Community Activism in San Francisco

 “White Knight,” by Henry Hitz, 2015

This is an unpredictable left-wing novel about San Francisco and environs, the high-profile assassinations carried out by Dan White and the tragedy of the People’s Temple mass suicides in November, 1978.  It centers on community organizer Barney Blatz, who is deeply involved with all these people, and through a few careless comments, thinks he encouraged these two disasters. 

A member of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PL), Barney and his wife Linda Jean quit the Party after the local leadership is expelled for going against a national Party edict.   What happened is the national Party demanded the local start a rent strike at a public housing project, Geneva Towers, after serious fire threats.  This even though most of the rent is provided by Section 8 vouchers and non-payment would endanger the resident’s right to live in the Towers.  

Then Proposition 13 passes in California in June of 1978.  This results in an additional burden on the Towers. It leads to the defunding of the local kindergarten facility in the Towers by the School Board.  A group of residents, including Barney who is a teacher there, object and organize to keep the school open.  They are successful for a time, running the school on their own. Their fight to keep the school open involves getting money - appealing to the somewhat suspect People’s Temple and the charismatic Jim Jones, the vagaries of councilperson Dan White, the capitalist Bank of America, friendly Mayor Moscone and others.  For Barney and Linda Jean it is a far cry from their prior work with PL.  But after some victories, they lose and the school is forced to shutdown due to lack of funds.

The WHITE KNIGHTS

Barney is the only ‘whitish’ person in the Towers and this is a sub-theme.  Linda Jean, his wife, is darker.  For this he gets baited and this is part of why the book is called White Knight – although there are other reasons.  He’s a bit of a white knight trying to organize a poverty-stricken community.  Dan White, the future killer of Mayor Moscone and Councilperson Milk, actually saves a family from a Tower fire.   His last name is White, another so-called ‘white knight.'  ‘White nights’ was the name given by the People’s Temple for their suicide practices.  And the ‘White Knights’ are a rumored group of People’s Temple vigilantes that probably don’t exist. 

The book illustrates the somewhat unstable personality of Barney, who zig-zags through infidelity, gay sex, paranoia, macho, belligerence, carelessness and drugs, all the while trying to ‘do the right thing.’  It almost makes you wish he was still in PL.  He and his wife buy a muddy patch of rural land as an escape.  His idealist ideas about education conflict with the harsher circumstances some children grow up in.  He’s mad at his wife for not standing up to him.  Barney’s family celebrates black nationalist Ron Karenga’s Juneteenth after an argument. He says stupid things sometimes, especially one remark he makes to Dan White and one to a tough guy named Mike, who ends up in Guyana with the People’s Temple.  But at the same time, his heart seems to be in the right place.  The book uses a font change to show Barney’s internal thoughts.

Dan White Gets Off Easy

COMMUNITY

Part of the book is drawn from Hitz’ personal experiences at a very trying time in San Francisco for someone politically active.  Hitz himself was a grade-school teacher for 35 years and probably a member of PLP for awhile, as was I.  It is a good picture of community organizing – its pitfalls and strengths, dealing with flawed humans and a political system that gives no quarter.  The People’s Temple was popular in the Towers, so not being friendly to them would be a problem.  Bourgeois black people show up from the School Board, as do petty criminals just trying to get by. 

When all is said and done, the Geneva Towers were a community. Each month for years the capitalist owners pocketed $200K from the U.S. government while letting the Towers fall apart.  At the end, what happened?  The cover of the book shows the 1998 demolition of the Towers in Visitacion Valley, San Francisco after the residents were thrown out.  White got an ‘involuntary manslaughter’ jury decision based on his Twinkie defense, even though he planned the murders.  A large number of proletarian black people paid with their lives for being part of a religious cult, no matter how ‘communistic.’  Now gentrification in San Francisco is rampant.  And people like Barney were damaged in the process.

Ultimately a dark story, but worth reading.

Prior blog reviews on San Francisco fiction, city issues and activism, use blog search box, upper left:  So You Say You Want a Revolution? (Levin/Silbar); Last Man in the Tower (Adiga); The Daminificados, (Wilson); Rebel Cities (Harvey); Cade’s Rebellion (Sheehy); How to Kill a City (Moskowitz); Capital City (Stein); Passage of Rebellion; Revolution in the Air (Elbaum); Darlingtonia; There, There; Clandestine Occupations.

Thanks to John Levin for the gift of this book!

The Kulture Kommissar

January 22, 2021    

Class Lives

 “One Night in Miami,” 2020 film by Regina King

This film is based on the stage play by Kemp Powers written in 2013.  It fictionally depicts what happened mostly inside a motel room in Miami on the historic night when Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing title.  The date is February 25, 1964.  In the audience was Malcolm X, taking pictures and cheering Clay on and Jim Brown, working as a boxing analyst of all things.  Coming from the Fontainebleau Hotel nearby was Sam Cooke, who had worked on a new song and was watching too.  The four of them all actually met later at a low-end motel, the Hampton House, in the Brownsville area of Miami where Malcolm X was staying. 

Victory Party?

This film/play is sort of the “Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf” of black leadership, as its centerpiece is a raw hard argument between Sam Cooke and Malcolm.  All we needed was James Baldwin and MLK in the room too. As imagined, the text is based on what each ‘might’ have said given their public personas – a political, religious and cultural clash of ideas, not actual people.

PARTY DOWNER

As you might expect in the film, Malcolm comes off the worst.  He’s a bad ‘party’ host who invited no one else, has no booze, no women, not even any music on the stereo – just some vanilla ice cream and two Fruit of Islam (FOI) guards outside.  He starts a long, ferocious argument with Cooke for being a pampered sell-out.  This in front of Clay, who is thinking of joining the Nation of Islam (NOI), and Brown, who is starting a career in acting.  Quite a bummer of a victory party for Clay, whose ferocious energy is taken up jumping on beds. 

Hiding behind all this for Malcolm emotionally are the FBI tails outside, his distant children, fearful wife and the imminent split with Elijah Muhammad.  

Cooke defends himself by saying how his music company is promoting black musicians, getting writers royalties and owning the masters.  He says that black people too have a right to success.  This is the classic black entrepreneurial claim.  Malcolm accuses him of writing pap (Cooke wrote all of his own hits, including Chain Gang).  Malcolm plays Dylan’s Times They Are a Changin’ as a great example instead, though Malcolm being a Dylan fan is hard to buy. (The song was actually played to Cooke earlier by his partner.) Cooke himself had already written A Change is Gonna Come before this argument, so he could have easily deflected Malcolm.  Brown tries to hide his role in a movie from Malcolm, which he was paid well for, while not being as physically damaging as football.  At the end Malcolm improbably tells the group, in whispers, that he will be leaving the Nation.  Malcolm hopes Clay will leave with him in the new organization.  Clay explodes and they have to hold him back, as he feels he’s been used by Malcolm.

THE CLASS BONES

That is the bare bones.  What is really at issue here is a line Clay has in a car while he and Cooke escape the dismal room to buy booze.  Clay says that the 4 of them have to stick together because no one else will understand:  They are - “You know:  young, black, righteous, famous, unapologetic.”  This is the nut of the issue here.  Every single politically-aware middle and upper-class African American has wrestled with the class question, which is what this is.  As did the playwright and the director probably.  Malcolm always styled himself a ‘field Negro” and he was the brokest of this bunch.  At one point in the text, Malcolm makes a comment about ‘boushie Negroes.”  Brown points out Malcolm might be feeling guilty about being a ‘high yellow’ – an identity politics observation that might reflect a more modern sensibility.  The opening scenes show that even these stars have problems with white people.  While still subject to bigotry, they nevertheless have risen above the majority of African Americans and they know it, and so does Malcolm.

What Cooke might have said to defend himself is that the NOI is also based on creating black businesses and self-reliance - but he doesn’t.  The NOI owned bakeries, printing plants, farms, retail stores, groceries, etc. - all propping up the lifestyles of the top leadership in Chicago.  Cooke hints at this.  Malcolm knew the rot in the NOI on the ideological and personal side, but ignores the economic side.  (Now under Farrakhan, they have joined with the Church of Scientology cult.)

You can see here that some of the writing is intended to exaggerate their differences or hide certain issues

Nice 'black' neighborhood in Atlanta

This is another version of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual posed by Harold Cruse in 1967 or the arguments W.E.B. Dubois had with Booker T. Washington much earlier. It is apparent that there is now a layer of middle-class ‘black’ people who have political, intellectual and economic power, mostly due to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  This is Dubois' 'talented tenth.'  The majority of their political representatives are a shabby lot that have thrown in with the (white) ruling class.  They run cities full of poverty.  They run police departments that are killing people.  They oversee businesses that are just another capitalist concern. They fill the pathetic 'Black Caucus" in the Congress.  They buttress systemic racism while nibbling around the edges.  Black Agenda Report calls them ‘the black mis-leadership class.’  Others hawk liberal or crappy culture or join the Republican Party and become even more reactionary.  They are, in a word, pretty comfortable in the system as it is.

This is what Malcolm was getting at, though none of those here could change their circumstances.  Malcolm was dead more than a year later from an assassination plot hatched by the FOI in the Newark Temple – aided by the NY police and the FBI.  Cooke died about a year later, shot in a shabby motel in Los Angeles, though there were a number of people who wanted him dead – his soon-to-be ex-wife, his manager and various racists.  At his wake it was observed by Etta James that his head was nearly severed from his neck, his nose smashed and his hands crushed – due to a single gunshot?  Clay declared himself a Black Muslim and changed his name the next day, but his fighting career led to severe brain damage at 29.  Only Brown survived relatively unscathed, getting out of football in time and becoming a full-time actor.  Brown is portrayed as the most level-headed of the bunch in that room.  He's not being separated from his mother's pork and sex for the rigidity of the Nation. And he knew something was troubling Malcolm X, so his emotional intel was better than the rest. 

Like the Good Lord Bird, this film reflects the conflicted feelings of black artists and professionals when confronted by hostility to the whole system they are succeeding in.  No amount of films or books can fix that.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: Who Killed Malcolm X?; Malcolm X – A Life of Reinvention (Marable); I am Not Your Negro (Baldwin); Da 5 Bloods (Lee); The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois); The Good Lord Bird; The Plot to Kill King and Orders to Kill (Pepper); Selma. 

The Cultural Marxist

January 19, 2021

Statues Come Tumblin' Tumblin'

 DRIVIN’ DIXIE DOWN

On Sunday 1/10/20, National Government Radio (NPR) did a lame segment on the Confederate ‘Lost Cause’ and its possible links to current white supremacy  One mainstream historian seemed to be arguing that there was no real continuity between slavery, the destruction of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and present white supremacy – the latter still especially strong in the South.  The liquidation of native Americans, the seizure of land from Mexico and European colonialism went invisible in this segment, as did the overall role of capital and labor exploitation. 

In the process they played originals of the song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band and also Joan Baez, a somber song about the damage wrought to the South by the North in the Civil War.  Some tried to find some small progressive meaning to the lyrics.   The song was denounced in "Loaded"  by Dunbar-Ortiz as an example of rightist culture.

Here is a new, leftist version of the lyrics.  The tune is certainly great and I love the Band, but …

The Night We Drove Old Dixie Down

“Virgil Lane is the name

And I served on the Nashville train

'Till Forrest's cavalry came

And tore up the tracks again

In the winter of '65

The Rebs were hungry, just barely alive

By May the 10th, Richmond had fell

It's a time I remember, oh so well

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the bells were ringing

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the people were singing

They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"

Back with my wife in Ohio

One day she called to me

"Virgil, quick, come see,

There goes Grant, not Bobby Lee!"

Now, I don't mind chopping wood

And I don't care if the money's no good

You take what you need

And you leave the rest

But the Rebs should never

Have taken the very best

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the bells were ringing

The night we drove old Dixie down

And all the people were singing

They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"

Like my father before me

I will work the land

And like my brother above me

Who took a Union stand

He was just 18, proud and brave

But a Reb laid him in his grave

I swear by the mud below my feet

You can't raise a Lane back up

When he's in defeat

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the bells were ringing

The night we drove old Dixie down

And all the Freedmen were singing

They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"

The night we drove old Dixie down

And all the bells were ringing

The night we drove old Dixie down

And the North was singing

They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"

At this late point in the Civil War, Nashville was controlled by the Union and served as a rail hub for supplies going east and south.  Minnesota regiments had won the battle of Nashville in December 1864 by turning the Confederate left on a high hill. The Minnesota state flag still flies over this battlefield.  Forrest was a brutal Confederate cavalryman operating in the western and central theaters.  A former slave trader, he founded the KKK and carried out the Fort Pillow massacre of captured black soldiers and their white officers.  Hard core scum.

Originally written by Robbie Robertson, The Band’s Canadian lead guitarist; sung by Levon Helm, from Alabama, The Band’s drummer.  From The Band’s concert The Last Waltz.

Prior Blog reviews on the Civil War, use blog search box, upper left:  "Civil War."

The Cranky Yankee

January 14, 2021

 

Historical Laws

 “Can History Predict the Future?” by Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, Dec. 2020 Issue

If your answer to the title of this article is ‘of course’ then you’ll be wondering why the liberal Atlantic is asking what is a leftist question.  This article goes against liberal bromides. What gives?

This article is based on an interview with Peter Turchin, a former Russian who emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 21 in 1978.  Turchin borrows from Marxist method via mathematics and data-crunching. Turchin studied 10,000 years of human history and created a database to find patterns in history.  In 2010 he predicted severe social unrest based on 3 markers, starting in 2020. 

MARKERS of CONFLICT

Turchin’s three markers are:  1, a bloated elite class with too few elite jobs to go around.  Part of this is the over-production of PHD’s, MAs and college grads across the world. 2, declining living standards for the general population, but especially the ‘commoners’ – the working class, farmers and proletariat; 3, governments deeply in debt, verging on insolvency.  As you can see, all of these trends are happening now.  Regarding point 3, modern corporations actually have higher debt levels than governments and that impacts society.  The large number of indebted zombie corporations is a danger signal.  Turchin’s mapping is not based on capitalism, as you can see.  Debt is actually a more general and broader term than he uses.

Turchin’s data predicted 2020 to be the start of intense upheaval in the U.S. and other societies – perhaps lasting 10 years.  For the U.S. his team looked at 1,590 violent incidents over 230 years and claims that ‘brutality cycles’ occurred in 1870, 1920 and 1970 – a 50 year cycle.  Turchin leaves out the Civil War in 1860 as a ‘statistical outlier’ and the article leaves out 1820.  The American Revolution was from 1775 to 1781, the start of Turchin’s cycles.   The ultra-rightist political riot in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 showed a sort of amateur and delusional ‘civil war’ strife is possible, but no major capitalist sector is advocating it, nor is capital in an existential crisis yet.

Turchin’s database also reveals that complex societies arise through war, which he theorizes solidifies countries on a collective and ‘democratic’ basis.  That idea seems to be somewhat fanciful.  Wars encourage authoritarianism and state collapse too.  According to historian Michael Graeber, war nearly always results in state debt – one of Turchin’s keys to social fraying. Must be why peaceful Switzerland and Iceland are such a mess!  Or not.

The “Global Database of Events” and John Bieler’s “Protest Map” are historical databases that could also be used to look at social patterns based on the frequency and scale of protests, strikes, general strikes, insurrections and revolutions - and everything in between.  Acorrding to the Hack website, another professor who has worked with Turchin, Jack Goldstone, uses a similar method to predict social turmoil, though with different dates popping up in that story – citing the 1860s and 1930s.  “Factional elites” is something Goldstone mentions as a source of breakdown, unlike this story in The Atlantic. So Turchin's rigid '50 year' pattern might not be quite accurate given the inconsistencies or the underlying data may be incomplete.

HISTORY

If you are saying “duh” as to taking an overall view of history, you’d be in the minority.  Most bourgeois historians believe history is too complicated to understand and there are no patterns beneath it.  This is why they get lost in the factual weeds of history and specialize intensely.  They hate any form of ‘systems theory’ – even Jared Diamond’s partially flawed geographic one – and distain Marxism or anything close to it.  Thomas Piketty borrows from class analysis to look at wealth accumulation over time as a key indicator of social disorder.  He’s an outlier in the bourgeois history crowd.  Turchin too is on the outs with his fellow U.S. academics and historians.  He comes from a science background in biology and ecology, which partially explains how he thinks.

UBIQUITY

Turchin’s basic method isn’t all that new, though Wood, the journalist, seems not to know it.  This Blog reviewed a 2001 book called “Ubiquity” which focuses on the probability of different events happening, charting across a large number of issues including some human ones.  Mark Buchanan, its author, thinks that complexity many times hides simplicity, a position also held by Turchin.  Chaos theory leans in this direction as well – positing rules beneath apparent confusion.  Buchanan posits that ‘time’ has to be used to study systems, which Turchin obviously understands with his 10,000 year stare.  Buchanan calls the inverse math relationship between the likelihood of an event and its actuality, the ‘power law’ – predicting when a critical state is reached ‘out of equilibrium.’  Smaller events occur more frequently, while larger ones do not.  But the latter finally do occur, as change, even quick or revolutionary/counter-revolutionary change, is inevitable.  Quantity into quality, as dialectics posits. 

Buchanan thinks ‘ubiquity’ and the power law apply to landslides, earthquakes, forest fires, freezing substances, magnets, solar flares, disease transmission, traffic jams, species extinction, the 1987 market crash, price movements in the Standard & Poor’s, wars and the assassination of Duke Ferdinand.  Both authors use empirical methods to discover patterns in history and, for Buchanan, in nature.  Between the two, Buchanan is years ahead on theory, but not on Turchin’s focus on humans.  Turchin understands, like a Marxist, that history has underlying laws, laws he has christened ‘Cliodynamics.’

Alexander Bogdanov

SOVIET SYSTEM ANALYSIS

Russia and the USSR have produced many systemic analyses, not just Lenin or Trotsky or Bukharin.  Alexander Bogdanov, a Bolshevik, is credited with being a founder of ‘systems theory’ in the early 1900s.  Vassily Leontiev understood that ecologic environmental costs had to be added into any economic accounting measures – something he advocated in the 1920’s USSR.  Nikolai Krondratiev, a Soviet NEP economist in the 1920s, tracked severe capitalist depression ‘waves’ every 70 years. (He was shot in 1938 during the purges.) Mikhail Budyko predicted global warming in 1972 while studying the atmosphere.  All these thinkers were influenced by Marxism and dialectical materialism and were the first in their fields to develop these general views – far ahead of scientists or economists in the capitalist world. 

A present Marxist economist, Michael Roberts, graphs capitalist crises and the falling rate of profit based on 4 different cycles and their overlay – depressions, major social construction, recessions and inventory cycles. He borrows one of these from Krondratiev.  Turchin, though he might run from it, is part of a long methodical history that identifies broader patterns.  He himself is against Marx, as he thinks that Marxism says socialism is inevitable.  It does not.  He has no prescription as to how to stop these cycles, seeming to think that financial elites and debt are eternal givens.  He views history as circular and ‘ever recurring’ which is a common bourgeois view, though nonsensical on the face of it. 

MATERIALIST DIALECTICS

Turchin’s method might remind readers of certain features of materialist dialectics:  historical time involving changes; quantity turning into quality; negation of the negation (contradictions within everything); all based on material facts.  This leads to the most basic fact for Turchin - class conflict regarding rigid wealthy elites and declining living standards for the working classes.  Turchin’s idea of debt is linked to this, because debt weakens governments – and corporations - from solving the problems of class conflict.  Bankruptcy increases class immiseration and class impermeability.

Wood, the Atlantic journalist hopes Turchin is not right as to increasing and imminent turmoil.  But then again, he works for the Atlantic.  During the interview Turchin erroneously calls Wood ‘ruling class’ - another funhouse mirror insult of what a real ruling class looks like.  But at least he knows the term.

Prior blog reviews relevant to this, use blog search box, upper left:  “Ubiquity” (Buchanan); “Red Star” (Bogadanov); “The Long Depression”(Roberts); “Planning Green Growth,” “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel” (both by Diamond); “Capital”(Piketty) or the words ‘dialectics’ or ‘science.’    

You can buy many left-wing magazines at May Day, but not ones like the Atlantic.

Red Frog

January 10, 2021

Anti-Fascist Series #7: Don't Be Surprised

 It Was Predictable

Everything that happened in D.C. was predictable.  Someone in the Capitol Police allowed this to happen, something that the Left, BLM and Antifa and even CNN/MSNBC know.  The D.C. police and National Guard were also missing.  The head of the Capitol police or D.C. police would be fired immediately in a normal world. The Democrats should be worried that the armed force of the state disappeared on their day of days.  Check your back, Democrats.

One Metro D.C. cop claimed on FB that:  "...off-duty police officers and members of the military, who were among the rioters, flashed their badges and ID cards as they attempted to overrun the building." There are reports that DHS provided no 'risk report' on the rally, while the Trumpist leadership of the military disarmed and stalled the Guard, making mobilization longer.

The second part of this is the constant naiveté shown by our  corporate media as to anything real beyond the Beltway.  They were all flabbergasted, when they should have known.  "It can't happen here" say these American exceptionalists.  These people are upper middle-class amateurs, an embarrassment to their profession.

The hysterical hypocrisy of the corporate media and the bourgeois politicians over this ‘insurrection,’ ‘terrorism’ and ‘coup’ is transparent however.  Most of the hundreds that pushed their way into the Capitol through a broken window and door were Proud Boys, 3%ers, Patriot Prayer or neo-fascist militia ‘incognito,’ as the head of the Proud Boys advised.  They were the hard core of Trump’s white supremacist, nationalist and neo-fascist base.

What obviously links them all is paranoid anti-communism and anti-socialism, while white supremacy plays a quieter role.  The Proud Boys are really the new Brown Shirts, based on small business attitudes, including some Latinos and African-Americans. This has been historically true of rightist street-fighters.

Might I remind the talking heads and U.S. politicians that they also have supported invasions of legislative buildings, not to mention dozens of coups.  We can cite 3 recent examples.

1.    The first is the support for Boris Yeltsin’s assault on the Russian parliament in 1993, which resulted in the killing and wounding of many Communist legislators.

2.    The second is the warm embrace of the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014, when hard-right demonstrators in the Right Sector laid siege to the parliament after days of street-fighting. Before that they had seized some government buildings.  This eventually resulted in the elected head of the Ukrainian government fleeing the country.

3.    The third is the assault on the Hong Kong legislative assembly in 2019 by pro-Western demonstrators, who took it over for a time.

There are no doubt other examples, including the recent violent attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government which never got beyond the beach.  Prior to this there was an attempted invasion of the legislature by Juan Guido.  All of these were approved by TV’s talking heads at CNN, MSNBC and FOX, along with the U.S. government.  Overthrowing governments opposed to the U.S. is second nature to the politicians in D.C.  The method is tactical but the hypocrisy is strategic. Far right mobs stormed Germany's Reichstag in 2020, Hungary's parliament building in 2006 and in the Netherlands, rightist farmers have invaded government offices for years. 

The second point is the careless and propagandistic use of words to describe what happened in D.C. by the media.  Even elements of the liberal-left wet the bed.  It was not an insurrection, a coup, a sacking or terrorism as those words are commonly used.  Nor is this "The People's House" for obvious reasons.  An actual insurrection involves lethal violence to take control of a country.  A coup is the sudden, violent taking of power, especially by the army.  Terrorism involves killing innocent civilians or government officials for political reasons.  Sacking involves significant destruction and many valuables stolen.  (From the Cambridge Dictionary.)

None of this happened.  The Trump woman killed was shot by the Capitol police or Secret Service.  While bombs and Molotovs were found, they were not used.  Some weapons were hidden, but not used.  There was fighting and injuries instead.  The other 3 'dead' Trumpers were heart attacks, strokes and being crushed.  Doors and windows were broken and some items stolen. Protesters left the Capitol and did not try to occupy it.  If they were really serious, they would have stayed. Some of their actions were even clownish - you might call this the "Selfie Putsch" or the "Social Media Putsch." Some were arrested and others ushered out of the Capitol grounds quite politely.  All of this is illegal but it does not rise to the level of counter-revolution - yet.  I might remind Leftists that destroying property or trespassing does not rise to the level of physical harm either.

All of these terms have been used or will be used against the real Left.  Behind these words will be actions.

What happened was the Rightists’ pushing, shoving and fighting moved into the Capitol to delay a legal vote for president.  It might accurately be called a ultra-rightist political riot.  They succeeded.  It scared the hell out of a bunch of legislators who maybe needed a bit of a wake-up call.  This was a mass anti-democratic act to stop the certification of Joe Biden, part and parcel of the voter suppression and violent street fighting the white nationalist Right and the Republican Party have acted on for years, now taken to a logical conclusion.  It is no accident that the Confederate flag was carried too.  Lee tried to occupy Washington twice.  The actual Left was invisible on this day in D.C. though the lying fucks at FOX thought maybe ‘antifa’ was behind this.

I might remind people that in Wisconsin in 2011 the labor movement and left occupied the Wisconsin State House rotunda for days while anti-labor laws were being passed by the Republican Party.  That occupation was certainly much more polite that this.  The Republicans called that movement ‘terrorist’ too, just as they do any actions against police killings and brutality.  Even labor strikes have been called 'terrorism.'

If there is a RICO case coming out of this, the greedy mob boss in the White House is implicated.  In Latin America there is a term for a deposed leader who attempts to stay in power though nefarious methods - autogolpe (self-coup).  That is what this idiocy looks like, but its a faux coup.  Will Pence go along with the 25th Amendment call made by the big capitalists, the Association of Manufacturers?  Doubtful.  At this point the U.S. is a laughable and weakened hegemon.

ANTI-FASCIST FRONT

On January 20^th, the thugs will be back to try to wreck Biden’s inauguration and perhaps start shooting.  Beyond that is the real issue.

The socialist left in the U.S., along with BLM and Antifa elements, need to form a broad Anti-Fascist Front dedicated to defending communities and labor and repelling neo-fascist attempts to control the streets or destroy democratic functioning.  Unions would be invited as well. Whether the leaders of these organizations or tendencies can work with each other is debatable, but I think they have to.  If they don’t, one day they will be forced to.  A Front would rely on all reasonable and defensible tactics, with the broad goal of mobilizing thousands and tens of thousands of proletarians.  Ultimately unions would be invited.  Certainly the work in Portland is a good initial example.

The prescription of the 3^rd International for an Anti-Fascist Front came in 1923 after the rise of Mussolini.  We certainly are not there yet, as the far right has overplayed their hand.  But in order not to get there, we have to act now.

P.S. - Later it was 'reported' that a police officer, Sicknick, died after injuries received in a fight with Trumpists.*  The death of a police officer, as part of the state apparatus, is the final straw for those who control the state apparatus.  Only a small silver of the capitalist class directly supports the neo-fascist right, but they are outweighed by the overwhelming majority of the class who do not see the need for fascism yet.  Efforts by the Joint Chiefs, the NAM, nearly every internet corporation and the courts have all stalled Trump. Which is why Trump read out a condemnation and recognition of Biden's win, written by lawyers who are trying to protect him from indictment.

Here is a Guardian article on a real coup attempt in Spain in 1981.For Spaniards who remember 1981, the storming of the Capitol looked eerily familiar | US Capitol breach | The Guardian

P.S. - CNN reported on 2/2 that Officer Sicknik did not have 'blunt force trauma' as reported by the NYT. No video of his 'injuries' has been recovered.  His death is still a mystery. 

P.P.S. - How high-up Trump officials in military and FBI hindered defense of the Capitol, from Alternet: https://www.alternet.org/2022/12/police-conspiracy/

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left:  Fascism Today; Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate; Against the Fascist Creep; Fighting Fascism (Zetkin); The Real Red Pill; No Fascist USA; The Ultra-Right; It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis); Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety; The Coming Storm; A Fascist Edge; Clandestine Occupations; Charlottesville, Virginia; What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?; Angry White Men.

Red Frog

January 7, 2021

King Jazz

 “Really the Blues,”by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, 1946

This is a book by and about a Jewish hepcat born in Chicago who boarded the blues and jazz train for a lifetime.  It is written in a 'jive' slang style, proving slang can be classic.  He’s first a wannabe Negro slumming in the working class area around Chicago’s Division and Western avenues.  Mezzrow became an average be-bop and swing clarinetist and sax player according to many.  At the same time, he and Wolfe are interesting writers.  They tell the intimate tale of the jazz world in Chicago’s Southside, cities around the Big Windy and then New York and Harlem from the late 1910s to the 1940s -  the musicians Mezz met, heard and played with, the joints he visited, the joy numbers played, the life. 

Learning music and Jim Crow in the Pontiac Boys reformatory in the late 1910s, Milton Mezzrow cements his fascination with African-American culture. He thought being a Jewish Yid was like being half-black, so he was ‘the missing link’ between whites and blacks.  In stir a few more times, he eventually leaves home in the early 1920s for the hot music life after his sister insults the ‘aints.  He works in various spots in and around Chicago, legally and illegally, as its Prohibition.  Booze and music go together, cash tying them like a tether.

This book’s a dandy hop, working like a cyclo’ of old-time jive-talkin'.  It’s old timey but rhymey, a polyglot patois.  Later, Mezzrow calls it "the new poetry of the proletariat." The text sounds like music sometimes, especially his description of playing without sheet music, only feel.  This is something every popular musician can relate to.  His description of intuitive playing while on mariuana (or grass or tea or gauge or hay or grefa or muggles or muta as he calls it) is excellent.  Then he’s introduced to opium and becomes a hop head for 5 years later in the book. 

Mezzrow hears New Orleans’ King Oliver, banters with Al Capone and becomes a good early music friend with Bix Beiderbecke.  He listens to Bessie Smith sing the holy blues and Louis Armstrong invent scat on the Southside. He joins up with ‘white’ compadres in the Austin High Chicagoans to make music and live the jazz life, doing some recording as the "Chicago Sound." He mentors a young Gene Krupa on drums.  He thinks his group of guys, including Beiderbecke and Krupa, invented the public ‘jam session’ one night in the basement of The Deuces club.  All in the pursuit of what Mezzrow wanted - ‘Negro style.’

Mezzrow is there to see the loose, jumping, intuitive New Orleans jazz style taken over by rigid big band orchestration and commercialism.  And then the advent of the Great Depression in 1929 and into the 30s.  In 1928 the band members split without Mezzrow, moving to New York.  They hoped to ride the $Dough Ray Me$ Tin Pan Alley gravy train there.  Mezzrow’s gigs in Chicago dry up after they leave.  The gang's last night in Chicago the leaving band members hear a ‘preaching’ blues done to their faces by Jimmy Noone’s ‘colored’ band at The Nest club.  The vocalist puts down their commercial move to New York while backing Mezzrow’s style. A big, sad night for Mezz.  The lyrics printed in the book of the Preaching blues sure read like early rap to me.  

After some blue times, Mezzrow leaves his wife again (he seems to be a frequently absent husband) and also heads to New York to follow King Jazz.  His closeness with Armstrong, being the top mariuana dealer in Harlem, kicking opium, integrating big band jazz in New York, getting locked up in Rikers - all to come.

That is a taste.  Buy the book and check out the rest.

P.S. – Bernard Wolfe, the co-author, was a prolific author.  He wrote for the SWP’s The Militant, then worked as Trotsky’s secretary and bodyguard in Mexico for 8 months. While there he worked with the Dewey Commission’s investigation of the Moscow show trials and later published a novel of Trotsky’s assassination marred by bourgeois psychologizing.

Prior blog reviews on music, use the blog search box, upper left:  “Music is Power,” “If it Sounds Good, It is Good,” “In Search of the Blues,” “Cool Town,” Kids”(Patti Smith); “Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “Grateful Dead,” “Mississippi Delta,” “Life”(Keith Richards); “Janis Joplin,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” "33 Revolutions Per Minute," "Searching for Sugarman," "Marie and Rosetta,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Echo in the Canyon,” “The Music Sell-Outs,” “Palmer’s Bar,” “Treme,” “Subculture,” “The Long Strange Trip.”

And I bought it at May Day Books music section!

Recommended by an older be-bop friend who plays his tinkle-box high on weed

The Kulture Kommissar

January 5, 2021

Class Struggle and the Lumpen Bourgeoisie

 “The English Game” written by Julian Fellowes, directed by Birgitte Staermose, 2020

If you type in ‘class struggle’ movies or series into your browser you’ll get this limited series.  It’s based on a true story of the advent of modern U.K. football.  Set in the late 1870s and early 1880s it features an angry strike against an obnoxious textile mill owner because of a 10% cut in wages.  One of the more sensitive mill owners in Darwen, Lancashire relents and only cuts the wages by 5% to end the strike. 

But this strike and form of class struggle are only a subtext to the real issue – how will working-men play football (soccer to Yanks) when they have to compete against privileged Etonians?  The upper-class Etonians have plenty of time to practice, eat well and are in better health.  When losing they use thuggish tactics that are now red card calls.  The working-class players from the North of England and Scotland in Darwen and Blackburn work long hours a day, 6 day weeks, eat bad food and suffer from injuries at work.  Their women are subject to the vicious stigma of out-of-wedlock birth and drunken husbands, which forms the female side of this tale. 

How can the working-class compete with the British upper classes in football?  And how can working-class women achieve dignity?  Their communities are solid in support of their home-town teams – something that has continued to the present.

The answer the film gives is to pay the working-class players to play, not work in a mill or mine.  This is the innovation of several of the smaller northern capitalists.  Then the teams can all be on that fabled ‘level playing field.’  The Etonians try to get them banned for professionalism as opposed to their gentlemanly amateurism.  Paying a player is against the rules, which are controlled by the Etonians.  Another reason is a football riot between the early soccer ‘hooligans’ of Darwen and Blackburn. Another is that the Etonians style of play is the losing style of mobbing the ball like a rubgy scrum, not passing to each other.

The lead player of Blackburn, Fergus Suter, finds an ally among the Etonians and the game goes on.  Their ally, Arthur, is a tall, handsome, young banker with a kind wife who attempts to help proletarian women with illegitimate babies.  By the way, illegitimacy was outlawed in 1917 in the early USSR.  After this break-through, the workers win 2-1 in a teary cup final using their ability to pass and U.K. football is changed forever.

This film was written by the same don who wrote Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes.  What is clear is that the break-through comes because labor and capital come together for a deal to modernize football. But it also results in the slow but full commodification of football and its players.  We have seen the pinnacle of this process, which in no way created ‘proletarian’ sports.  Professionalism was a step forward to a higher level, which then slowly turned into its opposite, as dialectics would predict. 

“Riviera” created by Neil Jordan, 2020, Seasons 1&2

This limited series is basically wealth porn.  The real star is the French Riviera (and a bit of Italy like Venice) – Lamborghinis, huge chateaus, flowing bubbly, Prada bags, swimming pools, race horses, million-dollar paintings, yachts, private helicopters, the ocean and cliffs of the Riviera itself - all filthy but sparkling lucre.  For people in the U.S., it is vicarious tourism.   One of the perks of wealth seems to be the ability to kill people with impunity and to commit money crimes to protect ‘the family.’  This is why we have to coin the term the ‘lumpen bourgeoisie’ to refer to parts of the European and U.S. upper classes. It reflects the intersection of crime and capitalism that has become so obvious.  

This parade of useless people is led by Julia Stiles, playing an American art dealer who hooks up with a rich family.  She joins a scheming ex-wife, her husband’s neurotic daughter, drug-addled son and manipulative other son in what passes for a southern French soap opera made up of people speaking English.  It features various violent local criminals, two instances of children by others, a serial murderer, a Nazi painting hoarder, explosions, family deaths and so many plot holes and unlikely bullshit (million dollar paintings, even one from the Louvre hanging in an unguarded and open old castle) that you can only wonder who watches this stuff. Oh, I did. 

Other reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  "The Football Factory," "Chavs," "Class Against Class," "The City,"  

The Kulture Kommissar

January 3, 2021