Welcome to the Neighborhood

 “Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors,” by Slavoj Žižek, 2016

Žižek aims his arrows at liberals, Left-liberals and the petit-bourgeois ‘left’ in this slim polemic, dealing with the issue of refugees in Europe and the racist liberal idea of ‘cultural relativism.’ I’ll leave you with quotes for the most part.  He deals with growing femicides, Islamic terror groups like ISIS, ‘nihilist’ violence, Europe’s libratory side, imperialism and invasions, fascism’s two aspects in religion and nationalism, then delves into some questionable psychology.  He seems to take somewhat of a ‘culture of civilization’ tack at first, but then clearly promotes universal liberation.  It was written in the aftermath of gang attacks on women in Cologne, Germany carried out mostly by Arab youth, ISIS attacks against civilians in Paris and the kidnapping of girls in Rotherham, UK by Pakistani gangs.

Žižek’s overall solution – a left solution by the way – to the dilemma of either completely open borders or unscalable walled borders, promoted by humanitarian liberals and rightist nationalists in that order, is not new.  Liberals do not deal with the causes of immigration; the Rightists don’t either, nor do they care.  The solution is to stop wars, invasions, bombings, unequal trade, export substitutes and debt, ‘pragmatic’ support for dictators and imperialist economic competition over minerals, oil, gas, diamonds, food, land and rare metals.  Add to that global warming.  Refugees do not want to leave their families, countries and societies unless they are in dire need.  And they are.  To follow this route would mean an overturn of the capitalist system world-wide. 

Žižek knows that immigration is only going to increase due to ‘failed states’ and national borders are going to become more and more useless.  His scalable solution is to highly organize the inclusion of immigrants into Europe.  Many stations in countries interviewing, classifying and organizing immigrants as to what work they can do, where they can live, their rationale, their ties to fundamentalism, but still with limits.  After all, capital is actually looking for workers and consumers, though he doesn’t mention that key economic fact except once, commenting on a “cheap precarious workforce.”  Nor does he mention the concept of ‘blowback’ for the crimes of capital.  Europeans, like many societies, are having less babies as well.

What does Žižek have to say?  His use of the term “Left” is a muddy idea mixing liberals, left-liberals and Stalinists together.  By the way, he is not a Marxist, he is just secretly inspired by Marxism. 

QUOTES:

     ·        “Every four minutes in South Africa a woman or a girl – often a teenager, sometimes a child – is reported raped and every eight hours a woman is killed by her partner.”

     ·        “Western leftists ... make some kind of ‘strategic compromise’ in which the humiliation and persecution of women and gays are silently tolerated on behalf of the greater ‘anti-imperialist’ struggle.”  

·        “Their remedies (charity in this case) do not cure the disease, they merely prolong it.” (Oscar Wilde)

·        “Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism and ‘Asian values’-infused authoritarian capitalism” are the two, twin poles of capital, both of which need to be opposed.  He thinks the latter is now being preferred by most capitalists as more effective.

·        “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” … allows companies to sue governments if those government’s policies result in loss of profits.”

·        “… culture is no longer just an exception, a kind of fragile superstructure rising above the ‘real’ economic infrastructure, but more and more a central ingredient of our mainstream ‘real’ economy.”

·        He opposes the liberal-leftist mantra that “our main task is the critique of Eurocentrism.”

·        “…another Leftist taboo that needs to be abandoned is that of prohibiting any critique of Islam.”

·        “The silent premise of some critics of Islamophobia is that Islam somehow resists global capitalism.”  It does not, as for instance ISIS was a profit-making machine, as is Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Gulf States.

·        “The Old Testament describes this gift (of Israel) in the terms of ethnic cleansing.”

·        “Netanyahu suggested that Hitler had wanted only to expel Jews from Germany, not to exterminate them” – instead blaming that on the Palestinian mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini - thus giving comfort to holocaust deniers.

·        “…the good thing about the intolerance of religious fundamentalisms: that they cannot tolerate each other.”

·        “…some apparent anti-racism is effectively a barely covert racism, condescendingly treating Pakistanis as morally inferior beings who should not be held to our standards…” regarding women.

·        Rapes in India, Ciudad Juarez, of aboriginal women in western Canada, and Catholic pedophilia he calls “learned, externally imposed, ritualized: part of the collective, secret, symbolic substance of a community.” 

·        “…violence against women resonates with the subordination of women and their exclusion from public life.”

·        Some riots and violence are “means without ends.” (Walter Benjamin.) See the destruction of two post offices and damage to one library in Minneapolis during the Floyd rebellion.  

·        “The dynamics of world capitalism” and “western military intervention” constitute “the political economy of refugees.” This is based on export substitution and exploitation of oil, diamonds, food and land in ‘failed states.’ 

·        “What if the obstacle to integration is not only Western racism?” Some communities have no interest in integration.

·        “…the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode.”

·        “The wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism (class struggle) which overdetermines all others…which is … the concrete universal…”

·        “…yet another taboo to be left behind is the dismissal of the worries and cares of so-called ‘ordinary people’…”

·        “… the multiculturalist anti-colonialist defense of the multiplicity of ‘ways of life’ is also false; it covers up the antagonisms within each of these particular ways of life…”

·        “We are not gays!” (Robert Mugabe); “The struggle against gays appears as an aspect of the anti-colonial struggle.”  He opposes this idea.

·        “The principal threat to Europe does not come in the shape of Muslim immigrants but in its anti-immigrant populist defenders.”

·        “…Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the basic Judeo-Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor…”

·        “…there is no emancipatory potential in fundamentalist violence, however anti-capitalist it claims to be…”

·        “…all the imagined, democratic-multitude-grassroots changes ‘from below’ are ultimately doomed to fail…”

·        “Should we tolerate it if refugees settling in Europe prevent their children going to school; if they force their women to dress and behave in a certain way; if they arrange the marriage of their children; if they maltreat – and worse – gays among their ranks?”

·        In this situation:  “Our axiom should be the struggle against Western neo-colonialism as well as the struggle against fundamentalism…”

·        “… humankind should get ready to live in a more plastic and nomadic way…”

·        “…national sovereignty will have to be radically redefined and new levels of global cooperation invented.”

At the end Žižek endorses a reinvented Communism as the only progressive solution to the capitalist melt-down of the entire world by climate change, refugees, dictatorship, poverty and apartheid.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Living in the End Times,” “Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?” “Violence,” “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” “Pandemic – Covid 19 Shakes the World,” “Heaven in Disorder,” “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight,” (All by Zizek); “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “Illegals, Migrants and Refugees,” “Central America’s Forgotten History” (A. Chomsky); “The Great Escape.”

Red Frog

And I bought it at May Day Books! / July 10, 2023

Reds Under the Hood

 “Fighting Times – Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War” by Jonathan Melrod, 2022

This is part memoir and part history of a turbulent time in U.S. politics, when every issue was up for grabs – the late 1960s into the early 1980s.  Melrod was one of those at the forefront of in-plant trade union struggles.  He went from being shocked by seeing a black chain gang in Virginia as a child, to standing up to an archaic teacher at his private high school, to attending the U of Wisconsin at Madison in 1968, a student political hotbed.  There he joined SDS, marched with thousands of others supporting black studies, fought along with hippies defending a People’s Park against the police, participated in the 1970 mass student strikes and became a supporter of the Revolutionary Union (RU).  He worked with Obreros Unidos helping organize farmworkers in Wisconsin.  That connection brought him to the organized labor movement, who called the Latino’s ‘brother.’ 

The September 1970 Math building bombing in Madison motivated Melrod to move to Milwaukee and join the labor movement.  Melrod, a slight guy, worked at toxic worksites inhaling silica dust, plastic fumes, chlorofluorocarbons, leather solvents, degreasing chemicals and the like.  Later he contracted pancreatic cancer because of it.  But he does not regret his progressive activism in the labor movement, which lasted for 13 years.  

UAW/AMC

Melrod finally got a job at a UAW / AMC plant in Milwaukee, which became a hotbed of a different sort.  He had several advantages at the AMC plant.  The plant had an excellent UAW Working Agreement that limited the power of the bosses and supervisors, won by UAW activists long ago.  It was full of young workers, ex-Vietnam veteran black workers and Latino comrades.    AMC’s Wisconsin plants were large and key production sites.  1972 was a time of labor turmoil in auto and across the country, with many strikes.  This upheaval is one reason why the capitalists opted for a neo-liberal strategy in the late 1970s. His ties with the RU helped, though he had already earned an FBI file for his work in support of the Black Panthers.  His work at AMC added to that file, as he was an open communist only a few months after gaining permanent status … a somewhat questionable option.        

The book could be used by present union comrades on how to organize on the shop floor in certain locations.  It goes into union minutia occasionally.  It’s also an entertaining read.  It involves distributing the contract, working to rule, forming a rank & file caucus, issuing leaflets and periodic news bulletins, creating buttons and T-shirts, opposing speed-up and forced overtime, enforcing the contract, in-plant strategies and wildcats - all the while finding allies where you can.  Bars become organizing centers; socials useful in melding comrades. This while opposing the sell-out leadership of the UAW locals and the International.  As you might guess, Melrod was fired quickly after an anti-speed-up struggle.  A grievance was filed with the company against the termination.  The Local 75 Working Agreement allowed the workforce to strike over grievances (!), not just go to a dead-end arbitration.  Melrod and the majority of the work-force stood up to the Union president, who purposely miscounted a hand vote to defeat a possible strike vote. He was terminated.  Melrod won his NLRB suit against AMC for “McCarthy-like tactics,” but it was appealed by AMC, per normal.

More Struggles

While waiting to be rehired Melrod works at a reeking, non-union tannery staffed by black workers; another toxic job at a welding shop from which the FBI gets him fired; and a steel workers union (USW) job in 1974 at a metal-dust-filled plant in West Allis, where he was also tracked by the FBI.  None of these places provided protective masks or anything else. The USW job resulted in a wildcat contract strike against the missing Local and the Steelworkers’ international led by a local Unity caucus, part of Melrod’s doing.  The picket lines were honored by Teamster drivers.  They stopped scab trucks by placing large sharp ‘jacks’ quietly under the tires.  They won some of their demands in a 7 week strike. 

At this time there were still massive civil rights, student, women’s and native movements, so there was plenty of fuel lying around for ‘prairie fires.’  Melrod also worked on an anti-police brutality campaign; support for the Menominee Warrior Society takeover of a reservation abbey, similar to what AIM did at Wounded Knee; the 1976 Bicentennial protest in Philadelphia and a rally in Tupelo, MS against the racist Klan and cops.  All in his spare time!  This was closely connected to his work with RU and its various front groups.

AMC Milwaukee Again, then Kenosha

After 2.5 years Melrod got his AMC job reinstated by the NLRB and the Appeals court. He reentered the plant, was harassed by supervisors and helped launch a campaign against 1,000 proposed layoffs in the Milwaukee plant.  This failed and he was transferred to another local, Local 72 in Kenosha, with 350 others who were not laid-off.  They were there to build one of the shittiest cars ever, the Gremlin.  There was already a Fighting Times caucus at Kenosha.  The first issue was the 1976 industry-wide contract negotiations, followed by negotiations every 2 years.  AMC went after voluntary overtime, the steward system and the right to strike over grievances.  At least 30+ rank and file caucuses in the auto plants united to fight concessions and satisfy a hunger for information, as the officials were keeping a lid on it.

At one point the Fighting Times caucus members were told by an older union activist that they needed to drop the ‘outsider pose’ and run for union offices if they were serious. I’m not going to tell the rest.  What follows is the story of their combative climb up the union ladder, with Melrod going from steward to department chair to chief steward and eventually to the board of the Kenosha local.  He details the small and large internal struggles that led to his victories, along with the characters you meet in any workplace. 

Some of this happened after Maoism shattered in the U.S., leading to the RU splitting in 1978.  He left the organization after that.  It ends with AMC’s partnership/ownership by Renault, and the international battles that ensued over new car models, robots and automation.  In ’85 Renault pushed through a crushing give-back contract, heaped on layoffs, work transfers and the threat to close Kenosha.  At that point Melrod decided to leave AMC and go to law school.

Constant Themes

A constant theme is the do-little to do-nothing attitudes of local and international union leaderships – UAW and USW – complacent as they lose members in the 1970s and still siding with the company. UAW Local 75 had 10,000 members and was down to 2,500 in ‘76.  The other theme is ‘divide and conquer’ – by job category, by skin color, by ethnicity, by anti-communism, by work location or department, by age, by gender.  Anything will do in a pinch.  Racism was one of the most embedded.  The counter-theme is to bridge divides in order to be successful, which he always tried to do.  Another theme is to try to find embedded activists that they could ally with.  And another is the damage to the body and exhaustion working greatly ‘physical’ jobs.  An obvious theme is connecting the trade-union struggles to events outside the factory walls.  A background theme is the role of a Marxist organization in being able to influence and affect events, even in the conservative and anti-communist U.S., by training, guiding and supporting class struggles.

Melrod was in the right place at the right time, as this saga shows.  Many Marxist organizations sent cadre into the factories in the 1970s and ‘80s.  The RU was not alone.  Like much radical syndicalism, it did not attempt to gain political power outside of street protests, but focuses on union struggles most of all.  The stories will ring bells for comrades who worked in factories, warehouses, plants, mines and shops in that period, union and non-union; those who work there now or are planning to; or those who want to know what it is like. The book pictures a radical time in detail, which has faded from view but will return with a vengeance.  It ended in the crushing of organized labor’s great bargaining agreement at AMC.  But labor is rising again.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Factory Days” (Gibbs); “Polar Star” (Smith); “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Autopsy of an Engine,” “Night Shift,” “The Unseen” (Bellestrini); “Red Baker,” “A Contract is a Contract,” “USMCA Fraud,” “The Flivver King” (Sinclair);  “Save Our Unions” (Early); “Tell the Bosses We’re Coming,” “Embedded with Organized Labor” (Early); “Reviving the Strike” (Burns); “Rebuilding Power in Open-Shop America,” “On New Terrain” (Moody).

And I bought it at May Day Books.

The author will be present for a book talk September 30 at May Day.  

Red Frog

July 7, 2023

No Aesthetic Stasis

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

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

Shostakovich & Beethoven

Beethoven

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

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

Napoleon crowns himself Emperor, with the Pope's blessing 

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

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

And Now For Something Completely Different

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

Shostakovich

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

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

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

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

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

The War and After

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

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

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

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

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

The Kultur Kommissar

July 4, 2023 – Happy Partial Revolution Day!

Down the Rabbit Hole

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

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

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

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

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

Insights of the Book

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

Hip, rich and Christian - Time to Tithe!

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

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

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

Ashli Babbitt - Martyr?

UnCivil War?

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

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

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

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 30, 2023

Who Reads Newspapers and Magazines Anymore?

 Periodical Survey: Newspapers and Magazines 

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

Marx and Pigeon Together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Frog

June 27, 2023