The Mangrove Roots

 “The Magic Kingdom” by Russell Banks, 2022

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

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

The Memoir

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

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

Shaker colony near St. Cloud, Florida

Utopianism

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

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

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

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

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

And I got the book at the Minneapolis Library!

Red Frog

June 23, 2023

Coups and Coups

 “Harsh Times” by Mario Vargas Llosa, 2019

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

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

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

The Coup

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

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

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

Personal Stories

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

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

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

And I got it at the Minneapolis Library!

Red Frog

June 20, 2023

They're Legends Now, But Before ...

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

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

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

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

Music Entwined With Events

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

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

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

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

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

And a war on musicians

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Red Frog

June 16, 2023

Camel, Meet Needle - II

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

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

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

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

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

Organized & Organizer

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

The central committee - with one woman

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

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

Wandering, Pacifism, Non-Jews

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

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

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

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

'Cleansing' the Temple

Passover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 13, 2023

Seen This Picture Before

 “The New Power Elite” by Heather Gautney, 2022

This is not a book about a ‘new power elite’ – it is a book about the history of U.S. neo-liberalism from its roots in the 1970s. And that book has already been written 30 times. There is absolutely nothing new in this book. If you are almost unfamiliar with the history of this period, then buy it. However, it is written by a Bernie Sanders staffer who is a professor of sociology at Fordham and is on the ‘Biden-Sanders Task Force on Education.’ How's that going? She’s a Democratic Party political wonk who has done no original research here. It's basically a lit review.  If there is an example of self-preening, predictable left-liberalism, this is it.

A look at the index is revealing – not one listing on terms like Marx, fascism, socialism or capitalism. Just a plethora of names from the news – the Koch Brothers, Trump, the Sacklers, Colin Powell, Friedman, Facebook, Limbaugh, blah, blah, blah. Neo-liberalism takes the place of capitalism in the text. No solutions are proposed. No real problematic issues are raised, like the Democratic Party itself and its own power elite. There is no economic analysis and only the slightest attempt at a class analysis – just vague mentions of 'the elite.' Nothing is said about the state of the working-class. Movements are almost invisible. There are no predictions. There is barely a fact that is not already well-known to those on the actual Left.

In fact it is an insult to C. Wright Mills to steal his book’s name and pretend to extend his analysis with ‘new’ control figures. “Giants – the New Global Elite” is actually that book. (Reviewed below). “The Capitalists of the 21^st Century” is also new research. (Reviewed below). So is Roberts and Carchedi’s “Capitalism in the 21^st Century.” (Reviewed below). Even Piketty did better than this.

Who runs Fordham? Who runs the U.S.? Who runs U.S. capitalism? Who runs the world? Who has the actual power? Who owns what? What are the capitalist factions? A list of names from the news is actually not enough to answer these questions, except as a jumble. Perhaps being a professor is a hindrance in itself.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: ““Giants – the New Global Elite” (Phillips); “The Capitalists of the 21^st Century” (Rügemer); “Capitalism in the 21^st Century” (Roberts-Carchedi).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 8, 2023

Business as Usual?

 “Carnival Row,” Season 2 only, created by R. Echivarria and T. Beacham, 2023

This historic urban fantasy is like a thermometer dipped into the near present. It’s a depiction of racist oppression and even class struggle. We’re thrown back into a Dickensian, steam-punk city under Victorian control, dressed in a throw-back aesthetic.  A ghetto has been created in the city on ‘the Row,” like a Jewish ghetto during WWII, the immigrant detention camp in Children of Men or the prison neighborhood in Cloud Atlas.  

Human-like fairies (fae), human-like goat and sheep-headed creatures with hooves (fauns) and some zombie-like beings with bare, stringy heads populate the ghetto, taking the place of Jews … or whatever minority you might imagine.  There is also a centaur, a werewolf, a witch, a gay relationship and many Scottish or Irish accents.  These ‘Fae’ or ‘Pix” are imprisoned by the humans, who have police, an army and all the power, in a government called the Burgue.  They walled the ghetto and strung barbed-wire above so the fairies can’t fly out.  In one gruesome scene, they use a swinging axe blade, as in some Poe story, to cut off 5 innocent heads at once.  Remember, the guillotine was a punishment favored by the French ruling class before it was repurposed.

There is an inept ruler of the Burgue who follows the machinations of a woman politician of the opposing party.  She wants a war to fill the coffers of all the armament factories she owns. The central figure is Orlando Bloom, no longer a delicate elf but a hulking, tough guy.  He is an efficient policeman who is found to be a ‘cross-breed’ between human and a Fae and who also has divided loyalties.  He is thrown off the force due to the brutal caste-like treatment of all oppressed, though he had passed for a time.  Miscegenation is especially despised.

In the colonies a revolt has started under the New Dawn, a revolutionary group somewhat modeled after the Bolsheviks, led by a woman faun with a broken horn, Leonora.  They call each other comrade and dance to Russian tunes.  They overthrew the local aristocracy and expropriated their wealth.  They are for equality and equal shares to all, so everyone works and those who don’t work, don’t eat. They are against ‘race’ prejudice, so their ranks are made up of humans, fauns, fairies, pix, fae, pucks, critches and any other imaginary beings who want to join.  Those from the aristocracy usually cannot be transformed and ‘re-educated,’ as class sticks. We see an example of this. 

There is also a secretive anarchist group within the Row called the Black Ravens – flying fairies who resist the Burgue because of the imprisonment.  They later work with New Dawn.  A temporary ally of the bourgeois Burgue – which looks like a stand-in for top-hatted England - is a more war-like country called The Pact - a bunch of Germanic Junkers dressed in military red.  The Germanic Pact wages war on the New Dawn with weapons supplied by the Burgue.  The Pact burns their city in the colonies with bombs dropped from dirigibles. 

There is also a plague within the Row; a series of gruesome murders which Bloom is trying to solve and a gut-eating, flying monster called Desparis that hates humans – or certain humans.  Every character has a unique, cool and meaningful name, per normal in a world-building fantasy story.

POLITICS

The treatment of the New Dawn is partly sympathetic.  Then an episode shows a huge marsh full of the bodies of the rich they have killed.  Earlier all the ‘officers’ on a seized civilian ship were machine-gunned.  The Bolsheviks never executed the rich or civilian sailors as a program. So this bunch have a touch of Pol Pot, though the peasant Khmer Rouge just made the rich and city folk work back-breaking rural jobs with almost no food.  The Black Ravens also seem to be sympathetic, until they bomb some ships that could prove beneficial to the citizens of the Row.  But then a logical reason emerges – the ship was a cover for a Burgue invasion of a former colony.  So the writers are hostile to the ‘hurricane’ of red revolution and the bomb-throwing of a band of anarchists.  This makes sense as the writers are liberal and ‘neutral’ artists.  The sympathetic characters are a female fairy that quits the Black Ravens for a time (Hollywood’s Cara Delevingne); Bloom, the half-breed with divided loyalties; and a clever liberal advisor to the Burgue who tries to help the imprisoned.  He’s a sort of a Tyrion Lannister knock-off.  What is interesting is how a class revolution has intruded on the imagination of Hollywood writers and show-runners again, somewhat like the Hunger Games.    

The show’s season was shot in the Czech Republic – in Prague and surrounding areas.  What it really reflects is a thinly-veiled look at present-day politics across world capitalism.  The reality of class and ethnic oppression, war, fascism and revolution are the uber-topics, even though the script is 17 years old, probably inspired by the 2008 capitalist meltdown.  It should be dated but it’s not. It did not do well on Rotten Tomatoes.

Predictably when the revolution comes to the Row, most of the lead characters fight against it – their Kerensky move. It’s about saving lives – though whose lives is up for debate.  They are more about individual lives like the beautiful witch or the rich faun - so it’s really about class peace.  Revolutionaries are stock characters portrayed as bloodthirsty, and that is the moral core of the season.  The monster Desparis is depicted as the bloody Id of the revolution.  The silver-tongued Leonora is the hypnotic leader. The film acts as if revolutions are plots, even in the Row. There seem to be no workers among the ordinary population to recruit, so it’s a revolt of the most oppressed identities only. The rich faun says the Burgue is flawed, but he’s been over the world and seen worse.  He’s black and earned his wealth through slave trading.  He always sounds like a reasonable, well-educated fellow who predictably says ‘change is slow.’

The set-up is in place.

REVOLUTION?

The battle is joined.  The New Dawn mutilate a captive. The Black Ravens gruesomely burn out a police bar with a group of racist cops inside. In spite of that, the Burgue parliament decide to hear the New Dawn’s offer of peace.  An angry human-supremacist fascist mob has gathered at the gate to the Row, in bowler hats waving hammers.  The New Dawn plan to liquidate them by luring them into the Row.  With the agreement of the police, they are let into the ghetto to carry out a pogrom.  It ends with a ridiculous deus-ex machina that wipes the whole story. The liberal, wealthy faun plays a police role in the battle and wonderfully, starts an electric company as a successful capitalist entreprenuer.

The liberals win with a plea for tolerance and an attempt at a new Obama-like chancellor – and nothing more.  Somehow the Fae have gotten out of the Row, the walls and barbed wire were removed and the inhabitants go about their happy business, like some Renaissance Fair… still unable to vote and in poverty.   “The seeds have been sown” says Leonora, though most viewers will ignore that.

Prior blog reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Cloud Atlas,” “Game of Thrones,” “People’s Future of the United States,” “A People’s History of the Russian Revolution,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “The Hunger Games,” “October – the Story of the Russian Revolution,” “Blade Runner,” “Children of Men,” “Divergent-Insurgent,” “Mad Max Fury Road,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “3%,” “Fugitives of the Forest.”   

The Kultur Kommissar

June 5, 2023

Born Under a Bad Sign

 “L’Assommoir” by Ėmile Zola, 1867

This is a marvelous story, part of Zola’s 20 novel cycle, detailing Parisian proletarian life in the 18^th arrondissement in the ‘Gouette d’Or’ district, just above the Gare du Nord.  At the time in 1850 when the novel starts, the area was just outside the old city wall. It ends in 1869.  It is the story of the rise and fall of a young laundress, Gervaise.  She is abandoned by her shiftless lover with two children after being in Paris for some months, then marries a young and responsible teetotaler and roofer.  Together they are able to save enough francs so that they can move to better quarters.  The neighborhood is full of factory men and working women, artisans and shabby storefronts.  Smells and stink; dirt and wear surround the characters on the streets.  Artisans labor in garrets, tiny rooms and basements.  Money is always dear; drunks lie on the sidewalks, but Gervaisse works hard no matter what.  Zola gives atmosphere, color and the sun, light, rhythm and music to the neighborhood too – illuminating lives that can be as ‘pretty’ as those of the rich in their odd way.

Memorable scenes follow: a huge fight in a steamy self-service laundry; an odd marriage trek which involves a famous parade to and through the Louvre; the new laundry on the Rue de la Gouette d’Or they rent; the tenement; an asylum for the DT's and mental illness; dancehalls, bars, the streets of Paris.  They have a baby girl, Nana, who also shows up in a later Zola book. Things seem to be going well!

Politics?

At one point in the wedding feast the roofer Coupeau says “politics is bunk” and indeed, this is not a directly political novel. Other than Coupeau’s on-a-lark visit to a barricade in 1851 protesting the coup of Napoleon III, there is nothing here.  He reflects the sentiment of most proletarians, who ‘leave politics to the middle-classes.’  Some Marxists like Georgy Lukács or Tony McKenna have a distain for Zola, finding Honoré Balzac to be a ‘higher level’ humanist writer.  They look down their noses at explicitly political work. Zola’s classic political book, Germinale is written squarely about class struggle miners.  L’Assommoir is not, nor are others in the cycle.  Gervaise’ little boy Etienne shows up in Germinale, but here he is a cypher... as is politics.  This book does not focus on a whole society or try to, though implicit in part of the book is a sturdy, working class feminism.  The book is set 2 years after the barricades of 1848 – including barricades in the Gouette d’Or.’  Of most importance, self-censorship was in effect, as the censors controlled what was printed.  This affected this book.

Balzac died in 1850 and was the naturalist forerunner and inspiration to Zola and other naturalist / realist writers like Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Hugo and James. Zola also championed ‘naturalism,’ which is a study of social life in literature.  He was not afraid to directly focus on the working poor while Balzac only touched that class. Zola wrote the famous ‘J’Accuse’ letter against the anti-Semitic frame-up of Dreyfus.  Balzac’s politics were conservative and royalist.  Marx and Engels lived in Paris just prior to 1850, the period of the start of the novel, writing many of the founding documents of communism.  They were referencing the same proletarian conditions in this book.

The early founders of communism appreciated Balzac because he pictured all levels of a cruel and shallow, class-riven society. Most importantly, he had published his books for them to read by 1850.  Zola published L’Assommoir  in 1976 and Germinale was serialized in 1884-1886 after Marx had died.  Leftist critics who ape Marx and Engel’s early preferences avoid history’s movement through literary production.  Zola reflects a higher level of class struggle and modernism, just as Hardy did in comparison to Dickens, Austen or the Brontës.

Proletarian Life

Assommoir is colloquial French for getting hammered, plastered or knocked out… so a bar with cheap liquor where you can drink to bury your sorrows.  In the U.S. parlance, a dive bar.  Zola was attacked for using working-class colloquialisms, sly nick-names, slang, profanity and insults in the book, as well as depicting such ‘low’ topics as poverty, hard work, abuse, bad smells, omnipresent dirt, death and disorder.  He is accused of lying about and slandering the working class and his response was that ‘I write what I see.’  He was not a romantic or social-realist propagandist.  

The main issue in the book is whether the environment or individual failings are the cause of downfalls. Whether ignorance and stupidity, overwrought emotions, social climbing and lusts of various kinds are the real issue; not the cruel environment surrounding proletarians.  In reading the book, they interrelate, as there is no simple answer.  At first Gervaise and Coupeau are ordinary people with good habits, kind and able.  They love each other, have a child together and start making a life.  The ‘fall’ starts with a literal fall for Coupeau.  Roofing, even in 2021, is still the 3^rd most dangerous occupation and still filled with low-paid immigrants working long hours.  ‘Shit happens’ – including temporary success.  Some marry the wrong man. Rent day is a horror in the tenements.  Food and drink are the only comforts – if there is any food.  Children starve and old people waste away under stairwells.  Walls are thin, children and women are beaten; drink abounds. Careful misers have a distinct advantage in a situation of proletarian poverty.  Zola ultimately comes down on both sides of this issue, though a bit of a puritan in his language.

Gervaise at first assumes hard work, generosity and kindness will suffice.  Is this a character flaw?  “Hard work” is the essence of the capitalist mode for workers.  Through labor power surplus value is generated for the capitalist and through ‘hard work’ a sort of a living can be earned by the worker.  This formula hasn’t changed since 1850.  Gervaise rents a small shop and goes into a large debt to a friend.  So her condition as an employed proletarian changes to self-employed laundress.  This leap into another ‘higher’ class fraction as a shop owner with employees is pressured by the social logic of capital - a promise of greater earnings and independence.  At first that is the case, and these scenes of success are happy and beguiling.     

The wedding parade in the Louvre is real because it shows that workers never went to museums, and understood even less of what they were seeing.  This is similar to today. This is Zola’s sly poke at high culture and archaic Christian culture versus low culture – especially the ogling of painted nudes.  Which as Berger pointed out in “Ways of Seeing” were the first porno pin-ups. 

The Troubles    

A washerwoman doing clothes by hand knows the secrets of every client through their intimate torn, dirty, stained and odiferous clothing.  What she could tell!  Zola crafts extended scenes of work – roofing a building; the detailing in a laundry, the making of iron rivets in a foundry and a flower shop full of girls.  He mentions Marx's theory of increasing mechanization leading to job losses. Then just “a bit o’ fun” intrudes… the first spell of laziness after a mountain of work; the first falling down drunk in the daylight; the first lewd behavior in public, the first sensual instinct - and an end to saving.  It is the ‘pleasure principle’ in action.  Another large debt is incurred to become a landlord.  There’s a triangle of 3 men interested in Gervaise, one a useless drunk, one a lazy opportunist and one that actually works. The family holds a big, expensive Rabelaisian party.  Sneaky adultery becomes normal, as divorce is illegal. In a cruel capitalist context these are failings.  Like the tight-rope walker hundreds of feet up, a small slip is no small thing, but several, well... 

Is this a tract against alcohol and adultery? Some will see it as such, because alcoholics drag everyone down with them - Gervaise, the laundry, her sexually precocious daughter Nana.  Eventually they lose the laundry and are forced into cold 6^th floor attic rooms. Gervaise loses jobs and Coupeau barely works, hoarding his money for drink, which Gervaise takes to too. At one point Zola says, after their daughter’s communion: “That was the family’s last happy day.”  Dance halls, begging and an asylum fill the days.  Gervaise eventually ends up in the arms of a vile, drunken undertaker in her tenement.  Zola ends by saying "...she died from poverty."

The book is repetitive, overlong and overly-detailed in the style of its day.  It reaches levels of melodrama at times.  Some events or concerns take many pages, like an involved, many-peopled scene in a film by Robert Altman.  L’Assommoir is 440 pages, so no one-day read.  The ultimate impact is of being sent back in time, dropped onto several streets in Paris in the mid-1800s, in a neighborhood like a small village. It’s the only real ‘time travel’ there is.    

Prior blog reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Ways of Seeing” (Berger); “Thieves of the Wood,” “Citizen Tom Paine” (Fast); “A Walk Through Paris,” “Poverty – What is it Good For?,” “The Lower Depths” (Gorky); “U.S. Cities With Lowest Life Expectancy,” “Famished Road” (Okri); “Hillbilly Elegy” (Vance)’ “The Jungle” (Sinclair); "Palmer's Bar," "Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety," "Lukacs."   

And I got it at Chapman Street Books, Ely Mn!

The Cultural Marxist

June 1, 2023

A Philosophic Dialog

 “The Wonder,” film directed by Sebastián Lelio, 2022 (some spoilers…)

This is another one of those depressing Irish films, dwelling on the rural backwardness of the past, like the almost idiotic Banshees of Inisherin.  But unlike the absurd inanity of Banshees, this one is a philosophic film aimed directly at religious superstition.  It reflects the current enmity in Ireland against the Catholic Church for its various crimes – child abuse, dead orphans and ‘illegitimate’ children buried behind orphanages; anti-abortion fundamentalism, retrograde politics and hatred of women. In this story the echoes of the famine of 1847 hover in the background, though the scene is set in 1862.

The nurse and the 'holy' girl

It is the story of an Irish farm girl, Anna, who has stopped eating for 4 months and has become a beacon of holiness for locals and the faithful. She represents a miracle of the mortification of the flesh. A group of 5 village men – a local council person, a priest, a convinced religious man, a quack doctor and one free-thinker – hire a sophisticated professional nurse from London to watch the girl and try to understand how she is surviving on only water.  A nun is also hired, so they take shifts.

At first the nurse, played by Florence Pugh, observes the healthy girl carefully, taking notes, searching for hidden food, checking her vitals. The girl says she survives with ‘manna from heaven.’ What that mysterious substance is, is unknown.  The girl prays constantly, plays with the religious cards of various saints, reads her Bible, sings church songs – clearly a ‘devout’ soul.  The family – a deeply religious mother, father and sister - still have physical contact with the girl several times a day.  It is a mystery how the girl survives.

A former local who is now a newspaperman comes to the town to investigate what he considers a hoax, as it is impossible not to eat for 4 months without dying.  He tries to interview the nurse and asks her out to eat.  She rejects his advances for a while, though they eventually form a relationship.

The nurse then notices that the mother is passing food through kissing, like a mother bird feeding a baby bird.  She cups her mouth while doing so to hide the process.  The nurse forbids the family from touching the girl. In a later tearful scene, Anna admits the holy ‘manna’ is from her mother.  Anna also explains her dreadful motivation for the ruse.  She was raped by her older, deceased brother and this mortification is to free his soul from the burnings of hell, for the sex was her fault. The nurse is appalled.  After the feeding stops and the child starts to waste away, the mother refuses to encourage her to eat.  The nurse knows she will die.  The family want her to die as penance, to save her and her brother’s wicked souls.

Isolated Irish cottages - not always romantic...

The nurse hatches a radical plan to save the girl, which I won’t go into. The story is an arrow aimed at the heart of cruel and irrational faith, of Catholicism gone literal. The cursed low cabin on the heath hides a family of back-hills violence and archaic ideas.  They dwell in visions of a non-existent hell and sexual blame towards the ‘lure’ of a young girl. Though unsaid, they raised a son who raped his sister, so their guilt is to be expatiated too.

The film is too long, it’s slow and cramped at times. The odds of feeding someone adequately through passing a bit of food several times a day through the lips is dubious. The film shows the sophistication of people in the city versus that of isolated rural farmers somewhere north of Dublin.  The film is relevant because the split between country and city still exists; the fight between backward religion and materially-based science is still ongoing; the curse of male chauvinism and violence is also ongoing.  Social time has not aged well, as bogus miracles continue to happen.  Watch the film if you can.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: "Abortion Referendum in Ireland," "The Immortal Irishman," "Sean O'Casey," "A Full Life: James Connolly," "Jimmy's Hall" (Loach); "Ireland - What's Up?" "1916 Rebellion Walking Tour, Dublin Ireland," "The Irish Literary Trail," "Black 47," "Rebellion," "The Dream of the Celt" (Llosa); "Without Apology."

The Cultural Marxist

May 29, 2023