Malcolm X Lives

“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. 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!

“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 apoliticals 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

Another God That Failed

"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 moralistic, 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 only a part of the American petit-bourgeoisie - the non-business professional side.  Hedges describes the present weakness of the liberal faction as similar to historical situations like Weimar Germany and pre-revolutionary, Checkovian Russia. To Hedges, capital needs a strong liberal segment, 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 faction. 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.  Maybe he's a Christian socialist?

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 in SDS 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 in DSOC/DSA. 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 insidious 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:

“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

“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

“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 ...

“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 scattered – 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 sulfuric 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”

“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, led 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?

“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"

“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

“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