘deregulation’ brought the 2007 crash on. The end of Bretton Woods predates ‘deregulation’ by many years. After currencies, anything could become a part of the speculative economy – even disaster ‘puts’ could be sold.

During the neo-liberal period, the IMF/World Bank-induced debt of the “Third” world / global “South’ was derived from ‘enclosing the commons’ - seizing common or individually-owned land, public property, public resources. It also included enriching western bankers with massive debt repayments – and that process is still going on. After 15 years of ‘free trade,’ 80% of Mexicans live below the poverty line, and .3% of the population owns 50% of Mexican wealth. When neo-liberalism was imposed on the USSR and eastern Europe, massive public goods were sold to private investors - including former 'Communists" - for a song. McNally’s contribution is including China in his analysis – starting first in 1978 when land in China was privatized and the communes ended, public health-care eliminated, state enterprises sold off, and “Special Economic Zones’ run by foreign capital instituted. 35 million workers lost their jobs in state-owned enterprises during this period.

Presently the Chinese working-class is double the working-class of the G7 industrial nations – it is the largest in the world. Yet the Chinese working-class' own wages and conditions have been deteriorating due the global slump too. Millions have lost their jobs and been sent back to the countryside. The working-class share of the GNP has dropped from 50% to 37%. China’s 250,000 millionaires now control 70% of the countries wealth. And as any Marxist knows, (even if you already believe China is capitalist) the growth of such a monied capitalist class indicates that they are growing in power, and quite clearly overlap with the bureaucracy. A transition to full capitalism can easily be made by a bureaucracy with these kind of contacts, because they themselves have the inside track on ownership of state and private assets. This is what happened in the USSR before and after its dissolution in 1989. The dynamics in China are crucial in some sense to what is happening in the world economy and the dearth of information from pro-China organizations is a telling indicator of trouble. Certainly, defenders of Chinese 'socialism' who cannot explain what is going on in China now don't deserve the name.

McNally ends his book with a role call of the struggles against neo-liberalism that are occurring now, and have occurred in the recent past: The Cochabamba uprising in Bolivia in 2000 (which lead to the presidential victory of Evo Morales); the Oaxaca Commune in Mexico in 2006; the sit-downs at Republic Windows & Doors in Chicago in 2008, and similar sit-downs in Iceland, China, Britain, Ireland and numerous ‘boss-nappings’ in France; the worker uprisings in Martinique and Guadalupe in 2009; the 2010 mass resistance in Greece and general strikes across Europe in answer to the sovereign debt crisis. We can now add the 2011 mass revolt in Egypt and other middle-eastern countries to the list.

Whether these struggles can be broadened and linked together is key. Capital operates on an international scale, with international cooperation. McNally points out that a Commune in one city like Oaxaca for 5 months cannot withstand the death-dealing police and military, without aid from the working-class in the rest of the nation, and other nations. He praises recent efforts of the left to build united fronts - such as the joint block of left organizations in Greece and the French Anti-Capitalist Party - as promising attempts against sectarianism.

As Lula, the former leader of the Brazilian Workers Party said last week, “Capitalism is dead.” However, perhaps the frequency of zombie movies in American culture has something to say in answer to that.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, February 9, 2011

The Fate of Fascism

2011-01-30T12:06:00.007-06:00

“Enemy at the Gates,” by William Craig (2000)

In 2001, ‘Enemy at the Gates’ was made into a film focused on the Soviet sniper Vassili Ziatsev and his actions at Stalingrad, including a love affair with Tania Chernova, another Soviet sniper. This is the book the film was partly based on - though Ziatsev plays only a small part in this book. Craig uses a partly novelistic treatment of the battle, one of the most crucial armed confrontations in world history, combining numerous personal stories on both sides with an overall description of events. Unlike many badly-written war books, it does not just concern itself solely with the sterile and microscopic movements of units and armies.

It was in Russia and China that the overwhelming bulk of World War II fighting took place, as fascism’s key target was the labor movement, the Soviet state and the Chinese Red Army. The Battle of Stalingrad saw perhaps the greatest casualty figures of any battle in warfare - estimates are between 1,250,000 and 1,798,619. The battle began on 17 July 1942. By the winter of 1942–43, German forces controlled 90% of the city, and had cornered the Soviets into two narrow pockets. On November 19, Soviet forces launched a massive counterattack, eventually encircling the Sixth German Army. On January 31, 1943 its commander, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, surrendered and the Battle of Stalingrad was over. The 68th anniversary is tomorrow, and all opponents of fascism should celebrate.

Little is now left of the devastation visited on the city and people of Stalingrad. Craig describes the fighting from house to house, sewer to sewer, room to room and factory to factory over the months. Buildings, basements and the biggest hill in the city, Mamaev Hill, changed hands numerous times. The Soviet 62nd army eventually lost control of nearly everything in the city except some caves along the Volga and bits of factories and apartment buildings in the northern part of the city. Supplies and men had to be brought across the river by ships, which were bombed by the German air-force on crossing. At a certain point, the ice flows stopped all shipping. The defenders of Stalingrad (now Volvograd, formerly Tsaritsyn) were starved for food, men and ammunition, until a day in December when the ice backed up and bridges could be built across the ice.

The names of the factories – the Lazur Plant, the Red October, the Barrikady Gun Factory and the Tractor Factory - have gone into legend. At the start of the battle, when German Panzer units arrived on the north end of Stalingrad, workers downed tools, took up rifles and machine-guns and marched to meet them. Unpainted T-34s from the Red October plant were driven off the assembly lines and right into battle. The workers’ militia held out for weeks against the Panzers until regular troops could arrive. In the southern part of the city individual unit leaders like Lt. Anton Dragan, Col. Ivan Lyudnikov and Sgt Jacob Pavlov fought for days in close quarters to slow and eventually stop the German Sixth Army. Pavlov held an apartment building on Solechnaya Street for 58 days, and eventually he made it to Berlin.

The Nazi penetration this deep into the Soviet Union was not an accident. Stalin’s actions prior to the invasion by Germany left the Soviet Union unprepared. His execution of the majority of the Red Army’s officer corps for being ‘Trotskyists’ and ‘fascist sympathizers’ lead to a great shortage of qualified officers. His execution of the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee further disorganized the Soviet Union. And after signing a pact with Hitler in 1939, (notice, Trotsky did not sign this pact…) Stalin believed that the English were the main enemy and the Germans would not invade - in spite of massive Soviet intelligence to the contrary. As a result, the Red Army was far less prepared than they could have been when the assault finally did happen. This lead to a massive collapse in the face of German armies, leading to millions of deaths and came close to ending the Soviet workers state. Right after the German invasion had rolled to the gates of Moscow, the staff of the Soviet state finally visited the shaken Stalin. He thought he would be shot for incompetence. He was not. Unsurprisingly.

Fortunately there were still some competent generals left. Generals Vassili Chuikov, Rodion Malinovsky (who later worked with Khrushchev), Alexander Rodimtsev, Konstantin Rokossovsky, Andrei Yeremenko and political commissar Nikita Khrushchev all participated in the battle. Yeremenko, who lead the initial defense of the city and succeeded in halting Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army south of Stalingrad, later wrote a book criticizing Stalin for the defeats of 1941. Rodimtsev lead the 13th Guards division at Stalingrad, which was decimated in building-to-building fighting in the city, but made the capture of the city extremely costly to the Nazis.

Chuikov was one of the engineers of the pincer movement which broke through the Italian and Hungarian armies north of Stalingrad, and joined forces coming from the south at Sovetsky to completely surround the Sixth Army in the ‘Kessel’ (Cauldron). Hitler had forbidden the Sixth Army from trying to break out and kept telling Paulus they would air-lift enough supplies to help him fight on until a relief force arrived. Enough supplies never arrived, due to stormy winter weather and the increasingly strong Soviet air-force. The relief force was stopped 20 miles from Paulus’ lines. Hitler essentially condemned his army to death for the glory of the Third Reich, as he thought leaving Stalingrad would be an admission of defeat.

One of he oddest parts of this story is the statistics kept by German censors, who read all the letters sent by the troops. From their letters, even at the very end, many soldiers refused to believe that the German Army could be defeated. This is a good example of false consciousness.

After the surrender, as Khrushchev pointed out, many German, Romanian, Italian and Hungarian soldiers (their ‘coalition of the willing’…) were shot; hundreds of thousands died in prison camps or on the way to camps by starvation, cold and execution – Craig puts the number at around 400,000. The most grotesque part of this was that cannibalism developed inside the camps, as some prisoners killed and ate others. The majority of prisoners never made it back home, and of those, some not until 1949, and the most hard-core, not until 1955.

If there is one World War II battle that should be studied, this is that battle, and Craig's book is a clear guide. It was the Soviet people and the Soviet working class that finally stopped Hitler, though at great, great cost. Drink a shot of Stolichnaya on January 31 to commemorate their struggle and remember the departed. Na zdorovye! Za vashe zdorovie!

Red Frog
January 30, 2011

Socialism - not just for Europeans anymore

2011-01-16T13:50:00.005-06:00

“The Structural Crisis of Capital,” by István Mézáros, 2010

Mézáros is a former comrade of Georg Lukacs, who left Hungary in 1956 and is now a professor of philosophy and Marxism at the University of Sussex in the UK. Like many European Marxists, he was schooled in Marxism in the universities, not just in the streets. This is a collection of essays (and interviews) written from the 1970s to the present, which give a flavor of his thinking and his most famous book - “Beyond Capital” – a book copiously studied by Hugo Chavez.

The main point that Mézáros makes is that capital (not just capitalism) has been in a long ‘creeping’ structural crisis since the late 1960s / early 1970s. This is not to be confused with any ‘long boom’ or ‘long wave,’ a theory he negates. He seems to identify the end of the ‘profitable conjuncture’ after World War II with the events of May-June 1968 in France; the end of Bretton Woods under Nixon, which turned the U.S, away from the gold standard in the early 70s; and paying for the war in Vietnam. He calls it, following George McGovern, the development of “credit card capitalism.’ Mézáros closely parallels the thesis of Baran and Sweezy that capital abandoned insufficient profits from production activities, and responded to the crisis by switching over to a more profitable emphasis on finance capital. Capital intentionally ‘de-industrialized’ Europe and the United States to accomplish this.

From his analysis, the present seems unlike the period prior to World War II, when boom/busts were the normal capitalist cycle. The final seizure of world monopoly power by the U.S. after the war issued in a different situation. Boom/busts were then exported to the subjugated nations of the world instead of being primarily located in the imperial centers. Of course, this is still going on. In addition, the stabilizing role of the non-market USSR and eastern Europe ended in 1989. These were areas in which capital did not yet directly control their economies, and hence did not suffer from instability. Because capital has intimately spread across nearly every part of the globe now, including the former non-capitalist areas, exporting busts to other countries is becoming much more dangerous. Because capital is now exporting the bust to ITSELF. As a result, capital has even less insulation from a crisis. In fact, if it was not for the only partly-capitalist Chinese economy, it is transparent that the present capital crisis would be much deeper.

Drawing from this perspective, Mézáros sees that the global character of this structural crisis reflects a terminal phase of capital. It is terminal because it is no longer confined to one or several nations, and it is terminal because of the massive scale of debt, unpredictability and environmental dead-ends involved. Essentially the debt is unpayable. No amount of Krugmanesque left-Keynesianism or trade-union bargaining or shop-steward grievances can change what is happening to the system as a whole. As a result, he sees a growing opportunity for the working class and revolutionaries to take advantage of this systemic weakness. In that sense, Mézáros is a hugely optimistic thinker.

Instead of describing the variegated essays as a whole, I am going to bullet-point some of his specific thoughts.

1. Mézáros praises Marcuse for identifying how labor had been integrated into capital’s structure. But he thinks Marcuse’s conclusion – that capital was now ‘managed’ and that welfare capitalism was ‘permanent,’ and that hence the working class was no longer the revolutionary class – was mistaken. As he wryly notes, exporting manual labor to other countries does not remove the working class from history. He cites Marx, who even in the 1800s pointed out the growing proletarianization of every phase of white-collar and service industry work - much of which still exists in the advance capital countries. This proletarianization continues today.

2. Mézáros has an essay on the “Bolivarian Revolution” – praising Chavez and Morales, and indicating the absolutely central role of ‘substantive equality’ in the socialist project. This equality was first articulated by Enlightenment thinkers like Jean Jacque Rousseau, and later made specific to Latin America by Simon Rodriquez, Jose Marti, Simon Bolivar and now Chavez. He feels the project of uniting all of Latin America against U.S. domination is becoming more and more possible.

3. Mézáros believes the theory of ‘socialism in one country’ over any length of time was and is absolutely untenable, and has been proven so by history. He quotes Lenin to the effect that even in Russia it was a ‘holding action.’ Capital continues to exert pressure on any post-capitalist society and will restore capitalism there, barring world-wide revolutions. Mézáros distinguishes between ‘overthrowing the capitalists’ and actually ending capital’s power, which demands something more - a ‘permanent revolution,’ according to Mézáros

4. Capital is unable to plan, and only makes a feeble attempt after the fact of a great crisis or collapse – he slyly calls it ‘planning post festum.’ Hence instability is endemic, and unknown ‘crises’ – black swans as the market now calls them – can crush the existing economic and social relations in a heartbeat. Capital can never take ‘responsibility’ because even capital does not understand how their own system works. For instance, none of the heads of government or banks issued a mea culpa after the most recent collapse. Mézáros feels planning is central to the socialist project, but it must be planning resulting from the democratic control of the process by the associated producers – not from above, nor through fake, partial planning.

5. The present capitalist crisis involved the ‘nationalization’ of the debts of the banking system to the tune of trillions of dollars, to be paid for by the tax-payer and the working class. The purpose is then to return the banks to private profitability – something the British government did after WWII. This is not true nationalization, of course, but shows that capital cannot rescue itself, but needs its government to extort money out of the population to do so. Mézáros believes that at some point the U.S. will declare bankruptcy. The sovereign debt crisis wracking the E.U. may well be a prelude to this. The debt will never be repaid due to its uncontrollable size.

6. Mézáros thinks that a ‘radicalization of the still primarily reformist trade union movement’ in every country is the answer to the crisis of capital, as ‘the goods’ can no longer be delivered in the way they were after WWII. In a way, it means going back to the beginning.

7. The collapse of the French and Italian Communist Parties, the British Labour Party and others were all part of the capital crisis, as reformism no longer had ground to stand on.

8. Capital is undermining their own systems of social control, by making more blatant their control of educational institutions, cultural entities, political parties and religious organizations. The ‘advanced’ capitalist societies are ‘tolerant’ only to a certain point, but ‘not beyond the point where protest starts to become effective and turns into a genuine social challenge to the perpetuation of the society of repressive tolerance.’

9. Mézáros believes the socialist movement has to become less defensive, and more aggressive in promoting a positive socialist vision of the future – as Marx called socialism humanity’s ‘positive self-consciousness.’ Substantive equality (not mere legal equality), dispositive time (not spent slaving), liberty from want and calamity, solidarity, cooperation and responsibility – all values of a socialist project, need to be promoted in the face of de-humanized profiteering. Like Chavez, Mézáros feels there is little time in which to respond to the social, economic and environmental crises at hand. This cannot happen by ‘regulation’ or by tinkering with some economic category, as is the favorite hobby-horse of Krugman and other liberals, but through a re-politicization of politics by the masses of people.

10. According to Mézáros, world wars, those most efficient generators of production and outlets for capital formation, have become impossible. Small wars will multiply, but a large war is simply unaffordable. Even the 'small' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have pushed the U.S. towards insolvency.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 1/16/2011

Not for the Faint of Heart

2011-01-03T22:08:00.010-06:00

“In the Crossfire - Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary,” by Ngo Van, 2010.

Most of the books available in the US on the struggles in Vietnam are written from either an American perspective or from the perspective of Ho Chi Minh. This book reflects the independent views and activities of the extremely militant labor, national and Marxist movements in Saigon in the 20s to the late 40s, written by a former supporter of the 4th International, who became a supporter of council-communism after his forced move to France. Ignorance of the history of the Vietnamese labor and peasant movements before the “American’ war is rife among the U.S. left, and this book is a good cure.

In Van’s time, nearly every revolutionary outside the Vietminh died. They were either killed by the French Secret Police - the Surete - in executions or jails; by the Vietminh themselves in planned assassinations and murders; by various criminal gangs, or by the Japanese. Van survived all by escaping.

The Trotskyists had a large following in Saigon and the surrounding areas. They were instrumental in many strikes, in forming workers’ militias, in supporting independent peasant actions, in publishing classic works of Trotsky and others, like Harold Isaacs “The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution,” and in being repeatedly elected to the Saigon City Council in the mid and late 30s over the representatives of the Stalinist ICP. Hence their existence was a threat to the ICP’s control of the people’s movement. As a result, some of Van's comrades were killed in a mass murder of Trotskyists and their supporters by Vietminh death squads in Thu Dau Mot in September 1945, on orders of the Indochinese Communist Party (“ICP”). The ICP formed the leadership of the Vietminh. Another group, including Chinese Trotskyists, were killed and tortured in Bien Hoa in 1950. Former Stalinists would issue orders to execute those they had once worked and shared jail cells with.

The book is written in the style of a memoir, with a haunting section in the middle devoted to the mostly forgotten dead revolutionaries Van knew. This includes the most famous Vietnamese Trotskyist, Ta Thu Thau, who was the leader of the “La Lutte” group, and who Van had some differences with. “La Lutte’ was a joint publication of the Marxists in Saigon, including both the Trotskyists and the Stalinists. They collaborated together for 5 years until 1937 when Moscow ordered, through the French CP, that their supporters in Vietnam stop working with the ‘twin brothers of fascism.’ La Lutte continued under sole Trotskyist leadership and Thau was again elected in 1939 to the Saigon City Council. Smelling the coming apocalypse, the French denounced Thau as someone who would ‘take advantage of a possible war in order to win total liberation.’ Which, of course, was the plan.

The differences between the two sides were stark, as the ICP for many years formed a ‘popular front’ with the bourgeois elements in Vietnam, similar to policy in Spain and China. As a result, they opposed independent action by the working class and peasants. During the period of the 1920-1947 covered in this book, the ICP opposed workers strikes and occupations, urban people’s committees, peasant seizures of land and peasant ‘soviets,’ a coal-miners Commune of 30,000 workers in Hongai-Campha, and arming the population. As part of the people's movement, the Trotskyists formed a street-car workers’ militia in Saigon. The ICP's position was all consistent with the ICP pledge of working with ‘progressive’ bourgeois elements. The ICP used violent methods to oppose these developments, not just propaganda. As the Vietminh (ICP) minister of the interior Nguyen Van Tao put it, “Those who are encouraging the peasants to take over landed property will be punished without mercy.”

The Vietminh blocked with Blum’s popular front government in the 1930s, even though during the French popular front, the French government continued activities against the Vietnamese popular movements. At one point, the ICP supported defencist measures sponsored by the French colonial government against the Japanese, like promoting war bonds and promoting a French military draft of Vietnamese. A post-war insurrection in Saigon in 1945 was crushed, partly because the ICP did not pose a clear alternative to the French, unlike the position of the Trotskyists. In 1946 Ho formed a block with General LeClerc that disarmed the Vietnamese masses, and allowed the French to re-conquer Vietnam after the defeat of the Japanese. What is the significant factor here is that whatever the Soviet line was, the local CP had to follow it, even if it contradicted the needs of the local working class.

Born in 1912, Van himself grew up in a poor peasant home north of Saigon, and, after failing to get into some critical schools due to lack of influence, lived in Saigon. In the ‘20s he involved himself in the revolutionary movement. He met many prominent activists while in prison or on the run and in hiding, was deported to Phnom Penh, was almost killed several times, and his remembrances form the heart of the book. In 1937 while an activist in Saigon, he wrote pamphlets denouncing the fraudulent Moscow Trials, and some criticisms of Thau for working with the Stalinists on “La Lutte.” This book incidentally exposes the violent history of two of Ho’s successors, Pham Van Dong and Ton Duc Thang. Both involved in murdering a woman ICP comrade who had fallen in love with the wrong person, and both did jail time for the murder.

After emigrating to France in 1948 to avoid certain death, Van settled in Paris, and eventually got electrical technician jobs at various factories. All the while he suffered from tuberculosis, contracted in Vietnam, and in hospital learned to paint. He met many expatriate Vietnamese, some of the 40,000 soldiers and civilians drafted and deported to France by the French to serve the French Army during World War II. While in France, he wrote and published a massive and detailed history of the Vietnamese struggle, in two volumes, covering 1920 to 2005, which is still in print. He also met many people who had fought in Spain or had left the Trotskyist movement to become either 'third' campists or council communists. He later became a ‘council communist,’ working with “News & Letters” and others. Van grew to reject not just the Leninist idea of the party, but Soviet defencism, including the Ho regime in Vietnam. Given his experiences in the struggle there, it is somewhat understandable. Van wrote about the French 1968 events from his position as a factory worker, noting the conservatizing influence of the French CP in his factory, which flew the tri-color and the red flag – literally, and politically - during the 1968 events, and the CP role in limiting and ending the rebellion.

Van’s principled opposition to the popular front reveals the misguided strategy of Stalinist reformism. Only when the Vietnamese CP, in practice, was forced to ronouce popular front 'strategy' did they overthrow private capitalism in Vietnam - though this happened only after decades of bloody 'mistakes' and massacres. This delayed the revolution by three or more decades - and also guaranteed that any victory would be deformed from the beginning. Instead of the working class and peasantry holding power, the CP bureaucracy took power in their 'name.' Any bureaucracy engenders capitalist counter-revolution, a process that has already succeeded in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and is well advanced in China. And it is even developing in Vietnam itself.

In China this process is through intense collaboration with international capital, through the encouragement of a national capitalist class - some out of the ranks of the CCP, through graft and privilege, and most of all, by ignoring workers democracy, weakening or destroying ties with the working class and farmers. When the Party is no longer seen as representing anyone but themselves, counter-revolution is inevitable. The real communist slogan, after all, is "all power to the Soviets," not "all power to the Communist Party."

It is to the courageous mass movements and revolutionaries in and around Saigon that we owe this understanding, who learned it with their own blood.

Red Frog,
January 3, 2011

Some Noir, Ce Soir?

2010-12-11T18:57:00.004-06:00

“Indian Country Noir,” edited by Sarah Cortez & Liz Martinez. Various Authors

Indian country noir seems a redundant phrase. White Earth or Pine Ridge reservations are not places of ‘blanc-itude.’ Nor has the history of American natives been anything but a long tale of misery – as one character says, ‘loss’ is the primary experience of life. These short stories bear this out, in their own way - alcohol, anger, crime, unemployment, PTSD and death form the sub-texts. White racism is a constant in the background, but the natives get their revenge. Of course, death is the sub-text of any kind of noir, even ‘Twin Cities Noir.’ Twin Cities noir seems a screaming contradiction in terms, but is also part of this Noir series by Akashic Books. This Native American collection is written by Native American and Anglo authors, set all over the country –including Puerto Rico, among the Taino.

The best stories deal with strangers or people who do not know each other well, suddenly ‘falling out’ – in a planned way. That new sexy, attractive man or woman who leads you down the garden path ... six feet under? Or the big dollars waved under your nose that end ... in a casket? You’d even be surprised at the number of native PI’s or cops there are. And they all seem to be physically adept and gigantic! Native character, street smarts or courage figure in each tale. The famous story of Pima Ira Hayes is included, who raised the flag on Suribachi on Iwo Jima, only to fall prey to PTSD and alcohol while touring for war bonds.

Some of these stories will stay with you for a long time, because of their grim extremity. They are short, and do not demand a 350-page attention span.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 12/11/10.

Mayday Event - A Blast from the Past (Click on Flier to Read)

2010-12-03T18:21:00.002-06:00

Hey, Deficit Commission!

2010-12-03T18:14:00.001-06:00

Lonely Rebels in Rural America

2010-11-28T18:50:00.007-06:00

“Red State Rebels – Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland,” Edited by Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair, 2008.

What is disappointing about this book is that the examples of rebellion in the ‘red states’ are mostly of individuals or small groups fighting against various environmental, ethnic or political crimes. It not really an optimistic book, though I’m sure it was intended to be one. Only two involve class directly – and one of those is an interview with and article by Joe Bageant, the ‘red-neck’ writer and left commentator. A good part of this book echoes St. Clair’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” about big Green and Democratic Party collaboration with environmental destruction. (Reviewed in the pages below.) The chapter on the racist railroading of the Jena 6 (Jena, Louisiana) involves the largest mass movement – 50,000 descended on that small town to protest the heavy charges and trials of 6 black teenagers accused of getting into a fist fight with some bigots. A rebellion of farmers in North Dakota against Monsanto seed policies involves a large group of farmers who echoed the Non-Partisan League, and beat Monsanto’s police-state approach to seeds. So does the community organizing in New Orleans after Katrina. But other than that, small groups and heroic individuals or pairs tell the tale. This echoes the somewhat anarchist slant of the authors, no doubt. The back of the book makes a point of saying “Marx would be confused” about what is happening in the ‘red states.’ I think not. Rebellion in rural and small-town America is really what this book is about. One story about pro-pot hippie libertarians even comes from Michigan, not traditionally seen as a ‘red state.’

The very phrase ‘red state’ plays into the Fox News narrative about whole states being right-wing…which of course the authors don’t believe.

Nearly all the stories set in the old south involve minorities, and minorities fighting against racism in its various forms, which figures. There are no white people except some peace activists in Alabama and Kentucky. So if you are looking for optimism in the south spreading beyond some black people, you will not find it here.

The best story is a deep history of Butte, Montana, and the vicious extractive economy run by Anaconda Copper for many years, crushing labor and environmentally destroying Butte. It is brutal in its clarity. A chapter on the rape of Western Shoshone lands by various gold mining companies, while the federal government stands by and demands the Native American’s sell their land for pennies an acre – in 2010 – is again shocking. The government refuses to pay the tribes money they were contractually obligated to pay. Nothing has changed as far as broken treaties are concerned, folks. The FBI blood circus at Ruby Ridge is detailed for all to see – the dead are incidental and the FBI killers free to shoot again. A story on a feminist and environmentalist shrimp-boat captain in Texas is surprising in its toughness, and contrasts well with the typical views of bourgeois feminism.

The book ends with a section on secessionist movements, irrespective of political intent. The right-wing Alaska independistas around the Palins, and various conservative or libertarian secessionist southerners (like Republicans in Texas), are lumped in with progressive secessionists like those in Vermont. I have favored the secession of Minnesota from the United States for many years. If Minnesota would see fit to join Canada, I'd be in favor of that. I'd be in favor of a socialist Minnesota, unlikely as that would be. But I would NOT favor secession if it resulted in a MORE reactionary state.

This is again a hard book to read. Too much has gone desperately wrong. Reading this, it is ever more evident that only a link-up of most of these forces in a nationwide, mass oppositional party can have a hope of beating the capitalist steamroller. The authors do detail the efforts of the western Green Party and other independent political formations, which unfortunately have not been successful. Lawsuits, civil disobedience and community organizing are the main tools being used here. The big gun - a progressive party - is still on the shelf.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 11/28/2010

Audiences Will Sleep

2010-11-22T18:03:00.007-06:00

“Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps,” by Oliver Stone, 2010

If you were expecting a sequel to the original film, 1987’s “Wall Street,” you’ll be disappointed. Yes, mentions are made of credit default swaps, derivatives, the real-estate bubble, short-selling, self-dealing, ‘too-big-to-fail’ and ‘moral hazard’ – but only briefly, and only to give the film an air of reality. Yes, a firm paralleling Goldman Sachs is the villain of the story, and a firm that looks like Lehman Brothers is the ‘tragic’ heroes of insolvency. But what this story really is, is the story of a sad daughter who hates Daddy Gekko. And the potential son-in-law who tries to bring them together. Gag.

The film is littered with unrealities. The daughter is a leftie blogger who takes up with a guy who works as an investment banker on Wall Street. Right. The rat-like investment banker seems to be only stuck on one investment and one product – fusion energy. Yet he’s considered some kind of investing genius since he was 12-years old. OK. Somehow grey-haired but charming Gordon figures out a way to get his potential son-in-law to wire him a $100,000,000. Right. Gekko spends 8 years in jail, instead of the actual 2 years that Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky really spent in jail. Right. The latter was the one who really said that ‘greed is healthy.’ Gordon Gekko gives speeches that sound more like Paul Krugman than Milken or Boesky. (Voicing Stone, no doubt.) The potential son-in-law gives up a lucrative job with Goldman’s stand-in because he thinks the head of the company is a nasty brute. Right. The head of the ersatz Lehman Brothers nobly commits suicide after the company goes belly-up. Right. It never happened. At the end, the leftie blogger, potential son-in-law and Gordon all agree to back the scientific oddity of fusion power, which brings this happy trio together. Right.

Michael Douglas plays Gekko in all the creepy vanity that Douglas can conjure. And yet ends up trying to be the good Dad by giving $100M to ‘fusion’ energy, which Gekko calls part of “the next bubble, right?” (The green bubble…) All just because he sees an ultrasound of his daughter’s baby. Gag.

The film does show the ridiculous amounts of money that investment bankers earn for their ‘pitches’ and hunches. Son-In-Law is given a 1.4M bonus by ersatz Lehman. They drink expensive champagne and party with models/hookers/gold-diggers. They buy expensive rings. They buy expensive cars and motorcycles. They live in expensive apartments and houses. They go to expensive fund-raisers and hob-nob with the rest of the ruling class. This should not be news to anyone except the intentionally dense.

The best scenes are the ones where an ersatz Hank Paulson summons the “Rockerfellerian” rulers of Wall Street to a long-table meeting in some ancient oak-paneled club hall. The ambiance of 'robber baron' hovers over it like a bad smell. Here the bankers and the government decide to save the banking system with a bail-out, and yet let Lehman go under. Truly a small peek at who rules America. The bigger the criminal, the more access they have to the government. And there is no real vote, except at this table. The rest is just details.

Skip this film unless you are a glutton for trivia.

Red Frog,
11/22/2010, the day the CIA and FBI killed John Kennedy.

Duh! We Shuda Knowed!

2010-11-16T19:46:00.011-06:00

Clintonites, Republicans, Friedmanites, Reaganites, one progressive and a couple of innocuous clucks. Take a look at the Initial Obama Cabinet and Staff:

Rahm Emmanuel - Managed fight for NAFTA, Likudnik, Goldman Sachs, Clintonista. Gone, but not forgotten.
Robert Gibbs - Press Secretary. Was unknown, but now identified as a neo-liberal. Attacked ‘professional leftists.’
John Podesta - Head of Transition Team (was Clinton chief of staff).
Sam Nunn & Warren Christopher - State/Defense Transition, Clintonistas.
Madeleine Albright, Economic Envoy to G20, a Clintonista.
Eric Holder - Attorney General - Deputy Atty General, Clinton administration. Has now endorsed all Bush legal policies on Guantanamo, spying, detentions, etc.
Tom Daschle - Health & Human Services - long term senator. Lobbyist of health care companies at his law firm.
Hillary Clinton - Sec of State - Clinton's wife. ‘Nuff said.
Dana Pelligrino - Dept of Homeland Security, recommended sending national guard troops to border – and did! AZ governor.
Bill Richardson - Commerce Secretary, Clinton UN Ambassador, Energy Secretary, withdrew due to ‘conflicts of interest.’
Judd Gregg, Republican #1, became Commerce Secretary
Joe Liberman - Kept as head of key Senate Committee. VP on Gore Liberman ticket. Gore was Clinton's VP.
Tim Geithner - Treasury Department, former Summers protege/Clinton period. Federal Reserve / Goldman insider.
Larry Summers - Head of Financial Policy Board in cabinet, Clintonista and pro-deregulation.
Christina Romer - Head of Counsel of Economic Advisors. A Friedmanite.
Robert Gates - Secretary of Defense, was Bush Secretary of Defense. Republican, #2. Pro-surge in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Susan Rice - UN Ambassador, Supported Invasion of Iraq. Former Clinton Sec of State officer.
Arne Duncan - Sec of Education. Obama friend. Supports "No child left behind" , supported by the professional Republican centrist David Broder of NYT. Endorses charter schools and privatization.
Lisa Jackson - EPA, career EPA official. And we know how the EPA has been doing.
Carol Browner - Environmental coordinator, Clintonista.
Ken Salazar - Dept of Interior - (Clintonista) Supported Republican Alberto Gonzalez. Did not close the Bureau of Mines Management as he promised, then changed it a bit after the BP oil spill. Timber/Mining/Ranchers like him. Clinton-like politics on environmentalism. Which means nice talk, pro-corporate acts.
Tom Vilsack - Agriculture - Supporter of industrial agriculture, bio-tech, agribusiness, pro-ethanol, friend of Monsanto.
Steven Chu - Energy Secretary. Scientist. However, got $500M from British Petroleum for bio-fuels research. Supports nuclear power.
Hilda Solis - Dept of Labor, very pro-labor. Best pick of bunch. Totally quiet. Did not push “Free Choice Act.” Heard she is quietly strengthening OSHA.
Mary Shapiro - SEC, former head of NASD/FINRA. A proponent of industry self-regulation. SEC appointee, by Reagan initially.
James Jones - National Security Advisor - Hardline, Pro Vietnam War. Clintonite/McCainite. NATO and Afghan war-monger.
Dennis Blair - Director of National Intelligence - 4 star admiral. Hmmmm.
Roy Lahood, Transportation Secretary. Republican #3. 'Nuff said.
Shaun Donovon- HUD, Clintonista.
Ron Kirk - US Trade Representative - Attorney at Vinson & Elkins, African American. Dallas Mayor. Chamber of Commerce likes him. Supports 'free trade' and NAFTA.
Dawn Johnsen - Office of Legal Counsel (former Clintonista) but hard critic of presidential overreaching. Was denied nomination, of course.
Virginia Seitz – Office of Legal Counsel. Appreciated by Republicans. Hmmmm.
Leon Panetta - CIA, Clintonista Chief of Staff, but not a prior spy.
Jennifer Granholm - Called Free Choice Act - "Divisive." Obama Economic adviser.
Steven Rattner - Car "Czar" - former Investment banker, knew nothing about the auto industry. Got bailout for GM/Chrysler, which resulted in plant closings and more off-shoring. Recently fined $$$ by SEC.
Ben Bernanke - Chair of the Federal Reserve. Former head of the Fed under Bush too. Head of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. Republican #4.
Barack Obama – President. Initially was thought to be to the left of Hillary Clinton, but revealed to be solidly in the Clinton/neo-liberal camp. Obama won the election but Clinton and the Republicans won the war.

Red Frog
11/16/2010

Overworked Readers Department:

2010-11-13T11:05:00.002-06:00

Progressive Fiction – 1 Line Reviews:

In order to respond to the massive interest in shorter reviews, I give you a fiction roundup that might help pick a book for Solstice:

“The Road – Short Stories” – by Vasily Grossman. The Soviet Tolstoy proves that not everyone in the USSR spent every day in a labor camp.

“The White Tiger” – by Aravind Adiga. Killing your Indian boss is easier and more profitable if you plan it well.

“The Given Day” – Dennis Lehane. In 1919, abused Boston policeman decide to strike instead of breaking strikes.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo” – Stieg Larsson. Rich Swedes enjoy torturing women – but women who know computers and aren’t afraid of violence make it less enjoyable.

“Rage and Reason” – Michael Tobias. Will turn any man into a raging 'kill humans' vegetarian after one read.

“City of Thieves” – David Benioff. Getting eggs in Leningrad during the siege is hilarious hard work.

“Inherent Vice” – Thomas Pynchon. The Dude goes LA noir.

“The Left Left Behind” – Terry Bisson. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the born-again Christians would just get Raptured, and leave us alone?

“The Grass is Singing” – Doris Lessing. South African apartheid even ruins whites.

“Children of Men” – P.D. James. Welcome to the remarkably familiar future prison camps of Britain.

So you want a PhD in Humanities

2010-11-03T17:56:00.000-06:00

Witty Lightweight attacks Marxism -

2010-11-02T19:08:00.005-06:00

“… or the Marxists, working to undermine our Constitution.” – Jon Stewart, Saturday, October 30 at the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/of Fear” in Washington, D.C.

This was part of Stewart’s speech about the people we should REALLY be afraid of – not the normal, everyday people, of course. If this sounds like something from a Republican Tea Party member, its not. Seems to Stewart the Marxists are outside the ‘big tent’ of reason in ‘America.’ Quelle surprise. Of course, this was after a song who’s chorus about the United States was, “The greatest, strongest country in the world.” And this was not irony.

Let’s look at the Constitution, Jon. There are several problems – maybe even many problems. I’ll just name some obvious ones:

#1 – The Senate. It is undemocratic. Large sparsely-populated states have as many votes as populous states. And because of this, thinly-settled states full of conservatives can block any real change - and they have. This was the way it was designed – to prevent the ‘rabble’ from ruling.
#2 – The Supreme Court. These people are in ‘for life.’ It was designed as the most conservative part of the government. Again, to insulate the law from the rabble. Enjoy your corporate Supreme Court until you die, Jon!
#3 – Personhood for corporations – The 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 14th amendments are now applied to corporations. And most recently, corporations gained the ‘right to free speech’ through the 1st amendment. A corporation, which never dies, now has eternal rights, and is no different than a human being. Except it cannot be thrown in jail, fired, executed or otherwise terminated – only fined piddling amounts. Do you have a problem with the Constitution, Jon?
#4 – Representative Democracy – Marxists are for the direct political AND economic rule of the majority of people, the working class, through work-site and geographic counsels. The Russians called them Soviets. We’d like to reduce the use of representative ‘democracy,’ mediated by millionaires and their media. Actually, the Marxist schema is MORE democratic than the bought-and-paid-for ‘representative’ democracy we have now.
#5 – The Electoral College. I don’t think even I have to explain this one. Undemocratic and built to be that way. You don’t actually elect the president. They do.
#6 – Lack of an “economic bill of rights.” Roosevelt wanted one. He wasn’t a Marxist, but he was to the left of Jon Stewart, who must think he was busily undermining the Constitution. A right to housing, food, a job and health care. Not really so radical, and a Marxist would agree. But we are outside the big tent of reason.
#7 - The anti-Federalists, like Jefferson, found many problems with the Constitution as written – mainly giving too much power to the federal government. Fear well-founded. As we see now, our federal government is now all powerful – it has the largest military, arms industry, spy force, prison system, intelligence technology and mercenary army in the world. States cannot secede from the United States legally, even for justified reasons. And the president, who was at one time one of 3 equal branches of government, now declares war on his own. He has become a ‘soft’ dictator if he wants to be.

Jon, these are just a few of the problems of the U.S. Constitution. I think I hit the ‘low’ points. I won’t talk about property relations, but that goes without saying. If you think allowing private corporations to own and control our water, oil, housing, land, health care and food supply, then you should not complain when the corporations exercise their RIGHTS to control these things.

In short, the Constitution undermines itself - or at least the majority of Americans. Sometimes keeping grandma's well-built but shaky parlor chair around for another 100 years might not make sense. It might just be time for a new chair.

Red Frog, 11/2/10

Know Your Enemy

2010-11-01T20:39:00.006-06:00

“To Serve God and Wal-Mart – the Making of Christian Free-Enterprise,” by Bethany Moreton, 2009

Bethany Moreton, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, avoids the typical narrative about Wal-Mart, as depicted in the excellent documentary “The High Cost of Low Prices” or the damning “The Wal-Mart Effect – How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works.” She focuses instead on how Wal-Mart used regionalism, working-class feminism and Christianity to become the Bensonville Beast it is today. There is not a word about cheap Chinese labor, excessively cheap prices or cheaply-made products in the whole book.

In the process, Moreton reveals what was going on during the Reagan ‘80s in the Ozark triangle of Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma – and how it shaped wider corporate America and the “new” Right. Essentially, the dynamics of local money and a rural culture produced an ideology that won over some working class people to ally with corporate America. It tries to answer Thomas Frank’s question, “What is the Matter with Kansas?” … by saying something other than - ‘they’re stupid.’

Homeland of Populism?

Moreton oddly compares Wal-Mart’s rise in the Tri-State Ozark area to the inspiration from the populist traditions in the late 1880s. Indeed, Woody Guthrie was born in Oklahoma, and the socialist “Appeal to Reason” newspaper was published in Girard, Kansas. However, a casual look at WikiPedia shows the populists were strong among “hard-pressed wheat farmers in the plains states, especially Kansas and Nebraska” and “among poor white cotton farmers in the South (especially North Carolina, Alabama and Texas.” The Populist Party was formed in an alliance of small farmers and the Knights of Labor, and was not exclusively a farmer’s party. The Populists carried Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, Kansas and pieces of North Dakota and Oregon in the 1892 election. The Ozark area was carried by the Democrats in 1892. In 1896, a partial fusion with the Democrats in the South under William Jennings Bryan for all intents and purposes destroyed the Populist Party. (The Populists had success blocking with some Republicans in the South and some Democrats in the North prior to this.) Bryan’s big issue in 1896 was “free silver” – which would make it easier for debtors to pay their debts to the north-east bankers. Bryan did directly center his attacks on the big banks and Trusts in the 1908 election, long after the Populists were in their grave, jibing with Teddy Roosevelt and ‘progressivism.’ In that election, however, Bryan lost Missouri. Moreton focuses on the ‘anti-chain-store’ movement during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the Ozarks, which represented a strand of progressivism. This movement supported local businesses, and opposed the large retail chains, mostly from the east, that were shuttering stores in the area. However, the anti-chain store movement was geographically wide - not limited to the Ozarks.

So Moreton’s evidence of the special strength of ‘populism’ as a political movement in the Tri-Ozarks is weak. Most of the South and parts of the West also voted for Bryan. Kansas always had special progressive history, given its role in the fight against slavery. But this is not Ozark territory. “Progressivism,” which became strong in the teens and 20s in the upper-Midwest, is a far more recent phenomenon and should naturally have influenced the alleged populism of the Ozark area. It lead to the rise of the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, William LaFollette in Wisconsin, the Progressive Party of Vermont, the Non-Partisan League in the Dakotas, etc. However, there is very little evidence that ‘progressivism’ was actually strong on the ground in the Ozarks, except in a few areas like mining. Even the leading populist of the 30s in the South, Huey Long, hailed from Louisiana. Nor did the union strike wave of the 30s and 40s affect this mostly rural area, full of small farms and small businesses. Nor was this area a center of activism in the 50s-60s – except among the black population, especially in … Little Rock. And for entirely different reasons - civil rights.

Most small businessmen have a built-in hostility to big banking and big corporations and their government IF they have felt the latter’s financial power. This is not unique to the Ozarks. I think Moreton confuses political ‘populism’ with a natural cultural form of small-town inclusiveness and solidarity, common among farmers and small towners, and a hostility to ‘outsiders’ – like black people and foreigners. This culture is also built upon rural frugality and hard work, both necessary to survive farm or small town life. From the beginning in 1962, Wal-Mart cultivated a regional, “localist” approach, which won them customers in a cultural sense, as customers viewed the store as growing from people like them. This is no different than the ‘buy local’ movement now. It also connects to the anti-chain store movement. In the 1970s it intentionally got funding to expand, not from Wall Street, but from investment bank Stephens Inc., centered in Little Rock, Arkansas. Wal-Mart was not hostile to ‘government’ at the time. Walton took advantage of many government projects and programs, even planning his stores in county seats because government employment brought in steady customers.

Various other Ozark-connected corporations make their appearance in this book – Tyson Foods, Wendys, Sun, Humble and Getty Oil, J.B. Hunt Transport, Halliburton, Am-Way and Holiday Inn, based in Memphis. People like Ross Perot, Sig Sigler, Milton Friedman, Fredrick Hayek, Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton (Wal-Mart board member) and of course, Sam Walton himself put in an appearance.

A Bit of Working-class Feminism / Reproductive Labor

In the process of developing his chain, Walton learned lessons from the legions of working-class white women employed by the firm to check items, stock shelves and sell. The stores were clean, spartan, stocked with useful, inexpensive goods, and the staff was polite. However, to this basic mix, the women hired by Walton, according to Moreton, taught the managers a thing or two about loyalty and sales. These were mostly either farm wives looking for part-time income, or small town women with families, also looking for part-time income. The key here is that the most important thing to them were hours, not wages or benefits – not that the latter were irrelevant, of course. And hours were most important because the category of ‘reproductive labor’ – i.e. having and raising children – was the key issue to these women. Wal-Mart gradually understood this, and made sure schedules were tailored to the family issues that arose.

People who have yet to have children, or who have never had or taken care of children, might not understand this, but reproductive labor is uncompensated. Yet it is key to the survival of the class. The government does little for the reproductive labor issue until children enter the full-time school system in first grade. 6 years go by without any support except tax breaks for children. This small bit of compensation is not sufficient, of course, so families have to create schedules that will make sure someone is always with their kids. And since most families have more than one child, that 6 years can stretch into 15 or more. Daycare in the 60s and on was probably almost non-existent in the Ozarks, so Wal-Mart aided these women with more flexible hours. And of course, they were flexible for profit-reasons, but that is not what the workers saw.

“We don’t get paid much but we sure have a lot of fun.” One older guy I worked with told me this while I worked at Mail-Ex in Chicago (and it was very true – we had a freaking blast!). But this is a window into how a business can get by without paying on the bottom line. At first, Walton treated his workers like cogs, as most businessmen did at that time. But then the managers started to learn from their staff, as Morton puts it, in this new area of ‘retail white collar’ work. The women workers at Wal-Mart began to be recognized by management. Their personal issues, like family graduations or accomplishments, family sickness or deaths, were made important within the stores. The women were allowed a lot of leeway in how they did things – displays, ideas, etc. Some even contributed products. The stores were all in rural communities, and because of this, the women and customers knew each other well – unlike the big city. Because the stores became larger than most local stores, they gradually became the largest group of working people in some towns, and this social comraderie made for more pleasant working conditions. Absent local manufacturing or offices, or retail, “Wal-Mart” became the town’s ‘company store.’ Walmart’s practice - “the customer is always right’ - could be seen as an outgrowth of the attitude of the women working there, not just as a clever profit strategy.

The “Servant Leader” and Masculinity

Moreton links this method of staffing with a concept from evangelical Christianity and later business manuals, called the ‘servant leader.’ This concept, developed in the late 1970s, linked being a male Christian with being both the ‘boss’ and also the ‘servant’ to those who work for you, or who are in your family. Moreton explains that the retail ‘nation of clerks’ which was developing upon the industrial economy ‘emasculated’ men, forcing them into ugly ties, black pants and white shirts, and stuffing them behind desks at low-skilled jobs. And all the while their male contemporaries might be doing physical, assembly or skilled trades work. To counter the loss felt by the overwhelmingly male managers at these new retail establishments, the ‘servant leader’ role saw to it that they served their families, children and wife – while still being the ‘titular’ head of the family. This was later applied to retail management theory, with the staff as the ‘family.’ And this theory was adopted by Wal-Mart, through individuals like Jack Shewmaker, their second-in-command. Male Wal-Mart store managers worked extremely long hours, had to pay supportive attention to their female staff, and were moved from store to store, almost like members of the Socialist Workers Party! This particular Christian faith made serving as a Wal-Mart manager (or cashier) part of your religious life, ‘serving’ customers. “Soft” female relationship skills became valuable in this context, even to men.

Moreton ends the book with a paen to ‘servant leaders’ who fight for progressive causes, like fighting for a living wage in Athens, Georgia. Of course, I wonder how many white Pentecostal ministers have signed on to that campaign.

Christian Colleges / The “Entrepreneur”

As Wal-Mart grew, it realized it needed to recruit staff for its management teams. It looked around the Ozark area and found 3 small Christian/conservative schools that would create business departments concentrating on free enterprise, and partner with Wal-Mart in the process. At this time in the 1970s, conservatives and Christians began promoting or starting business schools in schools all over the country to counter the anti-corporate sentiment on most university campuses. Business became the number one major for many students in the early 80s, though these were not always the best students. Wal-Mart partnered with the College/University of the Ozarks; John E Brown College/University; and Harding College/University. Later they expanded into business ties with the University of Arkansas, Texas A&M, Brigham Young, James Madison, the University of South Carolina, Florida State and Purdue. This aggressive pursuit of academic ties was a precursor to many other corporations increasing their links with higher education, to the point where corporations have more influence than ever before in academic affairs and the pursuit of ‘truth.’

In the process, student organizations like the “Students in Free Enterprise” (SIFE) developed out of the anti-socialist, pro-free enterprise business schools. Wal-Mart adopted SIFE in the Reagan 1980s, and many other corporations followed. It is now in 40 countries. It disguised itself as an ‘educational’ program for elementary, junior and senior high school students, for college students, even for adults. It promoted education that was actually indoctrination, starting with a “Mr. Pencil” that visited children’s class-rooms, who proved that a free market was the best (and only) way to produce products.

SIFE lionized the entrepreneur – even the entrepreneur that was now a billionaire. SIFE ignored the difference between small business and corporations – instead uniting all under the flag of free enterprise and the market. Never noting that ‘free’ enterprise leads to the rule of large enterprises, or that the ‘market’ is controlled by those same enterprises after awhile. Like Wal-Mart, which dictates price and quality to its suppliers, and regularly runs little Sam Walton’s out of business every day. The entrepreneur ends up a monopolist.

International Expansion

After the orgy of patriotism that was the First Gulf War, the regionalist Wal-Mart started to look outside the United States regarding educational programs. Their first international penetration into Latin America was to be through Mexico. Initially, they started an international student program in Panama, bringing ‘all classes’ of students to the campuses in the Ozarks for international exchange programs in business education. This program was meant to give them the same education that conservative and Christian American students were getting, providing an educated elite to combat the Marxists on many public Latin American campuses. Later they used these students to work as managers at Wal-Marts to be opened in Mexico and Central America.

The first large Wal-Mart Supercenter to open outside the United States was in Mexico City, in the suburb of Xtapalapa. This was exactly during the 1993 fight for ratification of the NAFTA treaty. At the time, most Americans and most congressman were against NAFTA, even in spite of Clinton and the Republican leadership’s support. The opening of this Wal-Mart was a propaganda gold mine because it showed Mexicans buying American products. Congressman and the press fell over themselves in praise. According to Moreton, this event turned the tide in the debate over NAFTA. Al Gore went on Larry King and debated Ross Perot, and used the Wal-Mart opening to hammer Perot, who was against NAFTA. And, as they say, the rest is history.

The 'folksie' Sam Walton is dead. The Walton family are now some of the richest individuals in the world. Wal-Mart is no longer a regional corporation. The homey, country-music store is now ensconsed in big cities, northern cities and areas, and now all across the globe, where 'homey' and 'country' means something quite different. Barbara Ehrenreich has reported that the Minnesota Wal-Mart she worked at was anything but friendly. Wal-Mart has been the target of the largest lawsuit over job discrimination against women in history. Wal-Mart is a big board stock quoted on the NASDAQ. The fundamentalist Christian movement, of which Wal-Mart is part, has become an influential pillar of the Republican Party. Today, Target donates to Republicans like Tom Emmer too.

Hopefully, reading Moreton’s book will illustrate just how smart that Arkansas ‘entrepreneur’ was. Because Wal-Mart conquered America.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 11/1/2010

Historical perspective

2010-11-01T08:20:00.001-06:00

Some historical perspective from Doug Henwood:

http://lbo-news.com/2010/10/31/taking-the-measure-of-rot/

Mayday Discussion Forum

2010-10-19T09:54:00.003-05:00

Thanks to all who came to our discussion of Marta Harnecker's article Latin America & Twenty-First Century Socialism: Inventing to Avoid Mistakes! Twenty people attended.

We are planning to have more discussions in the future and would love your input in the comments. Some ideas already floated:

• Articles in Monthly Review (a month after they publish)
• State and Revolution by Lenin
• The ABCs of the Economic Crisis by Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates
• The Great Ecnomic Crisis by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff

Next event will probably be after the new year. Please add comments below.

Electric Dialectic -

2010-10-17T11:33:00.008-05:00

Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord, 1967, re-issued 2005.

This thin philosophical classic was written by Debord, a Marxist ‘situationist’ living in France. It is in two main parts – one, on the ‘society of the spectacle,’ which is really about the all-compassing alienation brought about by bourgeois culture; and stuck in the middle, a criticism of Leninism, Trotskyism, Lukacs, structuralism, anarchism and Stalinism from a ‘Councilist’ and also a 3rd Camp perspective, similar to CLR James.

What is most striking is that Debord writes in an epigrammatic and dialectical form which is enjoyable to read, though not always so easy to understand. It initiates surprised pondering and stuns the reader into thinking. To do this, as Feurbach and Marx did, Debord many times replaces the subject with the predicate. While Debord is against quotations, or as he might put it: “Quoting is the death of the quotation,” I will do it anyway. Here is one example from section #72, which shows his dialectical method of thought:

“The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of production rests. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what separates them from it. What brings together men liberated from their local and national boundaries is also what pulls them apart. What requires a more profound rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchic exploitation and repression. What creates the abstract power of society creates its concrete un-freedom.”

The dialectic realizes that within every process is its negation, which is the heart of historical movement. Nothing is fixed. Capital, on the other hand, requires everything to seem eternal.

According to Dubord, Situationism believes in the ‘supersession’ of art – not its realization, as in Surrealism, or its suppression, as in Dadism (#191). It was most powerful in France during the worker-student strike wave in May-June 1968. The Situationists developed ‘unitary urbanism’ and ‘psycho-geography’ as fields of study, combining Marxism with non-alienating architecture and urban planning. They disbanded in 1972.

Dubord’s main point is that during the early phases of capitalist accumulation, the proletarian is only seen as a cog, receiving the minimum compensation for his contribution. However, as the society becomes more abundant, what is also required of the worker is ‘collaboration.’ Hence arises the ‘humanism of the commodity’ (#43) – the bourgeoisie finds it necessary and also profitable to take over the workers whole cultural existence. And the “society of the spectacle” is born. As Dubord puts it: “The real consumer is a consumer of illusions.” (#47) Gramsci understood the necessity of a proletarian cultural politics for this same reason.

Dubord identifies the ‘spectacle’ as not just religions, or sports, but every non-physical ideological commodity - tourism, celebrity worship, television (and now, the internet…), pseudo-festivals, the disappearance of history, credit, the service economy selling ‘experiences,’ art as a ‘collection of souvenirs,’ – perhaps even dating services, outdoor adventure trips and sites like Facebook.

Many ideas within this book show up later in the works of other writers. The commodification of dissent (#59) leads directly to Thomas Frank’s “The Conquest of Cool” and many articles in the Baffler. The ‘dictatorship of the automobile’ (#174) and the fake ruralism of suburbia (#177) show up in James Kunstler’s analysis of the suburbs, “The Geography of Nowhere.” Even Dubord's comments on the bourgeoisie’s belief and promotion of cyclical time can be seen as a criticism of writers like James Joyce, who posited the ‘endless return.’

The Revolutionary Organization:

Dubord’s ideas on the events in the USSR and other former and present workers’ states regarding third-campism are nothing new. The opposition of the ruling class to the bureaucratically-run states was part of their ‘bourgeois spectacle,’if you may. However, I am becoming more and more convinced that the Party, or the revolutionary organization, should ‘wither away’ itself. And it should wither away before the workers state.

Lukacs, in his 1924 book, “Lenin, a Study of the Unity of His Thought,” fresh from his own participation in the Budapest Soviet, wrote: “…had a relatively quiet period of prosperity and of the slow spread of democracy ensued …the professional revolutionaries would have necessarily remained stranded in sectarianism or become mere propaganda clubs. The party … is conceived as an instrument of class struggle in a revolutionary period.” If a highly ‘centralized’ party (Lukacs words) is not fit for time of ‘relative quiet,’ according to a Leninist like Lukacs, than why would it be fit to control the state after the working class takes power? In other words, if actual power is held by proletarian Soviets /workers councils, a party (or parties) is redundant. It/they should slowly relinquish it/their role(s), as the working class, through the councils, matures in its running of society. The Leninist idea of the party, or a single party, or any revolutionary organization, is really a ‘raft’ for revolution. And the raft, like the state, needs to wither away, not to exist eternally. Otherwise the party becomes (and did become, and still is) the vehicle for rule by a new bureaucracy. Of course, this bureaucracy is also made possible by the continued world dominance of capital. As such, another guarantee against bureaucratism is the extension of the revolution.

The Intellectual Commodity:

Debord reminds us that the development of late capitalism is not just about increasing financialization. Intellectual property and intellectual services have become a larger and larger segment of ‘production’ in the US and other advanced capitalist societies. This is in the form of films, inventions, software, music, graphics, television, etc. Intellectual services like legal work, engineering, drafting, academic theses, etc., and the paper/electronic ‘products’ of that labor, are also a larger part of the economy. They do not just play the role of 'spectacle' but also a role in profitability. As such, Marxists have to develop a clear analysis of intellectual property, and the nature of intellectual/cultural labor and its role in political economy.

Dubord's book is a delight, and if Craig has any copies left, grab one. It is certainly not for sale anywhere else in town.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, October 17, 2010

Class war, pure and simple

2010-10-14T13:19:00.002-05:00

A piece at Globalresearch:

In his intransigence, the Spanish leader is following the lead of other European governments. In France, despite three recent massive protests against pension reform, President Sarkozy repeated that he would not change the law. In Greece, six general strikes in as many months against the austerity measures had no effect on Prime Minister Yorgos Papandreu.

But at least the European proles know they're in a class war, and that the only means of combating the sinister powers-that-be is on the streets -- and not through the farce of formal elections, which are rigged from the get-go.