Are You a Survivor?

“Deep Survival – Who Lives and Dies and Why?” by Laurence Gonzales, 2005

Hikers lost.  Boats sinking.  Survivors on life-rafts.  Climbers falling or breaking legs.  Plane crashes on mountains and on aircraft carriers.    Snowmobilers under avalanches.  The kayaker in a flooded gorge.  Scuba divers trapped in an underwater cave.  A swimmer lost in the riptide, or one that fell out of a boat on a fast river.  A wrong turn on a mountain road in a blizzard. 

We all think we are survivors.  But we’re not.  Though, ultimately, none of us are.  Its just the timing that counts.  No matter how quiet a life you lead, even the most sheltered person can encounter extreme conditions or an accident waiting to happen.  Laurence Gonzales was inspired by the life of his father, who, during World War II, fell out of a B-17 at 27,000 feet and survived, and lived a full life, even reading “Finnegan’s Wake.”  This book reads as a paean to him.  Gonzales seems to have dedicated his life to living on the edge, and studying the conditions under which some die and some live. 

For instance, the average middle-class person  thinks that ‘risk’ can be totally eliminated – which is why they are such good candidates for insurance products.  They, on average, never, ever do anything ‘risky.’  However, that is actually impossible. Ultimately, being inured to risk actually increases their risk by hiding the real difference between risk and danger.  They don't know the difference, which means they fear more than they have to.  And when bad things happen, they are less prepared.

Gonzales quotes liberally from various sources – Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher; Erich Remarque, the author of “All Quiet on the Western Front;” Saint-Exupery on flight; Zen and the I-Ching; even Marcus Aurelius, for chrissakes.  He also refers to many individual written stories of survival.  He tracks the relationship between emotions and mental attitudes, and their relation to different parts of the brain – the fear-based amygdala, the cerebral neo-cortex, memories in the hippocampus.  He shows how accidents are inevitable.  The only issue is whether you, as an individual, will be in that accident or not.   

Lawrence relates this to criticality and chaos theory.  (Criticality theory was reviewed below, in the book, “Ubiquity.”)  Chaos theory posits that there is a pattern even among the most disparate effects; and that small events can sometimes have large consequences.  In his discussion of internal critical states, he covers the same ‘rice grain pile’ game discussed in “Ubiquity” and agrees that accidents are internal to every system, just as ‘catastrophes are.  For every 100 climbers up a mountain, some percentage will fail to get down.  Clausewitz called it “friction” – all the innumerable events that can impact an army, for instance, throwing off the best-laid plans.  Some conditions are even more precarious.  A ‘tightly-connected system’ – lets say the world financial market – will ricochet damage everywhere in the system.  A more loosely connected system, with a separation between components – can slow the damage down, or isolate it. (Glass-Steagall, anyone?)

So what are the secrets to survival? When you get in your car on that snowy day, and drive off, are you ready for what might happen? 

Two of the most common reactions to immense stress are panic and complete immobilization.  Thinking too little and thinking too much.  If you stay in these states for too long, you are toast.  Another is over-confidence or ‘irrational’ exuberance.  As he quotes in the book, “The Rambos always go first.”  The ability to retreat intelligently is a mark of a survivor.  Another fatal quality is rigidity.  A person or group who have a plan and a time-table and are going to stick to it, even if concrete conditions are changing, are in for trouble.  There must be many plans.  Another is inattention.  Gonzales repeatedly points to the ‘zen’ of ‘being there.’  And this is not a passive state, but an active one. You must be aware of everything that is happening around you, to the smallest detail, and then act from that.  He also spends a lot of time on ‘positive mental attitude,’ which sounds corny, but basically revolves around being cheerful, seeing the humor in even the most fucked-up situation, and being able to enjoy the mess you are in.  Survivors do that, according to him.  People who babble too much – bad sign.  Calmness is the essence of surviving.  He contends that a balance of intellect and emotion – with intellect in control – will result in the best outcome. 

Gonzales discusses lost and partly lost hikers who make the main mistake of continually moving forward, when they should backtrack.  He of course covers the practical skills and equipment people should have – which gives them a handle on the material world when it goes south.  Many people think bringing home a paycheck or cleaning their house is all they need to know in real-world mechanical skills.  These people are doomed in certain situations, as they have no practical skills.  He maintains that being able to act when you need to – many times quickly – can be key.  Successful survivors are able to plan, carry out and achieve small successes, which allow them not be overwhelmed by their situation.   He also understands that being able to accept a certain level of pain and discomfort is essential to survivors. (see "Reinventing Collapse," by Dimitri Orlov, reviewed below, who also discusses this issue.)

Gonzalez points out that sometimes attempts at increasing 'safety' actually lead to more dangerous conditions.  The rule that lost people should ‘wait for rescue’ is one embedded in much traditional training for disasters.  However, Gonzales points out that it can also lead to being lost permanently.  Every situation has to be evaluated independently, not by a set of rules good for all occasions.  He cites people on 9/11 in New York who followed instructions to stay put, and, instead of moving, waited for fireman, only to die.  A plane crash in the Amazon also resulted in the same thing – 25 adult plane survivors wasting away while not moving an inch - expecting someone else to show up.  Even the most famous crash, cannibalism and all, depicted in the book, “Alive,” only ended because some went for help.

Besides his main skill, ‘being there,’ Gonzales says a key to avoiding accidents is to plan that everything will take 8 times longer than the plan allows.  In other words, people who do not plan for fuckups, which are inevitable, ultimately run late, and lateness can be fatal – snowstorms, river floods, lightening, exhaustion, lack of food, fatigue and hypothermia.  Timing is sometimes everything.  This might also be a note to the people who never get anywhere on time – even those not trying to scale a mountain. 

Why am I reviewing a book on survival?  Well, as you might be able to tell, many of these processes might be good in a riot, or a demonstration, or in arrest, or on a picket line, or in any stressful situation, like your job or even your political group.  It also relates to the ability to survive in a general economic or environmental disaster – the ones that are moving over us like slow-motion avalanches.  And perhaps in your daily life, as you enjoy the woods or waters of this world.

And I did not buy it at Mayday Books.

Red Frog

February 27, 2013

The Female John Reed

“Daughter of the Earth,” by Agnes Smedley, 1929

Agnes Smedley is a mostly forgotten left-wing American activist and writer.  She is best known for her reporting about the Chinese revolution.  Her second book, “Battle Hymn of China,” serves as a sequel to “Daughter of the Earth.”  Until the Nazi’s closed the paper, she reported for the Frankfurter Zeitung on the Chinese Red Army, and met Mao, Chou En Lai and Chu Te.  She then reported for other western publications, and wrote other books about the revolution there.  She is really the female John Reed of the Chinese revolution, and was later black-listed for this in the 1950s. 

‘Daughter of the Earth’ concerns itself with the American period before World War I until 1927.  It is a powerfully written semi-autobiographical novel of a working-class woman growing up in a brutal, poor and conservative society.  It is as plainly written as Maxim Gorky or Jack London might do, missing the similes or metaphors that litter more middle-class writing.  There are no ‘the sun rose like the headlight on an on-coming train’ in this book.  Her raw emotions and anger provide the fuel which carries you through most of the book.  She is an inchoate Emma Goldman, a political Calamity Jane, her own person. 

The fictional Marie Rogers was the daughter of poor farmers in Missouri.  Her father got sick of living that grueling life and convinced the family to move to the mining towns of Colorado.  There they encountered the world of the mining companies – company stores, militia, poverty, class arrogance, sickness, flooding and cold.  Later she moves, patterned after her father's wanderlust, alone to Arizona, New Mexico, San Francisco, then Kansas City, and ultimately New York City, leaving her drunk father, soon-to-be-dead mother, her mother’s sister, her two brothers and one sister behind. 

The most striking part of this book is how it describes a young woman trying to keep her dignity in a society that just sees her as a sexual target, a baby-maker or a weakling.  Marie has to fend off the advances of various drunks and those men drunk on their own personalities. She avoids sex like the plague because she knows it will lead to having a houseful of kids, beatings and misery.  She hates marriage because she wants no man telling her what to do.  She is forever being thought of as a prostitute or loose woman because she is not married.  The Christian religion is a foreign thing to her, and she knows it to be hostile to the poor.  She knows that only earning her own living will give her independence.  She dresses atrociously, from both poverty and choice.  She carries a small gun and knife and travels from town to town searching for knowledge – attending various schools, becoming a hardscrabble teacher, trying to find someone she trusts.  She meets the various leftists of the day – working-class IWW members, parlor Socialists, middle-class liberals and a few Communists, and has a natural class feel for all of them. 

Marie also feels the guilt of someone who wants to help her family, but basically abandons her siblings and relatives to pursue her life.  There is a lot of ‘I’ in Marie, which might have been her salvation.  Her emotions are always on the surface, she sees insults easily and deeply, she is not afraid to tell people what she thinks without sugar-coating it.  What she sees among the majority of working people is that they do not have a clue why the world is the way it is.  Food, drink, warmth, sex, money and music are sufficient balms and concerns.  Yet the miners strike time after time against the bloodthirsty mining concerns.  She slowly comes to a political consciousness through study, her contact with leftists and the very material roots of her miseries. 

Marie eventually moves to New York where she works for a book-reviewing publication, then “The Call” – a socialist newspaper, and also, oddly, for the Indian independence movement.  Through her work with the Indians, she is arrested and sent to the cold Tombs Prison – which she wryly notes is very close to Wall Street.  There she is starved, interrogated and incarcerated as a ‘spy.’  It is only with the end of World War I that she is released.  The socialists in New York can’t understand why she would work for nationalist Indians, but she (as Lenin would also have agreed) argues that freeing India from British rule advances the cause of world revolution.  Later she gets several high-profile scoops for the Call, including one where she accompanies an Irish Communist to an upstate prison pretending to be his girlfriend.  She eventually gets caught up in a jealousy triangle after finally marrying an Indian, and to avoid conflict within the Indian independence movement, leaves for Denmark.

This book follows on the heels of the earlier American working-class feminist classic, “Life in the Iron Mills.”  Novels by working-class people are rare, and ones that are political are rarer still.  This book is unique in its class and feminist stance.  It portrays a lonely and tough female personality that one rarely encounters, except, perhaps, in the pages of books.  It is our way of meeting Agnes Smedley herself, a real person.

And I bought it at May Day Books used/cutout book section.

Red Frog / February 23, 2013

The Only Good South Vietnamese Farmer is a Dead South Vietnamese Farmer

“Kill Anything That Moves – the Real War in Vietnam,” by Nick Turse, 2013

This book recounts a tragedy so horrible, an experience so destructive, that a simple book review does not suffice. This is a book that shows the American War in Vietnam to be what it was – a high tech slaughter of millions of South Vietnamese civilians. For the generations of clueless Americans who vaguely know Vietnam was ‘bad’ – you don’t know how ‘bad.’  It will cure anyone of the Democratic or Republican parties.  It will cure anyone of praising the military machine.  It will cure anyone of simplistic thoughts about the innocence of good ‘ol U.S. boys.  It was free-fire, unadulterated mass murder, organized from the top.  The title of this book is not a ‘leftist’ generalization – it is a quote, a thought, a practice, repeated time and time again.

Body Count

Free-Fire Zones

Protected Hamlets – mass removal to squalid huts

Overkill; kill over and over

Kill prisoners – can’t take them along

War Criminals:  Westmoreland, McNamara, LBJ, Nixon, Kissinger, Singlaub, Laird, etc.

‘Scientific’ warfare methods

Industrial slaughter
Random murder

Orders from on High

Democrats and Republicans

Holocaust of Vietnamese

3 times more dead than the so-called ‘killing fields’ in Cambodia

Statistics:

58,000 dead Americans

304,000 wounded Americans

254,00 ARVN killed

783,000 wounded

1.7M Viet Cong / NLF dead

? VC / NLF wounded?

65,000 North Vietnamese civilians dead

2M South Vietnamese civilians dead – Harvard Medical School

7.3M Vietnamese casualties overall – Dead, KIA and wounded, Levy, Govt. of Vietnam

South Vietnam’s Population:  19M

Cluster bombs

White phosphorus

B-52 strikes

F-4 Phantoms

Napalm

Huey’s spitting bullets

Agent Orange defoliant

Friendly fire

South Vietnam is the most bombed place in history.

Orders

Destroy all buildings

Burn the ville
Fire the hooch

Level the rice, the fruit trees, the cane

Sink the sampan

Kill anything that moves, including the animals

Every bomb shelter hole in the ground is a VC bunker – grenades for all

Bomb craters in the paddies

Search & Destroy

Black pajamas are VC

Anyone who runs is VC

Little kids grow up to be VC

Water buffalo are VC

The “mere gook rule.”

Random shelling – use up your ammo

Ecocide

Pacification

The real Wasteland

Destroying the country to ‘save it’

They are not called Vietnamese, they are called ‘gooks’

Get the South Koreans to do it

Get the South Vietnamese Army to do it

CIA Operation Phoenix

Tiny 'Tiger' cages for humans; Tiger Force killers

Ewell:  Butcher of the Delta

A My Lai every week

What Geneva Convention?

Highway accidents; no speed limit

Leveled neighborhoods

Records of atrocities destroyed

West Point Protection Association

No one prosecuted

Cover-ups standard
Plant a Chi-Com grenade

Rape SOP

Torture normal – 93%

Trophy strings of ears around necks

War Pigs
The U.S. government and military - war criminals

Where is a Nuremburg when you need one?

Loser’s injustice wins.

(Other books about the Vietnam War, reviewed below:  "Into the Crossfire:  Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary," and "Peoples' History of the Vietnam War.")
And I bought it at Mayday Books – and you should too.

Red Frog

February 17, 2013

The February Revolution in Russia has started, 1917

Aren't You Glad Capitalism Has Been Restored?

Latest Developments in Hungary

#1.  On November 27, Marton Gyongyosi, one of the fascist Jobbik's 44 lawmakers in the 386-seat Hungarian parliament, said during a debate on violence in the Gaza Strip that it would be "timely" to draw up a list of people of Jewish ancestry who posed a national security risk for their pro-Zionist views.  This illustrates that while some think defense of Palestine is an exclusively ‘left’ issue, ant-Semites use it to slander Jews. 

Gyongyosi was denounced even by Victor Orban, the rightist prime minister of Hungary, who prefers soft anti-Semitism, though it took him a week to do so. On December 2^nd, 10,000 demonstrators converged on Budapest's Lajos Kossuth Square, next to the Parliament on the Danube, to protest Jobbik and anti-Semitism.  Jobbik has encountered little resistance from the government to its animosity toward the Roma (gypsy) minority and its efforts to rehabilitate unsavory figures such as Admiral Miklos Horthy, the country's pro-Nazi leader during World War II. 

The fascist Arrow Cross organized the deportation -- and subsequent murder -- of at least  430,000 Hungarian Jews in 1944.  The Nazi’s did not carry out the deportations, but relied on ethnic Hungarians.  Horthy was in power from 1919, when he took over after the destruction of the Hungarian Soviet Republic under Bela Kun by the Romanian Army.  He stayed in power until 1944, when he was deposed by the German Army for being insufficiently fascist, which put the Arrow Cross in power.  Kun himself was killed during one of Stalin’s purges in 1937, allegedly for being a ‘Trotskyite terrorist’ or some such fabrication. While Horthy was not instrumental, as far as I know, in the final roundup of Jews, his policies had been anti-Semitic for years, and laid the ground work for what happened.  He put Hungary in the Nazi camp, after all.  Horthy was a witness at Nuremberg, but was not indicted.

The Hungarian Communist Party eventually replaced this tradition of reactionary politics in the 1949 elections - elections which were never held again for the majority of people, in any form.  The Hungarian CP, which had been heavily Stalinist and repressive, eventually was schooled by the 1956 workers rebellion, and developed ‘goulash communism’ as a response.

#2. - Imre Kertesz, who wrote the great book “Fateless” about his experience in the concentrations camps as a 14 year old, has decided to move his archive to … Germany, not Hungary.  Yes, the organizer's of the camps.  He feels it will be more respected there.  This after a complete takeover of the art world in Budapest by Orban’s Party, which  is turning each venue into an exemplar of nationalist piety – the New Theatre, the Hungarian Academy of Arts and PEN.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti recently turned down a large cash award from the Hungarian PEN.  Elie Weisel has also returned a Hungarian award due to their laudatory reburial of a fascist writer.  Bela Tarr’s  premiere of “The Turin Horse” has been canceled by its Hungarian distributor.  And so it goes.    

#3. - At least someone is fighting back. December 19, 2012, thousands of high school and university students rallied in Budapest at the Academy of Sciences building, shutting down the Chain Bridge for a time.  They opposed education ‘reforms’ which would have severely cut 55,000 scholarships offered by the government.  The government later relented.   The students also opposed requirements that they be required to work in Hungary for several years after graduation if they accepted state funds. They also called for the resignation of the Education Secretary, so there are clearly a broad list of demands.  Orban’s intention was to put higher education in Hungary on a ‘self funding’ basis – an impossible goal unless all students are wealthy.  As if education is now a profit-making pursuit.  Student protests continue.

#4. – A third of the staff of one of the top universities in Budapest is being laid off.  The Orban government says they were appointed under ‘other administrations’ and therefore are illegitimate.  So much for freedom of research and freedom of thought.  A purge of the universities is under way.

#5. - Zsolt Bayer, a prominent conservative commentator, has sparked outrage in Hungary and abroad for comparing Roma to animals and saying they "shouldn't be allowed to exist." Criticism of the remarks has grown, but Prime Minister Orbán will probably keep silent.

Quote from Hungarian/English sources:  “Zsolt Bayer always pipes up whenever the Hungarian media mentions that Roma are suspected of involvement in a crime. Usually, he spares no words in his hate-filled tirades against the ethnic minority, regardless how ugly. For example, he has written: "Whoever runs over a Gypsy child is acting correctly if he gives no thought to stopping and steps hard on the accelerator." Bayer's most recent outburst came last Saturday after a bar fight and stabbing on New Year's Eve in which some of the attackers were reportedly Roma. Writing in the ultra-right-wing newspaper Magyar Hirlap, which has close ties to the conservative government, Bayer argued for what amounts to genocide.

Bayer wrote:
"A significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals, and they behave like animals. When they meet with resistance, they commit murder. They are incapable of human communication. Inarticulate sounds pour out of their bestial skulls. At the same time, these Gypsies understand how to exploit the 'achievements' of the idiotic Western world. But one must retaliate rather than tolerate. These animals shouldn't be allowed to exist. In no way. That needs to be solved -- immediately and regardless of the method."

Bring back Bela Kun, Gyorgy Lukacs, the Budapest Soviet and the workers' councils!

Red Frog / February 12, 2013

On Salutations and Signatures

Dear Fellow Commodity,

Throughout the years I have had numerous people inquire about the salutations and signatures I use in articles, e-mails and posts. Here is a brief explanation:

In 1974 I joined the New Union Party, a pro-worker, anti-capitalist group. I wrote a column for their paper The New Unionist which had the title NO NEED FOR SLAVES, NO ROOM FOR MASTERS. My salutation for the column (resurrected for my posts to this blog) was Dear Fellow Commodity which angered “individualists” who resented being called a commodity even though any thinking person would realize that workers are commodities;  they are bought and sold on the “labor market” just as slaves in the American south were bought and sold on the slave market.

I use the signature “AWAY WITH ALL BORDERS” on my email messages because I believe that citizens of the world should not be atomized by lines on a map drawn by world “leaders” in part for their personal glorification. (Capitalists have already done away with borders for the most part,) It's only workers who are still not internationally-minded and kill each other in wars that benefit the capitalists. A bayonet is a weapon with a worker on each end.

He Used To Be A Radical

“The Conspiracy,” by Paul Nizan, 1938, forward by Jean Paul Sartre, 1960, afterward by Walter Benjamin

Paris is the brooding presence under every novel or film set in that city.  Its streets, history, river, monuments, neighborhoods and personalities soak the narrative.  For good reason.  Paris has been a center of philosophy, an archive of history, a birthplace of revolution.  ‘The Conspiracy’ is no different – it is set in Paris in the late 1920s, but the city plays a role in the shaping of its characters and the novel itself  This is a book written by former Communist Paul Nizan, who quit the Party upon hearing of the Molotov/Von Ribbentrop cooperation pact in 1939.  He wrote for L'Humanite, the Party newspaper.  He died at the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940.

Some Americans dislike Paris due to their own chauvinist or provincial upbringing or perhaps plain ignorance.  Yet Paris is a city of the world, not just of the French.  At one time in the ‘20s and ‘30s it was the center of world intellectual life in almost every discipline – writing, painting, dance, sculpture, music – even haute couture.  It gave rise to the phenomenon of the ‘bohemian,’ which morphed into the beats, which begat the hippies, and then the punks, grunge and now in its most pale commercial reflection, the ‘urban hipster.’  Black people like Josephine Baker and Cole Porter fled to Paris, as did Irish writers stifled by Catholicism.  American artistic expatriates started bookshops and wrote books; Spanish painters mixed with French surrealists.  One might say these events in Paris were one of the great renaissances of culture in the capitalist world, if not the greatest.  (see reviews of the importance of geographic ‘location’ in the formation of culture, in this case American music in “Laurel Canyon,” “Just Kids,” “In Search of the Blues” and The Grateful Dead, all below.)

It is 1928 and 1929.  The main characters of this book are the privileged sons of the local bourgeois – dissatisfied with a conventional life, unserious, yet committed to revolution.  Bernard Rosenthal is their leader – his father a stockbroker (yes, before 1929), his brother one too.   Of their families, though against them.  Nizan examines these inter-war youth and their desire to mean something.  Something other than a professional job, a boring wife, their fated elegant Parisian row-house on Rue Berlioz and their summer chateau in Picardy.  Why Nizan, a Party communist at the time, spends so much time on this sliver of the class is somewhat odd – unless it is part of a polemic against their influence on the revolutionary youth of the time. 

In order to encapsulate some of them, Nizan writes in the shade of Proust, and walks with him on the Channel beaches and into the country homes of romance and dull upper-class pleasures.  His portrayal of Rosenthal could be a disturbed 20-year-old student of that milieu.  They easily study for the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale in the Quartier Latin and the Faubourg St. Germain.  Rosenthal, with 4 others - Pluvinage. Laforgue, Bloye and Jurien - start an overly-intellectual magazine for this rebellious generation.  Then, bored, he theorizes that ‘sabotage’ (a term that originated from the shoes of rebellious workers) is the real road to affecting change. The book sets you up to expect an early anarchist re-run of “The Invisible Committee.” (Reviewed below.)  Some plans for the defense of Paris and the location and structure of a large boiler in the city are stolen.  Instead, the ‘conspiracy’ Rosenthal really gets involved in is the seduction of his brother’s wife – his way of ‘overthrowing’ bourgeois morality and his family.  And the second conspiracy is that one of their number – Pluvinage, a son of a Parisian cemetery bureaucrat – turns informer on a ranking member of the Communist Party.  The Communist Party itself in 1929 was being accused of a an immediate ‘conspiracy’ to overthrow the French Government by force that fall, and hundreds were jailed.

The group had considered joining the Party to be in an intolerable affront to their independence, and hence had never joined.  Pluvinage, oddly, was the first to join, though he was the weakest in commitment.  

Nizan describes some scenes within a Party cell of working-class Parisians in the Belleville / Pere Lachaise area of the 20th Arrondissment.  He tracks the rich people on Avenue Mozart in de Passy.  Pluvinage, the informer, haunts the bars and prostitutes of Montmartre and Pigalle.  Pluvinage always felt socially inferior to Rosenthal and the rest, and eventually understands that the Communists would not come to power, and decides to stay with the ‘powerful’ on the Ile de la Cite and become a policeman – to do the ‘dirty work’ of Paris his own father did.  A third character, Laforgue, becomes very ill, and returns to the bosom of his bourgeois family.  Rosenthal himself commits suicide due to his grief at eventually losing the battle for his shallow paramour, his brother’s wife. 

An odd book, a snapshot of a faded time.  Well written, somewhat poetic, aimed at the untrustworthy petit-bourgeois youth who predictably give up on Left politics - then and in later ages.  And set in Paris, the city of much greater light.

And I bought it in the progressive literature section at May Day Books!

Red Frog / February 9, 2013

Why Revolutions Are Inevitable

"Ubiquity – Why Catastrophes Happen,” by Mark Buchanan, 2001

Buchanan is a theoretical physicist who writes easily about scientific disciplines that concentrate on evolution, earthquakes and avalanches, forest fires, animal extinctions, nuclear reactions and human history.   He, like many, is seeking a logic beneath the myriad faces of complexity in science and human behavior, and thinks he has come up with an outlook that seems to explain change – especially quick change.  The first thing Buchanan posits is that sometimes complexity blinds us to the simplicity behind events.  The second thing he suggests is that change cannot be studied without a concept of time, so history is the basic characteristic of almost anything out of ‘equilibrium.’  Equilibrium is essentially the disappearance of change and time…though even things in equilibrium might have subtle changes that we don’t notice.

Buchanan's book starts with a computer simulating the dropping of sand (and later rice) grains to mimic avalanches – a rather simple ‘game.’  The sand pile game indicated that a tiny event can precipitate many kinds of events – mostly miniscule changes in the pile, but sometimes large avalanches of sand from the pile.  Each drop changes the interaction of the grains to each other.  The question is why?  The game discovered a geometric rule – ‘the power law” – which is a certain inverse mathematical relationship between the size of an avalanche of sand grains and its likelihood of happening.  (For instance, doubling the size of an event results in it becoming 4 times as rare.)  Buchanan then travels through other fields studying earthquakes, forest fires, freezing substances, magnets and species extinctions to figure out when and why they happened.  He concludes that this ‘power law’ is true across every one of these events, and others like solar flares, disease transmission and traffic jams.  In essence it explains the ‘critical state’ of any system out of equilibrium – he calls it ‘self-organized criticality’ – which inhabits the system itself, and the influence of its internal component parts on each other.  So, in essence, 'catastrophe' - or sudden change - is built into everything. It is an internal contradiction.

He furthermore maintains, against those that argue these game models are ridiculously simple, that knowing every detail of a system is not essential, that, if you have the physical dimensions or size of something in your model, and also its shape or frequency, you have everything you need to create a model that conforms to actual data already gathered by scientific means.  In the study of ‘phase transitions’ (like between cold and boiling water) the phrase describing this state of simplicity is a ‘universality class.’ 

Now, what Buchanan seems to be getting at in these scientific thoughts is an approach that parallels aspects of dialectics – time, matter, quantity into quality, and also, negation of the negation – the internal contradictions within systems affecting how much and how quickly they change.

So what about the 1987 stock market crash or World War I, some so-called ‘Black Swans’ of reality?  Can the ‘power law’ and critical state universality be found in human affairs?  Buchanan starts his book with description of the random 1914 assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand by a Serbian anarchist, and a description of the supposedly unpredictable October 19, 1987 U.S. market crash, where the stock market lost a 1/5^th of its value, over $500 billion dollars in one day on a wave of panic selling.  Why did these events happen in such a way? 

Buchanan cites many surveys of economic predictions by bourgeois economists.  He quotes John Kay of the London Business School in 1995:  “Economic forecasters …all say more or less the same thing at the same time; the degree of agreement is astonishing.”  “…what they say is almost always wrong… the consensus forecast failed to predict any of the most important developments in the economy over the last 7 years…”  In 1999, Robert Schiller called the ‘efficient market hypothesis’ "the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory."   And these guys aren’t even Marxists! The ‘efficient market’ is a market full of perfect and equal information, where everyone acts absolutely rationally, the government has no role, and no one influences anyone else – an idea which is still taken seriously to this day by the business press.  

According to Buchanan, studies of daily price movements on the Standard & Poor's 500 and other markets over many years shows that the ‘power law’ continues to apply even there.  Price spikes are inversely proportional to their occurrence, but they happen frequently enough because every market is not a stable system of equilibrium, as capitalist political theory hopes.  Short and even long-term investors influence other investors, and so trigger panics.  Information is imperfect.  People trade for emotional reasons or even financial desperation, thinking this will lead to profit maximization.  It is not primarily outside events that impact the markets, according to Buchanan, but the existence of flaws in the market process itself. 

Buchanan cites a famous 1961 book by Thomas Kuhn called, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” which traces in what way Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Heisenberg upset the traditional conservative paradigms of prior ‘normal’ science.  Kuhn carefully delineated how scientists, being human and tied to the secure structure of academe, did not automatically accept these new paradigms – and resisted until it was obvious that the new ideas were right.  Of course, the occurrence of these theoretical revolutions and new ideas are inversely proportional to their frequency again.  Yet they occur inevitably. Kuhn also points out that ‘revolutions’ in an idea might occur to as small a group as 25 – which totally changes they way that small group does something. 

Buchanan finally addresses the issue of social change.  The power law is even found in the frequency and scope of wars, calculated by the number of dead.  However, social revolution is not quite so mathematically trackable – or perhaps no one has done it.  The trick would be to define lower stages of revolution - strikes, general strikes, demonstrations, occupations, street fighting, guerrilla war - then to various larger upheavals like political revolutions and social revolutions - by their number and timing, and see if that corresponds to the automatic power law.  I suspect it might.

According to him, social revolutions are caused by extreme ‘maladjustments’ that lead to the overthrow of the prior order – sort of like the geologic stress exerted by passing tectonic plates that cause earthquakes.  In the process he eviscerates the ‘great man’ theory of history using this approach – as no ‘one’ stress actually causes movement, unless conditions are right.  He quotes E.H. Carr, “History is to a considerable extent a matter of numbers.”  “Great men,” according to Buchanan, are those who can give voice to great mass movements.  He also takes apart the method of history that concerns itself with the accretion of random facts.  Carr pointed out that there is a ‘natural hierarchy of facts.’  Historians and students of history who get bogged down in minutiae, who cannot choose the more important facts to analyze and hence have no ability to generalize, will be lost in the thickets of time.   Perhaps a re-creation of a nostalgic lost world, but not an understanding of this one. 

My thumbnail of Dialectics:

1. Time is a constant.
2. Quantity turns into quality. 
3. Negation of the negation - there are contradictions within everything.
4. Contradiction sometimes takes the form of thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, and repeat.
5. Internal contradictions are the motor of economics, history, science, social relations, even thought.  Class struggle is the motor of society, as class is the main internal contradiction. 
6. Materialistic dialectics is based on matter – hence materialism - and its internal motion, not pure ideas.  Material things are not static, and ultimately lead to change in the realm of ideas.  

And I did not buy it at Mayday Books, but Craig might order it.

Red Frog,

February 3, 2013 / Loser-Bowl Sunday

P.S. - The 'Global Database of Events' and John Bieler's "Protest Map" could possibly be analyzed to see if social protest is following the power law.  This is a listing of protests/strikes/revolutions etc. since 1979 based on news reports.  From a casual tour, it seems the pace of protest is picking up across the world.  However, something more long term - going back to the American Revolution, for instance - might shed even more light.

Labor By Another Name

“Slavery by Another Name – the Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” by Douglas A Blackmon, 2009

This is a great book of original research by an Atlanta-based journalist from the Wall Street Journal.  It makes the point that slavery was not simply the product of ‘bad ideas’ or ‘bad people’ but was financially beneficial to many businessmen in the post-Civil War South. 

This is why virtual slavery didn’t go away after the end of the war, or the White League’s destruction of Reconstruction.   Capitalism remained.  And capitalism will use any kind of labor – slave, forced, debtor, contract, involuntary servitude, Bracero, guest worker, share-cropper, prison or so-called ‘free’ – in order to make a profit.  This book shows how Blacks after the Civil War were still exploited for super-profits through various forms of forced labor, helped by the southern legal system, the prison system and the political system, in a seamless web of oppression.  “Jim Crow” and segregation were only a reflection of these labor relations.  At this point, chattel slavery had come to a formal end.  But ‘slavery’ in its financial essence, as a peculiar form of labor – in some respects worse than chattel slavery – still affected the whole black population in the South, especially in the period after Reconstruction until World War II.  Not ‘affected’ in the sense that everyone was a direct ‘prison’ slave, but that every black person feared this. 

Blackmon (who is a white man) keys his story around a black man sent to an Alabama coalmine near present-day Birmingham in Jefferson County in 1908.  He was sold-off by a sheriff in Columbiana, Shelby County to work as a prisoner at the Tennessee, Coal, Iron & Railroad mines, recently purchased by U.S. Steel.  His debt was $38.22.  He was 22 years old.  He was ‘convicted’ to work for 6 months for the crime of ‘vagrancy.’   He died in that most profitable hell-hole 5 and a half months later of tuberculosis, overwork and bad nutrition.  His name was Green Cottenham. This is his story and that of unknown hundreds of thousands like him.

Not all black people in this South were subject to county or state prison labor – but the legal ease with which a black person could be thrown into these death-holes – many times underground coal and iron mines - played a role in disciplining the whole black working class in the south.  It also had a role in disciplining white southern workers too, though they only intermittently understood this. Strikes of ‘free’ white and black workers were repeatedly broken using government-supplied contract slaves.  Unions were proscribed.  Communist, leftist and progressive organizers were persona non grata.  Having a vast pool of indentured slaves had a bad effect on everyone, much as plantation slavery distorted not just the black man but the white.

This kind of industrial slavery – on cotton farms either picking cotton or clearing land, timber stands and sawmills, underground coal and iron mines, coke ovens, limestone & quartz quarries, turpentine camps, railroad and road construction, poultry processing – played a role in the further ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ in the south.   This benefitted not just southern capitalists but northern ones too, who used the coal and steel to build or heat the cities of the north.  In fact, another monumentally bad 1896 Supreme Court decision, ‘Plessy v Ferguson,’ allowed the southern States to set their own standards when it came to black people – not just regarding segregation, but in everything.  It spelled the death knell of northern concern with black labor standards.  By 1901 according to Blackmon, no black people were voting anywhere in the South.  The last vestiges of Reconstruction had been destroyed.

It worked like this.  Thuggish locals saw some strong young black man.  They’d grab him and lock him up.  Then some county, state or random ‘justices of the peace,’ sheriff, deputy, constable, store-owner or rich son made up a fake or real charge like vagrancy, drinking, not having any money, swearing, stealing, adultery, carrying a firearm or razor blade, failing to honor a contract, laughing inappropriately, making advances on a white woman, riding a box car, etc.  A mock trial would be performed in minutes, few records were kept and the suspect was always convicted.  They would fine the black man more money than he had, then add extra fees.  The county or state would then ‘sell’ the fine & fees to an industrialist or big farmer, who would pay the tiny amount in order to get a ‘contract’ worker for many months.  Because he couldn’t pay, they’d force the black man to sign a contract with an “X” saying he would work for 3 months, 6 months, a year to pay his ‘debt.’  The sheriff or store-owner would get a kickback, and the circle continued. 

Then the owner would keep him locked up, in chains, beat him regularly, barely feed or clothe him, and work him literally to death.  Debt peonage was worse than chattel slavery because they didn’t own the people over the long run, they only wanted to squeeze the most out of them in a shorter period of time.  If anyone tried to escape, they’d track them with bloodhounds.  Punishment would be meted out to those who helped.  To extend the ‘term’ of a good worker, they’d make up another ‘crime’ and he’d be incarcerated to do more time.  Sometimes they’d even be sold to other businessmen to serve out their ‘time.’

Black women would be dragooned for the crime of ‘prostitution,’ then held at a farm and raped.  Black children as young as 8 also became prisoners.

The racism of the South was all about justifying cheap labor.  WEB Dubois put it this way in a fictional book about the issue:  "Cheap cotton depends on cheap niggers."  It was not simply a moral failing.  In fact, a good case could be made that the eventual weakening of the system came about through the mechanization of mining, road building, cotton farming and timber, not the tardy efforts of the Federal government.

In 1903, the federal government under Theodore Roosevelt finally got wind of what was happening in central Alabama, initially in Coosa, Tallapoosa and Lowndes counties.  A Federal grand jury sitting in Montgomery took testimony from black men who had been snatched off streets of tiny shit towns like Goodwater and Dadeville, and the owners and deputies who had taken them.  A naïve Federal judge finally announced that the system of debt peonage was illegal, and that the Alabama law that said that it was a crime for a black worker to quit his job was also illegal.  (Nearly every other southern state had the same law.) The judge thought the system just involved a few ‘bad apples.’  He didn’t realize the whole state of Alabama was guilty – and, according to Blackmon, involved ‘tens of thousands’ of virtual black slaves and the men who were complicit in rounding them up.  Many of the wealthiest and most prominent people in each state were involved.  While several like John Pace pleaded guilty without a trial, alleging that slavery was not illegal, the rest were released with fines, and cases were dropped.  This became true across the south. Prosecutors eventually believed that ‘symbolic’ victories were the best, and so, eventually, did the federal government.  The Supreme Court struck down lower courts that had declared debt peonage illegal, as ‘states rights’ trumped human rights.  So the system continued, with a slight legal twist - they'd run everything through a courthouse.

Through all this, Dubois called the South ‘an armed camp for the intimidation of the Negro.’  As Blackmon put it, what choices did black people have? “…free labor camps that functioned like prisons, cotton tenancy that equated to serfdom, or prison mines filled with slaves.”  Dubois himself, in an interesting sidelight, did a first-rate and deep sociological survey of Lowndes County, only to have it lost by the U.S. government for political reasons.

Black neo-slavery – or prison labor, ‘contract’ labor, debt peonage - was similar to the methods used against young white ‘criminals’ – many times poor, homeless or orphan children - dragooned off the streets of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England.  They too were sold to farmers as indentured ‘servants’ (essentially workers in bondage) in the 1500 and 1600’s, prior to the full advent of black slavery.  (Read the book, “They Were White and They Were Slaves.”) The U.S. was built on this kind of labor thievery from day one, only switching methods or targets from time to time.  The north had its own debtors prisons and work programs, though these died out much earlier than the south.

Blackmon historicizes this issue, as do most bourgeois historians, by ending his history under the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, which finally abolished neo-slavery through actually applying and clarifying earlier federal laws in 1951 – not leaving it to the “South” to decide.  This, of course, came due to the pressure from Japanese and German propaganda, and also from the Soviet Union and domestic communists, who made debt peonage a world-wide political issue. 

Blackmon does not mention the present ‘war on drugs,’ which allows the U.S. to incarcerate millions of black and Latino people for fake crimes.  Nor does he mention the present prison-industrial complex, which still uses black prison labor for super-profits on a large scale. According to Steve Fraser, "nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses or manufacturing textiles, shoes and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day."  Wal-Mart, for instance, along with other large corporations, use suppliers using prison labor.  Private capitalists taking advantage of prison labor was legally sanctioned in 1979 under Democrat Jimmy Carter, unsurprisingly of Plains, Georgia. Recently a rash of stories have come out about poor people being thrown in jail for non-payment of legal fines and fees, and, even more draconian, failure to pay debts to private parties.  The 'debtor's prison' is returning.  I have been told that the book, "The New Jim Crow" goes into this in some detail.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

January 30, 2013

Women War Mongers

Dear Fellow Commodity,

The women in combat question brought to mind the Virginia Slims cigarette slogan, of a few years back,”You've come a long way, baby.” And, in one case, it referred to a woman fighter pilot whose nickname was K C which stood for Killer Chick!

When the Secretary of Defense??? ruled that women could be in combat there was great enthusiam (but not from Code Pink). Much of the focus seemed to be on the “career” opportunities (A Career in Killing!)

A few years ago at the annual Mayday Parade down Bloomington Ave to Powderhorn Park , the late Myron Fossum , a Veterans For Peace member, carried a sign which read:

NO GAYS IN THE MILITARY,

NO STRAIGHTS IN THE MILITARY,

NO WOMEN IN COMBAT,

NO MEN IN COMBAT,

NO PEOPLE IN THE MILITARY,

NO MILITARY IN THE PEOPLE.

The sign got great cheers and applause.

Tom R. Dooley

St Paul MN

Bonaparte’s Russian Mustache

“The Struggle for Power – Russia in 1923,” by Valentina Vilkova, 1996

This is a work of original research on documents from what was then the newly-opened Soviet government archives in Russia.  Vilkova is a researcher at the Centre for Political and Economic History of Russia in Moscow.  In the excellent preface of this volume she analyzes original documents rarely made available within the country.  They show, according to her, that in this critical year 1923, when Lenin was dying, a factional triumvirate (the ‘troika”) of central Soviet leaders – Kamenev, Zinoviev & Stalin – assumed power based on a campaign of distortions and slander against Trotsky and those who agreed in some respects with Trotsky.  This event some have called the assumption to power of a new bureaucracy within the party, based not on politics, but on a pure power play.  

This concentration of power in ‘the troika,’ and then ‘the seven,’ resulted in the eventual consolidation of power in ‘the one’ – Stalin, and the subsequent liquidation of nearly all of his confederates – Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and more.  Subsequently the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik Old Guard, and later, the overwhelming majority of the leadership of the Red Army were also executed.  In essence, over time the revolutionary generation was killed, and a new generation loyal to a ‘strongman’ like Stalin and the new bureaucracy was installed.

Trotsky later called this “Bonapartism,” as it reflected how Napoleon Bonaparte defanged the French Revolution.

Vilkova collects here key documents tracking the developments in that fateful year 1923 – a few of which were only available previously from Trotsky and his supporters.  Lenin’s last testament – which indicated support for Trotsky, and opposition to Stalin – is not included here, but it plays a role in the background.  Vilkova notes that the Testament was distorted or suppressed at the time.  She also does not deal with documents related to the “Georgian question,” which revealed Stalin’s real attitude towards national minorities – not a pleasant one, but a 'great Russian chauvinist' one.

In her introduction, Vilkova makes some main points in her analysis of the texts.  The economic questions which plagued the USSR in 1923 were ignored in order to focus on attacking Trotsky.  The national question was also not clarified.  The troika agreed to Lenin (and Trotsky’s) ideas on the national question regarding federalism formally.  But when Lenin left political life after his stroke in March 1923, they backtracked, and reverted to a position that ‘local nationalism’ was the main enemy.  As part of this, they dissolved the Ukrainian government headed by Rakovsky, and put the Georgian leader M. Sultan-Galiev on trial.  

Lenin, being sick, was ignored or kept in the dark by the troika.  Stalin, getting wind through Kamenev that Lenin was going to advocate he be demoted from his post as “General Secretary” (an ostensibly ‘organizational’ position), put forward a resolution to postpone the Twelveth Congress to prevent this, to buy the troika some time.  It was postponed and it worked, as Lenin had a ‘stroke’ and was not able to intervene in the Congress, except with pre-prepared paper documents on the national question and the formation of the USSR. 

Vilkova notes that a new form of ‘intra-party’ discussion developed – one of rudeness, disloyalty and animosity.  Pyatakov, one of Trotsky’s allies, was called a Menshevik, which in those days was equated with being a White Guard.  In December 1923, the Central Committee removed Antonev-Ovseenko, Radek and Pyatakov for ‘factionalism.’  The ‘Statement of the 46” – mostly old-time party members in positions of authority in various parts of the economy who agreed with Trotsky’s concerns about the crashing economy – led them to being put on a black list.

To justify the new attitude, here is a choice quote from Kamenev:  “… that in order to support the dictatorship of the proletariat, it was necessary to support the Dictatorship of the Party, which was impossible without the dictatorship of the ‘old guard,’ which, in turn, was impossible without the leading role of the Central Committee as a leading institution.”

According to Vilkova, Lenin understood what was going on and, too late, proposed a different organizational structure for the Bolshevik Party.  He proposed doing it as part of a joint block with Trotsky.  It would be one much more controlled by the ranks of the Party, not a faction of the Central Committee, or a ‘charismatic’ leader, and which he hoped would prevent a split at the top.  Unfortunately, the split happened in 1923, but took another 15 years to mature into the Moscow Show Trials of 1938.   

Other materials to read on this subject is the pamphlet, “On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin” by Leon Trotsky; and “Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in the Soviet Union,” by R Daniels. 

And I bought it at Mayday Books excellent used and cutout book section!

Red Frog / January 23, 2013

Hypocrisy & The World's Largest Arms Dealer

A Culture War Debate

The Democrats are starting off their second term, not with a focus on jobs, class disparities, union rights, poverty, low wages or continuing foreclosures – but with the ‘deficit’ and now, gun control in the U.S..  I.E. the culture war. 

Let no crisis go unavailed.  The slaughter of the little white innocents in Newtown, CT has led to putting some spine into the Democrats on their side of the American culture war.  Hence Obama’s suggestions to control the gun trade within the United States.

I say ‘within’ because the United States is the biggest gun dealer in the world.  By 2011, the last year for which there are figures, the worldwide percentage of U.S. weapons sales to other countries had reached a near-monopolistic 78% ($66.3 billion in weapons sales), with the Russians coming in a distant second at 5.6% ($4.8 billion).  Saudi Arabia, a reactionary, anti-female kingdom dominated by fundamentalist Sunni clerics and oil billionaires, is one of the leading recipients of these weapons.  The Pentagon is the biggest arms dealer and broker/shill for weapons in history. Obama’s recent focus on Chinese ‘militarism’ pointed out that they ‘might’ have 400 inter-continental ballistic missiles.  The U.S. has 10,000.  We could go on, but you see the point.

No limits are being discussed there, of course.  In fact, the ‘happy’ co-incidence that the Democrats and Republicans made a deal on their self-created ‘fiscal cliff’ was based on not cutting Pentagon or Homeland spending one iota.  That was the main motivator for a deal.  So our well-armed SWAT teams and police departments in every city in the country are in no danger of being deprived of their weapons.  

Shit runs downhill.  Or should I say, violence runs downhill.  The U.S. is a most violent society – for a society ostensibly at peace.  The U.S. has the highest homicide rate of any ‘advanced’ nation, thought violent crime has been going down in the U.S. for some time. 16,000+ died by homicide in 2011.  It is the second leading cause of death for young people, and the leading cause of death for African Americans.  Of all regions, the southern U.S. is the most violent, which figures.  Nevertheless, twice that number – around 32,000+ in 2011 - die by suicide in the U.S., though this does not approach the numbers in Japan or Russia.  This is a statistic that is most alarming for former soldiers.

Our television, films and video games are all saturated in violence.  As I have said before in an essay on TV cop shows (reviewed below), the .45 handgun is the most common ‘leading man.’  Mirror or accelerant, this is no accident either.  Our love of ‘hunting’ has resulted in hunters shooting other hunters – and also ‘legally’ shooting endangered moose and wolves here in Minnesota.  The clowns are even having gun accidents at gun shows – 3 in the last week.

The number killed in ‘mass shootings’ is statistically small.  Schools are statistically safer for children than their home or the streets.  The greatest danger regarding guns, as Tom pointed out below, is in accidents and homicides within families or among those who know each other.  People with poor impulse control, conflicts, mental problems, anger issues or depression should not have guns in their home.  It is a public health issue. 

It is also a political issue.  Suicides do not use semi-automatic weapons or high-capacity magazines on themselves.  Most murders are not committed by these weapons either.  The recent wave of killings of black kids in Chicago was unlamented by the national media – but assault weapons were not the norm in these shootings. Nor does the media focus on police shootings - 43 shot dead by cops in Chicago in 2011 alone.  So why the focus on these weapons? 

I think the secret reason is that the government does not want large numbers of people to have weapons approximating those held by the police, the secret police and the army.  Would some single civilian have a chance against a trained SWAT squad storming his house?  Of course not.  No matter how many rounds, or bullet proof vests or weaponry that individual has.  It is ridiculous.  However, if thousands of people suddenly have decent weapons, it becomes a different issue.  It comes down to the issue of disarming your own population – not for health issues, or crime reasons, but for political reasons.  Which is why some working class people are worried.  The inordinate fear of ‘crime’ is legitimate in some neighborhoods, but certainly not in all. 

Another consideration is the possible use of weapons by fascists.  In any situation of social unrest, fascist elements would use guns against unions, picket lines, against left demonstrations, against individuals, against occupations, against African Americans, Jews and Latinos. The left does not want to be disarmed, nor can it ‘trust’ the police at all times.  After all, the police many times work with the right.

I’d certainly support the majority of suggestions Obama made about gun control, which seem to be all common sense - especially allowing scientific study of the issue, better logs by dealers, real background checks, tougher gun show requirements, etc.  I don’t support the ban on large magazines and assault weapons unless that ban also applies to our local SWAT squads, police and the domestic military.  Then we can start working on 'downsizing' the Offense Department and the Department of Homeland Insecurity.  After all, what’s fair is ‘fair.’

P.S. - Obama recently visited Minneapolis and was quoted as saying, as he stood before an audience of policeman, in essence "we cannot have a situation where the 'bad' guys are better armed than the police."  What happened to the little martyrs of Newtown?

Red Frog

January 20, 2013