A Born Organizer

 “Rustin” directed by George Wolfe, 2023

If you are unfamiliar with the story of Bayard Rustin, this movie will give you a glimpse into his life.  It concentrates on the organizing for the August 1963 March For Jobs and Freedom in D.C. where Martin Luther King made his famous speech.  It is also aimed at an Oscar nomination, especially for the screen-eating lead actor Colman Domingo. 

The real Rustin, tooth gap and all.

Rustin was a civil rights and peace activist who was in a Communist youth group for 5 years, then quit as a pacifist when WWII started.  He was trained by the American Friends Service Committee, a pacifist group, then a member of the Quakers, then became an organizer for the Socialist Party, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the civil rights organization CORE, the War Resistor’s League and King’s SCLC before he began organizing this march, especially after convincing King to speak.     

The film highlights the internal conflicts and issues between Rustin and his Socialist Party labor ally A. Phillip Randolph versus conservative leaders like the NAACP’s ‘uncle Tom’ Roy Wilkins and bombastic New York politician Adam Clayton Powell. Wilkins is unfortunately played by a grey-haired Chris Rock, one of the most idiotic casting decisions ever. An earlier march was threatened in 1941 when Randolph and Rustin were attempting to get FDR to integrate the armed forces.  They succeeded without a march.

Rustin’s homosexuality was one issue within ‘the movement,’ as it was for the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and racist South Carolina reactionary Strom Thurmond. Thurmond denounced Rustin as “a Communist, a draft dodger and a homosexual” in order to stop the march.  Rustin had been arrested and convicted of ‘sodomy’ in Pasadena years before. He was beaten by police for sitting in the front section of a Jim Crow bus in 1942, but not charged.  He was put on a chain gang in 1947 for violating segregated seating again, but Thurmond didn’t mention that arrest. 

Standard scenes of Rustin’s gay dalliances with a black preacher and a white volunteer follow.  The key internal woman organizer of the March, Eleanor Holmes Norton, complains that no women were speaking – because all the leaders were men. At that time gay and women’s rights were seemingly too early for this movement, but King did stand up for Rustin when the pressure got hot.  What is forgotten is that a huge range of celebrities and musicians also appeared at the rally, including Mahalia Jackson and Stevie Wonder, so it was a concert too.  Walter Reuther’s UAW came on board after an invite by the hilariously combative leader of a large New York District 65 local , Cleveland Robinson.  Robinson later founded the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. 

Rustin convinced hundreds of NYC black police not to carry guns as volunteer security for the event.  One of the best scenes is a SNCC-BPP-type activist haranguing these cops as Uncle Tom’s in order to get them to keep their anger in check.  No equivalent harassment by a white racist is shown, so this is a slam against the left.  The details of the rally were organized by a large group of multi-ethnic young people who did it down to a T: sandwiches, buses, porta-potties, security, sound systems, chairs, tables and outreach.  

The group had wanted a 2-day event, camping overnight on the National Mall in tents and then surrounding the White House, but that was scotched after Wilkins’ met with JFK.  Later in 1968 the King and SCLC-led Poor People’s Campaign did camp on the National Mall in a tent village christened Resurrection City.  After 6 weeks Washington D.C. police violently evicted the tenants and ended the occupation,  Poverty is inbuilt into the capitalist system and not reformable, so the response was different.  That event will probably not get lionized by Hollywood, even though King was one of its leaders until he was assassinated in Memphis by a police sharpshooter.

Many of the figures of the heroic period of the civil rights movement appear briefly, among them Ella Baker, John Lewis, Medgar Evers,  James Farmer, Coretta Scott King and others.  And yes, the film was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, which means it has the stamp of liberal approval. 

This was the biggest public demonstration in U.S. history up to that time, with estimates of attendance around 250,000.  Most of the attendees were darker skinned.  After the rally, JFK invited the leadership (though not Rustin) to attend a meeting at the White House.  Months later the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, a first national attempt to deal with Jim Crow outside the federal realm.  1963 was chosen as the 100^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the site of the speeches was the Lincoln Memorial.  But it was really spurred by the police and city violence in Birmingham and the lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides across the South.

At the end the most poetic scene is Rustin, after not being invited to the White House, telling the ‘leaders’ that he’d be a garbage man if that is what it took to bring freedom. They leave to hobnob with JFK and he grabs up a shoulder bag and begins picking up garbage to help clean the site along with his young volunteers. It showed the real proletarian mettle of the man.

The film illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the civil rights movement at this moment – its energy and brilliance, its mass character, its internal conservative side, its reliance on key figures in the Democratic Party and government, along with its limited 'rights' aims and mild character.  Worth watching, if only to fill in the gaps in your knowledge about what it really takes to organize a huge event.  

And sorry, if you don’t know an acronym, look it up.

P.S. - + Adolph Reed Jr on the Netflix biopic about Bayard Rustin produced by the Obamas: “It was so banal and + wrong-headed that immediately after it ended, I watched ‘The Battle of Algiers’ as a purgative.”

P.P.S. - Counterpunch's James Creegan exposes Rustin's opposition to the left in the 1960s - "But Rustin did not merely fail to speak out against the war. He was also extremely vociferous when it came to condemning the Black Power movement, anti-war mobilizations and the New Left." https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/25/the-rebel-who-came-in-from-the-cold-the-tainted-career-of-bayard-rustin/ 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The New Black (The Old Black),” “Meridian” (Walker); “Toward Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism” (T. Reed); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “The Second Founding” (Foner); “Selma,” “Orders to Kill” (Pepper); “The South – Jim Crow and Its Afterlives” (A. Reed); “One Night in Miami,” “Roman J. Israel,” “Things of Dry Hours,” “Slavery By Another Name.”      

The Cultured Marxist

November 21, 2023

Attention Rebellion

“Stolen Focus - Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again” by Johan Hari, 2023

Hari is a professional, harried by his cell phone, his apps, his poor sleeping habits, his general inability to concentrate as well as he used to.  He’s also a bit naïve.  He’s the author of “Lost Connections” and a workaholic, so he interviews 250 scientists, techies, counselors, psychologists and sociologists to find out why, as he thinks this is a social problem too.  Here is what he discovered.  Unsurprisingly, it is not unconnected to the social system we live in.

These are the culprits, in the order of the book.  Most of this is pretty obvious, but ...

*Digital detoxes only go so far.  His only worked for a while.

*The speed-up of everything.  Increased complexity, demands, schedules.

*The impossibility of actually focusing on more than one thing at a time.  The human mind cannot do ‘focus’ multi-tasking.

*Not enough sleep.  Beware of coffee, melatonin, lights, screens at night.

*The interruptions of the internet, e-mail, texts, pop-ups, notifications, etc.

*The intentionally addictive nature of social media, due to profit considerations.

*The intentional role of social media in creating conspiracy nuts and nonsense, which was proved by internal Facebook investigations.

*Long work hours – and this also means the 8 hour day, not just multiple jobs, overtime, on-call or endless salaried hours.

*Stress from various sources, some very high stress, some low, some omnipresent and constant.

*Toxic and ultra-high processed industrial junk food, producing brain fog and lack of clarity. 

*Pollution – lead, pesticides, BPAs, PFAS, particulates, exhaust, cosmetics, water contamination, toxic home products, etc.

*Children no longer play freely outdoors.  Most play inside, under supervision, or in supervised programs, weakening their ability to formulate thoughts. 

The signs of inability to concentrate can be found in productivity figures.  They can be found in people who are unable to read books, or concentrate on a movie or listen to music other than as background noise.  Or even finish a long blog post. It can be seen in their inability to have a real conversation or pay attention to their kids. It can be seen in the inability to think deeply about anything. The stress from poverty, medical bills, violence, a chaotic home life, unemployment and jobs also interrupts focus. It ends up with poor life performance, failure to learn, so-called ADHD and eventually dementia. All of this is mostly related to the profit system.

Nationalize Big Tech as a Public Utility

Hari continually wrestles with whether these are individual issues, or if they extend to the social, and finally decides on the latter. He highlights the notion of ‘cruel optimism’ – that some easy fix like yoga or a pill or some personal change will solve everything.  Re pollution, chemicals in the U.S. are actually unregulated.  Only later, when it’s discovered that they damage people ‘might’ these chemicals get regulated or banned.  Long hours at work would ‘seem’ to get more work done, but the reverse is true, as experiments on the 4 day week or the 6 hour day for the same pay show.  Workers actually become more productive!  Tell that to your boss. Social media is intentionally constructed by the Silicon Valley capitalists to be addictive, to 'hook' you, to keep you on their sites so they can sell your information and eyeballs to advertisers. Speed-up and lack of sleep are related to labor issues, but we see it in the way films are constructed, in the moronic jumpiness of pictures and slogans on X/Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, FB, YouTube, or in the way some people talk, drive, walk or ride.  Even political discussions become dumbed down and lacking in nuance.  Everything becomes part of the ‘short attention span theater.’

Hari takes a deep dive into ADHD ‘diagnoses’ – finding that the root cause is not biological but something in home or school life that is interfering with attention.  So the solution is not Ritalin but a practical fix – if possible. The key science that supposes ADHD is fully inherited are twin studies, which he gives credence too – even though they are inaccurate in racist ‘intelligence’ estimates. He does not mention intrauterine issues like alcohol or drug use.  He settles on a position of the dialectic interaction of genes and the environment, in which certain environmental changes can trigger biologic forces. 

He also looks at how children can no longer play freely outside, and how the parents of ‘free range’ children are condemned and insulted.  Even pets suffer neurotic behavior from being caged at home. Free play encourages creativity and imagination; social skills and the sense of freedom in kids – all useful in being able to actually pay attention.  He tracks a program that brings free play to elementary schools as part of the program.  As an aside, Finland has been doing this for years, and Hari points to their lack of tests, homework and emphasis on play, while still producing educated, happy and creative adults.

Finally his solutions.  He tries to get more sleep, turn off his phone, stops switching tasks, get into a ‘flow state’ to think deeply and lets his mind wander.  He has a hard time stopping the eating of crap food and still personally overworks. His social recommendations are:  1. Stop surveillance capitalism by either nationalizing or harshly regulating the tech giants; 2. Go to a 4 day week with 40 hours pay, or 6 hour days for the same pay; 3. Transform education so as to let in more free play and more exercise, with less homework and teaching to the test.   He most fears that ‘rigid’ short-term, shallow thinking will block humans from dealing with climate change.  Perhaps he should say it outright – that the capitalist system blocks any sufficient attempt to deal with global warming, even if we all suddenly realized the danger we are in.

All together a good companion volume to his book about ‘lost connections.’  It’s a bit obvious but has useful data to back up most of the points. It’s also an easy and enjoyable read, which for a public intellectual is a requirement.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Lost Connections” (Hari); “Psychology and Capitalism,” “Bright Sided” (Ehrenreich); “The Happiness Industry,” “The Ego and Its Hyperstate,” “McMindfulness.”  

Red Frog

November 17, 2023

"Down on the Killin' Floor"

 “Dirty Work – Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America,” by Eyal Press, 2021

This is a muckraking reporter’s book about ‘dirty jobs’ – though Press doesn’t mean physically dirty and hard jobs as you’d think.  It is jobs that are ‘socially’ dirty… nasty work done behind the scenes that also impacts the perpetrators.  He looks at the prison system, which has become the main repository for mental health care in the U.S. Then at military drone operators, who kill people in a real life ‘video’ chamber. And border guards, tasked with an impossible mission.  Or workers in slaughterhouses who kill animals and injure themselves for a living. Included are oil rig workers providing dirty energy in the U.S. petrostate and lastly, upper-level white collars working tech surveillance companies like Google.  What they all share is that capitalist society finds them ‘essential’ but hides their work from the public because of what they do and how they do it.

Nearly all of these workers are from lower levels of the working-class, who take unpleasant jobs out of economic necessity.  It’s like the modern military, which after WWII and the end of the draft became more and more a repository for the unskilled, the poor and the least educated.  In the civilian world no one aspires to be a prison guard or a slaughterhouse worker.  The real culprits in prisons and the incarceration state are politicians, businessmen and the chattering class.  In that vein Press pillories liberal ‘class clueless’ organizations like Code Pink, some immigrant rights groups, prison abolitionist outfits and PETA, whose members attack all these workers as the enemy, as vicious brutes, instead of seeing how they are affected and controlled by the same system.

Press tells their depressing stories and that of the places they work, along with the supervisors, bosses and assorted big-wigs who never face the consequences of the cruelty and death dished out.  He shows how the work brutalizes everyone.  If there are scapegoats, it is these very same workers that are first chosen.  He focuses on ‘moral injury’ – not quite the same as PTSD, but related in how it damages the physical and mental health of the ‘dirty’ worker by the transgression of their ethical standards.  (I question the term ‘dirty’ as it borrows from squeamishness about the healthy role dirt actually plays in agriculture, labor and life.)

Other issues covered are the role of prison privatization in making the lives of prisoners, guards and mental health professionals worse through cost-cutting; the industrial meat industries’ toxic appetite for more production; the numerous flaws in drone imagery; the fact that Latinos are a majority of border guards and the huge role of secrecy in keeping all of these activities hidden.  While the latest Gaza invasion is playing out on screens daily, leading even non-political people to be repulsed - prisons, mental health sections, drone bases, ICE detention facilities, meat slaughterhouses and pens, carbon extraction sites and algorithms are invisible to the public on purpose.  Many people have even turned off the news to avoid any glimpse of what is going on. As the monkey says:  “Hear no evil, see no evil…”

The Stories

Press visits the limited mental health units in Florida and interviews some of the prisoners and former mental health staff.  The state underfunds or privatizes the prison and mental health sections on purpose, even though politicians are the ones demanding more and more arrests. Now inadequate prisons house the most mentally ill, as ‘society’ closed many poorly-functioning mental hospitals. Guards rule inside and if they are violent, few will stand up to them due to losing their jobs or being victims of physical retaliation. Their supervisors even give them promotions and they get off scot-free. The required mental health counselors cannot actually do their jobs and become profoundly disturbed by the situations they see or hear about.  This section is his best, as it dives deep into an issue few know about.

Press talks to former drone operators who worked just north of Las Vegas, Nevada and in northern Virginia.  They report losing sleep, hair and their complacency as they realize they are harming innocent civilians, or have made wrong kill decisions due to poor images and intel. The image of ‘clean’ drone hits is as fraudulent as that of ‘precision bombing.’  This policy increased under Obama and went higher under Trump, so the ‘workload’ and stress got even worse. 

He quizzes former border guards about what they saw along the new southern ‘battle-line.’  Latinos sign up because it is the only good job available, thinking some of their job will be humanitarian, with the Spanish language a useful help.  But they find out that it involves death, brutality and detention camps. 

In Texas he investigates the Latino workers in a poultry plant, one of the few better-paying jobs.  The supervisors refuse bathroom breaks, speed-up the line, harangue the workers to work faster, increasing the chance of accidents and carpal tunnel, all under the whip of their managers. Medical personnel in one chicken plant run by Sanderson Farms blamed repetitive stress injuries on ‘pre-existing’ conditions.  They were deemed essential by Trump and forced to work while sick and dying of CoVid.  88% of workers in these plants are non-white.  After strikes at IBP and Hormel, union shops were weakened, as many immigrants without papers do not join the union due to fear of termination.  That is the financial purpose for illegality – capitalists prefer the fear of deportation to a green card.  The immigration issue is not going to be ‘solved’ in this context.

Behind this picture is the enormous appetite for industrial meat, totaling 222.2 pounds per average person in 2020, far higher than it had been.  As one researcher remarked, the animal killing system in the U.S. is the biggest and most brutal in history. Over all this are the USDA and OSHA, which exercise almost no oversight. In a sly aside, Press notes that foodie locavores favoring ‘ethical’ and ‘sustainable’ food have no idea about the labor conditions in which their food is produced. They only care about their personal health and perhaps about animals. Local smaller farms also employ low-paid immigrants whose work is hidden and are unmentioned on the label.

Then there are U.S. energy workers in the carbon sector – working on oil rigs in the Gulf, in the fields of North Dakota fracking or drilling in the cold reaches of Alaska.  The immediate focus is on the Deepwater Horizon explosion and massive spill, and its effect on some of the workers who survived, along with oil politics in Louisiana.  The U.S. still uses carbon on a grand scale at 87% of energy use, as 5% of the world population consumes 25% of the world’s energy. Press closes the book by interviewing high-level white collars at Google, who find out they are involved in surveillance and collaboration with police states.  He makes the point that even fancy office workers with higher-pay are not immune from ‘dirty' work.

All of these people tell their stories, which sociologically reveal the dark underside of the U.S. economy, its capitalist nature and the destructive role of ‘dirty’ jobs in profiteering industries and institutions.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Strategy of Deception,” “The Jungle” (Sinclair); “Vegan Freak,” “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (A. Davis); “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “Lost Connections” (Hari); “Oil” (Sinclair); “This Changes Everything” (Klein); “On the Clock,” “Reviving the Strike” (Burns); “Embedded With Organized Labor” (Early); “Tell the Bosses We’re Coming,” “Save Our Unions” (Early); “On New Terrain” (Moody).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 14, 2023

'Moments' Don't Last

 “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement” by Fredrik deBoer, 2023

This is a book by a non-profit organizer, former professor and Ph.D who, yes, criticizes the conservative role of non-profits, academe, the black and white middle class and the internet in radical movements.  The term ‘elite’ – used by Republicans as a dodge for class – he uses to refer to how these groups became proponents of Black Lives Matter (BLM) in 2020.  deBoer also discusses Occupy Wall Street and #MeToo.  He claims he’s a socialist of some sort.  At one point he calls himself ‘very liberal’ and at another, a ‘Marxist.’ So he might be a secret DSA member.

The concrete results of the massive BLM movement are few, though millions were involved.  Some people got hired, some organizations got money, some people were elected, some laws were changed.  Yet policing remains almost identical to the situation prior to the protest upsurge around George Floyd’s murder, even in Minneapolis.  One of the main issues is that symbols and language changed, but political power is key to substantial change.  deBoer wants to analyze why things turned out this way.

Groupthink

deBoer is irritated by radical group-think, which he experienced in 2020.  This process doesn’t allow differences or debates but instead reams anyone who has a difference with any popular left slogan, position or program. The prime weapon is social media, but also within groups.  This is still true today on many issues – Ukraine, Gaza, transgenderism, etc.  He makes the valuable point that liberal cultural ‘elites’ most interested in BLM favored symbolism and language over concrete political results.  These academic and middle-class elements were more interested in ‘representations,’ not political power. He does approve of telling off-the-wall types what they think is nuts, ludicrous, wrong, absurd, idiotic.  Oddly he’s not quite sure what to do about tearing down statues of Confederates and colonizers, but he kinda thinks it’s ok...    

deBoer is hard against consensus, which is an ultra-liberal totalitarian process to force everyone to agree on a question, unlike voting which allows disagreement.  Non-profits and certain ad hoc or anarchist groups use consensus. Eventually if you don’t agree, they can throw you out of the so-called organization - which is what happened to him. 

Defund the Police

This is an admittedly vague demand, as it can be interpreted in two ways.  One way is a reduction in funding for the police so as to pay for actual professionals to handle traffic, the unhoused, mental health crises, drug use, family disputes, 'quality of life' issues and even petty infractions, leaving the cops to handle significant crime.  The second meaning is to cut all funding for the police – to ‘abolish’ the police.  The latter is a utopian demand in a capitalist society and could only become possible under real socialism.  Demands with two meanings fail the clarity test, and allows the Right to torpedo the demand.  deBoer suggests the wonky main demand should have been ‘End Qualified Legal Immunity’ for police misconduct, which allows cops to get away with trigger-happy, arrest-happy and club-happy behavior.   

deBoer hangs his hat on one poll showing older Black residents wanted more police in 2020. As he should be aware, youth in both dark and light-skinned communities are more suspicious of the police than their elders.  The real issue is crime and black communities are ridden with it.  Yet deBoer doesn’t link crime to poverty, poverty to skin color castes, these castes to class and class to capitalism. Police do catch some criminals, but the profit system produces both, just as it hosts the incarceration state – another thing he ignores.  He admits he would rather tail the older religious and centrist Black residents in their desire for more cops.  A businessman candidate for city council in Minneapolis recently made just that argument in a mostly Black ward and lost to a younger and more leftish alternative. Perhaps he should check the bank accounts of cities to see how many millions are going to pay off police misconduct settlements for another argument against his perspective.   

End of the 3rd Precinct ... building.

Violence

deBoer has an iffy chapter on violence, never mentioning the concept of ‘self-defense’ once.  He is unclear on looting but clear that the ‘Left’ could never violently defeat the forces of the capitalist state.  He makes no mention of eventually splitting the Army and National Guard, or future conditions of state weakness. The state is his straw man when the immediate conflict will actually be with fascists – who have been blunted by shows of leftist force in the U.S.  He does not mention specifics of violence, but in Minneapolis 2020 it was varied.  Looting is carried out by people with little money, predictable in a capitalist society and something that happens in nearly every breakdown of ‘law and order.’  Is he upset by the burning of a fast-food chain outlet like Wendys?  That might be a plus for health!  Criminals, building owners, thrill-seekers and provocateurs were also involved in fires and break-ins, and this is inevitable too.  On the other hand the burning or damaging of many small local businesses, two post offices and a library were stupidly counter-productive and anti-social.

Let’s get to the main building, the 3^rd Precinct police station, which was abandoned to the crowd by outnumbered police. Geography is part of the power structure’s writ, as anyone knows.  Occupy Wall Street found this out when encampments in ‘public’ squares were removed across the country by Democratic mayors. Indicative are the massive protests and encampments across the world centered on squares, like Tahir in Egypt. In rebellions in other parts of the world, police stations are targets too, as they were in Egypt.  A part of a country held by an armed Left, as in Mexico or India, is also significant, as the state no longer controls it.  When the 3^rd Precinct was shut-down, this was a victory for Left street power against an opposing semi-military force.  And power is what deBoer ostensibly wants.  It made the whole country stand up and take notice – Minneapolis was no longer just another normal protest site. 

Non-Profits

While still (?) working at a housing non-profit, deBoer sees the huge non-profit sector 1. Privatizing formerly government tasks; 2. Domesticating radicals into bureaucrats; 3. Providing a tax-haven for the wealthy, foundations and corporations; 4. Acting as a cautious, conservative, legalistic brake to left causes. And yet he considers them an essential part of ‘the movement.’  He has no concept of an organization between an ad hoc single-issue grassroots’ group and an organized, professionalized non-profit.  He evidently can’t conceive of a Left party of any size, which is neither a non-profit nor ad-hoc.  Unions are invisible to him too. He once mentions a national and electoral workers party to represent the Left and labor, then abandons that idea in his ‘solution’ summary.      

Me Too

The ‘Me Too’ feminist movement also seems to be exhausted.  deBoer looks at the various persons accused of sexual rape, abuse and harassment and the collapse of Time’s Up due to its too cozy relationship with Andrew Cuomo.  His main point is that #MeToo was always a meme, a ‘movement’ that was mostly on-line; and memes have lifespans. #MeToo used existing law and corporate policies to remove sexual predators.  It lacked what he calls ‘clear legislative goals’ – so in his mind if you cannot put it into a bill in Congress, you don’t have clarity.  This is a heavily sub-reformist way to structure demands, but his essential point, also in reference to Occupy, is that clear demands and a real organizational, on-the-ground presence are required.

Liberalism and Solutions

deBoer does a well-worn anthropology of the conflicted upper middle class liberal. He centers internal or external issues of control, education and meritocracy, while identity politics and liberal guilt play predictably damaging roles.  Perhaps he has spent too much time marinating in this atmosphere!  At bottom, deBoer says he wants to turn these liberals into leftists.  To do this he favors a class approach as the best way to unite the most people against capital.  This will actually lead the majority to political power, in the process helping the disadvantaged the most. In this regard he contests the slanders of ‘class reductionism’ and ‘class-first leftism.’  “A class-first philosophy for left-wing movements ultimately foregrounds, rather than sidelines, traditional oppressions of minority groups.”  This attack on bourgeois identitarianism has been explored before by Adolph and Toure Reed, Olufemi Taiwo and Asad Haider (all reviewed below), along with many Marxists, so I’m not going to repeat it. 

deBoer believes a social revolution is a ‘dream,’ so prefers things like single-payer health care and laws making it easier to organize unions.  He has no transitional program, only a few scattered demands and no organizational recommendations except an in/out strategy related to the Democratic Party. His program might even reflect the book’s title.  It’s a book worth reading if any of this is unfamiliar to you. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Mistaken Identity” (Haider); “Elite Capture” (Taiwo); “Towards Freedom” (T. Reed); “The South – Jim Crow and It’s Afterlives” (A. Reed); “George Floyd,” “BLM,” “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (Davis); “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “feminism,” “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” Mutual Aid,” “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers Again.”

And I bought it with Solomon at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 10, 2023

Barcelona & Seattle

 “Gun City” directed by Dani de la Torre, 2018

This is a riveting story of the battle between mass anarchism and reactionaries in the city of Barcelona in 1921.  It is a preview to the later Spanish Civil War.  The factions here are laid-out.  The military, which wants to declare Martial Law. The police, led by a liberal but staffed by crooked, inept and violent thugs. The civilian government in Madrid, which is trying to forestall a coup and prevent any provocations, real or staged. The majority of anarchists, strong in the CNT labor movement, who are engaging in many tough strikes.  A small minority of anarchists who want to pick up the gun right away ‘for the revolution.’  A criminal ‘Mafia’ underground, which might have stolen the guns from a military train to sell to the highest bidder.  And a capitalist looking for weapons and enforcers.

Fighting strike-breakers in Barcelona

A mysterious detective arrives from Madrid and becomes part of the investigation to find the guns.  The factions clash, murders are committed, strikers and scabs fight pitched battles, and the guns are finally located.  The characters are an anarchist daughter that wavers between the factions, her father, leader of the anarchist movement in Barcelona and a young punk, yelling for revolution.  The mystery cop, a crooked police lieutenant and his vicious right-hand man form the police ‘Information Brigade.’ The criminals are headed by a manipulative night-club owner who deals with everyone for cash.  And a be-medaled military general making threats – a precursor to a future Franco.

The movie gives a partial picture of the labor strife in Spain in 1919-1923, centered on Barcelona, the most industrial city in Spain.  In 1919 the 8-hour day was won by the Canadenca general strike there. In 1923 there was a coup carried out by Primo de Rivera to stop the Left.  In 1936 the Spanish Civil War started, lasting until 1939 with the establishment of a fascist state under Franco and the defeat of anarchists, the CNT, Soviet-line Communists and communist POUMists who formed the base of the ‘Republican’ forces.

“How It Ends”directed by David Rosenthal, 2018

This film is an apocalyptic road picture, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or Mad Max II, or Two-Lane Blacktop, but updated to the present U.S.  Through the whole picture the clueless principals wonder ‘what happened’ to cause the destruction of Seattle and possibly other west coast cities, along with the U.S. electrical grid and cell service.  The writers aren’t telling, which is how self-censorship works in the U.S. 

Getting gas on the northern plains

Ashes are falling over Washington State and Seattle with buildings destroyed in the city.  Fires are burning in the woods in the northern plains and along the roads.  There is a moving ash cloud.  Earthquakes rattle after a tsunami wave crashed into the west coast.  There could have been a possible nuclear explosion somewhere in the Pacific. There are volcanic eruptions in the west and heavy rain storms in South Dakota.  No logical connection seems to exist between all these things – yet they mirror real, individual events that have happened.  Are the writers trying to tell us something between the lines, afraid of actual clarity?  Or is it just disaster porn?

The two male principals, Ghost Dog Forest Whitaker, playing a tough, retired military type and Will, a newbie middle-class lawyer that has never handled a gun, set off from Chicago by Cadillac to rescue their daughter/wife, who is in Seattle.  The airports are all shut down so ...  apocalyptic road trip! That means driving Interstate 90 across Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington State – with no working gas stations for nearly the whole way due to the power outage.  That is over 2,000 miles of freeway.  They have to scavenge or siphon gas and … of course they can! At 25 miles a gallon highway, that means 80 gallons.  The tank holds 19 gallons so they’d need more than 4 complete fill-ups to make it in ideal interstate conditions.  The conditions are not ideal, given dirt roads, indirect routes and some rough driving.  The rescue mission is not doable except in a film.

These two male rescuers meet the required amount of gun-toting criminals attempting to take their gas and car.  Guns out!  Fancy driving!  Also a tough, young Lakota girl who knows automobile repair; one nice family; the standard distressed white woman and a treacherous friend.  They get off I90 in Minnesota due to the criminals and try the backroads. They run into unexplained, blown-up military trains and terrible rain storms that crash lightening into everything, so they hide under a bridge.  Places are abandoned or heavily guarded by townspeople.  Smoke pillars on the horizons.

‘Luckily’ Will has a friend in South Dakota and a father in Idaho living along their path.  Ah, fiction.  Mr. Pollyanna Will always has faith that his pregnant wife will be okay – not dead - and everything else ‘will be ok.’ At any rate, the happy story is that they eventually escape to Canada ahead of a rolling ash cloud.  Canada seems to again be a safe-haven from various disasters in the U.S.A. The characters are cliché’s and the predictable cranky father-in-law / defensive son-in-law relationship ends on a bittersweet note.  It’s also a taste of city people going into the backlands, sort of a car version of that canoe trip in Deliverance.  No squealing here though.  Everybody’s got a gun, which even Will learns to use. 

I track certain apocalyptic and dystopian films and books. Perhaps this one will partly prepare you for the next climate emergency.  To the writers it’s all about 1 family, no one else. The ‘critics’ didn’t like it because the clichés never stop coming.  I find the film unable to deal with real disaster.  Its vagueness is ridiculous, as refraining from naming the cause is a typical cop-out in this genre.  The small-scope family angle is both debilitating and hinders a real social response to an ‘apocalypse.’  All we see is chaos and family.  How does it end? Given this disaster seems not to be exclusive to the U.S., Canada might be no better a refuge.  So it ends, as a film, poorly.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “World War Z, “ “The Road” (McCarthy); “Furious Feminisms – Alternate Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road,” “We’re Doomed.  Now What?” “Cloud Atlas,” “Living in the End Times” (Zizek); “How Will Capitalism End?” “Blade Runner – 2049,” “Hothouse Utopia,” “People’s Future of the United States,” “The Heart Goes Last” (Atwood); “Good News” (Abbey); “Hunger Games,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick); “Planet of the Apes,” (3 movies); American War.”     

The Kultur Kommissar

November 7, 2023 / Happy Bolshevik Revolution Day!

Second Thoughts?

 “Fetal – Your Body is a Battleground,” by Trista Baldwin, performed at Frank Theater, 11/3/23

This is an intense play set on the day Dobbs was decided by the Supreme Court, in an abortion clinic waiting room in Texas.  It becomes the waiting room of a smallish hell. Three women read, flip through magazines and fidget as they wait to be called for their procedures.  One is a lesbian woman who went to bed with some guy she met, and got pregnant and regrets it.  One is an older working woman who already has one child and can’t handle having another.  The last is an inexperienced 15-year old teenager brought up in a religious home, who forged the permission line on her form to avoid dealing with her parents.  

The clinic doctors are never seen, just heard once.  The noises of protesters filter from the outside.  The admitting assistant is a woman who nearly died during her own pregnancy, which motivated her to work at the clinic. She has to read Texas’ long list of so-called negative effects of abortion to each patient before they can meet the doctors. She then morphs into the ‘conscience’ of each individual as they internally wrestle with whether they should have the baby or not. This part is the ‘intense’ part – seeming to highlight the guilt and mixed mind of each woman and especially the girl, who is ghost-ridden by religious visions of sin and transgression, but still determined to go ahead. 

The case, Dobbs – who was the ‘state health officer’ of the reactionary state government of Mississippi – versus Jackson Women’s Health Organization, located in the state capital, was decided by the Supreme Court on June 24, 2022.  Prior to that Texas had a ‘heartbeat’ law that banned abortion after 6 weeks.  Amazingly, all these women are at or prior to six weeks, because it is very difficult to diagnose pregnancy that early. So time is of the essence.

The waiting seems endless, even though there are only 3 patients and in real theater time, the waiting is more than an hour.  The procedure takes from 5-15 minutes on the tiny bean-like fetus with a tail, so what is the hang-up?  At one point it is suggested that this is a fake clinic, which sends a shiver through the audience. The women talk among themselves, mentioning adoption’s pros and cons and everything else.  Details of birth, children and abortion, past and present, are given.  The young woman does not want to have children period, and she is adamant but a bit conflicted.  The older woman is also conflicted, and is irritated that her husband never had that vasectomy he talked about. She had extreme difficulty breastfeeding, in which the cruelty of employers is hinted at.  The girl is new to all this, and distraught at what her parents will think no matter what she does.  This is the scaffolding for their difficult second thoughts.

While every large decision is full of contradictions and indecision, of back and forth, pros and cons, the play’s highlighting of this miserable state is suspect.  It seems to have the effect of increasing guilt about abortion. It is certainly a truism for some women and as a theatrical device, it is very effective.  It is odd that contraception is never mentioned. I won’t reveal what happens next, though what happens seems unreal.  It ends with the four women, who have bonded in the waiting room, now united in their determination to stand up for themselves ‘somehow.’  The ending seems patched on, but that is typical of liberal works that descend into vagueness.  They intend to only 'tell the story.'  Nevertheless it is a very good play about the trauma and hard problems for women caused by the vicious reversal of Roe v. Wade.  See it!

The play runs from 10/27 to 11/19 on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in the Vine Arts Building of the Seward neighborhood in Minneapolis.  The May Day Blog has reviewed many prior plays by the Frank Theater – “Things of Dry Hours,” “Love and Information,” “The Cradle Will Rock,” “The Convert,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “The Good Person of Setzuan,” and “The Visit.”  They are usually held in random locations sometimes – an empty grocery store loading dock, an industrial workroom, a rail museum, a boat anchored on the Mississippi, an empty dance hall. The Vine Arts location is their practice space, as they are coming back from the long hiatus of CoVid.  It is one of 3 progressive theaters in Minneapolis, the other two being Mixed Blood and Penumbra. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Abortion,” ‘sexism,” “feminism,” or “Frank Theater.”   

The Cultural Marxist

11/4/2023

It Can Happen Here

 “How Fascism Works – the Politics of Us and Them,” by Jason Stanley, 2018

This topic has been beaten to death on this blog, but every book, even the weakest, has some valuable points, and this does too.  Stanley is a philosophy professor at Yale, so the book is imbued with the kind of Democratic Party liberalism you’d expect written under the reign of a hard reactionary like Donald Trump. These are his points, perhaps for your next argument with a libertarian, ‘left’ or fascist clown.  Of course as he makes clear, the real argument is about power and emotions, not truth, facts or logic.

Stanley’s sub-title of ‘us and them’ reflects anxiety about the ‘center not holding,’ which implicitly rejects class struggle.  His focus is on ethnic, gender, national and religious ‘us versus them’ identity issues instead.  He claims his book is about fascist politics, not a fascist state. For the most part he omits the economic and class roots of fascism, actual social conditions, war or the huge initial role of thug violence, so this is only a partial analysis of ‘how fascism works.’ His main problem is disentangling standard conservative ideas from fascist ideas, as there is continuity.  What does he think is the moment of ideological quantity into quality then, of conservative to fascist?  After all this guy is a philosophy prof.

The Issues

Stanley addresses what he calls ‘fascist’ ideas:  Myths of the past; conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism; nationalism and racism; sexism and sexual panics; hierarchy and strong leaders; law & order fears; rurality and anti-statism, anti-unionism.  If none of these look specifically ‘fascist’ alone, join the club, as they are standard conservative tropes. Stanley uses examples world-wide – Myanmar and the treatment of the Rohingya; India and their treatment of Muslims; Turkey and the Armenians; Israel and Palestinians; the U.S. and African-Americans; Nazi Germany and the Jews; Trump and Muslims and Mexicans.  He uses many quotes from Hitler, Mussolini and Orban to make his points. 

His definition of fascism:  “I have chosen the label ‘fascism’ for ultra-nationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural) with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader…”  Notice that fascism is now defined as ultra-nationalism.  Even liberals play with words.

Hannah Arendt attempts to look at the ‘quantity into quality’ issue, as Stanley never quotes from Marxist sources.  It is when standard conservative ideas are amplified and become more openly vicious and right-wing (i.e. quantity increasing) - then become overall state policy (i.e. quality reached).  From ideas to full-fledged, consistent state practice. As she puts it:  “…fascist unreality is a promissory note on the way to a future reality.” This, however, could also describe a police state.  Stanley doesn’t look at the fascist state and compare it to partial conservative state policies, thus missing the concept of complete domination in a fascist state.  A Marxist would add that real fascism is based on full support from all factions of the bourgeoisie, in conditions where the ‘left’ needs to be violently crushed using extra-governmental forces, in a time of economic danger.  A conjuncture so to speak.  That is how fascism actually ‘works.’

Certainly we are in the phase of ‘quantity increasing.’  His phrase is “normalization of the previously unthinkable.”  This condition is reflected in certain governments that are fully authoritarian, like Hungary or Russia, yet have a voting fig-leaf so as to claim bourgeois ‘democracy.’  As an aside, he talks about colonialism but misses the relation of war to many of these concepts.  He mostly ignores Libertarian ideas about ‘the state’ shared by fascists because the fascists want it to be about the ‘nation.’

Stanley does mention standard Left understandings of fascism:  “We increasingly see connections between powerful business interests and the institutions of state terror.” Groups have been “empowered by the Administration that resemble fascist paramilitary organizations.”  “Behind this transnational ultranationalist movement are the forces of capital.” He’s completely aware that a ‘democratic society’ and dictatorial corporations are a contradiction; that legal equality and economic inequality are another contradiction. Yet the rest of the book is a look at ideas.  He defends ‘liberal democracy’ without any recognition of its actual democratic limitations.  He does know that it is a raft that fascists use to take power, after which they discard it. The fascists consider ‘liberal democracy’ a weakness. 

The List

To Stanley the first sign of fascist thinking is the adoption of fake myths about the past. In the U.S. context it’s wanting to bring back a sanitized version of 1776, the Founders, the frontier, guns, European settlers, dead Indians, women as mothers, the nuclear family, farmers, Confederates – and maybe even slavery!   It’s the originalist myth of someone’s Manifest Destiny.  The realities of the U.S. past, like native genocide, African slavery, labor exploitation and invasive wars have to be covered up, so you invent a past.  Mussolini said he created a myth for Italians to live by, not a reality.  Indian Hindutva ‘indigenous’ origins and Germany’s medieval past were also celebrated, so this is not an isolated phenomenon.

Another is false propaganda to muddy the waters about everything.  This is where many conspiracy theories play a role. They are not intended to be true, they are intended to be fear-noise with which to block an opponent.  It’s the ideological version of trolling and is defended by free speech absolutism. They are examples of pretending to know something.  Lying, outrageous claims and nonsense become standard.  Stanley cites the birther allegation against Obama; the Pizzagate QAnon absurdity; Greg Abbot’s claim that Muslims were introducing Sharia Law into Texas or the exclusive targeting of Jewish billionaire George Soros.  The forged Protocols of Zion were introduced after the 1905 Russian revolution so there is a pattern here. Attacking corruption while being extremely corrupt is also standard.  The capitalist concept of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is based on a “utopian conception of consumers” – as if they will all see through bullshit.  They don’t. 

Another is twisting language into a topsy-turvy muck, in the Orwellian sense. As a consequence being a bigot, sexist or asshole in a “political culture that seems dominated by real and imagined hypocrisy” seems like heroic truth-telling!  The follow-up is attacking education, knowledge, science and expertise and then attempting to purge universities of leftish professors and programs.  

Another is the familiar love of hierarchy and ‘a strong leader.’ This is part of the logic of Social Darwinism.  Stanley believes in the “human tendency to organize society hierarchically.”  So the Right takes advantage of this supposed automatic hierarchy as a ‘natural law of nature.’  This flows into the role of women, which in conservative ideology is only being a mother and homemaker.  It is their ‘biological destiny.’  Women who get out of place like feminists or working women threaten male hierarchy and also limit themselves. Equality, whether legal or economic, becomes the enemy, as it allows the ‘weak, lazy, unnatural or unfit’ to share with their betters. If the underclass gets treated better, this means the over-class is being victimized! In the U.S. men are oppressed by women!  White are irritated!  Christians are persecuted by atheists! Stanley advocates everyone ‘check their privilege’ - even if poor whites are living in the same run-down trailer park as African Americans and Latinos.  What was that about class unity? Stanley actually believes that ‘working-class whites” are the main base for Trump, buying the propaganda.

Stanley goes after law and order politics, starting with Nixon, which led to the drug war and the present racist incarceration state.  Stanley thinks “Norms of law and order in a liberal democratic state are fundamentally fair.” These kind of generic statements miss any factual content – they are a corresponding liberal myth.  The Right feels blacks, Latinos, immigrants, Muslims and others are, under the surface, criminals.  Liberals are 'communists' and are now also criminals.  He notes that incarceration actually increases crime, as our prisons are not centers of rehabilitation but of thug life.  In this context he never mentions poverty. 

Rape of white women becomes the ‘ur’ crime.  In that context, sexual anxiety about non-whites is rampant.  Rape allegations have motivated lynchings, pogroms, acts of war, immigration detention camps and harsh laws.  This moral panic has now extended beyond gays and lesbians, the right of abortion and to people who call themselves transgender. “Polluting” the gene pool through rape is part of this for racists. The odd part here is that the police ignore most rapes, rape kits are not processed and rapists are rarely convicted.  Many claims of rape are not presented to ‘law enforcement’ because of this situation.  Most conservatives actually don’t believe rape allegations, or blame the female victim, so another contradiction for reactionaries.  They think there are ‘good’ and bad rapes.

The love of rural areas is counter-posed to the cesspools that cities supposedly are.  Cosmopolitan, diverse, educated, cultured - the false idea of an elite - and full of crime, dependent, sexually deviant, lazy and arrogant – that is the city to the conservative imagination.  Hitler grew up in a small town in Germany and hated Vienna. This outlook maps the political rural / urban divide in many countries. Reactionaries believe that the rural areas ‘support’ the cities when, except for food, it is the exact reverse.  Poverty in rural areas is increasing and obvious.  Rural areas and exurbs are where small businessman and large farmers rule, who are the typical conservative base - unless it is a company town.  This is the disappearing economic location of right-wing voters. 

Lastly is a hostile attitude towards labor unions, which usually protect and improve the conditions of the working-class. Conservatives think unions defend lazy, drunk workers, exploit them with dues and ruin capitalism. Being ‘lazy’ is the key insult.  Of course nearly all these people have never been in a factory, union or part of a large workforce, so the myth suffices. It is a profitable myth after all. 

The book is a very common and incomplete argument regarding the nature of fascism, but from a liberal anti-fascist whose own grandmother worked underground against the Nazis in Berlin before escaping Germany in 1939. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Anti-fascist series,” “Trump,” “rape,” “libertarian,” “unions,” “rural,” “incarceration state,” “conspiracy theories,”     

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 1, 2023