Put Down That iPhone!

“New Dark Age – Technology and the End of the Future,” by James Bridle, 2018

This book is a too lyrical and scattered meditation on the effect information technology and the computer ‘revolution’ is having on human society.  It challenges the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley.  It undermines the cheery corporate commodification of information overloads, software upgrades and endless gadgets.  It challenges the idea that pure ‘computation’ will make us free.  It makes a point that humans have to use technology and not let technology or information use them.   This book will remind most computer users of the flaws in software, which we are all familiar with.  This is why computers are tools like any other, but anyone who takes them as fail-safe systems – like self-driving trucks and cars – will find out soon enough the darker consequences.

  

Medieval Times Are Back Again?

For the capitalist computer companies or many governments, they are busy using the technology of the digital age to profit and to control.  Some bourgeois tech thinkers see ‘information as the new oil.’  Bridle thinks it is the new ‘nuclear power’ – with all its radioactive dangers.

Bridle sees the internet now as a world-wide ‘mass mind’ that shows all the weaknesses and strengths of human beings - their uncontrolled lizard brains and their amazing intelligence.  This is guided by robot algorithms and corporate and government needs, which is at the root of ‘the cloud.’ In a way, he’s warning us that films like The Matrix or Terminator’s Skynet are not so unreal.   

Bridle discusses ‘computational thinking’ (which some have called cybernetics, others artificial intelligence - AI) as a danger without any analytic context.  Machine thinking substitutes for human thought as the path of least resistance.  This is his ‘dark age,’ where the positivist “Moore’s law” is a fraud. Instead pure massive data is driving propaganda, advertising, surveillance, profits and human thinking in ways that mold citizens into obedient servants, even if they think otherwise.  He grounds the history of the computer in the development of weather forecasting and nuclear weapons done by the U.S. government in the 1940s.  The weather forecasting system ultimately became SABRE, which is now used to book travel.  GPS systems came out of this, so you can now be led down a dirt road to save distance - if you are not paying attention.       

Bridle looks at how this relates to the failing climate.  Big Data actually requires enormous amounts of energy to run server farms, along with all the technology connected to them – cell phone towers, fiber optic cables, the ‘internet of things,’ satellites, internet phones and computers. Bitcoin alone is a huge user of energy, as is AI. 

Bridle touches on many software and hardware subjects, including the increasing number of retractions in scientific studies because of computer-driven ‘brute force’ data fails.  Or why more data has led to less development in capitalist drug research.  He covers the same ground Michael Lewis did in Flash Boys about the increasing speed of technology, leading to financial market crashes and extreme stock price swings.  Even technology’s relation to inequality is addressed.  Bridle says “Complexity itself is a driver of inequality.”

 

We Have Your Number...

Artificial intelligence, Friedrich Hayek, facial recognition software, Stuxnet, computer chess, government secrecy, drones and the NSA, Amazon and Uber – it’s all here.  Oddly, he comes out against whistle blowers, who he thinks feed the idea that there is a smoking-gun conspiracy secret that ‘we’ don’t know.  He continues this with a long discussion of how ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy theories are riffing off the very real 'contrails’ left by high-flying jets.  Conspiracy theories themselves are enabled by fact-free suppositions that spread on the internet.  He is shocked by the terrible quality of very popular children’s ‘entertainment’ on YouTube, much of which is moronic, repetitive, violent and probably created by robot algorithms. Even the Ashley Madison scandal shows up, as husbands looking for affairs plunked down money to talk to 70,000 AI 'bots' that seemed to be real women.

At the end of the book, if you were not familiar with the computer’s dark side, you will be.  But he never addresses the key role computers have in replacing human labor, leading to unemployment, deskilling or lower wages, which is odd.  He also does not look at the political uses of data.  The British Cambridge Analytica data used by the Trump campaign, the Russian troll farms; Facebook, YouTube and Google's banning or hiding many left-wing sites - all missing.  In all this, Bridle has no solution except to suggest that this tool be controlled.  But how?  Like an untethered air-drill jumping around an auto shop because it is stuck in the ‘on’ position, the computer itself has to come to heel.  But as long as it is controlled by capital, the computer’s dialectical dark side can prevail. 

Prior archived reviews on this subject:  “CypherPunks,” “Propaganda,” (Bernays); “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Why People Don’t Buy Books,” “Manufacturing Consent,” “In Letters of Blood and Fire,” “Creative Destruction,” “The Endless Crisis,” “Time Wars,” “Flash Boys.” Use blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 15, 2018

The Big Suck

Stop Tar Sands Oil ‘Straw’ Going Through Minnesota

Minnesota is one of the latest battlefields in the fight for clean water and against global warming.  Enbridge Energy Partners, a Canadian firm headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, is trying to increase the size of their dirty oil pipeline across northern Minnesota.  The Line 3 pipeline is to travel further, pumping larger amounts of  tar sands oil than their small existent line can handle, all for export.  Line 3 is one of 5 new pipeline ‘straws’ that were proposed for the Alberta tar sands in Canada.  So far, 4 of them have been stopped by climate activists, Canadian governmental bodies and U.S. courts.  Only the Enbridge 3 pipeline remains ‘alive’ at present. 

Front Line Camps are already in Northern Minnesota

Lazy political thinkers assume only Trump is bad for the earth.  They will be flummoxed by this situation if they are honest.  The Enbridge 3 Pipeline was just OK’d by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC), though opposed by the Minnesota Commerce Department.   3 of the 5 members of the PUC were appointed Democrats, one a Republican and one some kind of independent.  If you think ‘regulatory capture’ is unique to Trump or Republicans or just in the last 2 federal years, think again.  The staff and commissioners of this state-level department ignored all testimony from experts opposing the pipeline and instead took everything that Enbridge said as ‘good coin.’ 

The PUC said it had a 'gun to their head' since the old pipeline was decaying.  Get rid of the gun by shutting down the old pipeline too.  This project will carry oil for the next 30 years.  The environment cannot handle something like that.

Just as Democratic and Republican politicians in northern Minnesota are salivating over the water-destroying sulfide mine proposals of various criminal mining concerns from other countries, so too do politicians in Minnesota sit on the fence or support Enbridge.  Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (The Liberal Party is a partial version of the Democrats in Canada) has strongly supported the Trans Mountain pipeline from the tar sands by buying it!  Basically, the Democratic Party majority doesn’t have a clue on how to stop global warming, as they are addicted to a ‘market’ or ‘all options’ approach.  Tar sands, fracking, deep water and Arctic drilling, solar, wind, ethanol, etc. – what is wrong with this picture as painted by Obama or Clinton?  Lame-duck Minnesota Governor Dayton is one of the few who is suspicious of this pipeline.  He calls himself ‘the Water Governor.’  We will see how suspicious or how pro-water…

This fight is crucial to the battle to stop global climate change.  The site of the pipeline crosses Ojibwe tribal land and the inevitable spills will wreck wild rice production in surrounding waters. This is covered by an 1855 Treaty, a treaty ignored by the PUC.  It will make the Alberta Tar sands more economically viable, giving it a constant large outlet for dirty oil.  The long dig path is close to two large tribal areas – Red Lake and White Earth – and to 2 large population centers – Duluth and the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area.  The over whelming majority of Minnesotans are against this line, just as they oppose sulfide mining in northern Minnesota.  But few listen to the people, as capitalist governments have been captured by corporate cash and logic.  The two main political parties are based on two different wings of capital which have different tactical outlooks, but both support a market approach to environmentalism - or no approach at all.  After all, this country is ALSO a petro-state.  It's not just Nigeria or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Russia...

You cannot negotiate with Mother Nature.

EEP Bond Deal Prospectus - Book Runners

Among financial firms recently issuing corporate bonds for Enbridge is Wells Fargo Securities, part of one of the most criminal banks in the U.S. and also located in Minnesota.  The support of Wall Street and Toronto’s financial firms is ESSENTIAL to the funding of these pipelines and corporations. They are the hidden actors behind the scenes.  Attached is the cover of the latest prospectus for their truly ‘junk bonds.’  Enbridge has told investors that they are confident Line 3 will be operational in ‘2H 2019’ – the second half of next year.  Firms like RBC Capital (located in Minneapolis) issue analyst recommendations.  Their analyst said to ‘hold’ these bonds, not sell them, so they are propping up Enbridge’s market value.   RBC is “Royal Bank of Canada” which claims to have a ‘Blue Water’ project.  Yet they fund various Alberta oil sands projects including Enbridge, which helps pollute the McKenzie River basin, one of the largest in North America.  By any other name, this is corporate ‘blue-washing.’ 

Most labor unions in Minnesota would oppose the Line 3 project, but not the construction unions and maybe not the Teamsters.  To win over the whole working class, the U.S. needs a guaranteed job economy to provide union jobs at scale as a part of a transition away from fossil fuels.  It will need to nationalize these carbon companies under workers’ control and slowly wind them down.  None of these measures are being talked about in polite company.

In fact, it is not just federal government agencies that have suffered from 'regulatory capture' by the industries they regulate.  Because of this decision by the Minnesota PUC and other decisions by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Department of Natural Resources on sulfide mines in northeast Minnesota, regulatory capture is also a state issue.  Not to mention the capture of politicians of both parties by the capitalists they are supposed to regulate.  The oil and mining interests in the state rule, slowly but surely.

U.S. government agencies have recently issued two reports indicating the dire prospects to the environment if global carbon production is not slowed or stopped.  The UN IPCC has issued another report that says the world has 12 years to act, as all efforts to date have not stopped the rise in carbon concentrations.  A collapse in global food production caused by warming oceans and desertification will lead to widespread starvation if nothing is done. and that is only one of the deadly effects.  Now is the time to act. 

Shut down the tar sands’ ‘straws.’

Ojibwe Nation leader and head of Honor the Earth, Winona LaDuke, discusses the proposed expansion of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline across Minnesota, including indigenous land on “Democracy Now.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/7/winona_laduke_calls_for_indigenous_led

P.S. – Hemp growing has just been legalized in the U.S. in the next ‘Farm Bill,’ but the bill has not been signed by Trump.  Hemp is superior to cotton in many ways, using less water and chemicals, and easier to grow and harvest.  Corporate ‘Reefer madness’ is the only reason it has taken this long to legalize on a mass scale. As LaDuke pointed out, canvas is merely a reference to 'cannabis.' 

See prior reviews on this topic:  “Tar Sands,” “Collapse,” “Stirring Up the Bacon Eaters,” “Climate Emergency,” “Planning Green Growth,” “Sulfuric Acid & the Boundary Waters.” 

Red Frog

December 12, 2018

Who Rules the World?

“Giants – The Global Power Elite,” by Peter Phillips, 2018

Like those detective shows where they trace the web-like connections within a crime family on a large wall, with pictures and everything, left sociologists have also mapped the U.S. ruling class.  The two most prominent books on that subject are “The Power Elite” by C. Wright Mills and “Who Rules America,” by William Domhoff.  Phillips and his researchers have gone one better – this book maps the power matrix of what he calls the transnational capitalist class (TCC) and the various individual members of the global power elite (GPE) by name, 389 people in all.  No pictures or addresses of this particular crime family are included however.

"They Got the Whole World In Their Hands..."

GLOBALIST FINANCIAL FIRMS

This is significant because capital has long burst the boundaries of nation states.  Neo-liberalism as a market ideology presupposes relatively free transit across national boundaries by capital flows, by private ownership, by propaganda, by military force, sometimes by labor, by trade and by travel.  The internet is part of the technological structure that makes this possible, along with the software that binds the various players together.  Capitalist “globalism” in this context is the last stage of imperialism, which is now penetrating into every nook and cranny of the world.

This book is useful to anyone attempting to understand who they are dealing with in a social struggle.  This matrix, if presented visually, would look like a huge spider web of interconnections between these individuals and their non-governmental organizations, finance firms, media companies and military and mercenary contractors across the world.  Most are centered in the U.S., then Europe, but outposts extend across the former British colonies, and into various other countries like Zambia, Kuwait, Qatar, Columbia and Mexico.  Notice, no Saudis, who don’t show up in other groups either.  Evidently they are still trying to gain admission.      

Phillips names 17 asset management financial firms and their controlling board members.  These firms own $41 trillion in assets and control the shares of most large corporations in the world.  Prior sociologists have not ‘named names’ but Phillips does so in this listing of the 199 directors of these various companies and institutions. “Interlocking directorates’ was the term used by Domhoff for people who show up on board after board.  These firms are cross-invested with one another, so any ideas of capitalist ‘competition’ at this level are absurd  Below the level of the ‘giants’ are ‘new giants’ and ‘near giants’ who also cross-invest, all together 69 firms controlling $74T in assets.  No small cheese. 

This group has also been called the ‘superclass’.  It includes ‘shadow elites’ that make money from illegal activities like drugs, gun-running, prostitution and slavery.  Which are all part of the capitalist economy too.  In a way, these are the people that manage the money and firms for the multi-billionaires we know so well.

RUSSIA & CHINA

In these lists there is an almost total ABSENCE of anyone from Russia, except one NGO member.  Remember, Russia was thrown out of the G8 a few years ago over Crimea.  Also of note is the limited role of the Chinese, although 5 Chinese, including a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, are listed as members of the International Monetary Conference, the top banking conference in the world.  There is one Chinese member each on the Trilateral Commission and the G30.   

This explains quite a lot about the war drive against Russia, which is full of oil and gas, cheap labor and minerals.  The EU and US would certainly like to get their hands on these riches, so sanctions and low-intensity warfare are the methods to 'make the economy scream' and weaken support for Putin or Russian products.  It also explains part of the trade war against China.  Russia is not in ‘the club’ while China has a very limited role in 'the club,' even given its massive economy.  It is somewhat odd that Chinese banks are not listed anywhere in the 17 investment firms.   

OTHER SOURCES OF POWER

Phillips goes on to name the 6 media companies that dominate world ‘news’ and culture; the 3 public relations firms that do most of the advertising for the corporate world; the 3 private mercenary firms that provide armed muscle for the TCC.  And lastly, the main capitalist transnational organizations planning and acting for world capital: – the World Bank, IMF, NATO, WTO, G7, G20.  Less familiar ones are the Council on Foreign Relations, the Group of 30, the  World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the Atlantic Council.  These groups actually set policy for the TCC.  

Davos 2012 - The Global Power Elite Socialize

3 of these are most important – the G30, the Atlantic Council and the Trilateral Commission.  Phillips names the members of all 3, including the G30’s Executive Group’s Paul Krugman, a liberal commentator for the NYT.  Another notable on the Executive Group is Zhou Xiaochuan, member of the CCP Central Committee, two banks in China, the Bank of International Settlements, the World Economic Forum and the Trilateral Commission.  Members of the Trilateral Commission are from all over the world, including a healthy contingent from the former workers’ states in Central and Eastern Europe.  David Gergen, constant yapper on CNN, is a member.  The Atlantic Council is a veritable who’s who of neo-cons and financial capitalists and are behind some of the anti-Russia propaganda in the U.S. today (see below).  The 3 PR firms listed represent almost every major corporation you can think of, along with many governmental bodies, states and nations.

Phillips does not call these arrest lists, but it could certainly help in the future, as this is a mapping of the capitalist world’s ‘Central Committees’ as presently constituted. 

NOT A CONSIPRACY

Unlike right-wing and fascist conspiracy theories that pretend that secretive organizations like the Masons, the ‘Jews,’ the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, a ‘Round Table’ of British bankers, communists, aliens or Shriners are running the ‘One World Order,’ the people and organizations here are obvious, as long as you do the research.  They are essentially right out in the open.  Fascist theories want to divert people from seeing the international capitalist class as driving increasing misery around the world.  In this the rightists provide the useful veil of misdirection, since right-wingers love capital, the ‘free’ market and money - and can’t believe that they are actually the cause of all these problems. In a way, right-wingers' version of politics is like seeing the truth in a particularly twisted fun-house mirror.

HIS SOLUTION

For solutions, Phillips makes the standard rhetorical nod to ‘non-violent mass resistance.’  His actual program for this struggle against the TCC and the GPE is the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which incidentally does not allow the working class to seize capitalist property). Just looking at the history of the world since that document came out shows it to be polite cover to the actions of the large imperial nations.  Phillips repeats the inaccurate Occupy reference to the ‘1%,’ as if they were the only people in the population that are materially invested in protecting the system as it is. 

Like Ralph Nader’s plea for billionaires to ‘save us,’ Phillips makes an appeal to these 389 powerful and wealthy people to ‘save us’ from a world of poverty, war, hunger, inequality, unemployment and environmental destruction.  ‘Capitalism with a human mask’ is his goal, not a sustainable economy run by the majority based on peoples’ needs.   The odds of this group of capitalists or their masters hearing Phillips’ humanitarian plea and doing anything about it is about nil, but then, what else is new? Most are too busy steering the Titanic, making and hiding money and planning their bolt-holes. 

Other reviews on this topic, below:  “Richistan,” “Look Who We’re Calling Comrade,” Capital in the 21^st Century,” “The Necessity of Social Control,” “Understanding Class.”  Use blog search box, upper left.

Podcast by the author on You Tube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUGh1Su7-ok

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog

December 08, 2018

For instance: -  (Salon, 12/7) “Furthermore, as FAIR (8/22/18, 9/25/18) has already catalogued, media giants such as Facebook are already working with governmental organizations like the Atlantic Council to control what we see online, under the guise of battling Russian-sponsored fake news. The Atlantic Council is a NATO offshoot whose board of directors includes neoconservative hawks like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and James Baker; former CIA directors like Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden; as well as retired generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus.  Leave alone that much of the most sensational reporting and claims about Russian influence comes from the Atlantic Council’s reports in the first place, thus creating a perfect feedback loop justifying more active measures. Therefore, much of the coverage of Russian state propaganda is itself state propaganda.”

or:  The Guardian on Bilderberg in 2023:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/20/bilderberg-meeting-group-lisbon-kissinger

Humanitarian Crimes

HIROSHIMA and NAGASAKI – OBVIOUS WAR CRIMES

During WWII the nuclear bombing of these two Japanese cities were war crimes.  This was covered up in order to keep the innocence of American capitalism intact.  For many people in the U.S. it has succeeded.  But the bombings were not really about protecting ‘our boys in uniform.’  Facts always get in the way of pretty, lying stories. These are the facts:

1. 18 Japanese cities were carpet bombed using conventional weapons by Curtis LeMay, starting in March 1945.  For instance, 50% of Tokyo and 99% of Toyama were destroyed and this kind of damage was visited on large parts of 16 other cities – not including Hiroshima or Nagasaki.  Cities in Japan were built with wood…so they burned easily.  See McNamara ‘You Tube’ video for graphics on these bombings.  So if 'conventional' bombing of civilians was proceeding (and these could be considered war crimes too...) why H/N?
2. Eisenhower and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, William Leahy, were against the H/N bombings. 
3. LeMay told McNamara that if the U.S. lost the war, they would be tried for war crimes over the nuclear bombing of Japan.  McNamara agreed: "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."
4. Before the bombing, the Japanese had been in negotiations with the Russians and U.S. for several months over surrender terms, starting in May 1945.  The first bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945.  The main Japanese demand was to keep the emperor.  The U.S. said ‘no’ at the time.  After H/N, the U.S. agreed they could keep their emperor… so the whole thing was a delaying tactic.  Both Nimitz and McArthur agreed the Japanese were negotiating surrender.
5. Truman’s announcement of the H/N bombings made no mention of ‘saving U.S. soldiers lives’ as the reason for the bombing.  Instead the braggadocio statement was about collective punishment and power.  Remember, the U.S. imprisoned all U.S. residents of Japanese descent in camps…so anti-Japanese ‘Jap’ racism was standard issue. 
6. A follow-up report by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, from the highest levels of the U.S. military, said H/N was not militarily necessary.
7. Most historians understand that the bombing was a threat to the USSR.  The Soviets entered Manchuria two days after Hiroshima on August 8, moving towards Japan.  The Japanese actually surrendered, not because of the bombing, but because of the Soviets.  See Suzuki quote below. The U.S. Navy Museum in Washington D.C. agrees. The bombings were designed to intimidate the USSR.   See quote by Byrnes below. 
8. Killing civilians intentionally is a war crime.  Killing more than 225,000 people with two bombs instantaneously is … what?  That is only the initial numbers…as many died or were deformed later due to radiation poisoning. 
9. The ‘humanitarian’ U.S. is the only country in the world to drop nuclear bombs.  Due to long-lasting radiation effects, that is even worse than fire-bombing whole cities, which the U.S. did in Germany AND Japan during WWII.
10. From that day forward, a dominant and heavily militarized U.S. imperialism was loosed on the world. 

Humanitarian Bombing

Text of Boasting Truman Speech:

“Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.  It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”  (Note:  Bomb was dropped in center of city, far from any factories or military facilities…)

TRUMAN ADVISOR:

Presidential advisor James Byrnes had told Truman that dropping the bombs would allow the United States to “dictate the terms of ending the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Byrnes was ‘most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.’

TRUMAN Notes:

Truman was well aware of the situation. He referred to the intercepted July 18 cable as the "telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace."  Stalin will "be in the Jap war on August 15," Truman penned in his journal. "Fini Japs when that comes about." He wrote to his wife the next night, "We'll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won't be killed."

SUZUKI Statement:

After the USSR defeated the Japanese in Manchuria on August 8, Prime Minister Suzuki explained, Japan must surrender immediately or "the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States." 

The Japanese surrender was announced on August 15 and the formal surrender (to the U.S.) on September 2, 1945.

The Manhattan Project matured under the saint, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Later in Vietnam, McNamara's role could be considered aiding a war crime.  In Vietnam, Curtis LeMay wanted to drop a nuclear weapon on Hanoi.  Instead he did what he did to Japan, but worse - dropping more tonnage on Vietnam than all of WWII.  Leveling dozens of north Korean cities predated this. War crimes have continued up to now.  Even the invasion of Iraq could be considered a war crime and that is only for starters.  It is clear Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the conventional bombing of 18 other cities in Japan was a 'political' choice, not a military one.

It was the first shot in the Cold War and the last shot of Pearl Harbor.

Red Frog

December 5, 2018

Iowa Class War TV

“Damnation,” Netflix series created by Tony Tost, 2017-2018

Television is full of stupid fucking middle class people.  But not this show.  They may be starting a new Hollywood Black List after this series, though it was stopped after 1 season.  No surprise.  It is based on real history – a Farmer’s Holiday strike in Plymouth County, Iowa during the 1930s.  But in this case it is called Holden County.  That strike is only an inspiration, and not what fully transpires in this much more violent series.  There is even a bit of Robin Hood here. The villains are strike-breaking Pinkertons and Burns’ employees and the Black Legion, who mostly go around killing labor organizers.

Armed Farmers in "Damnation"

 A Pinkerton thug gives intelligent counsel to the businessmen opposed to the corn and milk farmers strike.  He suggests splitting the strikers by making a deal with the dairy farmers, while stiffing the corn farmers.  An illustration of ‘divide and conquer.’ The “Black Legion” – a northern version of the Ku Klux Klan, make violent appearances and become the main bulwark against a farmer’ strike for better prices.  They were real racist and anti-labor terrorists in the 1930s, who were involved in the burning of Malcom X’s father’s home in Michigan.  The famous song “Which Side Are You On?” is sung in this series, written during the Harlan County miner’s strikes.  Auto-worker organizing in Detroit is also a brief part of the story.  The actions of armed farmers to buy foreclosed farms for 1 cent is depicted, along with road blockades to enforce a harvest strike.  So is the reality of a ‘church’ that was formed to foment class war, based on a real church established by the Communist Party in Alabama, where the majority of CP members were black. In this series, the ‘preacher’ becomes a sort of Christian socialist with a revolver.  There is a reference to Thorstein Veblein’s ‘Theory of the Leisure Class” in a newspaper headline.  A ‘farm collective’ is formed.  Nothing on TV has ever been quite like this.

This is a form of ‘reckoning’ on the corrupt businessmen, bankers and fascists of ‘America.’  Even the electoral system comes in for shade. The emotional issues are manhood, a brutal father, subterranean love and brotherhood.  The plot is somewhat overly convoluted.

The Real Farmers' Holiday - a Strike!

It is transparent that this virtually revolutionary series also makes allusions to the present, with modern chants, words and situations. In a way, this is how veiled allusions are necessary in the context of cultural censorship and filtering in the U.S.  

In a continuing farce, the local paper in Holden County never mentions the farmer’s strike, but instead covers various trivial events.  The local reporter is a budding ‘novelist’ who follows his boss’s orders and does what he is told, but then is recruited to the other side by the most intelligent woman of all.  So the mainstream press comes off as similar to the present corporate press.  The local sheriff is behind an illegal speakeasy and brothel in town, and plays a somewhat neutral role, evidently hoping the two sides kill each other off.  But he has the misfortune’ of falling in love with a black singer and this changes everything for him due to his mixed child.  The local banker has called in the Pinkertons to help him cut the money paid for farmers’ produce, and then foreclosing on their farms for a hidden industrialist, who buys up land cheap for oil or industrial concerns.  The small businessmen in the farm town are not allies of the farmers, which is somewhat predictable.

You are waiting for unity between the businessmen, the Pinkertons, the Black Legion and the Sheriff, but as among workers, the capitalists also have divisions that are useful. But eventually most of this begins to happen.  Guns are plentiful on all sides, and this seems a bit over the top – at one point the astounding accuracy of the Pinkerton’s handgun, at another an unbelievable armed assault by the Black Legion.

The real issue is ‘Who is Tony Tost?” He’s the producer and originator of this series.  He’s a southern writer from a proletarian background.  His bio avoids any relation to left-wing politics, so for him this series seems mostly to be an ‘aesthetic’ choice – in line with some kind of ‘labor noir’ genre. But he’s definitely here on the right side of the class war.

As they say on this series, “Who Need Jesus Christ When You Have Henry Ford?”

Anyway, watch it if you can, on Netflix or on tvonline.cc.

Other series covered below: ‘Vikings,’ ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘Golden Age of U.S. Television,’  ‘Fargo,’ ‘Treme,‘ ‘Bad Cops’  or use the terms ‘noir’ or ‘television.’

The Cultural Marxist, the foil of the Alt-Right

12/02/2018  

History Is Not Over

“Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism – Radical Politics after Yugoslavia, edited by Srećko Horvat and Igor Štiks, 2015

One of the most important issues for leftists is the experiences of ‘actually existing socialism,’ ‘state socialism,’ or the workers’ states, some of the phrases used to describe the governments and economy of the USSR and Central and Southern Europe by different tendencies.  This time is rich in positive lessons for the future, as well as understanding the failures of that ideology and practice   In the U.S. ridicule and ignorance of this issue are the mainstream responses, given the deep, deep hostility to any form of socialism drilled into the population by our ruling class.  We are to forget the workers states ever existed. “Nothing to see here, go about your business” say the ideological police.

History Is Not Over

This book joins a small but important group of left-wing books in English about the breakup of the USSR and the Central European workers’ states. It focuses on the aftermath of the destruction and neo-liberal ‘transition’ of Yugoslavia from a multinational workers’ state with a mixed economy that made ‘workers’ self-management’ official policy.  The book consists of 14 contributions from people across the region on Yugoslavia after dismemberment and the current realities for Marxist and working class struggle given that history.  Some of the writers are connected to Slavoj Zizek.  Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia are the countries and EU/US ‘protectorates’ that emerged from the destruction of Yugoslavia, still sadly called by the loaded term: ‘the Balkans.’  Albania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania are also sometimes mentioned in the book. 

As they say, time does not stand still and so the victory of capitalism in Central and South Central Europe is not permanent.  Class struggle is automatically generated by capital, even in places where the issue seems ‘settled.’ 

Here are brief descriptions of each chapter contribution, which cannot do justice to the whole chapter of course:

• Štiks/Horvat – The endless ‘transition’ to neo-liberal Europeanization for the subaltern countries of the former Yugoslavia will never end.  Across the zone it has produced impoverishment, public & private debt linked to foreign credit, deindustrialization and factory closures, depopulation, land grabbing and high unemployment, especially among youth. Reactionary ethno-nationalist governments have been the political result.  Direct democracy ‘plenums’ implicitly attacking neo-liberalism have been the left response, while more left political parties are another response to the pro-capitalist Nationalist and Social-Democratic alternatives .
•  Umkovski-Korica – “Factories to the Workers!”  - A review of Yugoslav worker self-management as theory and practice. (A topic routinely ignored by U.S. Marxist Richard Wolff in his endless writings on worker-owned co-ops.)  Ultimately the practice of integrated Yugoslav development broke down due to the centrifugal pull of external capitalist and internal regional competition.  These are contradictions that remain after a revolution - between local, national and international aims and production. 
• Živiković – While Yugoslavia had a controlled market economy prior to counter-revolution, the current debt crisis ‘is precisely a crisis of the market’ introduced by the ‘transition.’  The pursuit of interest-bearing loans by EU banks is connected to long-term profit declines in the advanced capitalist countries from production.  The new debt is caused by a rigid exchange rate regime (the Euro); seizure of the banking system by EU banks and the privatization of a large part of the economies. It has resulted in large debts to EU creditor banks.  The solution is a renewal of a “Balkan Socialist Federation” encompassing more than just the prior Yugoslavia. 
• Grdešić – This chapter concentrates on working-class struggle, focusing on sectoral and company collective bargaining and the now weaker trade union confederations.  One Serbian federation came out against Milosevic’s war.  The focus is on several major union and labor struggles, especially Jugoremedija in Serbia, where workers took over the company in a years-long struggle, harkening back to the period of ‘worker self-management.’

  

  Jugoremedija fight for workers' control

     
• Todorova/ Petrović/ Buden - 3 chapters concentrate on how the metaphoric ‘Balkans’ are treated by the EU as a place of backward and crude children, who need to be educated and led to the promised land. (All the while being robbed in the process.)  In reality the ‘humanitarian hawk’ wars in the 1990s were meant to destroy Yugoslavia and spread NATO and the EU, while installing local ethno-nationalist elites in power. That succeeded for now.
• Nikolaidis – Focuses on Montenegro where the workers demanded new leaders for the League of Communists and instead got their factories closed and ethno-nationalist reactionaries as leaders.  So the ‘revolution’ was really a counter-revolution.  ‘The thieves became businessmen.’  ‘EU enlargement is primarily an imperialist project.’
• Hamza – Focuses on Kosovo, the poorest country in the region.  Hamza considers the struggle against Serbian control to have been an anti-occupation struggle, which turned into the farce of ‘independence’ under ‘imperial (EU) democracy.’
•  Velikonja – this chapter focuses on the nostalgia surrounding Yugoslavia (Yugonostalgia) and specifically Tito (Titostalgia), the ‘Che’ of the Yugoslav anti-fascist struggle and leader of a multi-national nation.  This fondness for Tito is seen, not as some attempt to go back to the past, but as a criticism of the reactionary and divisive present.
• Kraft – A study of the large worker and student occupations in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia.  Struggles for lower or free tuition and against the commercialization of education or interference by the EU.  Highlights labor events at Jugoremedija again, and the struggle to keep the Petrokemija plant open in Croatia.  These resulted in the formation of directly democratic ‘general assemblies’ and ‘plenums’ – the Balkan version of Soviets or councils or communes.  In 2012 in Slovenia workers and students took down the government in an ‘All Slovenia Uprising.’ (Occupy Slovenia was involved…)

  

  Occupy Slovenia

• Baćević – A focus on student struggles in Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro & Croatia. Free tuition, the ‘right to the city,’ direct democracy through plenums and labor conditions for graduate students and professors were the immediate issues.  A free university – the ‘Workers & Punks University’ in Ljubljana, and a faculty organization – ‘Academic Solidarity’ – came out of these struggles.
• Čakardić – All about the women’s struggle, inspired by the ‘Women’s Anti-Fascist Front’ which developed during WWII.  The author contends that conditions for women were better in Yugoslavia. Now socialist feminists have to combat an exclusive focus on “human rights, identity and juridical solutions’ promoted by liberal feminism, which ignore economic or social issues that the region’s women face.  Women’s entrepreneurship and ‘breaking the glass ceiling’ are not the main goals of a working women’s movement.

Prior reviews on this subject: “The Contradictions of Real Socialism,” “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives,” “From Solidarity to Sellout….” “The Ghost of Stalin.”  Also reviews of books by ‘Zizek.’  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I got it at May Day Books excellent used / cutout/ estate gift book section!

Red Frog

November 28, 2018