Free! Two Reviews for the Price of One:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHILLIPS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Frog
August 11, 2011

The Accident on the Potomac

Obama Set to 'Fold' Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Frog
July 27, 2011

The Accident on the Mississippi

Lockout Over - Dayton Blinks, then Dayton Collapses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Frog
July 15, 2011

Strike This! Workman-Like Book by Local Activist

“Reviving the Strike” by Joe Burns, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Place is the Space

Just Kids,” by Patti Smith, 2011

This is the story of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s not a biography so much as an homage to a time, a place and a relationship. The time is the late sixties and early seventies. The place is New York. The relationship is a friendship/love between a young gay guy and a young punk girl. Although ‘punks’ hadn’t been invented yet. Mapplethorpe is the ultimate ‘gay best friend’ and lover, I guess. Smith writes in a poetic but somewhat childish manner, which fits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you Forgotten Your Roots?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

June 19, 2011

The Poverty of Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetic Fact

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

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

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

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

Our own prose poetess, Le Sueur.

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

The Place is the Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For her next book, Hamilton should center on the invention of rock & roll. One story I’ve been told was that Ike Turner wrote the first rock song, “Rocket 88” in the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Another is that Fats Domino recorded the first rock song "Fat Man" in 1949 at J&M Studio in New Orleans.  But then she probably thinks some white tastemaker – like Sam Phillips - really invented those songs and rock and roll.

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

Malcolm X Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zizek Says: Wage Theoretical Class War Now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog, April 28, 2011

Another God That Failed

"Death of the Liberal Class" – Chris Hedges, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

Downplaying Labor

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

Downplaying the Left

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

Downplaying the Mass Movement

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

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

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