No Aesthetic Stasis

 “Beethoven and Shostakovich – Composers of Revolution” by Alan Woods, 2006

This handy pamphlet challenges the idea that art is a purely ‘aesthetic’ or static experience, dedicated only to entertainment, comfort or blissful repose. Woods shows how the French Revolution influenced Beethoven ‘til the end, and the Bolshevik Revolution influenced Shostakovich up to his death in 1975.  Woods puts these composers into the context of history, as no one escapes from history, much as they pretend to.

Shostakovich & Beethoven

Beethoven

Beethoven lived as a working-class Bohemian all his life. Stravinsky called him a “plebian genius.”  He broke with his mentor Haydn and the influence of Mozart and Bach to create a music less aristocratic, courtly and more energetic, violent and dissonant.  He once broke the strings on a piano he was playing he hit the keys so hard.  He expanded the sonata form from its staid roots, creating music that Woods calls a dynamic ‘dialectic’ of opposing sounds, not just harmonies, giving birth to the romantic style that influenced Wagner. 

This was under the impact of the French Revolution according to Woods, a period Beethoven lived through and was closely acquainted with:  “…it is only with Beethoven that the spirit of the French Revolution finds its true expression in music.” Beethoven had distain for royalty and thought the Austrians would never make revolution.  He said: “As long as the Austrians have their brown beer and little sausages, they will never revolt.”  In the U.S. we might substitute yellow beer and hamburgers. He admired Napoleon until Napoleon became Emperor and betrayed the populist thrust of the French Revolution.  This action by Napoleon has come down in history as ‘Bonapartism’ – the hijacking of a revolution in the interests of reaction.  Beethoven was disgusted by it.

Napoleon crowns himself Emperor, with the Pope's blessing 

Beethoven’s first symphony, the Pathetique, is sunny, but also agitated, dissonant and mysterious - breaking with the template.  The 3^rd symphony, the Eroica, was to be dedicated to Napoleon, but after Napoleon’s crowning and concordat with the Pope, Beethoven changed the dedication to an unknown martyr of the Revolution.  This symphony contained more dissonance and violence, a picture of musical struggle, a “musical cavalry charge” and a ‘funeral march.’  The Fifth Symphony opens with the musical hammer blows of the most famous classical ‘riff’ in history – “Da da da daaa, Da da da duuu…” and from there the symphony progressed from minor to major keys.  All its main passages are based on French revolutionary songs.  Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, contains a scene of prisoners emerging from prison singing about freedom, a prison like the Bastille.  His play Egmont is even more explicit, based on a hero of Dutch nationalism fighting Spanish occupation, and follows the execution of the hero with the Victory symphony… showing his undying and rebellious optimism. 

Beethoven’s music – like the Sixth Pastorale – also had lyric and quiet moments, but these are dynamic intervals between the tumult. Beethoven’s career ended with the 9^th Symphony, written after a period of silence due to the defeat of revolutionary France at Waterloo and the consequent Europe-wide monarchist reaction.  The 9^th has been called the ‘Marseillaise of Humanity.’ It starts in a nebulous manner, then becomes dynamic, violent and triumphant.  When it was first played in 1824 it brought forth 5 ovations – more than His Majesty ever got in Austria.  25,000 people turned out for his funeral in Vienna in 1827. 

And Now For Something Completely Different

What other kinds of music shares some of Woods’ descriptions?  “Thunderous, dissonant, shocking, full of feeling, rugged, a musical explosion, energetic, rages, violent, dynamic, hammer-blows…” are all Woods’ adjectives for Beethoven’s music. I’d say these descriptors describe some jazz, blues and most of all rock, especially that of the 1960s and 1970s but even up to today.  These styles were born out of periods of social & political upheaval too.  As to dynamism, quiet/loud and contradictory themes, these can be found in the music of many musicians and bands in those days.  Woods himself dislikes modern popular music like rock, but I’d say Beethoven was in spirit the disruptive classical ‘rocker’ of his time.

Shostakovich

Shostakovich was a child of the Bolshevik revolution, born in 1906.  He lived through the revolution, the civil war, two world wars, Stalinism and part of the cold war, dying in 1975.  Woods’ portrays him as a supporter of the revolution, an opponent of Stalin and also opposed to capital by looking at his musical works and the accurate parts of his worked-over memoir. 

Shostakovich was accused of making ‘formalist,’ tragic and difficult music - for not being cheery enough or ‘representing the Soviet working class.’ Yet the civil war, the gulag, purges and forced collectivization, WWII and anti-Semitic undertones were not cheery times.  He was attacked in 1937 by Stalin personally during the purge years and again after WWII by Zhdanov. His saving grace was writing film scores for films that praised the Leader, for instance ones that praised Stalin as the absurd architect of the military victory in the Civil War.  Stalin was a movie buff, especially when he was the star.

Shostakovich was a political musician.  He said “…any artist that isolates himself from the world is doomed.” His 11^th Symphony was based on Russian revolutionary songs, centering on the 1905 insurrection against the Czar.  His 1^st Symphony in 1926 made him famous.  The 2^nd Symphony in 1927 was dedicated ‘To October,’ and starts with a factory whistle and ends with the words ‘October, commune, Lenin.’   His 1930 3^rd Symphony was dedicated to May Day.  But by that period, the cultural shift to the right had begun inside the USSR.  The revolutionary poet Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930. 

Shostakovich wrote a satirical opera, “The Nose” based on a famous anti-bureaucratic story by Gogol, but the opera’s epilogue says that “reality is worse.”  (Woods calls opera an “archetypal bourgeois medium” up to that point.)  The Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) denounced The Nose as ‘formalist’ and official reviews were hostile.  He did another opera called “Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District” in 1934, the same year Stalin had Kirov killed and used the event to attack his enemies, blaming them for the assassination. Pravda attacked his opera as “coarse, primitive and vulgar” -  Stalin himself might have been the article's author.  Socialist realism opposed innovation, satire, experimentation and anything deviating from the official Party line … and this opera was it.  Its feminism was also derided, as were the negative portrayals of the police and authorities, along with a depiction of a very familiar party of prisoners.  Pravda actually called Shostakovich an “Enemy of the People.”  No sh*t.  His 4^th Symphony was only publicly performed in 1961. 

The 1930s purges reached into the ranks of the top artists.  Soviet theater director Vsevolod Meyerholt was sent to a concentration camp, then murdered. Isaak Bebel and Osip Mandelshtam were imprisoned. His friend General Tukachevsky was killed.  In response, Shostakovich wrote the tragic 5^th Symphony – not a cheery or smug work, but one reflecting suffering.  The 6^th also reflected tragedy, menace and sarcasm.   He was to write a Lenin symphony in 1940 but it never happened. 

The War and After

Living in Leningrad, he stayed in the city, joined the fire brigade and endured the Nazi siege.  Out of this he wrote his famous 7^th Symphony, the Leningrad.  It is a marvelous musical version of the approach of the Nazi armies, the siege, the deaths and eventually the victory.  The 8^th Symphony, written in 1943, was bleak, reflecting the decimation wrought by the fascist armies in the USSR.  It was banned until 1960.  The 9^th Symphony was also not full of cheery uplift either.  Woods calls it “comical, ironic, even trivial” but also “anxious, sinister, menacing, even diabolical.” In 1948 Shostakovitch’s music was denounced as ‘disgusting, a cacophony’ and a ‘brain-twister’ by Zhdanov’s crew.  Prokofiev was also denounced by Zhdanov and his wife sent to prison.  Shostakovich was fired from teaching at the Moscow Conservatory; his works banned, he was forced to publicly repent; his privileges withdrawn.  His only source of funds was his film scores.

In 1948 he wrote a cantata called Rayok that made fun of the ‘musical activism’ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.  This cantata was a secret until 1975.  He also wrote a Jewish song cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry” as his response to the anti-Semitic attacks on ‘rootless cosmopolitans’-  though he was not Jewish.  He would not write the 10^th Symphony until after Stalin’s death in 1953. It is ‘stormy and savage’ in depicting what might be Stalin. The 1957 11^th, as already mentioned, was based on Bloody Sunday in 1905, but has echoes of the Hungarian uprising crushed by Soviet tanks.  It is a musical diatribe against tyrants.  He himself said it dealt with ‘contemporary themes’ too.  The 12^th Symphony is subtitled “October.”  The 1962 13^th Symphony dealt with anti-Semitism, and was subtitled “Baba Yar.”  It not only depicts the Nazi massacre, but Soviet queues, fear of the ‘midnight knock’ and a subtle criticism of bureaucracy under Brezhnev.  He wrote two more symphonies after this. 

Woods makes a valuable defense and analysis of these two composers and their political times and leanings.  Worth buying!

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Reason in Revolt” & “The History of Philosophy” (both by Woods); “Jazz,” “Rock and Roll,” “Blues,” “Classical,” “Folk” and “Music,” or “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Zhdanov,” Beethoven,” "Leningrad." 

And I bought it at May Day Books, which has many inexpensive pamphlets.

The Kultur Kommissar

July 4, 2023 – Happy Partial Revolution Day!

Down the Rabbit Hole

 “The Undertow – Scenes from a Slow Civil War” by Jeff Sharlet, 2023

Like many books, the title does not describe what is inside.  It’s the book version of click-bait.  Sharlet is a reporter depicting various U.S. stories with little concern for linking them together except in some kind of loose cultural impressionism. As you read them, you wonder … ‘so where is the actual civil war?’  What we have here mostly are the various wonderments of the Right - bits of violence, lots of ideological nonsense, especially religious, some justified anger, guns, lies and the organizations and individuals that take advantage of it.

Sharlet is also an academic who almost exclusively focuses on religion and its influence in the U.S. – especially the negative effects of fundamentalism.  So this book has much from that point of view. This book starts with Harry Belafonte in the ‘50s and ‘60s – his songs, his life, his anger, his relation to Martin Luther King, his activism around civil rights.  It is not clear why this is included.  To depict an earlier period of semi-fascistic ‘America’?  For hope?  He includes his reminiscences about the brief, programless existence of Occupy Wall Street in the ‘90s. More hope?  He ends with a paean to Leadbelly and the Weavers.  Pathetic, I think.

Sharlet attends several Trump rallies in 2016 and 2020.  He investigates a prosperity-gospel “Vous” megachurch in Miami, led by a young, hip, clueless showman, Pastor Rich Wilkerson.  In the same vein he attends a very creepy convention of the anti-female, anti-feminist manosphere website “A Voice for Men” in 2014.  He looks at the QAnon cult, starting with a drunken Q’er ramming suspected pedophiles with her car in Waco, Texas.   He relates the story of military vet Ashli Babbitt, a martyr for Trumpism, who was killed on January 6 as she attempted to break into the House chamber.  His meditation on Babbitt continues through a rally and church service in California, then interviews with various rioters at the Capitol.  He spends more time on her then his glancing mentions of the light-skinned BLM martyrs in Kenosha killed by Rittenhouse. It is her 3 inch knife on the cover. He even does an analysis of The Big Lebowski because Babbitt liked the movie.  He doesn't know this but that film has a huge fan base among leftists.

Sharlet drives across the country and visits Boebert’s gun café (now closed), then a visit to an Omaha church which preaches that CoVid, drought and floods are curses from God upon the sinners and the wicked.  I’m waiting for the grasshoppers, although now we do have more mosquitos! Gun-slinging church attendees eventually order him out of that church.  He goes on to visit a tent-revival in a bleak Ohio town and trips to gun-owning rural libertarians, farmers, vets and Trumpers in ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’ Wisconsin.  He never goes South…

Insights of the Book

I do not think a liberal like Jeff Sharlet really understands a ‘slow civil war’ or the rise of fascism, but his snapshots are useful.  What conclusions can we draw from his intimate portraits of this fascistic and lunatic movement?  Shartlet’s own religious understanding says Trumpism is like Gnosticism – a mode of ‘knowing’ that does not involve facts, expertise, real research, theory or actual material knowledge.  It consists instead of hints, numbers, letters, codes, imagination, faith, emotion and ‘gut’ feelings.  The only documents are the Bible and the Constitution.  Trump’s speeches are full of fear mongering about rape, pedophilia and murder carried out by immigrants, Democrats, Marxists, black criminals, Antifa and the like.  It’s a political diet of True Crime television, detective fiction, conspiracies, local 'bleed and lead' news, the “Cops” TV show and the kind of white fear you see on Nextdoor.

Hip, rich and Christian - Time to Tithe!

What Sharlet also catches is the overwhelming presence of the prosperity gospel and ‘getting rich’ as a theme for Trump and evangelical white nationalism.  Pleasure, ‘fun,’ ‘ease,’ and every other hedonic – like saying or doing whatever you want, racist, sexist or not, eating whatever you want, driving whatever vehicle you want, blowing as much gas as you want – deeply appeals to people whose ‘fun’ is threatened.  My 4x4, my snowmobile, my boat, my riding lawnmower, my big house, my my my … They ‘believe’ and this will lead them to wealth. It is hedonism as policy. This material lust appeals to those who perhaps have failed in business the most, and need some kind of bogus 'lift.'

Sharlet only hints at the real crimes of Democrats like Clinton – for instance how the U.S. under Clinton’s watch helped decimate the Haitian economy.  He ignores the long history of Democrats spurning working-class concerns.  Even the failure of the Left in the 1930s and later to build a mass electoral party plays into this current situation.  His focus is exclusively on Trump supporters and in this he ignores class.  But in spite of himself he sometimes lists the occupations of Trump’s base – and many of them are business people, while a few are white-collars.  Only one blue-collar working-class identity is mentioned, along with one lumpen. Now why would a media-savvy, wealth-flaunting, mafia-don boss man appeal to the small fry of the business world?  Or the entrepreneurs, the self-employed, the ‘independent contractors’?  And all the church followers of the prosperity gospel and its wealthy pastor proponents? It’s pretty obvious - they want to be rich too!  Tithe and it will be so.

His reporting confirms the Marxist view that the petit-bourgeois is the main mass base for fascism and the ultra-right.  14 year vet Babbitt herself ran a ‘pool-supply company’ with family members, but it was $71K in debt.  It is explicitly ‘the ruined petit-bourgeois’ that have to take their anger out on something.  Behind this is a fractured understanding of how capitalism actually works, so scape-goats must be targeted. Small business is nothing but meat to large capital and only some now realize it.  As I’ve written before, fascistic and right-wing ideas are like seeing reality in a cracked, fun-house mirror.  They can’t face the fact that it is the capital system itself that is the problem.

Ashli Babbitt - Martyr?

UnCivil War?

Sharlet asks his interviewees if they think a civil war is coming.  They all say yes – but given their shaky understanding of the world, that rings a bit hollow.  He interviews a 3% militia member who agrees, though his estimate of those who directly participated in 1776 of 3% - is about 22% off according to Shartlett.  There is a big difference between 3% and 25% and the lower number hints more at right-wing terrorism and small mob violence than counter-revolution.  Which is where we stand right now… though Republican state legislatures are doing their part too.  Their ideas of civil war also smack of a vague 'myth' - not a real understanding of what that means.  Sharlet consistently points out the actual facts over the lies on issue after issue to interviewees, but it makes no difference.  At one point he calls Trumpism a shared dream, and that certainly seems operative. Fascist ideology is partly based on fear and magical thinking, but that is not all as it has a material base within a capitalist matrix.

If you want a look inside the minds of ultra-right individuals, this book will help.  If you want a broader understanding or theory that rises above anecdotal stories, it will not.  It ruminates about ‘whiteness’ but doesn’t get much beyond that. If you want a plan to defeat budding fascism or win over potential allies, it will not either.  Another sad, passive microscopic liberal meditation. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “It Was Predictable,” “Anti-Fascist Series,” “Loaded – a Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment,” “American War,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Cranky Yankee,” ‘Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “Kenosha Trial Was Rigged.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 30, 2023

Who Reads Newspapers and Magazines Anymore?

 Periodical Survey: Newspapers and Magazines 

May Day Books carries an almost complete set of current left-wing newspapers and magazines, from Bust to Jacobin to Z Magazine.  Here is a roundup of a few of them, mostly newspapers, focusing on the news and ideas the mainstream bourgeois press ignore.

Marx and Pigeon Together

Monthly Review – April ’23 - “Marxian Ecology, Dialectics & the Hierarchy of Needs”

J.B. Foster, in a follow-up to several of his books on this subject, describes the great scientific strides in the early and late Soviet Union related to the ‘dialectics of nature’ which initially influenced a group of ‘red scientists’ in England.  The middle Stalin period and purges were a time of scientific regression, especially under Lysenko. Foster argues against Western Marxism’s ignoring the applicability of materialist dialectics to natural processes.  He says that the dialectic is applicable to nature on its own terms.

Marx saw a human link with animals influenced by Darwin, not a dualistic separation - with humanity only being distinguished by labor and higher social organization. Foster points out that Marx explained that humans are “corporeal beings and thus objective, sensuous, material beings insofar as their needs lie outside of themselves."  Although I would phrase it as "needs lie within themselves."  The satisfaction lies without, in nature.  It is a theory of body corporality that leads to a hierarchy of material needs. Foster shows that capital has introduced a ‘corporeal rift’ affecting the human body - relating to epidemics, short life spans, injuries and sicknesses affecting workers, the use of women’s bodies, slavery and incarceration, etc.

Foster argues that science many times becomes an ‘anti-capitalist’ force, just as Marx and Engel’s projects were essentially scientific, though capital works to limit science's usefulness only to the realm of profit.  He lastly discusses environmental strategies like the Green New Deal, degrowth, ecological Leninism and ecological war communism.

The Internationalist - January-May 2023 - “U.S. Imperialism Hurtling Toward World War III”      

This article by the Internationalist Group claims that the U.S. and NATO are planning an “all-out war” and “a nuclear showdown with Moscow and Beijing.”  They call for “militarily defending Russia,” a regional capitalist power; and China, a bureaucratically-deformed workers state.”  Their politics on this issue seems to be a form of overwrought hysteria along with a popular front with the Russian capitalist regime.  The line on China is certainly legitimate.  Not a word on peace or uniting Russian, Bylorussian and Ukrainian workers against both regimes.  They apply formal logic instead of a dialectical understanding, thinking it is purely a matter of taking one side in a military conflict.  The combined nature of this war as both a U.S. / NATO proxy war and a struggle for Ukrainian self-determination has confused many and this is more proof. 

Labor Notes – June 2023 – “Organizing Against the Churn”

Turnover is the subject of this article related to union organizing at Amazon, Starbucks, various colleges, charter schools, in fast food and retail.  Because of the high turnover in these jobs, it is hard to get union organizing drives going or complete.  Supposedly Amazon has a 150% turnover rate, though some workers stay for years.  Yet persistence has shown that turnover can be beaten.  The article calls for building a ‘co-worker culture’ prior to unionization where workers rely on each other and do not snitch to the boss. In Durham, NC a ‘cross-job’ organization named “Union of Southern Service Workers” (USSW) has formed for people who switch between various low-wage jobs to help them advocate at work. Strikes have been shown to be effective in the successful organizing of Chicago charter schools. 

The article talks about unionization of the Smithfield pork plant in open-shop North Carolina in 2008. However, a union that does not orient members, service them or stand up to the boss will become a minority ‘sh*t’ union, stay a minority and perhaps get thrown out.

Workers World - June 2023 – “Cop City Won’t Be Built”

Stop Cop City Solidarity has called for a week of action June 24-July 1 in Atlanta. The assassination of Tortuguita; the filing of ‘terrorism’ charges by the Georgia AG against peaceful protesters; the raid, destruction and arrests of a legal defense team office and the bloc between Democrat and Republican council members have all exposed the reactionary police state plans that Cop City will only amplify.  A referendum on Cop City in Atlanta has been proposed by a broad front of groups who think the public will vote it down.  The petition was delivered by the ‘Union of Southern Service Workers’ -already noted in the Labor Notes article.  Rallies and protests during this week will be directed at proposed contractors, as well as donors and board members of the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is proposing the facility.  Public monies will be part of the deal, propping up the Police Foundation.  The board includes Delta, Chick-fil-A, Home Depot, Coca Cola, Bank of America and AT&T.  This is a picture of the Georgia ruling class and a bit of the national ruling class.

The Militant – July 3, 2023 – “Rail Unions:  ‘Bosses drive for profits cause of derailments’”

Slashing crew sizes, cutting the workforce, imposing 24/7 on-call work schedules and 12 hour shifts all are meant to boost the huge profits of rail companies according to unionists familiar with the issues, while harming safety and damaging workers.  The head of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way (which was once a member of the Labor Party) blames Norfolk Southern and Democratic/Republican politicians for the disaster at East Palestine and many other derailment sites.  Another problem is very little training for newly-hired workers before being sent out, according to the head of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART-TD).  Toxic conditions and effects still exist in East Palestine.  The head of the EPA blamed these on the ‘lifestyle choices’ of East Palestine residents instead.  Demands for “Medicare for All” and declaring East Palestine a FEMA site have been made.  Residents attended an NTSB hearing on the derailment June 21-23 as to the causes of the disaster.  No mention is made in the article of shoddy equipment, too long trains, no sick time or lack of maintenance on the rail lines.

There have been prior reviews about Monthly Review and Labor Notes articles on the blog.

Prior blog reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Marx and the Earth – an Anti-Critique,” “The Ecological Revolution,” & “The Robbery of Nature – Capitalism and the Ecological Rift” (3 by Foster); “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukács); “The Structural Crisis of Capital”(Mészáros); “Thoughts on Ukraine,” “War With Russia?” (Cohen); “US/EU Meddling,” “The Russians Are Coming Again,” “Rebuilding Power in Open-Shop America,” “Breaking the Impasse,” “Tell The Bosses We’re Coming,” “Reviving the Strike,” “Notes From Minneapolis,” “Defund, Disband or Abolish the Police?” “Warrior Cops."

And I bought these at May Day Books with Sweat Equity!

Red Frog

June 27, 2023

The Mangrove Roots

 “The Magic Kingdom” by Russell Banks, 2022

This is the last book by the great writer Russell Banks, who died in January this year.  Banks wrote stories about the working-class in New England and Florida – books like Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Trailer Park and Continental Drift.  In this book, Banks allegedly shows the historical roots of the land upon which Disney World sits – though by my geography that land is not quite the same as this. Clues in the book about Tampa being ‘north’ of this area are curious, as Tampa is west or southwest.  Constant references to the land being in “south central Florida” when it’s more like central Florida also belie the factuality. I’m assuming he did research into land records prior to their purchase by Disney and perhaps made up a connection – or not.

At any rate, the ‘magic kingdom’ in question is not the fake land of cartoons and nostalgia.  It is a real, religious Shaker farming community named ‘New Bethany’ covering 7,000 acres in central Florida, situated in the watery land of that area near what is now Narcoossee, just southeast of Orlando. The Shakers are a split-off from the Quakers. The colony is joined by a ‘communistic’ family leaving a utopian socialist commune in Georgia run by the Ruskinites, who move because the husband has died and the commune is failing.  On the way they spend time in an almost literal ‘slave’ plantation as the only white people, trapped in excruciating labor until they are rescued by a Shaker elder, Brother John.  That plantation’s labor was mostly supplied by convict leasing, per Jim Crow.  It's just after 1900.

The Memoir

This is a memoir of a teenager and then an old man, a real-estate speculator, Harley Mann, who lived on the Shaker commune for many years… and thinks he destroyed it.  Each chapter is based on his dictation into a reel to reel tape machine, tapes supposedly found in the ‘basement’ of the local library.  Florida buildings have no basements because of the water table, so that is a tipoff that the story might not be wholly true. Harley’s the one who supposedly got ahold of the Shaker land after the commune failed and sold it to Walt Disney.  This guilt suffuses the book - about this lost world in the mangroves and cypress swamps, about his first love, about Elder John who was the architect of the successful farms, the sad fate of the colony, estrangement from his own mother, sister and brothers, about his lost youth and lost reality. 

It is the early 1900s.  At New Bethany, teenaged Harley doesn’t buy the Shakers’ religious hokum but he attempts to be a celibate like the Shakers (they cannot have sex so they have to recruit to survive); hard working, community-oriented and ignorant of the outside world. He becomes a bee keeper for the colony, learning from an older worker.  He gets no pay, just his room and board, along with his family. His romantic and sexual crush on a frail tubercular woman who visits and eventually settles in New Bethany does this world in. Wild animals, fires, sinkholes, storms and jealousy and hypocrisy eventually ruin the massive farm, which was the most successful and efficient in the area. Even outsiders approved of its presence.  The community had drained the land and grew vegetables and fruit, milled grains, raised animals, sold eggs and honey, made furniture – almost everything a farm could do.  And what they did, they did well.  Elder John later becomes a successful businessman and politician in Tampa after the collapse – leaving his Shaker ways of not pursuing a profit.

Shaker colony near St. Cloud, Florida

Utopianism

To a socialist, there is more here than just a stock story of the frailty of human beings.  Utopian experiments surrounded by a sea of capitalism are fraught and many have not survived.  Marx himself argued against them as the method of overthrowing capital – though workers’ cooperatives have survived for years in some locations.  Banks was not a socialist, so instead he shows the huge benefits of collective labor and the pitfalls of personalist, religious collectivism … called sinkholes in the Florida context.  You might remember the Ruskinite community was also failing, so there is a pattern.

The ‘magic kingdom’ of the title is a functioning human community, not constructed of a plastic ‘Main Street’ but of cooperation.  Religious utopianism can be twisted, as is seen in many religious cults using free labor, enriching the leaderships of Scientology, the Branch Davidians, Rajneeshees or fundamentalist FLDS Mormonism.  But in this case of Shaker communalism no strata of brutal or totalitarian leaders emerged.  Just small, sad lusts and the involvement of the outside legal system, which led the elderly leadership to close the colony. 

Shakerism, still waiting for the Second Coming, was bound to fail, given their complete and typical religious antagonism to sexuality. Only 2-3 elderly Shakers are left, per Wiki, in one small town. Previously they had recruited from the many people left adrift by society, from poverty and jail, desperate, homeless, lonely or sick.  Now people have other avenues in which to survive, but in the 17, 18 and 1900s, Sharkerism might have been a logical social option in England and the U.S., a refuge of sorts for the dispossessed.

Russell Banks, like Cormac McCarthy, will be missed, as every one of his books has something valuable to say. Read on!   

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Affliction” and “Rule of the Bone,” (both by Banks); “Slavery by Another Name,” “Cults and Cultists,” “The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx,” “Sick Puppy” and “Native Tongue” (both by Hiassen); “Florida Will Sink.”

And I got the book at the Minneapolis Library!

Red Frog

June 23, 2023

Coups and Coups

 “Harsh Times” by Mario Vargas Llosa, 2019

This is a fictional recreation of the coup and its’ aftermath against Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala.  It has all the standard characters behind coups in Latin America – United Fruit, Edward Bernays, the CIA, Howard Hunt, David Atlee Phillips, the Dulles brothers, hired mercenaries, Somoza, Trujillo and local military reactionaries chosen to take his place.  In this case it was Colonel Castillo Armas – Hatchet Face – a swarthy looking thug of poor birth, born out of wedlock, chosen by the CIA to lead the coup.  He’d been trained in counter-insurgency at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  Armas had hated Árbenz since they both went to military school in Guatemala City. 

The political logic was that the land reform, taxing United Fruit and labor rights instituted by the Arbenz government meant he was ‘a communist.’  Though everyone – especially Edward Bernays, the propagandist for bananas and United Fruit – knew he idolized democracy and the U.S., not socialism or communism or the USSR.  As Bernays basically put it to the UF Board of Directors – “even democracy is not good for the profits of United Fruit.” This might remind one of assertions by Marxists that capital cannot carry out a true democratic revolution.  The lie that finally got everyone’s attention was that the USSR was using Guatemala to ‘take over the Panama Canal.’  Ludicrous claims like this were normal during the Cold War.

Llosa is probably the top writer in Latin America, in spite of his conservative politics.  His consistently political novels are both readable and, oddly, ‘on the left’ so to speak. Even today after the coup, years of bloody civil war, more coups and changes of government, decades of repression of Mayan peasants and official corruption, Guatemala is still sunk in capitalist misery – even after ‘peace’ was declared. Landed families and foreign corporations rule through various conservative factions, with the silent support of the U.S. mothership.  This coup in 1954 was significant because it served as a modern CIA template in all of Latin and Central America.    

The Coup

In this story Nicaragua’s Somoza provides training facilities for the rebels.  The Dominican Republic’s Trujillo sends guns and money.  The CIA sets up a radio station in Key West, supplies planes and hires mercenaries. Árbenz is pictured as a decent military man who is too naïve for his own good, especially when he expected the ruling elite and the military to put up with land reform.  His proposed 'civilian militias' to defend the 'revolution' were stymied by the military, who later handed power over to the coupists. He was exposed to new ideas by his wife's friends. Árbenz has an ‘unfortunate’ friend, Jose Manual Fortuny, who leaned towards Marxism and helped found the tiny Guatemalan Party of Labor... the only real commies in the country, if that.

The agrarian reform passed was mild, only applying to land left fallow or abused by landlords.  Yet the peasant masses saw it as a doorway to all landless peasants getting land.  Árbenz opposed the land occupations that followed.  He had wanted to promote small-scale capitalism in the countryside instead of latifundia, but not at the expense of the jefes and patrones.  He opposed any cooperatives, communes, collectives, confiscation without compensation and state farms.  U.S. Ambassador Purifoy, the 'butcher of Greece,' ignored this.

The land reform gave the pretext for the new dictatorship, which threw thousands into jail, executed others and forced many to apply for asylum or leave the country.  It dropped all land taxes and returned any land taken back to United Fruit and the racist jefes. Col. Armas was welcomed by the Eisenhower administration, Richard Nixon presiding, with open arms as a hero.  One of the other highlights of the coup regime was the local Archbishop dressing ‘the Black Christ of Esquipulas’ carving in military attire, and parading it through the streets in support of the regime.  Yet after 3 years Armas' military dictatorship was under threat, not an unfamiliar story.

Personal Stories

A weird, possibly fictional ‘side story’ involves a plot to kidnap Armas’ beautiful lover Marta after the coup by agents hired by Trujillo, who had developed a grudge against Armas for breaking promises to him.  But this plot after the coup is not actually a ‘side’ story - it becomes one focus of the book.  I suspect it is for those who can't follow the multiple political machinations.  The girl, Marta, Miss Guatemala, becomes a central figure, and ends up in the Dominican Republic under the shaky dictatorship of Trujillo.  Rinse and repeat? Intrigue, mistrust, lust for power, assassinations and factions all ruin a good dictatorship or two or three, as even Haiti is thrown in here.  If you want to know how U.S. sponsored coups and their dictatorships cum governments are run – and they are still being run in Latin America – this is a good inside look, with the standard secretive and personal twists you'd expect.

P.S. - Bernardo Arevelo, the son of a prior progressive president of Guatemala, won the recent election overwhelming on 8/20/23 and will be the first progressive after Arbenz to be elected.  Let's see how long he lasts.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Central America’s Forgotten History” (A. Chomsky); “American Made,” “The Open Veins of Latin America” (Galeano); “Kill the Messenger,” “Not a Nation of Immigrants” (Dunbar-Ortiz); “November – A Novel,” “Manufacturing Consent” (Chomsky), "Drug War Capitalism."  

And I got it at the Minneapolis Library!

Red Frog

June 20, 2023

They're Legends Now, But Before ...

 “Whole World in an Uproar” – Music, Rebellion and Repression – 1955-1972 by Aaron Leonard

This is an excellent look back at the ties between political upheaval, music and political repression.  As we enter another phase of repression similar or worse than the past – knowledge of how it went 50-60+ years ago might help.  Leonard has written 2 prior books on FBI / police actions against various branches of the Maoist and Marxist left in this period.  This book shows how repression worked in the music field.  If you are a Leftist who thinks culture is irrelevant – this book shows it is not to the ruling class. Class struggle penetrates every sector of society, especially during social tumult.

Examples from the book?  Folk singers were brought before the anti-communist HUAC committee and Pete Seeger jailed and black-listed for not answering questions.  Harry Belafonte was forced to say he was not a Communist. Jazz players put out political albums and songs attacking Jim Crow, as did folk-blues artists like Josh White and J.B. Lenoir.  Early rock and roll and R&B were attacked by the racist power structure, as it brought together white and black music styles and also people in a time of Jim Crow, weakening segregation.  Dylan was stopped from playing a song about the raving anti-communists in the John Birch Society on the Ed Sullivan show, and later garnered an FBI file.  A Trotskyist political artist like Dave Van Ronk earned his own FBI file and was later pilloried in a Cohen Brothers film. Phil Ochs was banned from the airways. Sam Cooke also had an FBI file, especially after penning “A Change is Going To Come” and associating with Malcolm X.  The Beatles were ridiculed in the press and a U.S. musician’s union sought to bar them and several other British groups like the Kinks from playing in the U.S.  Joan Baez sang at Berkley’s Free Speech Movement – a movement also denounced in the press.

That is the beginning.  All these people and events are now legends, but at the time, like MLK, they were abhorred by the conservative ruling elite.  The ‘counter-culture’ was not just about apolitical pot smoking and ‘free’ sex, but politically involved with the social struggles of the time. Leonard believes politics actually dominated the period and he is certainly right.  The book integrates the upheavals as they happened each year, and how that impacted the music scene. His perspective of the '50s and ‘60s’ period is not the standard press depiction of dopey Beat'niks' or drugged-out ‘dippy’ hippies,’ the latter best exemplified by middle-class journalists like Joan Didion in her exposé “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”    

Music Entwined With Events

Leonard pokes at folk music purists like Irwin Silber, first an editor of “Sing Out,” then an editor of the National Guardian and later a leader of a post-Maoist left group, Line of March.  Silber led the charge against Dylan and anyone else who wrote something other than protest or folk songs, with invective against folk-rock.  Leonard cites Greil Marcus as to Dylan being blocked from certain folk clubs in Britain due to the Communist Party disliking his new musical direction.  Leonard contends this purist hostility might have been one reason he stopped touring, not just the motorcycle accident.

Rock bands in the mid to late ‘60s were the target of police action across the U.S.  Drug busts, banning political or so-called ‘drug’ songs from the airwaves, blocking venues, denying visas and shutting down on-going concerts for various flimsy reasons were the most popular tactics.  A police riot occurred at an Ochs concert in LA, shutting it down; Country Joe and the Fish were physically attacked by reactionaries in a Chicago hotel lobby during the '68 Convention; Jim Morrison went to jail in Florida. The Beatles were disliked by the Philippine Marcos regime, getting roughed up several times during their visit.  In the U.S. they were the target of drug busts, a radio boycott and album burnings after John’s Jesus remark and pickets by the KKK.  No wonder they stopped touring.

1968 saw the greatest social upheaval since the 1930s in the U.S., with the assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy, nationwide black-led riots, the My Lai massacre and the Tet offensive, student strikes, the Chicago Democratic convention police riot.  Rebellions also occurred in Mexico, France, Italy, China, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan, Poland and elsewhere.  During this period not every music artist was in opposition.  For instance James Brown toured Vietnam with Bob Hope, celebrated black capitalism, told rioters to ‘go home,’ and later endorsed Nixon.  He even regretted his song “Say it Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

Rock bands like the Grateful Dead and the MC5 regularly played gratis for movement events.  The folk-comedy duo the Smothers Brothers was canceled due to the subversive musicians on their show, high-lighted by Pete Seeger’s re-emergence doing the anti-Vietnam war song “The Big Muddy.”  The half-wit, middle class press claimed the Altamont concert was ‘the end of the ‘60s,’ blaming it on the Rolling Stones – even though conservative San Francisco Mayor Alito and a dispute over film rights denied permits for two prior locations that would have allowed more time to prepare.  Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young did songs about the Chicago 8 trial and the murders of students at Kent State and others wrote songs about the Attica rebellion.  John Lennon’s role in making dissent legitimate to a mass audience didn’t hurt.

Nixon’s government retaliated.  The drug war started up in high style, busting musicians constantly.  Hard hats in New York led by a Union bureaucrat Brennan attacked high-school and college anti-war protesters.  He was later appointed as labor secretary by Nixon.  “Okie From Muskogee” became a hit song, though former jailee Merle Haggard later joked that he’d smoked weed.  The FBI ended Mariam Makeba’s career because of her marriage to Black Panther Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure).  And then Nixon began to withdraw from Vietnam…and made peace with China.

And a war on musicians

Conclusion

This is a good book that integrates social struggle, history and music – showing that culture is not some isolated phenomenon but directly tied to the economic and political structure of a country, both reflecting and acting upon it. Leonard includes photo-copies of various FBI file pages to show you he’s not making this story up.  Dissident musicians, writers, film-makers and painters will always face the hostility of the ‘powers that be.’  In this period the counter-culture was massive and involved millions, which was its strength. But ultimately it failed to significantly change the political/economic structure it challenged, nor could it given its diffusion.  Capitalism recovered, reformed a bit, repressed the rest, then morphed into neo-liberalism.  Now neo-liberal ideology and practice is breaking down, creating a cultural and political opening once again – which can be filled by the Right or the Left.

At present there is no real ‘counter-culture’ of a proletarian or dissident nature, as corporatization has swallowed nearly every art form.  Yet culture has become more democratic below this monied crust, with more musicians, writers, artists, film-makers, actors and other crafts than ever before in history. This presages what it would be like for cultural and practical skills under socialism and communism.  In that context more and more of the population would achieve social stability, work fewer hours, have better health and education, with guaranteed housing and food and thus be able to expand their skills and knowledge.  But that outcome is just what the ruling class does not want to happen.  The present situation with the rise of fascist and ultra-right groups is part of a reaction to that possibility.

For prior blog reviews on this subject, please use the blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  "A Threat of the First Magnitude" and "Heavy Radicals" (Both by Leonard);“Summer of Soul” “Let Us Now Praise the Dead,” “We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years,” “33 Revolutions Per Minutes,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Blues and Blues-rock,” “Music is Power,” “The Music Sell-Outs.”

And I bought it at May Day Books, which has a good music section!

Red Frog

June 16, 2023

Camel, Meet Needle - II

 “Jesus – A Life in Class Conflict”by J. Crossley & R.J. Myles, 2023

This is a historical-materialist study of the Jesus movement in ancient Judea and Galilee.  It closely looks at writings about the material conditions of that time, in a land ruled by Rome and dominated by a local elite, both subsisting on taxes, tribute, slavery and corveé labor.  The authors contend, following the work of English historian Eric Hobsbawn, that Jesus was an artisan and leader of a movement against both Rome and the local Temple Pharisees, based on the grievances of the Jewish peasantry.  The struggle was cloaked in moralism, magic and ‘end times’ verbiage, as was common at the time, but the real issues were economic and political.  The authors call it ‘revolutionary millenarianism.’

Their work involves at least 28 sources, principally the 4 Gospels, the Synoptic tradition and the work of historians like Josephus. They are acutely aware of the historical weaknesses and contradictions in the Bible, along with the theological motivations of its various authors, none of whom were writing until long after Jesus’ execution. They make reasonable, grounded points, discard others and propose possible theories when they are not sure.  The authors carefully note when the Gospels insert later things into the past.  In 66-73 CE there was a violent mass rebellion against Rome by the Israelites, and it is logical that Jesus and other prophets laid the groundwork.  In 70 CE Jerusalem was surrounded and the Temple destroyed by the Roman legions. 2 other rebellions followed.  It was only later in the early 300s that Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of Rome – turning Christianity into an ideology of the ruling class.

If you want to understand what was going on at the time, this book is far more level-headed than the magical nonsense dished out in a Bible-study class at your typical church.  I myself have not read the Bible in toto, and I suspect many others have not done so either, so it’s an excellent historical introduction. It might also make the Christian socialists happy – all 8 of you.  Yet you will have to discard the idealist and moralistic baggage that you carry.  It also might make the Maoists happy – after all, this was a peasant movement.

The authors contradict various bourgeois historians that paint Judean social conditions as pleasant; or picture Jesus’ followers as passive ‘believers,’ or think that the movement was led by ‘middle-class’ fisherman.  There was no real middle-class at this time – the fisherman were not much different than local farmer living off subsistence crops. They point out that several mega-building projects, so beloved of those same historians, might have displaced residents, involved forced labor, increased taxes and were resented as bad attempts at ‘modernization.’  Freeway, corporate, mining, oil and stadium projects in our own day play the same role.

Organized & Organizer

The authors picture the disciples as ‘The Twelve’ - a ‘central committee’ of the movement.  They relate their artisanal and rural class backgrounds, with several fisherman, Jesus a carpenter, one a former tax-collector, and several women who had access to money.  They came from small rural villages like Nazareth. The movement was not fully male-centric, as you can see, with Mary Magdalene most prominent, but the authors discount it as feminist.  God was always a ‘Father,’ for instance, and there were strict prohibitions against divorce.  There were 12 tribes of Israel so ‘12’ was a magic number.  The leading members were depicted in the Da Vinci painting The Last Supper. Jesus actually aimed many of his sermons at the rich, telling them they should share their wealth or give it up, leading to repentance.  The authors call this a 'mission to the rich,' sort of like Millionaires for Taxation. This allowed him to gain money to fund the movement from either guilt or threats.  Left-wing groups with sugar-daddies might be familiar with this phenomenon. 

The central committee - with one woman

The authors go on to claim this was a ‘vanguard party’ with the goal of a ‘dictatorship of the peasantry,’ but led by new moral kings, really a moral theocracy.  Jesus was the leader of this party, a religious organizer if you will. ‘Vanguard party’ and “dictatorship of the peasantry’ is borrowed from 19^th and 20^th century Marxism and historically seems out of place, though it’s pretty clever.  The movement’s millenarianism, in which God comes down to ‘smite the wicked’ and overturn society, is absent from any Marxist concept of revolution.  Replacing one set of kings with another is against socialism too.  Indeed, the authority of God, miracles, healing and exorcism gave this group credibility, not just their class hostility to the monied elites, the line of Herod or the Roman praetorians.

The present Evangelical prosperity gospelites or the wealthy Catholic, Anglican and Mormon churches will not be happy remembering the Biblical quotes from Jesus about camels and needles, God and Mammon, how the last shall be first or sending the rich away empty. The fate of the poverty-stricken Lazarus in Heaven and the ordinary wealthy man in Hades are the divine rewards imagined by this movement. The Lazarus story explicitly rejects wealth itself…not behavior. The authors refute the idea that this class hostility was just the complaint of ‘out elites’ – scribes who resented their subservient role - as these ideas were also held by ‘crowds,’ ‘multitudes,’ 'mobs' and 'hundreds' of followers in rural areas.  The authors pay special attention to the power of crowds.

Wandering, Pacifism, Non-Jews

A curious question is why Jesus, at the age of about 30, would quit his trade as a carpenter and begin to wander from village to village.  He certainly had no land though he spoke Aramaic and was literate.  Most historians claim it was ‘voluntary,’ a life-style choice so to speak.  Yet why would former farmers and fishermen abandon their work and families to become virtually homeless as wandering cadre?  The authors cannot say definitely, but there might have been economic forces at work that made it the only option left – as it is for many migrants on our own borders. To this day religious street people accept donations as one way of surviving.  Even homeless people scrawl “God Bless” on their cardboard.

The authors refute the idea that Jesus was a pacifist.  The movement’s use of non-violence was a strictly practical tactic, saving violent retribution and judgment for the end times.  The Book of Revelation ending the New Testament tells you all you need to know about their ‘pacifism.’  The Jesus movement embraced the actions of prior ‘manly’ Jewish martyrs – the Maccabees, John the Baptist and the rebels executed by Herod the Great.  So it is no great surprise when Jesus was also martyred. 

The authors point to the movement’s strict adherence to Jewish tradition and law on subjects like circumcision, honoring the Sabbath, pork, purity laws and Jewish holy days so as to gain the confidence of conservative peasants.  For instance divorce was heavily sanctioned by Jesus, perhaps to keep peasant families whole, as children and wives where essential workers on most plots of land.  Child labor is still economically useful to small businessmen on farms and in small shops, as are intact families, both providing free labor for the business.  Hence the social conservatism.

Note that all of this rhetoric was aimed at Jews, not non-Jews like Gentiles, Samaritans, Romans and the like.  Non-Jews only became important as the movement spread out of Palestine's urban centers and began recruiting others.  

'Cleansing' the Temple

Passover

Jesus’ trip to Jerusalem for Passover is a crucial event in the Gospels.  Passover itself is full of political meaning against slavery and oppression – sort of the U.S. 4^th of July or Juneteenth; November 7 in the former USSR or the date of the storming of the Bastille in France.  Jerusalem was packed with Jews arriving from the villages.  Roman legionnaires stood guard at the Temple; volatile and unruly crowds filled the streets.  The Jesus group was in and around the city as revolutionary millenarians, led by a leader pursuing imminent liberation.  It’s not quite Lenin at the Finland Station but you see the setting. 

The key, plausible event that got Jesus arrested and executed was his entry into the Temple itself, where he supposedly overturned the money-changers tables and chased away traders using it as a commercial site, saying it had become a ‘den of bandits.’  The authors suggest that it was quite possible that Jesus’s disciples and followers also participated in shutting down the commercial activities in the Temple. At Jesus’ trial before Pilate there is a mention of an ‘insurrection’ that week involving Barabbas.  At any rate, this was performative politics, but behind it was a general and historical dislike of the corruption, wealth-seeking, idolatry and cruelty of the Temple priests and behind them, the local Jewish elite and their Roman allies. 

Jesus was later quietly arrested at Gethsemane with the help of a traitor in his own organization, Judas.  He was then quickly tried by the High Priest and then Pilate, and condemned to be crucified between two insurrectionists – the actual Greek translation according to the authors. The authors consider Jesus was executed as a ‘deranged insurrectionist’ too.  The Romans supposedly hung an insulting ethno-racialist notation ‘King of the Jews’ above his head.  Crucifixion was the normal Roman method used to punish the lower classes, slaves and foreigners with the most excruciating and shameful death.

Being buried in a ‘rock cut’ tomb was only for the rich – normally a condemned criminal would be thrown into a pit grave or left for feral dogs.  It is possible that his followers retrieved his body.  The story that a powerful and observant Jew, Joseph of Arimathea, asked Pilate if he could take the body to his own crypt is analyzed by the authors, who say it is possible.  At any rate, there is no reliable source as to what happened after Jesus’ crucifixion – the claims are all over the map.  The authors cite visions of Jesus after his death, which became a central element in the Jesus myth.

The Jesus class struggle revolution failed.  No apocalypse appeared from on high.  The 2nd Coming is still in abeyance and will be forever.  Jesus didn't even denounce slavery, so his emancipatory activity only went so far.  This is the real story from the authors point of view.

P.S. - Christian conservatives are now rejecting Jesus as 'too woke.'  How they are going to retain the moniker 'Christian' is beyond me.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1alx8lLGwrc

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Marx on Religion,” “Nonverts,” “Rise of the Nones,” “Libertarian Atheism and Liberal Religionism,” “Jude the Obscure” (Hardy); “Spiritual Snake Oil” "The Dark Side of Christian History,"  “The Great Evil” (Nunpa); “Godless – 150 Years of Unbelief” and “Astrology – (both by Bufe); American Theocracy” (Phillips); “Religulous” (Maher); “Go Tell It On The Mountain” (Baldwin); “The Da Vinci Code” (Brown); “To Serve God and Walmart,” “Marx and Human Nature,” "The Jesus Comics."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 13, 2023